The times are tough, both for women in politics, and regarding political decisions affecting women. Three recent events are particularly noteworthy. The first was the overthrow last week of the first female Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. While I was scouring news sites for comment and analysis on that sorry affair, I noticed the extraordinary effort of Texan senator Wendy Davis to filibister a Senate Bill that aimed to introduce regulations with the potential to close 37 of the 42 clinics that provide abortions in Texas and to ban abortion after 20 weeks gestation. Her courage and tenacity have proved to be a lightening rod, attracting swelling support in the aftermath of her marathon speech. The contrast could not be greater between this event and the actions of Ohio’s governor in signing into law major restrictions on women’s reproductive rights in that state a few days later. As Steve Benen reports, Governor Kasich was surrounded by middle-aged white men as at the stroke of a pen, he introduced wide-ranging and draconian measures that will make seeking abortion, for women including those pregnant following rape, a far more onerous, expensive and difficult event than it needs to be.
How are these events linked? First, the treatment of Julia Gillard has exposed a raw current of misogyny in Australia. Gillard took the prime ministership in a leadership coup against the populist but reportedly dysfunctional Kevin Rudd, and then went on to form a minority Labour government after the 2010 election. Gillard has many strengths and skills but an unrelenting chorus of hate and vitriol, led by the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and the media, drowned these out. Gillard was subject to familiar gender-inflected criticisms – she was described as a bitch, a witch, a liar (“Ju-liar”), deceitful and double-crossing, barren: the list goes on. A Liberal party fundraising menu featured Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – a puerile take on the worst of school boy-style sexism. In Queensland you could buy Julia dolls, designed for mauling by dogs, while live-on-air she was questioned about her partner’s sexuality. And when Gillard fought back, with her rightly famous misogyny speech, she was accused of playing the gender card. Of course Gillard made mistakes. Her treatment of asylum seekers and single parents was particularly harsh, but nothing she did warranted the treatment she received at the hands of the public, the media, the Opposition and the disenfranchised Rudd. And no man in Australian politics has ever been treated in such a manner, much less a prime minister. As feminist journalist Ann Summers notes, we are all demeaned by this treatment.
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We must continue fighting, for our women politicians, for our reproductive rights, for a world in which the power is shared equally, but some weeks it’s a hard grind.
Wendy Rogers is right that urgent attention needs to be focused on the underrepresentation of women in the institutions where decisions about the future are made. The underrepresentation is so profound that we take it for granted: everyday we look at news photos of politicians or business leaders and barely notice that they are all men. How can we inject a sense of urgency into this political scene?
This underrepresentation is understandable, if just as objectionable, in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia where an ideology of women’s subjection holds sway, but it is particularly appalling in a country like the US with its rhetoric of liberty and equality. How is it possible that in 2013 women in the US are still not sovereign in their own bodies, a condition of full citizenship? How is possible that a legislature composed mostly of people “without uteruses,” as Wendy Davis put it, could get away with infringing on a woman’s right to make decisions about her own reproductive life? How is it possible for them to present a bill as protecting women, when its primary effect will be to deny poor women basic health care?
Wendy Rogers is right that this calls for a fight. How can we amplify women’s voices and achieve a robust role in decision-making, both in politics and in the other institutions where the future is determined?
Legends like Davis notwithstanding, I don’t believe putting more women into the institutionalised corporate sycophancy that passes for 21st century representative democracy will help women any more than Obama helps African Americans or an Aboriginal Prime Minister of Australia would help me.
I shouldn’t even have to run off a list like ‘Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Jiang Qing, Gloria Arroyo, Benazir Bhutto, Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko …’ to remind people that women who reach positions of power in our political structures are not working for women. They are working for the corrupt systems that put them there.
And please, no “we are working within the system in order to change it” nonsense. That’s what the system *is*. And its sure not the system that’s gonna get changed.
Do you want to beat the oppressive patriarchs, or join them?
Is equal opportunism really worth fighting for?
It doesn’t matter what kind of genitalia they have, its always the arsehole that sits on the throne.
Yep, Gillard’s experiences laid bare the vicious streak of paleolithic misogyny that runs through Australian society like fat on a lamb chop, but she still deserved to lose her job.
The reason ‘Ju-liar’ was such an effective insult was not because she was a woman but because she was publicly exposed as a liar and double-crosser to an extent that is excessive even by Australian political standards.
And to suggest that she didn’t deserve the treatment she received at the hands of Rudd ignores the treatment Rudd received at her hands when she was his deputy.
Except that I shouldn’t say ‘her hands’ because the coup was not her idea at all. She was simply a tool of the usual gang of ‘faceless men’ who run the ALP. Those who imagine that her elevation was some sort of victory for feminism ignore the fact that she was entirely beholden to (and ultimately betrayed by) perhaps the most unaccountable patriarchal power group in the country.
But what really did Julia in was her lack of even a semblance of sincerity in dealing with the Australian people (with one or two exceptions, including the ‘misogyny’ speech). Her regular claims to have dispensed with that to reveal the ‘real Julia’ showed that she was aware of the problem, but nonetheless she never made a serious attempt to address it.
As a result we now have an unrepentant misogynist on course to become the next Prime Minister of this country with a record breaking majority and probable domination of both houses of parliament.
Australia sure didn’t need the woman bashing that was brought to bear against Gillard by the media and opposition.
But we sure needed to get rid of Gillard.
(BTW, this week another ALP politician became a lightning rod for Australia’s Islamophobia.
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/shame-shame-shame-australias-first-muslim-frontbencher-abused-for-taking-oath-on-koran-20130702-2p8l2.html
We Australians consider ourselves licenced to hate our politicians. Unfortunately many interpret this as a licence to dump any hatreds we may have on them).
The thing is that the behaviour described by Wendy is a symptom of a patriarchal society and political systems but it is not just men/male views that dominate certain debates; women are heavily involved in anti-abortion work in Ireland, for example. Similarly, in the US it is One Million Moms that target women in politics, women in the media etc. These misogynistic, homophobic views are deeply entrenched across social dimensions and we need to keep standing up against it, again and again and again in every way we can (on the streets, with our friends and family, and even within the corrupt system of politics/government). If Wendy Davis wasn’t so much of a notable case, she probably wouldn’t be so vulnerable to the consequences that Wendy R foresees.