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Is it the fault of women?

By Kellie Tranter - posted Monday, 9 March 2009


Another International Women’s Day has rolled around on March 8, 2009, and women are still asking, "Why aren't we there yet?" But to question we need to first to ask is, “Where is ‘there’?” Is it equal pay for equal work? Is it equal numbers of women and men at senior levels in business and government? Or is it something more fundamental? And we probably should also look at where we are trying to advance from.

An historical perspective might be useful.

In her 1792 book Vindication of the Rights of Women Mary Wollstonecraft analysed the effects on women of an educational system where women learn accomplishments only to please men. She argued - as was explained by Moira Ferguson in 1975:

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… that women should have an education commensurate with their position in society, women being essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands rather than mere wives. Instead of women being seen as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintained that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men. And because human rights apply equally to men and women, so women should have an education that would enable them to achieve financial and intellectual freedom.

Fast forward a century and a quarter, and even though women had been given the right to vote, nothing much had changed. In 1928 Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own:

The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself. He suspended the film actress in mid-air. He will decide if the hair on the meat axe is human; he it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything.

The problem was not and is not limited to the English-speaking world. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir noted in the Nature of the Second Sex that:

… the women’s effort has never been anything more than symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.

The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity, no work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men - fathers or husbands - more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with the proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women ...

Now fast forward another 60 years to our own, allegedly more enlightened, times and what do we see? Fifty-five per cent of women in Australia experience some sort of violence during their lifetime. There is still a gender pay gap. And the just released EOWA 2008 Australian Census of Women in Leadership reveals that the number of women on boards and in executive management positions has actually declined since 2006.

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Unfortunately it is still necessary to ask, as Woolfe did, why is one sex more prosperous and the other so poor?

Perhaps it is the fault of women. Who can say? But Woolfe also made an astute and perhaps still apposite observation when she said:

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquet, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner as least twice the size he really is?

She went on to describe: “… that deep seated desire not so much that she shall remain inferior as that he shall be superior ...”.

Could that still be the case in 2009? Christopher Pyne’s recent response to a “glass ceiling” question on the ABC’s Q&A suggests it is. He said (and full credit for his frankness): “I don't know why, it's the culture of politics perhaps, or it's the culture of business. The more women become threatening perhaps the more the boys club together. I'm not sure.”

It also remains useful to consider Woolfe’s historical comparison of women as men imagine them and women as they are treated:

Indeed, if women had no existence save in fiction writing by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as man, some think even greater. But this is women in fiction. In fact as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.

These observations and analyses reinforce my belief that most men - with some appalling exceptions - are not angry or hostile towards women until women step outside their “pattern”, the subtly entrenched mental classification men have of the role of women and of the relative social positions of women and men. And although I do not excuse those women who decry and who would secretly sabotage the efforts of deserving women, the sad fact is that many women have an innate pattern similar to those of most men.

The end result is that women are still "very queer, composite beings", most without financial independence and many without intellectual freedom, comfortable within their social arrangements and feeling little solidarity with women outside them, and happy to live within the control of a male provider whose ego is salved by that subservience.

Why else, when a deserving man and an equally deserving woman candidates for a position, do females vote for the man and not the woman? And why else can our politicians get away with acknowledging women's rights and promising just outcomes one day, but blithely put them on the backburner the next?

We don't have to look very far for examples. On International Women's Day last year Prime Minister Rudd said of Australian women:

... And as I look into the faces of the young women here today … it makes me enormously optimistic about the nation’s future, when I see so many talented, ambitious, broad hearted, clear minded young women wishing passionately to make a contribution to this nation’s future.

You do our hearts proud every time we engage you across the nation. And we encourage you in taking on the challenges of the nation.

I welcome the leadership of all those women who are here in so many ways and so many places and so many different times, because you have made a contribution to making this country a better place with a greater and more effective participation in the affairs of the nation. I congratulate you for it.

And I thank you very much for this opportunity to be among you today to celebrate the role of women in our life, our national life, today in Australia, and to advance further the opportunities of women in the period ahead ...

If Mr Rudd really believes that, why isn't he actually doing something to address the realities reflected in Australia’s gender statistics? Perhaps Prime Minister Rudd gets caught up in the moment, carried away on his own rhetorical flourish, and sobers up afterwards?

He said in relation to paid maternity leave: “We are still some way off resolving the financial policy detail, but what I am saying to you loud and clear today is that this Australian Government believes the time has come to bite the bullet on this and we intend to do so.” But nowadays he seems to avert his eyes and says: “we would look at the Productivity Commission report, it’s due soon, and then we’d consider it in the Budget context.”

And his Government takes an apologist’s position on paid maternity leave in Australia’s formal report on the implementation - or more accurately, “non-implementation” - of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (PDF 352KB) (July 2003 to July 2008):

... The Australian Government is not at present in a position to take the measures required by CEDAW’s Article 11(2) to introduce “maternity leave with pay or with comparable social benefits” throughout Australia.

... In 2008, the Government asked the Productivity Commission to consider models to improve support for parents in the labour force with newborn children.

... Following the completion of the inquiry the Australian Government may, if appropriate, review Australia’s reservation to Article 11(2).

So notwithstanding the proven economic and social benefits that flow from the provision of paid maternity leave, we have to wait with baited breath to hear whether or not our Government, which now has the Productivity Commission report, will “give” Australian women paid maternity leave. But why should Australian women sit around and wait to be “given” paid maternity leave when according to most countries around the world they have a right to it?

In the last 200 years organised labour didn't hang around waiting for workers to be "given" rights when governments or employers were "in a position" to do so: it demanded and fought for those rights, and eventually it won them for the workers. Do women even realise that they would have an unstoppable majority if they marshalled their electoral power and allocated their votes according to their interests? Why should women not demand their entitlements and take them rather than wait meekly to be given them?

Where are Julia Gillard, Jenny Macklin, Nicola Roxon, Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek, Justine Elliot, Kate Ellis, Maxine McKew, Ursula Stevens and Jan McLucas on this issue? Are they standing up for women? How hard are they fighting? What would happen if they insisted that the government find the money? What would happen if they demanded that the government not abandon half of the electorate on this issue?

Virginia Woolf also said “Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for”. Is that not the way society makes "non-working" women feel? They live lives locked in dependency and in many cases cloaked in guilt. Everyone understands that economic independence gives any person freedom and choice, but many women work for no money at all, and many who do work have difficulty surviving, let alone saving, because of their casual employment and broken employment patterns. Their position will be greatly worsened in the forthcoming economic depression, and at the same time the government will use economic excuses for refusing to improve their lot.

Instead of truly seeing their situation and working hard to rectify it, after working out in their own minds what they will and won’t accept, too many women react like a modern day Hedda Gabler, turning the gun on themselves rather than pointing it outwards. Instead of seeing themselves simply as autonomous and equal human beings, and expecting to be treated and treating others accordingly, too many women end up conforming to the patriarchal structures that are so deeply rooted in our society and that still surround them in every direction.

They swim in self-doubt; they accept dependence and wait to be given rather than gently but firmly taking; they defer to patriarchal patterns and they allow their protests to be quashed and their voices drowned out.

Every passing International Women's Day I become a little more disheartened. More and more, when I see what little progress is being made, I see it as "symbolic agitation". Women who lived and died long before us worked hard to identify the fundamental issues and to move women to improve their lot, but their work has been passed over rather than recognised, built upon and acted upon.

Virginia Woolfe hit the nail on the head when she said:

Women are hard on women. Women dislike women … Let us agree, then, that a paper read by a woman to women should end with something particularly disagreeable ... How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant ... What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise love making, we have had other work on our hands ... When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure, and money no longer holds good ...

She also left a clue about why women weren't “there” then and still aren't:

… if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in relation to each other but in relation to reality ... if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go it alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come ...

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About the Author

Kellie Tranter is a lawyer and human rights activist. You can follow her on Twitter @KellieTranter

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