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Is it the fault of women?

By Kellie Tranter - posted Monday, 9 March 2009


... 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?

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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:

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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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