International Women’s Day has become a cosplay of empowerment.iStock
We might also choose to focus on the women still living in oppressive family and cultural circumstances,who get nary a cupcake to sweeten their deal. There are plenty of them in Australia and living in patriarchal societies around the globe. Their absence from IWD shows what a cosplay of empowerment the day has become.
With all due respect to the great trailblazers of the past,feminism has too often been the project of imposing a new social expectation. The message has become that only women in paid work have worth. That can be just as stifling as the gender roles that used to constrict us.
I blame a personal hero of mine,the sensational Germaine Greer. Witty,erudite,free-thinking,Greer defined the modern feminist movement for many in the West. Greer was,in part at least,as influential as she was because her writing was funny. Her signature book –The Female Eunuch –was an extremely effective recruitment tool for the feminist cause because even when her arguments fell a bit short,it was impossible for the reader not to want tobethe brilliant author.
Thanks to her style,Greer’s theories took hold. But the truth is,many of her ideas about the way women should free themselves of family life were derived from her childhood with a terrible mother,who was made destructive by its constraints.
Similarly,Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir’s personal experiences informed their recommendations for others. Betty Friedan,author ofThe Feminine Mystique,resented her married life and generalised her experience to all women,and all marriages.
Of course,it should be stated that one of the important achievements of this wave of feminists is that they normalised a woman’s right to choose not to have a family or children. But they also created a rut for the incurious and the incautious,which railroaded some women into an existence not of their choosing.
My own mother,who skipped out on an engagement to avoid becoming stuck on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall,conveyed to me that there was nothing more important than ambition. She felt she’d forgone a career during her years living like a vagabond heroine in South America,before meeting my father in Australia and settling down to have the baby she craved.
She wanted me to have a career,so I delayed the idea of children as I’d been taught. Fortunately,a slew of columns by bereft women who’d missed the biological boat alerted me in time that there was a reason my mother had decided to spend the first three years of my life at home. It turns out that having children is uniquely fulfilling. Not for all women,of course,and for some it’s not enough. These are the women who are setting national policy around What Women Want. Because the women participating in the corporate and public arena (me included) are,by definition,those for whom children are not everything. I enjoyed the baby years immensely,and I still relish the rearing as well as my full-time-and-a-bit work life,but many women who shape policy did not and do not.
Like Greer and her contemporaries,the women who currently think they’re designing society on behalf of all women are actually trying to impose a model of what self-actualisation has meant for them. They reveal themselves in the way they frame women choosing to work fewer hours or fewer years so they can raise children as a waste of talent and productive capacity. The policies they champion reflect their personal priorities,such as more government funding for long daycare,so women can spend more time at work.
Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood is a wonderful thinker,and I am glad that she participates energetically in public policy and discourse,but she was wrong in women,when they are not participating in the workforce,to factories or fertile land that lie idle.
Smart women,educated women,who spend time raising their children (or those of others) are not wasting their potential. They are channelling it into one of society’s most important roles. One of the reasons the West got wealthy,dear Productivity Supremo,is because it embraced education for girls,which translates into healthier pregnancies,smarter babies,better husbands,and the ability to choose the amount of time spent on them and on other projects of self-fulfilment.
Women who get their kicks in the public policy space would do well to respect that people contribute in different ways.
Instead of the relentless quest to sever us from our choices,it would make sense to focus on women who have no choices. In Australia,these are women living in heavily patriarchal families or communities for whom feminism would mean more than free childcare so they can put on a suit. They need access to basic rights,including the right to be safe in their own homes.
To her great credit,one of Australia’s leading public feminists,Natasha Stott Despoja,upon being appointed to head South Australia’s royal commission into domestic violence last week,identified the need to take an “intersectional approach”. Because,as she told the ABC,“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are three times more likely to experience this violence than non-Indigenous women” and “women with disabilities and women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds are also highly at risk”.
If feminism means anything,it has to mean fighting for the rights of these women. Now that corporate women have had their International Women’s Day,let’s declare Feminist Freedom Day and worry about the fundamental rights of the rest.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.