In the 1960s my father worked at a Sydney law firm that regularly threw parties for their (all-male) partners and their wives. My mother told me that one such evening, after dinner, the hostess announced that the women would retire so the men could enjoy port and cigars. My mother was deep in conversation with one of the lawyers at the time and felt flummoxed, then cranky. What could justify being asked to leave?
After a short stint with the women, with whom she shared little in common – none of them worked and their children all went to private schools – my mother returned to talk with the men and, noting the women’s chairs had been removed, perched herself on a lawyer’s lap to continue the conversation, port in hand. Later, she offered to play the piano as long as they kept up a beer for her on the lid.
My mother was a feminist and, needless to say, she wasn’t very popular with those lawyers’ wives.
Now 80, she’s always had a razor sharp intellect. The daughter of a road builder, she graduated from Bega High eleventh in the state in English. The last of very large family, she was the first to go to university, winning a teachers’ scholarship to study English, History and Mathematics.
There she met my father, also a country kid from a public school. They married young and had four children in six years.
When I was 16 I took The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan off my mother’s bookshelf. I remember her eagerly asking me what I thought and I reported it was okay, but there wasn’t much new I didn’t know.
Her response? “That book made sense of everything for me. It completely changed my life.”
She explained that until she read that book she thought she was the only one who felt the suffocation and isolation of being a mother, the only one who was angry at the raw deal she saw women getting and the only one resentful that she was forced to abandon her career while watching her husband’s take off, and that she set about altering as much as she could.
I am sure my mother looked at me growing up and saw progress. I studied law in the mid-1980s. My university friends and I sported hairy armpits, attended self defence classes and joined Reclaim the Night marches. We chose to do anti-discrimination law and women’s history and danced wildly to ‘Sisters Are Doin’ it for Themselves’.
We were strong and judged ourselves equal to our boyfriends and male mates.
Fast forward to now. I have three children: a son aged 17 and two daughters, 16 and 13.
My daughters and their female friends are fantastic – smart, funny, competent and politically aware. But as a mother, it’s clear some basic things haven’t shifted enough over time.
Take four elementary fronts.
Why do my daughters still waste precious time fussing about their weight, their hair and their looks, like my mother and I once did, buoyed by media saturated with unobtainable images of women?
Why is it that the unequal distribution of housework and quest to find decent, well paid, part-time work is a continuous point of discussion with my female friends?
Why is it that my male university mates are now CEOs and my equally clever female friends are not?
Why is it that walking down the street my daughters are still leered at, and young women I know are still raped, and have to live with the horror?
While gains have been made since the 1960s, men and women still aren’t equal in Australia. Yet with less than two weeks to the federal election, Turnbull and Shorten have pledged little to change this.
It’s not enough that the prime minister labels himself a “feminist”, or the major parties restate past commitments to increasing women on boards, or leaders throw us a few election campaign scraps around childcare and women in sport.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to challenge sexist behaviour, tackle inequality at work, question traditional structures and consciously raise our sons to respect women.
But to achieve significant gains, government needs to grow feminist muscle, reform laws and policies, and allocate resources so we never again have to battle over inequality, port and cigars.
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