June 24 is a date we need to remember. It is the date that white Australian women first saw significant signs of the possibility of fair political representation. I’ve said this before – one barrier to women’s freedom is that our significant events and dates are erased from historical records, and therefore we don’t have the opportunities to develop solidarity by celebrating those dates.
Most of us in this country can recognise dates associated with white male supremacy, like January 26 and April 25 and Dec 25, but few could name the date on which women were first granted voting rights, or the exact date that marital rape was finally outlawed (in the 1980s!). These dates need to be taught in schools along with accounts of the activism that women undertook and the persecution they experienced to ensure that we have some basic human rights today. Those women copped a lot of shit for us and we are denied opportunities to remember them and honour them. We can dismiss it all as tokenism or symbolism all we like, but in the long run symbolism plays a powerful role in maintaining male domination and patrism.
Personally I am thrilled to have lived long enough to see our first woman prime minister, and I’ve never supported either of the major parties for reasons which regular readers here would already be familiar with. But I have lived to see a woman, an unmarried, childless, atheist woman calmly, competently and unapologetically take control of public office, extending political representation to people who have thus far been excluded. Not only that but my own daughter will have the choice of voting for a woman in what will be the first federal election in which she is eligible to vote.
I have to say I am a little disappointed in some of the negativity peppering the feminist blogoshpere – overall there is some reservation, some nit-picking about whether it was the exact right time, speculation about factions and who owns her. It’s like feminists are scared to acknowledge the symbolism and just go “Fuckin hell’s yeah!” – it’s as though people are more invested in being seen to be gender-neutral in their attitudes (like the current set-up isn’t male-biased) and in order to be taken seriously they think they need to ignore the monumental historical significance of what Julia Gillard has just achieved today, lest they be seen as too emotional or irrational or hysterical or any of the other sexist terms that are applied to women.
When historical milestones are reached, we generally take a moment to reflect on them. Why should women be denied this moment?
I’ve also seen derision over the fact that there have been interviews with her family. Julia’s family are proud of her, and why would they not be? In a country where “family values” has so much traction in politics it’s necessary that our leaders are seen in the context of a family group. That is her family group! Her parents and her sister. I thought it was awesome to see something other than the garden variety heteronormative nuclear family unit being recognised as a genuine kin group. I mean hello, there are other types of families, people. Oh but apparently the prime minister’s very elderly mother did not live up to feminist expectations of how the mother of our first woman prime minister should behave. Those sorts of judgements are themselves, anti-feminist.
This has been a special day for so many of us, and once we have celebrated it and allowed ourselves to feel the elation and the rush (not least of all over the utterly shell-shocked appearance of the opposition leader during his press conference) we need to remind ourselves that the new prime minister has never explicitly pushed feminist issues; that there are issues that are specific to women that need to be talked about; and at the moment nobody wants to talk about them. Therefore we need to remind Prime Minister Gillard that we expect her want to talk about them. We have to understand that had she ever explicitly pushed feminist issues, then she would not be the prime minister today. But now that she is I can’t help but cling to some tiny hope that she will begin to show signs of feminist sensibilities that may have been previously unsafe to show.
I loved her in question time immediately following her swearing in, when she took a question from a woman member of the opposition and began her response by thanking the member for her friendship over the years. I took this as a small gesture of female solidarity. I hope it lasts.
