Contemporary Australia: Women

25 Kirsty Bruce Australia b.1973 Untitled (detail) 2010–11 Synthetic polymer paint and watercolour on paper 55 sheets ranging from 14.6cm x 7cm to 39.5 x 27cm Installed dimensions variable I can hear her breathing I was born in 1976, 55 years after the first woman was elected to an Australian parliament, four years after Australian law recognised the right of women to be paid the same as men, three years after the formation of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and one year after the publication of Anne Summers’s feminist classic Damned Whores and God’s Police . I have never had to march for equal pay or lobby to be allowed to work after marriage. I’ve never had to lie about my marital status in order to access contraception, nor have I had to risk arrest, serious infection or death in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I’ve never had a bank manager refuse my credit card application because my husband hadn’t signed it. I’ve always assumed that I could pursue any career or life goals that appealed to me. Feminism’s success is indisputable, but it is also incomplete. Despite equal pay for work of equal value becoming law in 1972, Australian women only earn, on average, 83 per cent of what men do. 1 Despite women now making up the majority of tertiary graduates, they account for a mere 8.4 per cent of board directors and 8 per cent of executive managers of ASX200 companies. The judiciary is little better, with fewer than 30 per cent of Commonwealth judges and magistrates being women. And despite having a woman as head of state and a female Prime Minister, politics remains a boys’ club with women holding only 29 of 76 federal senate positions and 37 of 150 seats in the House of Representatives. 2 The inequality isn’t confined to the elite. Women are the majority of Australia’s (and, for that matter, the world’s) poor. Women are responsible for the vast majority of unpaid domestic and caring work. Women are in the majority of underpaid and unskilled jobs. Women are the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual and domestic violence. 3 Watch TV for a couple of hours or pick up any magazine for sale in the supermarket and it’s evident that women are still judged primarily on their attractiveness (as measured by standards increasingly borrowed from pornography) or their success as mothers and nurturers. In other words, feminism, while so successful that my life would be unimaginable to my great-grandmother, remains an unfinished revolution. There is still so much to be done — not only because there was so damn much to begin with, but also because the world keeps on keeping on and, unfortunately, sexism and misogyny are finding new and exciting ways to be expressed. And yet, I am optimistic about the future. This is not because I think the powerful give a damn about justice (they don’t) and it’s not because I am a naturally optimistic person (I’m not). It’s because I’ve spent the past five years teaching and working with young people and speaking to and working with feminists, and their combined intelligence, compassion, sense of justice, determination and creativity make it impossible for me to see the future as anything but bright. Consider, for example, the glorious sight of thousands of Australians marching through the streets of their capital cities during the 2011 SlutWalks. The marches were part of a worldwide movement sparked by a Toronto police officer who told an audience of college students that, ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts’ in order to avoid being raped. 4 The organisers and participants of the SlutWalks were condemned and attacked and patronised in newspapers, on TV panel shows and, indeed, within the feminist and broader progressive movements, but still they marched, chanting ‘Yes means yes! No means no! However I dress! Wherever I go!’, and holding signs challenging onlookers to ‘Ask Me What I’m Asking For!’. Their numbers were huge in some cities and modest in others, but they were all unapologetic about their sexuality, their feminism and their decision to publicly condemn those who would blame and shame the victims of sexual assault. One of the criticisms of SlutWalk was that it was an attention-seeking display that would do little to create real change, but no one involved ever claimed the marches were the only way to combat sexual violence; indeed, plenty of feminists who marched (and plenty who didn’t) spend time doing less visible, but terribly important work to make the world safer for women. They work at rape crisis centres and in women’s refuges as counsellors and cleaners and legal advisors and translators. They run workshops for their peers about sexual consent and ethics. They lobby councils for better outdoor lighting and state governments for better law enforcement. Of course, women’s struggles do not begin and end with sexual violence, nor does the work being done by Australian feminists. Young feminists on university campuses across the country are right now campaigning I can hear her breathing Emily Maguire