The Women’s Club - Women’s History Circle Launch
Age Discrimination
Introduction
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet: the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and their Elders, past.
I also am very happy to acknowledge that we meet in the presence of one of our most revered Elders, Dame Marie Bashir.
Christine, Wendy and club members,
Thank you for inviting me to address the members of the Women’s Club at this important launch of the Women’s History Circle.
This is the first time I have had the privilege of addressing the Women’s Club.
In preparation I did a little research on this longstanding, shall I say venerable institution, that since the beginning of the 20th century has brought together for serious purpose some of the most accomplished and significant women Australia has produced.
I intend to make some remarks today on the crucial relationship between educational opportunity and the capacity of women to succeed in public life.
History of the Women’s club and education in Australia
Reading about your founding members and other early members I am struck by two things: since the earliest days of Federation, contrary to historical stereotyping, we did indeed have numbers women who played prominent and valuable roles in our society.
In the context of the entire society there were not many of them, but they were there – and they mattered.
When I looked closely, I could see that virtually all of them had what was until my children’s generation a rare privilege, access to education.
After all it was, I read, in 1901 at a meeting of 100 women at the Women’s College at Sydney University that the decision was taken to found the Women’s Club.
These founders were a privileged minority. I would be surprised if there were many more than 100 female students enrolled at Sydney University at that time (in fact, the University have confirmed only 84 women were enrolled at this time). And this crucial access remained a rare privilege for a long time.
Data about these enrolments is hard to find.
I did, however, establish that in 1911, only 2465 individuals, that is, 0.055% of the population of around four and a half million were enrolled at a university. Of them, 21% - just over 500 – were women[1] .
Things improved for women over the next few decades but very slowly.
When I started at Sydney University in 1960, only 0.54% of the population of just over 10 million[2] were university students; that is 53,780 individuals. Of these, 12,395 or 23% were women.
In 1960, only around 5% of female school leavers entered university.
Now in 2015 it is more than half the cohort of school leavers, and growing. A higher proportion of female school leavers than male now enter university, and have done so since 1987.
This massive growth in opportunity amounts to a revolution in women’s education, one I believe we all welcome, and for which we have to thank the achievements and inspiration of early women’s club members.
My experiences and education
If I can take my own life history as typical of Australia women of my era, I was the first person, let alone girl, in my family on both sides to enter university.
My mother, born in 1907, left school as a young teenager, about 13 according to her memory. She went straight to work, and became a successful shoe salesperson in some of Sydney’s smart shoe boutiques.
My grandmothers had, I believe, even fewer years at school. When I was lucky enough to find myself heading off to Sydney University in 1960, most of my fellow students at the Brigidine Convent in Maroubra had already left school at 15, and were well ensconced in jobs in the state public service, retailing, doctors surgeries and the like. These were not unpleasant jobs; few of our students had to go to the factories in nearby Botany and Pagewood, where the jobs were hard and unpleasant. But the jobs they did get were low level, without career paths, low paid, and in most cases terminated at marriage. Marriage generally occurred around the time you were old enough to vote, 21, in those days.
I actually jumped the gun there. I was a wife and mother before I cast my first vote.
This situation was typical right across Australia. There were always a few girls, from affluent or professional families who followed every year in the footsteps of your founders, but not many.
This near universal exclusion of most young women from higher education was accepted by the community, governments, and by families as a natural state of affairs. This “natural “ state continued until challenged by the new wave of feminism at the beginning of the 1970s, and the general progressive social movements that sprang up in the first world around that time, especially in the USA with the Civil Rights movement.
It is this long exclusion that explains two phenomena we are still struggling with as a society and an economy: first the low numbers of women in powerful positions in public life and business. The ongoing campaign to get more women on boards and see more female senior executives and C.E.O’s has its roots in the practices of my generation that kept capable girls stuck right down the ladder, without access to the desired educational qualifications and prevented from racking up the requisite years of learning the managerial ropes on the job.
The second thing it explains is today’s lack of childcare adequate to support the lives and career progression of most working mothers.
It has been for only about three decades that we have seen most mothers wanting and needing to work. Our child care policies have trailed badly behind these changes and are still trailing behind the career aspirations and workplace realities of most women. And the gaps seem to be getting bigger.
That’s the historical context in which I will place, as requested, a summary of my own story of education and public life.
So, to the personal account:
I was a child who always wanted education. I don’t especially know why this was so, but I always wanted to learn things and was frustrated when this did not happen. I hated the slow pace and repetition of a lot that went on in primary school classes, and reacted by reading my choice of books wherever and whenever I could, including under the desk during the many dull classes, until I was spotted by a cranky nun and punched sharply between the shoulder blades to discourage this insurrection. I didn’t stop. Through books I learned about the world beyond Maroubra, beyond Australia, and the worlds that had existed in previous ages.
I learned there were all kind of people, some awful some wonderful. Relevant to tonight’s launch, most of the people I read about were men. But, even so, the more I read the more I wanted to learn.
With all this self-motivated learning and the fact that I was a good student, it was still a stroke of luck that I managed to get to university. Our school was an intermediate domestic science establishment, but just as our class was finishing the intermediate year the Catholic Education Office in its wisdom decided that the nuns at Maroubra should offer the Leaving Certificate (with no preparation for that task but we won’t go into to that here).
Along with a handful of class mates I was allowed to stay on, succeeded in the leaving certificate and won scholarships. So off to Sydney University I went.
I thought I had died and gone to heaven! Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but I loved it.
If that had not happened, I am not sure how I would have got the ideas or the confidence that made me able, a few years later to decide I could have a go at getting into federal parliament…a career move unheard of and unimagined by girls of my era.
I mention confidence, and for me that is a crucial trait for any successful career but particularly one that exposes you to the constant slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of public life.
That kind of confidence: to pursue power, to exercise it, to fight off enemies and deliver polices that attract supporters, to keep critics at arm’s length while pursuing your purpose undistracted: that confidence in males is called “having leadership qualities”.
In men, that trait is much admired, and all of our male leaders in politics have those qualities…some of them even perhaps to excess.
Plenty of young men enter politics confident, energetic, and overwhelmingly ambitious.
Very few women had done so at the time I was elected to the Senate in 1975. More have since, but nowhere near enough.
I have said tonight that getting a university education gave me that kind of confidence, and that confidence saw me through an eventful, difficult, and sometimes turbulent but always rewarding working life, which continues to this evening.
But now more and more young women are going to university, more than young men in fact, and are often excelling. Do we see the growth in the kind of confidence I am talking about? There seems to be a time lag here too, and that is a phenomenon we should all address, and try to change.
Perhaps the great faith I had as a young woman and a young feminist that education for women would solve most of the problems of gender inequality was a bit too idealistic.
Women in politics today
I hope not, though I am deeply concerned that we have now for some years seen a critical mass of girls pursue education at whatever level they are capable of, succeed, but still find barriers to advancing to the top. Certainly women no matter how well educated still run into gender based storms if they move into political life. The hostility aroused in some quarters by our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, demonstrates that education and confidence of themselves don’t guarantee a fair response in every case.
It is my sincere hope that highly exposed episodes of sexism against female politicians do not discourage young women who otherwise would give it a go.
The development of effective polices and laws for Australia is a job of massive importance and the more capable people, men and women, we have working on it, the better for all of us.
I am often asked about my own experiences as a woman when I first went into Parliament.
I had been elected to the Senate in December 1975 after the Dismissal of Prime Minister Whitlam. When the new parliament opened, I was one of only 6 women, three Liberal senators and three Labor senators. There was not one woman in the House of Representatives. There had been a couple since the first, Enid Lyons, was elected in 1943, but there was not one sitting in 1976.
When asked as I have been dozens of times, questions like: was it daunting? All those men, were they aggressive, sexist towards this inexperienced young woman? My answers were and are; yes it was almost overwhelming to find myself there, faced with the vast range of tasks that come the way of a senator. But as to the attitude of my male colleagues, enough of them, especially the older men were courteous and even helpful. Few of them understood or supported feminism but they soon assessed me as a hard worker with some ability, and treated me accordingly.
Over the years, the numbers of women from all parties and in both chambers have grown. Some report that they have found the environment threatening and off putting. But in my observation, women, when they get there, do the job they been elected to do, and fight like mad to keep their positions against would be usurpers, male or female.
So, women can do it, Women I believe should do it.
Better policies, not only for women but for the entire community will come from having all the talent pool engaged, not less than a third as we have these days.
When I am asked about how I managed my responsibilities as a parent, to all intents and purposes a single parent, my answers then and now are the same. I got the home supports organised, spent a large whack of my parliamentary salary on keeping everything going, and didn’t make a fuss about it. And I should acknowledge that the extended family was there in the background, even if in Sydney rather than Canberra.
Of course, my expectations of sympathy or support in relation to the “double burden” were very low, so I was not disappointed. I didn’t really see the family responsibilities as an obstacle, so I got on with it all as best I could. I did cut a few corners here and there.
I coped; the children coped and grew into wonderful adults.
I like to think I made a contribution of some value.
I never regret the chance I had to contribute to public life, nor do I know any other female politician who does. We might all wish to lose fewer battles, to experience more constructive behaviours, and indeed less aggression. We all reject crude sexism when it occurs. Australia will
have a better parliament when it disappears entirely.
But, I can only repeat, with undiminished fervour, the claim blazoned on my first campaign T-shirt:
“A woman’s place is in the House, and in the Senate.”
