Sex, Lies and Question Time: Why the successes and struggles of women in Australia’s parliament matter to us all by Kate Ellis

Author:Kate Ellis [Ellis, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2021-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE POLITICS OF MOTHERHOOD

IN ALL THE interviews that I conducted for this book, with all of the women, on all the different topics, there is one moment that stands out above all others as capturing how brutal and sick the culture that women in politics face can be. It was when I was discussing attitudes to motherhood with Julia Gillard. I put to her that women without children were criticised and judged harshly for what that allegedly said about them, while women with young children were criticised and judged for choosing to spend time working away from their family. Are we stuck between a rock and a hard place?

‘If you are in the young kids stage, that’s damned if you do. And if you’ve never had children, that’s damned if you don’t. I think the slight nuance on the “never had children” side is if it was clear you wanted to have children but some health-related condition meant that you couldn’t. I think people would be quite sympathetic to that.’

What sort of sickness lies at the heart of a culture where, politically speaking, the only way a woman can win is if she has fertility issues?

There are few areas where gender stereotyping is more entrenched than in the area of motherhood. This is true not just in the parliament but in the broader community. Motherhood is also yet another tool in the arsenal of weapons that is cynically used against women in politics. Do we want women in politics to have children or not? It seems that, in many cases, motherhood is used as an excuse to limit women’s power and authority in political life. Paradoxically, childlessness is used to do exactly the same thing.

On this issue we simply cannot win. The female politician who has children risks being labelled a self-centred ‘career woman’; the woman who chooses not to is an offence to maternal instincts.

Julia Gillard was famously slammed as being ‘deliberately barren’ for not having children. She was subtly judged for it regularly, with the implication being that a woman who chose not to have children must be cold and calculating, couldn’t possibly understand the pressures of family life, must be out of touch and held different values to the rest of society. She believes the message was clear: ‘What sort of woman doesn’t want to have and care for children?’ In many cases these judgements stemmed from the belief that eschewing motherhood is contrary to what women ‘should’ do, what society has traditionally valued most in women. In other cases it was just another political weapon reserved for women. Julie Bishop received similar judgement and criticism, though she said herself it was ‘nowhere near the same extent that Julia experienced’.

I remember being surprised when a Channel 7 news story I was watching concluded by saying that perhaps the most surprising appointment in a minor cabinet reshuffle was Kate Ellis as Minister for Childcare when she didn’t have any children. I found it particularly odd, and not

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