Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

International Women’s Day address, March 8, 2009, by Joan Coxsedge

The title’s a little clunky but the sentiment is fine, because I believe you can’t have genuine feminism without socialism or genuine socialism without feminism and of course I’m linking the two in what I say. My comments this morning are based on first-hand experiences – as they should be – especially the politically active part of my life which goes back more than 40 years. One thing that really irritates me is that in recent times there’s been an increasing tendency by media commentators to talk and write about ‘politics’ as if they only happen within the confines of parliament houses and politicians are the only ones who are political. Is it an attempt to downgrade political activism? To diminish its importance? Who knows. It’s rubbish anyway. Today’s meeting is political, the Beacon is political, who you were born to and where you lived has political consequences. Politics is a driving force in all our lives.

If you’re a working-class female in a capitalist society, there are plenty of things to drive you nuts. Your job (if you’re lucky enough to have one), the bills that keep rolling in, your kids, your husband or partner, housework, looking OK and not looking OK, getting older and becoming invisible – and they’re just the personal bits. All of which can apply to men with some modifications. And when you look at the wider picture of wars, rampant corruption and a world spinning out of control, you contemplate heading for the hills. But if you join everything up and see how they fit together, it becomes obvious that trying to reform a society which is rotten to the core is a complete waste of time. We need nothing less than root and branch change.

I’ve always believed strongly in the fundamental right of women to equal opportunity, contraception, a free safe abortion and the ability to live the way they want to live. I also firmly believe that to achieve these aims we need a vastly different society to the one we’re inhabiting, one with a spirit of genuine independence that puts people before profits, cares for the environment and turns its back on wars and militarism in all its manifestations. Nowadays I rarely use the ‘F’ word - feminism I hasten to add - because it’s a term that is meaningless. Like democracy, radical and freedom, it’s been co-opted and debased by today’s spin-doctors and mind-benders.

A word of reassurance to men. Women’s struggle for a better fairer life is not a struggle against you. The phrase ‘battle of the sexes’ wasn’t coined to describe the female liberation movement. For those old enough to remember, Dagwood Bumpstead and his mates were not victims of free women, but of women trapped into playing the game. If you read the statistics on divorce, child bashing and mental illness, men should be reassured they will not suffer from initiatives by women to change their relationship to them and society.

My political activism kicked off in the md-60s at a time when my hands were well and truly full being a wife, mother of three, artist and doing occasional jobs for a drafting agency. At the end of the decade, I even spent a few fraught years creating fabric designs for a crazy fashion house in Collins Street, but like thousands of others I became so enraged at Washington’s brutal intervention in Vietnam that I changed course to become an anti-war/anti-conscription protester and went on a fast learning curve. I learned that if you want to change unjust laws you have to break them and that frequently meant gaol, an institution I came to know quite well. In a few short years, my status changed from being a reasonably conventional wife and mother to being a law-breaking ex-gaol-bird.

There’s nothing like a stretch in gaol to experience our class system unadorned. There were no well-heeled crims from Toorak or Brighton in the former women’s prison, Fairlea, just the powerless poor, the non-achievers living on the margins. A few had murdered their partners after decades of abuse, but most were young street prostitutes in the nick for non-payment of fines who, on release, went back on the game because they couldn’t get any other job, and were then sent back to gaol. Some didn’t even get a sniff of freedom, because the cops were waiting for them at the prison gate with fresh charges. A circular system of punishment creating the crime.

During the late 60s-early 70s, Women’s Liberation in all its variations marched into town and re-established the link between the lot of ordinary women and our political system, when many women fed up with being a male add-on joined its ranks. I admired Women’s Liberation’s energy and determination in building a greater awareness about discrimination and exploitation and worked closely with them on a number of issues, but somewhere along the line it missed the bus by failing to attract significant numbers of working-class women, a failure that left a significant hole in the movement. Many women simply sat on the fence, not wanting to be ‘involved’, the bane of our lives, like their male counterparts.

In the longer haul, Women’s Liberation was outsmarted by the more conservative middle-class WEL, the Women’s Electoral Lobby, which sought change from within, ignoring the class nature of our society and its impact on women at the bottom of the heap. Taking the status quo as a starting-point is no recipe for change. To state the bleeding obvious, you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs. It was therefore inevitable that equal opportunity became affirmative action and was co-opted by the well-heeled better-educated females with the know-how to use the system to advance themselves. A few fought their way up the male-dominated corporate and parliamentary ladders and then proceeded to behave in exactly the same self-seeking, ruthless way as the males they replaced - the Margaret Thatchers, Angela Merkels and our local examples, Pacific Brands chief executive Sue Morphet and Julia Gillard - spring to mind.

Today, boys still have the best gigs in industry and parliaments and the much-publicised ‘girls on top’ victories ring rather hollow when you look at the statistics and the wage rates. And I certainly can’t see anything to get excited about when women are allowed to put on jungle greens and go to war or don a pair of tight shorts to learn the art of boxing.

Similar contradictions emerged during the great suffragette battle at the beginning of the 20th century to win women the vote, a battle that has been almost completely obliterated from our history books. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, was the first and largest militant suffrage group in England. They were portrayed as ‘unwomanly and frustrated lacking normal feminine appeal’ – a line anti-feminists still like to run. Their campaign started in a genteel way with public meetings and speeches but as their politics of confrontation developed with the slogan ‘Deeds not Words’, these dedicated and passionate women resorted to window-smashing, arson and bombings, facing escalating police brutality, imprisonment, repeated forcible feeding, exile and death. More than a thousand WPSU women were imprisoned in Britain and suffered dreadful privations, their actions profoundly upsetting their non-militant sisters.

The outbreak of WW1 caused the gradual disintegration of the Suffragette movement and a permanent split in the Pankhurst family. On one side, Sylvia Pankhurst’s revolutionary socialists, on the other, mother Emmeline and sister Christabel and their group of more conservative feminists. When the dust finally settled in 1918, suffrage was only granted on a limited basis to those with property. Out of 17 female candidates, only one was elected – a Countess Markievicz in Dublin. In a very Irish way, she refused to take an oath of loyalty to the English crown and thereby forfeited her seat in the House of Commons.

The political climate for the suffragettes didn’t come out of thin air, but directly resulted from violent struggles during the 19th century by generation after generation of men trying to win the vote for themselves. In the late 1880s, when Emmeline Pankhurst was campaigning in England and Wales, only 4.5 million men out of a total population of 27.5 million were allowed to vote.

We were ahead of our English sisters but the vote didn’t come without a fight. Organised campaigns by Australia’s suffragettes had been gaining momentum since the 1860s and debated in colonial parliaments since the 1870s. The Australian Parliament under out first Prime Minister Edmund Barton passed the Franchise Bill in 1902 giving white Australian women 21 and over, the right to vote and stand for parliament, but winning a seat was something else again. Pioneer feminist Vida Goldstein stood in 1903 on a platform of equal pay and equal rights with four other candidates and had another four attempts – but was unsuccessful each time. She had more luck in the legal arena and was instrumental in drafting the Childrens Court Act (1906) and playing a part in the Basic Wage judgement. New Zealand beat Australia to the gun by enfranchising women in 1893 but they had to wait until 1919 before being allowed to stand for parliament, whereas American women had to wait until 1920 before even gaining the right to vote.

There were equal pay battles in the twenties and thirties, although broader questions surrounding women’s rights stayed on the sidelines until the political upheavals of the 1960s. Labor won government in 1972 and our social consciousness and demands for change peaked, but came crashing around our ears on 11 November 1975 when Whitlam was kicked out in a CIA-run constitutional coup. It became abundantly clear that even a moderately reformist government wasn’t acceptable to Washington, highlighting the fragility of our political institutions. Just a few weeks before Whitlam was shafted, he gave the green light for a Women and Politics Conference in Canberra as part of the United Nations Decade for Women, which it hoped it could control, but couldn’t. We women simply took over.

Instead of sticking to the official line of consensus politics or how to influence Tweedledee to become Tweedledum, increasing numbers of sessions emerged which confronted the real issues that cannot be tackled by a new institution or committee of inquiry or a new handout. There was a general recognition that socialism and feminism couldn’t be separated, that they were joined at the hip.

I gave a paper and workshop called The Politics of Women’s Oppression raising issues which have concerned women and other activists from day one and are still painfully relevant – the influence of a monolithic media in indoctrinating women and suppressing our concerns, the linking of women’s rights with the liberation of all oppressed groups in our society and the cruncher, the extent to which women can work within a hierarchical, right-wing economic system without being compromised and swallowed up whole. A socialist Canadian MP put it this way. She said ‘power is a competitive destructive force which thrives on the exploitation of the weak by the strong. If women exercise power as men do, betrayal is added to oppression.’

The media play a key role in keeping us in our place, with Lord of the Global Village Rupert Murdoch making sure we stay on message. Commercial television in particular continues to play an insidious role, blanking out social problems and bombarding us with values from an alien culture, mushing our brains with saccharine programmes that have nothing to do with the real world. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways media bosses suppress or grossly distort the news and turn history on its head, everything permeated by a hatred of communism and anything vaguely left-wing. Today in our mainstream press, it is impossible to get an honest look at the Russian revolution or its role during WW2, or at Cuba or Venezuela or the events leading up to the 1948 partition of Palestine. The consequences of keeping the citizenry ignorant are very serious indeed if we want the citizenry to rise up and demand fundamental social change. Thankfully, today, many of us have the Internet, which cuts across our media monolith and if used intelligently, gives us access to a range of alternative news and views never seen in the mainstream. Which is why governments of all shades would like to control it.

And then there’s the role of glossy magazines, which are far from being the innocuous purveyors of light entertainment they’re often made out to be. They’re a part of the nation’s most potent sales pitch to younger women in particular, not merely of consumerism but of presenting what is deemed to be an acceptable female image and standards of female achievement. Bad and all as they are, glossy magazines are relatively easy to counteract compared with other forms of indoctrination which affect us on a less conscious level – jokes, cartoons, films, comics, TV, fiction, sport, sport and yet more sport, and above all, advertising, where some of our so-called better intellects are given the job of identifying patterns of behaviour involving profits for their clients, reinforcing stereotypes. For example, when I entered parliament I was asked what I was going to wear, whereas John Cain was asked what he intended to do. And even after I’d been an MP for a number of years I was amazed at the number of letters I received addressed to Joan Coxsedge MP headed Dear Sir!

It’s often said that socialism is dead because it doesn’t work, which suggests that capitalism does work. In some ways, that’s true. The capitalist system was set up to create a new class of people who controlled riches and power beyond the wildest dreams of the Kings and Emperors of old, rapacious money-shufflers who make nothing and employ no-one, but simply move digits around on their computers. Never in the history of the world has there been a bigger gap between rich and poor in so-called rich countries, nor a bigger gap between rich and poor countries, with women at the bottom of the economic heap. Forty years ago, we were under the illusion that the capitalist system was capitulating a little when it wasn’t. The system was able to grant a few things, not because it was weak but because it was relatively strong.

And here we are today heading to hell in a hand-basket, with capitalism’s failures signposting the way. Everywhere you look there is human and ecological mayhem with levels of corruption that make Al Capone look like a choirboy – wars, famines and general erosion of hard-won freedoms - and even more deadly resurgence of fascism. People are scared because capitalism is going for our jugulars. It has always been a bosses system, but is now at its most lethal.

Today all bets are off, because events are changing so rapidly and deteriorating so badly – especially our environment - that you’d be hard pressed to predict what will happen tomorrow never mind next week or next month. But some things are certain. Perhaps the most important lesson is that capitalism has shown itself to be what we always said it was – a destructive rotten system that is bringing the world to its knees. And isn’t it ironic that its proponents, the shysters who’ve ripped us off any chance they get, have the gall to still tell us that capitalism is the only game in town and that socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried.

Which brings me to Cuba which has dared to stand up to the US and offer the world something new and different. Rounding off today’s talk nicely, it’s worth looking at the role of Cuban women in a socialist society. They were always in the forefront of the struggle and always took full advantage of government initiatives in every aspect of Cuban life, with the Federation of Cuban Women playing a leading role. They had a powerful advocate in Fidel. Right from the start, he defined women’s liberation as a ‘revolution within the revolution.’ Cuban women enjoy equal pay, hold 36% of seats in parliament, 49% of judgeships, make up 60% of lawyers, 47% of the Supreme Court and 70% of educators and health professionals. They’ve had free contraception and abortion since 1965 and get 6 weeks paid leave before birth and 12 weeks afterwards. The Federation of Cuban Women laughingly told us they still have some way to go as we exchanged stories comparing Macho Man with Mr Ocker.

We have to accept that there has always been sexism, no matter what the economic system, but sexism has no chance of being eliminated under capitalism, where divide and conquer is the rule. If some of us reckon ‘we’ve made it’, whatever that means, then the rest of us will still be used to supply cheap, free labour to consume and scab on each other.

So all of us together, please get active in whatever field you’re interested in and at whatever level you feel comfortable, because if you’re waiting for change from on high you’ll be waiting for hell to freeze over. Recognise the limitations of our system and be aware of its entrenched power structures and make the connections between the various issues. Always remember that only in solidarity can we be free, but only in struggle can we create that freedom. Above all, keep your sense of humour because it’s a long haul.

Happy International Women’s Day!