‘For the great Australian public
Though it loves to woo and flirt
Will never bend its noddle
To unmitigated skirt.’

This piece of doggerel was pasted into Vida’s scrapbook in 1903. In the midst of her first strong and positive election campaign it seems a rather deflating thing to keep, especially as she did not collect all the press clippings, cartoons and verse about her. What made her cut out and paste this particular verse?

A probable answer is that she put it into her scrapbook in a spirit of ‘I’ll show you’ defiance. But as time passed and she failed to enter parliament, the jaunty lines must have looked bleakly prophetic.

They were not, or not entirely. While the USA and Britain embraced female suffrage almost twenty years after Australia, women joined their national legislatures within five years (Jeanette Rankin, the first member of the US Congress, was appointed in 1917; Nancy Astor for the UK in 1919). In Australia, it took forty years for a woman to enter parliament.

Vida sent notes of congratulation to Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney in 1943. Both were members of established political parties: Tangney as a West Australian senator for the ALP, Lyons in Tasmania for Menzies’ Liberals. The first woman to be elected as a national independent MP was Vida’s former electoral secretary Doris Blackburn, who took over her husband Maurice’s Melbourne seat of Bourke in 1946 after his death. She, Lyons and Tangney had had long careers as advocates for issues involving women and children, as well as education; Blackburn also spoke out strongly against the Woomera rocket range on behalf of the Indigenous people of the Western Desert.

Pathfinders and trailblazers these women certainly were, but they were not wholly accepted and honoured by their peers when they entered parliament. (In criticising their perceived lack of activist spirit, Vida never really acknowledged this.) Once elected, each walked a lonely road. Lyons, whose abilities and experience would have entitled her to a ministry in the Menzies government, had to make do with being vice-president of the Executive Council: an important position but not, she felt, at the cutting edge of decision-making. She once commented with some bitterness that she thought the men had wanted her in parliament just to make the tea.

Tangney felt frustrated for similar reasons: she eventually lost her position in the Senate when the ALP decided that in the newly emerging Whitlamite agenda of the early 1970s, she was not sufficiently progressive. The Whitlam ministry in 1972 did not have a single woman in it.

And Blackburn, as a Labor independent, was never consulted by PM Ben Chifley or his Labor Party members in the House of Representatives. She had to go outside the party to find a fellow MP to second the motions she put up in parliament, and often had to rely on the maverick conservative Liberal Archie Cameron.

If any of these women had had the temerity to point out that their abilities were not being properly recognised, there would have been no shortage of men to tell them, nicely, that women had to earn their stripes before being rewarded. It is an argument that loses some force when one considers the number of male timeservers who have enjoyed long parliamentary careers.

The first two women to be given federal portfolios were the Liberal senator Dame Annabel Rankin, named minister for housing in 1966, and Senator Margaret Guilfoyle, also a Liberal, who was the first woman admitted to Cabinet, as minister for education, in 1975 and also as minister for social security and minister for finance. Since then, both sides of politics have admitted women to Cabinet in various portfolios – including education (Susan Ryan), foreign affairs (Julie Bishop) and defence (Marise Payne) and as attorney-general (Nicola Roxon). And since 1975 every Australian prime minister – Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison – has given women positions in Cabinet.

Vida and her colleagues would have been proud to see their daughters, granddaughters and even great-granddaughters making such giant strides in politics, and in 2010, they would have been delighted to see Julia Gillard confirmed as the country’s first woman prime minister. However, their joy would have been short-lived, for in the three years of Gillard’s prime ministership, it sometimes looked as if the pent-up Australian misogyny of years had risen like a wave and crashed around her head.

It is true that the way Gillard came to office – deposing her predecessor, Kevin Rudd – was messily done, and she and the ALP did a ham-fisted job of explaining why this had been necessary. It was not an especially edifying episode, but that kind of substitution is hardly unique in the annals of Australian party politics. Billy Hughes was replaced by Stanley Bruce, Menzies by Fadden, Gorton by McMahon and Hawke by Keating – not to mention, more recently, Abbott’s replacement by Turnbull and Turnbull’s by Morrison. In none of these cases was there the kind of continued hostility that Gillard suffered when she took over from Rudd. Living and dying by the sword is evidently fine, even accepted, if you happen to be male, but if you’re a woman, not so much.

It cannot be denied that as prime minister Gillard made some mistakes (not the least of which was allowing Rudd free rein to undermine her). She equivocated sometimes, contradicted herself, occasionally failed to act decisively. All those mistakes were pounced on by a vociferous Opposition and an aggressively confrontational conservative media. But even with all that, running a minority government that only remained in office with the help of two independents, Gillard managed to get more than 500 pieces of legislation through parliament – including the setting-up of a workable carbon credit mechanism to combat global heating, a national disability insurance scheme, and a royal commission to investigate institutional child abuse.

Quite a lot of what she did, of course, was speedily undone by her male successors: the sight of parliamentary conservatives congratulating themselves on repealing the carbon credit legislation is not easily forgotten. Yet as prime minister she was more productive, her record was more impressive, than that of her four male successors. In several ways, she put them to shame.

Gillard endured this undermining, not to mention the abuse – a small group of conservative politicians chanting ‘Ditch the witch’, comments about the size of her backside, her clothes, her hairstyles, her lack of housekeeping skills, her voice, even a television comedy series based on her personal life – but by 9 October 2012 she could bear it no longer. The trigger for her best-known speech was the hypocrisy of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s censure of Speaker Peter Slipper, when he piously pointed out Slipper’s crude and sexist remarks as shameful.

In scathing words, Gillard accused Abbott of sexism and misogyny, giving chapter and verse. Some journalists said she did this to deflect the attention of parliament and the media from her support of the Speaker, and others called it ‘desperate’ – but anyone who saw the so-called ‘misogyny speech’ can have been left in no doubt about the weight of anger behind it, going back years: ‘I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not,’ she said. ‘If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia . . . he needs a mirror.’

It was a speech that quickly went viral, in Australia and internationally. Gillard’s words were applauded by thousands of women, all of whom knew what she was talking about. Gillard later said she had been trying to show that sexism and misogyny could be named and shamed. Not that the speech had much effect on her wider political fortunes: she was deposed by her own party in 2013 in favour of Rudd once again, and subsequently resigned from parliament. In her farewell speech, she said:

There’s been a lot of analysis about the so-called gender wars. Me playing the so-called gender card because heaven knows no one noticed I was a woman until I raised it.

I’ve been a bit bemused by those colleagues in the newspapers who have admitted that I have suffered more pressure as a result of my gender than other prime ministers in the past, but then concluded it had zero effect on my political position or [that] of the Labor Party. It doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing. It explains some things. And it is up to the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey.¹

Showing the kind of restraint that Vida would have applauded, Gillard also made some cautious comments about her media treatment as Australia’s first woman prime minister. However, she later told a TV interviewer in Britain that media coverage of female politicians was more hostile than it had been forty years ago, when Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman prime minister.

This seems to be contradicted by the fact that all over the world, more women are running for political office, and are in power, than ever before. The numbers are not great, but they are growing, in countries as diverse as Brazil, Tunisia, Mexico and the United States. But politically motivated attacks against women have been rising every year in every region of the world. They take the form of public threats, legislation, and criticism on social media and in newspapers. A 2016 survey of woman politicians from thirty-nine countries found that 82 per cent had been subjected to ‘some form of psychological violence’ and 44 per cent had suffered violent and threatening behaviour. In the UK, a 2018 study found that 62 per cent of woman parliamentarians had received physical threats to their friends and family; the figure for male politicians was 6 per cent. And there was Hillary Clinton, who in the 2016 US Democratic presidential primary election received twice as much abuse on Twitter as did her main rival, Bernie Sanders – not to mention the vile treatment she endured during the actual presidential race from her opponent, Donald Trump, and his supporters.

None of this is coincidental. In the words of Katia Uriona, the former president of Bolivia’s electoral tribunal, ‘Women [are close to parity] now, and men cannot easily accept this.’² And what of Australia? On the face of it, we seem to be doing rather well. In the USA, 25 per cent of Congresspeople are women; in Australia at the time of writing the figure is 32 per cent. But this has not translated into women being willing to run for parliament. In a 2014 survey by the YWCA and the University of Adelaide, two-thirds of the women who expressed interest in running for office said that threats against female politicians were making them hesitate. Gillard said when she resigned that her example would make it easier for the next woman to become prime minister of Australia. But right now no one is putting up her hand.

The fact is, too, that women are not part of Australian political parties’ power structure – something Vida and other independent woman candidates recognised a long time ago. In October 2019 the national convenor of EMILY’s List Australia – an organisation set up to help progressive women gain access to political office – was scathing about the stranglehold men have on the organising arm of the Australian Labor Party, the more progressive of the two majors: ‘It’s as if [party organisation] is men’s business. It’s handed out along factional lines and not based on competency. Men have been the primary beneficiaries of that.’ Julie Bishop, for years the minister for foreign affairs in a conservative government, who was rolled by her party when she contested the leadership in 2018, would surely agree with that.³

Vida would have been pleased to see the progress Australian women have made and are making in certain fields – in education, law and medicine, for example. She would have applauded the existence of #MeToo and Destroy the Joint as organisations and movements drawing attention to women’s abuse, and the work of activists such as Rosie Batty would have delighted her, and earned her respect.

However, there are more men named ‘John’ on the boards of Australia’s biggest companies than there are women at all. Women in the sporting arena are still, mostly, paid much less than their male counterparts. Australia is still arguing the toss about the rules governing parental custody and the safety of children. The most influential leaders in law and medicine are still men. And this is still a country where Gillian Triggs, an internationally recognised human rights lawyer recently appointed by the United Nations as Assistant High Commissioner for Protection in the High Commission for Refugees, has had her reputation ignominiously trashed by a whole raft of conservative politicians, assisted by the media.

The World Economic Forum Gender Index is a global measure of women’s attainments according to four indices: economic participation, health and survival, educational attainment and political empowerment. In 2006 Australia was placed 15th in the world; ten years later we had slipped to 45th, behind Serbia, Laos and Cuba. How, asks Triggs, has it come to this?⁴

Vida would have been dismayed by these signs that, deep down, women in Australia are still the unequal half of society. But she knew, in her many years of political and social advocacy, that she and those who followed her were embarking on a long, long journey. She knew, as she wrote in 1903, that ‘the world moves slowly, my masters’. Let us hope she continues to be right in adding, ‘but it does move’.