Nadine Williams

Feminism fails girl in the telephone box

International Women’s Day, when we celebrate the economic, political and social achievements of women, calls to mind an incident yesterday.

I had called into a supermarket close to the controversial The Parks Community Centre in Mansfield Park, one of Adelaide’s western suburbs where the Westwood inner urban housing redevelopment is transforming large tracts of public housing into privately-owned new housing.

I noticed a skinny young woman making a call in the public telephone box with a boy of about six years old hanging around outside.  When she turned around to check up on the child, I was shocked at her drawn, tense appearance. She looked unkempt with untidy long hair, black stovepipe tights and flimsy top, but it was her face which told the story of a hard life. She had few front teeth and her complexion was sallow. It was hard to imagine she was only about 30 years old.  A male partner was close by and after she had finished the call, the duo sat on the cement curb running alongside the shopping centre.  The scenario dripped with despair and disillusionment.

And I wonder today, on the 100^th anniversary of the founding of  International Women’s Day, what needed to happen in this woman’s life to break out of that poverty cycle, to change her outcome to achievement, home ownership, career or vocational success and accumulation of wealth. These, by the way are the fruits of feminism wrought in our lifetime. We have lived through the days when women had to make a choice – marriage or a career – when their fortunes were tied to men – to when our female Governor-general, Quentin Bryce officially launched UN Women Australia this morning.

At one end of the equality spectrum we have much to be proud of and newspapers have been filled with congratulatory statements and praiseworthy facts and figures this week. Yes, we have a female Prime Minister, an achievement I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime. Three states have female premiers and here in South Australia, the Leader of the Opposition is Isobel Redmond.  Professional women can be found in management positions in many industries – and Heather Ridout is chief executive of the Australian Industry Group.

And even the old boy club of corporate Australia, that rock-solid male bastion, has mounted a new focus on the promotion of women into top management roles, which is beginning to bear fruit. Numbers of women on boards of the top 200 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange has move upwards from 8 per cent in 2009 to 11 per cent. This follows an aggressive push by the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Business Council of Australia. But the Business Council of Australia can only boast a handful of female CEOs – Gail Kelly, who heads Westpac being a standout figure.

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick acknowledges that the prominent women at all levels of business, politics and industry are too often the exceptions rather than the rule.

In my 20-year journalistic career as a feminist writer at The Advertiser, I covered the underbelly of women’s lives as well as celebrating the  achievements of our top women by writing up women newsmakers. I always interviewed winners of the Telstra Business Woman of the Year awards each year. But my heart went out to the many victims of domestic violence who shared their troubles with readers.

Women such as the girl in the telephone box never put their hands up to be interviewed as they sense the hopelessness of their lives and suffer low self-esteem and sometimes dependency problems and mental health issues.  But I covered the issues.  Their lives are steeped in poverty and they often suffer endemic domestic violence, sometimes inter-generational, from father, male partner and even from teenage sons.  Violence within the home is certainly not confined to the poor and here we should remember the violence of high profile media personalities such as Mel Gibson and locally Matthew Newton.  Poverty and Violence remain the two vital issues in women’s lives which still need to be addressed and then we have to grapple with pay inequity (unacceptable in 2011), and be vigilant against covert discrimination against young women following paid maternity leave (our great recent achievement).  The figures that interest me most today are the ones which read that one in three women experiences physical violence after the age of 15, and that most women experience sexual violence in some form in their lifetime and that most single older women  live in poverty on the pension. The latter being the clear result of broken work patterns due to child-rearing,  discriminatory social mores and inequality during their working lives.

Education is still pivotal to improving women’s life chances and their ability to build independent lives for themselves, where they can rely on their own resources and skills whatever life dishes up in relationships and child-rearing.

But achieving equality in society is still a work in progress. So we need to reflect that 100 years have passed since that first international Women’s Day and to celebrate amazing achievements. However, I still need to write as I have for 20 years of my life, that there is still so much work to be done to for the sisterhood to enjoy true equality economically, politically and socially.

Most important, we need to reflect that all this is examining our own back yard and if we look worldwide to the discriminatory injustices that impact on women’s lives, then the task ahead is awesome.

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