Election Retrospective:- The Feminist Vote

The suffragettes knew what I’m talking about. They faced, in their fight for the right for women to vote, the fear that women given the vote would vote in a conservative bloc. That it would be effectively giving married men twice the vote of single men. That women were frail and delicate creatures not capable of rational consideration. Oh dear me no. If we had the vote, something something ovaries overheating, something something end of civilisation.

As a woman, I am surrounded by men and women who think they are better placed to tell me what my feminism should mean. People like Australia’s new Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Women - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD1Lvds3N9g] - who think feminism is a stick to beat other women with. Our Cabinet representation is now a man who has said that he believes women are maybe just physiologically unsuited to being equally represented in high office - and he has demonstrated this by being unable to appoint more than one female colleague to his Cabinet. Because apparently the Liberal Party is entirely filled with women who are merit-less hacks (aside from their rampant sex appeal).

Faced with the claim that women especially should not have voted for Tony Abbott, given the constitution of his Cabinet and his well-known views on the role and status of women, I find myself perplexed. As a woman, I’d like the freedom to have voted against the LNP because I am terrified of what their immigration policy is going to mean, or because I want my gay and lesbian friends to be able to have the same rights I have. I’d like to be allowed to make up my mind based on the proposed defunding of the community legal sector, on which party will leave indigenous defendants in front of hostile and confusing courts without representation. I’d even like to be able to be like the whingey half of the internet who apparently voted exclusively on the issue of FTTH versus FTTP.

Election 2013 fortunately did not force me to decide between voting for a candidate who respected feminism and one who was going to support other values dear to my heart. It is luck that my feminism got to align with the other things that matter - rather than having to trump my compassion for stateless refugees or people from LSE backgrounds whose choices have been so much more limited than my own.

I think voting purely on self interest when you know it will disadvantage others is heinous. I must acknowledge that the pay differential between men and women, the difficulties in career progression, the chances of discrimination and assault, the ongoing challenge to the right to terminate a pregnancy - whilst all things women in Australia need to continue to fight for - are surely less urgent battles than fighting for something better for refugees. We’re offering them a lottery where the best possible outcome is a favourable first-instance administrative decision that says they can stay in limbo and reapply for a safe place to live every three years, and the worst outcome is being deported to the persecution and death they were fleeing. The plight of women in Australia may be difficult at times, but it is not desperate.

Thanks to my suffragette forebears, I had a choice. I could choose between the conservative white male candidate who undermined our first female prime minister and only begrudgingly acknowledged her contribution to the party and the nation - or the even more conservative white male candidate who thinks my whole gender is physiologically unsuited for high office. I could vote informally in disgust at the whole system, if I wanted to, and draw a phallus on my ballot paper like a surprisingly high number of my compatriots. Yet another dick option.

The right that was fought for was mine to exercise, and if I choose to be like the rest of the country and rank my genders’ equality well below my views on immigration, climate change, public education and access to justice - then have I betrayed feminism? Or is it when we let someone else’s idea of female self-actualisation dictate how women should exercise their right in fact the betrayal? We are not a monolith and we may well vote against our own interests with nary an incident of overheated ovary or internalised misogyny.

P.S - Anyone who thinks Sophie Mirabella's electoral defeat was celebrated primarily because she is a woman clearly doesn't remember  the much more substantial reasons for rejoicing in her defeat, like the views on public record, the comparison of Gillard's pricing carbon with Colonel Gaddafi slaughtering Libyan citizens,  that time she was the darling of the No Carbon Tax rally crowd and followed men with signs saying "Ditch the Witch" around the country. and the fact she wasn't actually much good as a local member for Indi.