2013 is the centenary of some of the most prominent events in the name of the women’s suffrage movement. One of the most famous took place on 4 June 1913, when Emily Wilding Davison threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at The Derby in protest at the lack of women’s rights. We have some amazing documents held at The National Archives on Emily Wilding Davison, which were recently filmed for the Channel 4 documentary Clare Balding’s Secrets of a Suffragette (shown in Britain on Sunday 26 May 2013).

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‘Socialist’ or ‘socialism’ is an alarming word in Australia, let alone the country town of Taree, New South Wales, Australia. Believed by most to be nothing more than Communism, Socialist principles are seen as a ‘failure’.  This view became deep-rooted by the fall of USSR and more importantly, denigration by the press, particularly the Murdoch Daily Telegraph, a paper most people read.

Taree, fifteen kilometres from beaches of such colour and inspiration words seem inadequate, is served by the magnificent Manning River. All this magnificence is contrasted by Purfleet, once the ‘mish’ or Mission, an Aboriginal presence on ‘the other side’ of the river. Taree, once a very conservative dairy farming community is now a mixed economy and it is also racist!

In 2007, five women met in Taree at the cafe Raw Sugar for breakfast; a nurse, a teacher, a women’s refuge worker, a school assistant and I, an author and retiree.  The original three are members of the Australian Labor (not Labour) Party. Therefore, although the meeting was not politically driven, the conversations had little to do with knitting tea cosies or cooking.  It was not long before it was realised that talking was not enough; we were just going around in circles. Socialist Women for Justice was the answer.

Against advice, we used the word ‘Socialist’ even though not one of us declared allegiance to such a philosophy. But we were sick and tired of the conservative attitudes displayed by our governments and press, let alone the people.

After one or two meetings, I fell into the role of ‘scribe’: write to Government, radio stations and local Council. It was agreed that the letters must appear ‘personal’: typed and formal but hand-written envelopes. We knew how many emails politicians receive and seldom see. Perhaps paper may get through?

Probably, Lisa’s concern for the neglected and abused children in the primary school at which she worked prompted our first letters.  We cannot say this was one of our successes. On the other hand, our correspondence created a furore to the extent we met with an Education Department delegation and talked about a subject we all knew in our hearts was beyond the people with whom we met: parental drug abuse and child abuse.  Am I suggesting our presence and our letters changed anything?  Yes, I think I am. One cannot raise these issues without some change occurring even if it is only in the thinking of some teachers, politicians or bureaucrats.

The group did not set out to proselytise. We had nothing to offer. No prizes, no games and very little success but somehow or other women heard of us and our activities: one breakfast a month, enthusiastic discussion and the belief, sometimes erroneously held, that by attending this breakfast and writing a letter or two made the previous week worthwhile.

The subjects tackled are too numerous to outline here but we have the ear of many politicians, State and Federal, some of whom are on our mailing list. I doubt that we have ever been ignored although obfuscation has raised its ugly head every now and then.

We are engaged in two ongoing discussions raised by individuals within the group. One is the accuracy of birth certificates. It was discovered by Kate twenty years ago when she registered her second child’s birth that her son from a previous relationship could not appear under his own name on his sister’s certificate. The powers that be ‘did not want to upset fathers’! Kate fought for some time gaining some ground with the establishment of a data base acknowledging the names of the children but allowed it to rest until she joined SWFJ. We want birth certificates to record the names of all siblings no matter the family name. A Review has taken place in New South Wales and the finding is about to be announced. There is no suggestion we have brought this about. It was the work of people like Kate but our support was an advantage and will be if either she or SWFJ is unhappy with the finding.  One has the right to expect Government documents to be accurate.

As for successful outcomes? The most important was our representation of  ‘stop and go’ workers: those workers who hold up signs on roads under construction or in times of accidents. On the lowest rung of the ladder as far as power is concerned, they believed they were short-changed with wages and hours. Following unsuccessful representation they approached the Ombudsman who also came down on the side of the employer. We studied the matter and decided the workers were denied their rightful pay and conditions. We made a case for the workers in a letter to the Minister for Employment, the Honourable Bill Shorten MP. He replied promptly and investigated promptly revealing $76000 owed to the workers and other oversights. The workers received that money and an apology from the Ombudsman. This kind of win made years of letter writing worthwhile.

Our successes have never been quite so dramatic; more often than not, we just add another letter on the desk of another politician. Even so, we are politically savvy enough to know that one letter, written with feeling, equates to a certain number of votes to each politician.

As the ‘scribe’, I must emphasise it is not just the writing of letters that sustains this group.  It is connection with other women of ‘like minds’ whether in Cairns, North Queensland, Adelaide, South Australia, United Kingdom or Taree. One can write letters without email but it is the immediacy of email that makes the formation of such a group exciting and productive.

An amusing aside; many men, particularly those interested in politics, appear jealous of the group. They ask, somewhat disparagingly, ‘…and what is that “little” group of yours, ABCD or whatever it is?’ There are some even generous enough to say, ‘I wish I could join’! Ha ha …

Marion Hosking (c) June 2013

Born in Epping, NSW, Australia, Marion Hosking, OAM, left school at 13 years for no other reason than she wanted work in a shop to earn her own living. From that moment, she worked and studied, devouring the classics, particularly Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck, from whom she received her socialist education. Always on the periphery of the labour and women’s movements she joined the NSW Humanist Society, becoming its first paid Secretary, She was a Convenor during the Moratorium, marching in protest with her son against Australia’s involvement in the Viet Nam war. On moving to the North Coast town of Taree, NSW, she became involved with a women’s refuge, spending 25 years in various unpaid roles. At age 74, she graduated BA (NEU) as a mature-age student, majoring in history. The same year, she was awarded the Centenary Medal, commemorating the Federation of Australia, for services to the community, and the NSW Premier’s Award for Active Citizenship for work with the Manning District Emergency Accommodation Committee Inc (refuge). Nominated in 2006 for Australian of the Year, the following year she received an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for work with victims/survivors of domestic violence.  Learning how to write and research history culminated in her writing the story of the refuge, Why Doesn’t She Leave? The story of a women’s refuge. Over the last few years she wrote her memoir, Family Likeness and is in the process of writing Our Australian Families.

Married for over sixty years Marion, now a widow, has three children and two grand children. She spends her time volunteering at the Manning Regional Art Gallery where her daughter is the Assistant Director, painting, gardening, facebooking and most of all, writing for Socialist Women for Justice.

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Happy International Women’s Day 2013

We have the numbers to create our own wellspring of women to change the world!

Attending a 2013 IWD breakfast I noted much diversity and talent amongst the women attending.  So I thought, why not meet, eat, and talk regularly and not just once a year?  So, I would like us to set up a grass roots national and international organisation of older women.  Grand Matriachs Worldwide – ordinary, everyday women who have lived at least 50 years.  Non elitist but grand as in grandmother, grand plan, grand vision and grand stand.

I will start the ball rolling with these thoughts:-

WHY?

Never before have we had such a large group of women over 50 worldwide.

Never before have we been as active in the community as we have been in recent years

Never before have we by our own activism achieved so much.

Never before have we been as connected to learn that much more needs to be done

Never before have women who have survived, been so supportive of each other.

Never before have we so many amazing women in the third world.

All those of us over 50 are members already with no joining process or fees. We are inclusive of all women who realise and understand what power we can wield.  Just BEING what we are is a force of sheer numbers that can be so powerful.  Worldwide, there are more than a billion of us over 50 who are matriachs.  The huge numbers that we have must count for something.

Let us use our raw numbers to flex our muscles in all areas of life.

Every one of us counts if we cast a vote in any election anywhere.

If we march together our numbers demand political attention and clout.

We need to recognise and harness our collective femaleness into social activism.

We are friends even if we have not met as we have shared experiences

We are all connected because we are daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers etc.

Never, ever let us again be ‘just women’ who react as victims and are the ‘other’.

Let us meet, inspire, support, connect, network, mentor, learn, think and plan.

In our homes, families, schools, community neighbourhoods, villages, town, city, country.

Yes and worldwide via the internet so come blog on this website and tell us what is possible.

We do this now, wherever we are, in every way, every day, in all that we do.

In the small and big tasks we undertake daily in child and maternal health, girls education.

Resisting bias and taking steps to prevent and eliminate violence against women and children.

With our collective activism we can achieve in all the ways that we are already familiar with.

Let us take action now for our children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces and all children.

We can lobby for the lives of the future generation to be better than ours.

We can make a fairer, safer, more peaceful and sustainable world for women and children.

We can address the gender imbalance on resources with accessible credit for women.

In Australia we can support Julia Gillard, Australia’s first PM who has been vilified by men to destroy her leadership.  As women we know politics and parties are less relevant than people and policies around the world.  Julia has put this before electoral numbers, for our planet, our futures our children and grandchildren.  Be part of us and never, let us ever again be ‘just women’ who react as victims and are the ‘other’.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Watch this space for news of the Grand Matriarchs Worldwide’s Blog.

Patmalar Ambikapathy Thuraisingham (c) May 2013

A Barrister and Children’s Rights Lawyer, Patmalar Ambikapathy Thuraisingham graduated in law from the University of Durham and is a member of Lincoln’s Inn. She practiced in commercial law in Malaysia, then emigrated with her family to Australia, where she practiced as a solicitor in Ballarat and Melbourne, before going to the Melbourne Bar. She was first Children’s Commissioner for Tasmania, taking a strong and positive stand to advance the rights of children. She is an active advocate for ending violence against women and children, standing up for the right of children not to be hit or assaulted in any way, whether in the name of parental ‘control’ or otherwise.

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Courtesy of See Red Women’s Workshop

Capturing the voices of a generation of feminist activists, ‘Sisterhood & After’ is a new oral history archive and website which launched at the British Library on 8th March on International Women’s Day, and provides a free and relevant major resource to anyone interested in the history of feminism. The oral history project was also partnered with The Women’s Library, which advised it, and directed by Margaretta Jolly at the University of Sussex. It was funded by The Leverhulme Trust.

Each of the 60 women activists recorded for this project campaigned for equality and freedom in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These women demanded that struggles for gender rights be won at home as well as in the public sphere. They describe their own experiences as girls, socialised to expect less than their brothers. They also describe a rich range of political heritages that informed British feminism, from Black Power to Gay Liberation to socialism and disability rights.

Wages for Housework c.1975 Designed by B. Warrior

Given that the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain was a mass movement involving thousands of women from all over the country and from all walks of life, selecting just 60 to record was a challenge. Some of our interviewees are well known – Susie Orbach, feminist psychotherapist and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Jenni Murray, the voice of Radio 4’sWomen’s Hour for example. But we also wanted to capture the stories of women who dedicated much of their lives to fighting for gender equality but were not in the public eye. Karen McMinn, Director of Northern Ireland Women’s Aid from 1981–1996, for instance, described the risks involved in protecting women from domestic violence during ‘the troubles’, while Rowena Arshad, Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Scotland 2001-2007, talked about co-organising a pioneering black women’s refuge in Scotland. We also recorded interviews with Barbara Jones about working as a builder and being a member of ‘Women in Manual Trades’, with Una Kroll, a one-time surgeon who played a key part in the Movement for the Ordination of Women and with Sue Lopez, one of the most prominent women football players in the 1970s who campaigned for women to be allowed to use Football Association pitches. The oral histories with these women last, on average, 7 hours and set the circumstances and consequences of a person’s activism in a biographical and social context.

You can access the full life story recordings at the British Library but for a snap-shot of the archive log onto the Sisterhood & After website (bl.uk/sisterhood). The website has over 120 audio-clips taken from the oral history recordings, 10 bespoke films reflecting key campaigns and an Interviewees Page which includes a biographical sketch and portrait for each narrator.

Polly Russell, Lead Curator, Social Science and

Margaretta Jolly, Project Director, University of Sussex (c) May 2013

Dr Margaretta Jolly
Margaretta Jolly is the project’s award holder and the project director. She is Reader in Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. Margaretta’s main interests are the art and use of life narrative and feminist cultures and histories. Her book In Love and Struggle: Letters in Contemporary Feminism, was joint winner of the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association UK book prize, 2008, and she co-directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research.

Dr Polly Russell
Polly Russell is a Lead Curator in the Social Science department at the British Library. Polly is responsible for collections relating to Human Geography and Anthropology and her research interests include feminism, oral history and food. She was the main British Library link for the project, working closely with the project team and library colleagues.

Project Team

More about the whole team behind the project is available in the ‘About’ section on the website: http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/about.html (accessed 13 May 2013)

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Globally, things are better, but not much.

Howard University’s Professor Caroline Byerly used a sample of almost 2000 editorial and administrative to conclude that in 2011 36.1 per cent of the world’s journalists are women. Her figures reveal that women’s participation in management roles might be creeping upward, now to 26 per cent of governing roles and 27 per cent of top management jobs around the globe in 2011, but that is still just one quarter of the whole.

Dr Louise North’s published research – and my rather unacademic Facebook foray – also show that the news industry in Australia continues to embody what she described in her academic paper as a “blokey and ego-driven” culture that’s for the most part ignored – and systemic and ongoing gender (and race) inequity permeates the workforce.

This was probably best illustrated several months ago when one of Australia’s best known female TV journalists and presenters wrote an excoriating speech which she titled ‘Dear Mr Sexist’. Driven to fury and what she described as an inferno in her belly, Tracey Spicer recounted the male excutive that shouted across the newsroom at her: “I want two inches off your hair and two inches off your arse.” And the radio executive, who, during a job interview said: “There’s a reason why you don’t hear women on commercial talkback radio. No-one wants to hear the whiney sound of a female voice. Us blokes get enough nagging at home!” And then there was  the station manager who came down after her first night news reading, saying: “You need to stick your tits out more.” On and on it went,  the executive who pointed at her forehead wrinkles and said it was time to give the youngsters a  go, the sacking by email just after she had given birth to her second child (fought in court and won) and a litany of other stories so awful, you would be hard pressed to make them up.

Tracey Spicer’s experience reminded me of the editor who, on hearing I had been appointed Europe correspondent, pointed at my eyes and said: ” …‘a spell in the northern hemisphere out of the Australian sun will do your face wrinkles a world of good.” I hate to tell you but this one came from a woman.

During her 2012 research on women and newsroom culture, Dr North interviewed 600 female journalists in Australia  – the biggest study of its kind. Her findings revealed that a staggering 57.3 per cent had been sexually harassed in the workplace, with the majority reporting that this had happened within the last five years. North found  the problem infected all newsrooms although the commercial TV sector seemed to have higher rates than newspaper newsrooms or the national broadcaster.

Ironically, all this research has emerged around the time that Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, rebelled with such spirit against the mysoginistic culture she perceives both in the Parliament and among the media that report politics. I’m sure few of you would have missed that speech but you might not know that it went viral on Youtube globally, sparking headlines in Europe, America and the developing world but was virtually ignored by the Parliamentary reporters until they realised their blunder.

Which brings me back, sadly, to where I began – my informal ask-around for anecdotes about being a woman in a modern newsroom.

In a moment of odd serendipity, about 24 hours after I posted a request for my colleagues’ observations, a debate exploded about The Sydney Morning Herald‘s rebrand and renaming of what was previously called the ‘Daily Life’ section into ‘Women’s Perspective’ while the more masculine sections were rebadged ‘Executive Style’ – as if women can’t be executives. This move outraged not just the paper’s readers but the section’s editor herself who risked her job and broke ranks to blog about her own internal arguments against the name change with the all male editorial team. Hundreds of women tweeted and wrote comments along these lines: “Do you think it could have even been possible for you to decide on a more patronising tactic to show exactly which sections of the newspaper you think matter and which don’t?”

In this case, the men were forced to capitulate and the sections returned to its less offensive name.

While all this was going on, my colleagues started to email me: the first one arrived from an Australian colleague I worked with in Sydney, who spent a decade in the Middle East in Jerusalem and is now a well known TV face in Europe. She is also married to a reporter and described her conversation with an editor, requesting a payrise: “The editor looked at me outraged and said, what?! I have just given your husband a rise.”

Another told of internal 2012 research quietly testing  suspicions that a new section editor was commissioning only men to write cover stories and this was then checked against by lines. “In a year or so of his editing that section there were zero cover stories from women, 100% from men,” my colleague wrote. “When we confronted him, he seemed genuinely shocked and seemed not to realize he had done this. We figured that perhaps it was personality related – he was not comfortable talking to women. . .net result was the same though. Zero result for us women”.

Another, currently stationed in the Middle East, described the first words of a new chief of staff as she reported back about a story: “ So luv, is it a ball-tearer or a blue-veiner?” She was quck to add that despite this, he turned out to be a “good bloke”. Another described a particular editor’s penchant for coming up to her and the younger women on staff and massaging shoulders while looking over copy. One remembers, as a young cadet, being warned by the trainee counselor that part of working in a newsroom was playing “the game” after she raised feeling uncomfortable with this behaviour.

The worst anecdotes, just as Dr North reported, came from colleagues in commercial TV newsrooms, with some truly shocking me. In one case, a 30 something reporter, winner of a recent prize in investigative reporting, told me how she asked privately not to work with a particular producer due to his insistent lewd comments and behaviour. She asked her superiors that her name not be mentioned as she did not want to make a formal complaint. The man was not only told of her complaint but he then turned the tables on her warning colleagues and cameramen against her and making her work life impossible. She has now moved and is working at the public broadcaster. Another described standing open mouthed as an executive, in his late fifties, stood beside her working his way through a list of pretty much every older woman in Australian TV journalism. With some, he asked rhetorically why they hadn’t just stepped aside, others he observed he felt sorry for them, still others he said blatantly that they were too old and shouldn’t be on TV. It was her second day on the job and she chose, like so many of us, to say nothing.

The stories keep coming in.

I haven’t painted a particularly pretty picture although all of us – young and older – agree that it’s much, much better than even ten years ago. In Australia, Julia Gillard’s feisty diatribe against sexism appears to have touched a nerve and many of you might have read about the extraordinary social media campaign #destroythejoint that harnessed collective female anger against a particularly mysoginistic radio host – and the subsequent loss of millions in advertising as commercial sponsors realised the dollar effect of women scorned.

And so, I leave the last words to one of my youngest colleagues – a TV reporter – and a colleague at the other end of the totem pole, one of the few very senior women media executives in Australia. The youngest put it this way: “My perception of ‘this day and age’ is that it is better, much better. Less overt stuff goes on and most men are much, much better in the workplace than they were.” But, as we all know – and researcher Dr Louise North has confirmed – when it does go on, unfortunately, too many women are finding that it still doesn’t pay to rock the boat.

My executive colleague was succinct in her verdict and I quote her email directly: “I asked all my most senior colleagues what a pair of testicles would mean to them in this industry. They all answered, without bitterness or rancour that being male would mean a minimum of $50,000 a year to them. And these women included a Sunday newspaper editor, an investigative editor, a chief sub editor, a magazine editor, Most were on well above the 140,000 range – so this was a significant proportion of salary.”

“The sad thing,” reported my friend, “is that nobody was ANGRY. They all answered with a kind of quiet, tired acceptance of fact.”

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

References:

Caroline Byerly, 2011, pp. 9, 219

Hyland, 2010

Louise North, 2009

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At the Herald, I’m told, it wasn’t until World War II that the very first woman was even used as a general reporter. Her name was Neil Bedford (no, you didn’t hear wrong, it was Neil!). She emerged from the women’s section, home to most of the female staff, after so many men left to go to war, including about two dozen Herald men sent off as war correspondents. For similar wartime reasons, a second woman, Molly Luke became the first staff female photographer. Neither stayed very long after the war ended: who knows if they were given the choice to stay or were pushed back into the home by the returning men?

During the ’60s and ’70s, there was a trickle of women doing general news and features, but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the first woman general news subeditor was appointed. My wonderfully helpful former editor told me that the men’s reluctance to appoint a female was that male sub editors tended to – and I quote – swear quite colorfully – as edition deadlines approached. Hilarious when I think how my team, lots of them women, used to turn the air blue at edition time. And it wouldn’t be until the late 1970s that a woman staff photographer was appointed – and management at the time had reservations even then because of “possible problems” – and I quote again “created by men and women sharing a darkroom”!

Funnily enough, the first woman chief of staff ever appointed to the paper was on deck when I was a rookie. I remember she was the one who sent me home to change clothing when I arrived at work in jeans. “You must dress always ready for the possibility that you could meet the queen,” she said.

Yep that was said, in Sydney, Australia in 1982. This was the same boss who refused to deploy me to the teams covering bushfires not long after saying ‘not appropriate, you’re a young woman’.

Extraordinary as it may seem, the Herald‘s first female Chief Sub-editor was not appointed until the late 1990s and a woman Managing Chief Sub-editor (in charge of all editorial production) was appointed in the 2000s. I won’t even bother going into the continuing rows over women reporters who in some places are still fighting to enter male territory such as football dressing rooms. How do you cover sport if you are not allowed to report the traditional end-of-game press conferences?!

Fast forward a century and the world of news is unrecognizable and I, like so many correspondents of this era have had to revolutionize the way I work – from an often barely daily deadline and workload to a virtual 24/7, stand alone operation. As Vice President of the Foreign Press Association in London, 125 years old this year, I have been intrigued thinking back to the old guard, the newspaper correspondents, pretty much all of them male, who filed once every couple of weeks from the outposts of the empire, including often horrendous theatres of war, to newspapers back home.

No, they did not have Google, sat phones, laptops or the safety that comes from immediacy, and a part of me remains open mouthed at the hardship they encountered. But the other part of me believes honestly that the modern correspondent – and the new demands of a 24 hour news cycle as well as the inhuman amount of information we have to scan and filter every hour – means our professional lives, in some ways, are tougher. For women correspondents, it was the legendary 20th century author and journalist Martha Gellhorn who broke the gender barrier nearly 80 years ago. And today, unfortunately as we saw with Marie Colvin – women are losing their lives alongside the male reporters as they document the wor;d’s conflict zones. Some of the greatest chroniclers of war in our generation are women — among them CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the BBC’s formidable Kate Adie, Alex Crawford from Sky, Lara Logan from CBS News – and many, many others.

Last year, Logan – who survived a horrendous attack at the hands of what she described as “300 baying men” reporting in Cairo joined 40 other media women in a book which graphically described the special additional risks they’ve faced over the years — and offer their advice on how to prepare for these dangers and best do our jobs.

Their words and experiences provide a powerful reminder that female journalists often offer a different take on war and conflict and unlike many of their male counterparts, remain utterly unimpressed by the whiz bang of the boys toys, knowing only too well that “collateral damage” means people: men, women and so often, little children. Like them, I believe that understanding makes them better journalists.

In all this, there is one fundamental that has changed very little and that is the presence of women at the pointy end of news, the place where the decisions are made – in executive offices, in the publishers’ suite, in the boardrooms of big media companies.

Returning to Dr Louise North’s work published in August 2012 in Australia, we learned that not one woman was entrusted with the editing role in a daily edition of the nation’s 21 metropolitan newspapers although three currently edit weekend editions – as I did before being posted to London.

Similarly, in broadcasting, women’s exclusion from leadership roles is evident although public broadcasters fared slightly better. But even at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), equivalent of the BBC, it wasn’t until 2009 that they appointed the first female director of news, Kate Torney. On morning and drive time radio shifts, commercial and public radio is dominated by male voices.

At CEO level, 23 of 24 of the big mainstream media companies in Oz are men – the only woman runs a regional network outside Sydney. Back at my old paper, of the 13 member executive team, 11 are men. The only women at that level are the chief legal counsel and human resources CEO.

And this is in the new world, a nation just 200 years old that prides itself on being open minded, easy going, classless!

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

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Asked to speak at the WWAFE House of Lords seminar, as I first began to muse about the issue a few weeks ago, I decided to put a call out on Facebook to elicit some observations from the many female colleagues I left behind in Australian media – and the many more I have met since my posting as a foreign correspondent to London in 2008. How did they see their profession when they began? Have things changed for those of us who are well into our careers?

And what about the youngest cohort, those who have entered the fray as the digital revolution continues to shake the industry to its core?

While many of us have busted barriers to report from war zones the world over, how many women have managed to infiltrate media boardrooms or editor’s offices and publisher’s top floor suites?

That first call out for anecdotes was an incredible eye opener. I thought I might glean a few good stories, even a few jokes. But what I heard, often messaged almost with a sense of apology to me in private, saddened and shocked me.

Before I head down that path, let me tell you a little of my own professional trajectory. I began as a young, trainee journalist on Australia’s oldest and most august broadsheet daily in the middle of 1981 – the last undergraduate, Italian born and the only non Australian rookie. Six months later, a colleague of Hungarian Jewish background joined as a trainee and she – a trailblazing feminist – and I laughed the other night about being The Sydney Morning Herald‘s ‘token ethnics’ of the time. When I started at the paper, stories were written on manual typewriters, every page of the eight-ply carbon paper allowed to contain just two paragraphs to ease the sub-editing and production process. Every day, we bloodied our thumbs pushing pins through the great wads of paper that made a whole article. The paper’s printing presses thrummed to life three or four times throughout the night but once the last edition was in bed that was it, another day was over. I will always remember the excitement of the facsimile machine and what we called gram machines, great big heavy drums that transmitted photographs via a telephone line at the speed of a snail on tranquillizers.

Now, as a correspondent covering Europe for Australian newspapers just two decades later, news can break and I will be able to get it out, into the ether or on our websites, sometimes in seconds. These days, the news cycle runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have filed stories from the strangest places: Congo River, the remotest foothills of the Himalayas, an earthquake torn mountain village in Italy and from 40,000 feet above the earth in a plane carrying Pope Benedict and a cabal – I’m not sure that is the collective noun for Cardinals!

In an effort to quantify change specifically for women in media, I hunted down a former editor of the time, one of Australia’s finest – and, it turns out, something of a newspaper historian. He told me that in the year I joined The Sydney Morning Herald, there were 180 journalist writing the paper – of which 39 or 22 per cent – were women.

Thirty years later, work done by Australian academic, Dr Louise North, and published last year reveals that there has been a slight improvement – but women still occupy only 30 per cent of the editorial positions at the Herald. There has been a technological – but not a gender – revolution.

I’m fairly sure that the year I began in what I still feel is the best job in the world was also the year the paper celebrated its 150^th birthday. Three decades – 30 years! – would pass before the first female editor was appointed – and she lasted less than two years, removed in a purge in 2012 which saw her replaced with two men!

Chatting to colleagues and editors who also began their careers in the 1980s, I realized that my generation was at the pointy end of huge changes for women in news and yet most of us were pretty much oblivious that what we were doing was trying to change the world. One reminded me with great gusto of the daily battle in news conference – the place where editors, mostly male, meet twice a day to create the newslist and place stories. The fight was never ending to get placement for stories about equal pay and equal opportunity, welfare, reproductive rights, balancing family life, stories about childbirth, about breast feeding into the paper, let alone onto page one alongside the nation’s male dominated political affairs. One year, this same colleague reminded me, childcare fees rocketed by 25 per cent in one go – none of us even had kids then but she remembers it took a full week of lobbying to get an editor (whose wife happened to be a feminist and mum of two young children) – to agree to running the story, let alone putting it on page one where it belonged.

Over the next decade, we fought and won a battle for purpose built childcare at work, we watched the election of a trickle of women to the nation’s parliaments, seethed with fury as the first female Deputy Opposition Leader in a Lower House was literally driven out of politics by the mysoginist language and political attacks by a Premier who is remembered also as one of Australia’s most erudite, eloquent and reforming QCs.

And national research shows still that in Australia today, women even now manage to get just 30 per cent of newspaper bylines on page one – and it’s the same percentage if you look at the main focus of news stories. As my trailblazer colleague says it’s still ‘news about blokes, by blokes.’

And yet, eight years ago, when I was appointed Editor of the Saturday edition of the Herald – the one with the biggest circulation and fattest income – the last thing I thought of myself was being a pioneer. I remember feeling that somehow, I had not earned it, was a fraud soon to be found out, felt amazingly thankful when my salary was given an unexpectedly big hoik. I suspect a male colleague would have asked for even more, out of principle. It’s funny because looking back, I now see that I was – and still am – one of a mere handful of women appointed to executive, decision making positions in Australian media – but somehow I didn’t feel I deserved it. I don’t think I am alone in these secret misgivings and thoughts.

Paola Totaro (c) March 2013

Paola Totaro is a journalist who lives in London and worked with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, Australia, before coming to the United Kingdom as European Correspondent. She studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New England in Australia, and is presently enrolled in an MA (Culture & Criticism) at the University of the Arts, London. She includes French and Italian amongst her languages, and lists her hometown as Naples, Italy.

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Several years ago, I had the opportunity of a weekend stay in central London. This led to my wondering what I’d like to do there. A visit to one of the usual places – museum, gallery, theatre – would be a good standby but I also wanted something more, something behind the glitzy city façade: a more personal, more exploratory, more emotionally engaging experience of London.

I’d been reading Miranda Seymour’s compelling biography of Mary Shelley’s extraordinary but in many ways deeply sad life. It was such an engrossing read that I felt I’d grown close to Mary and wanted to stay with her for a little longer, wanted ‘more’ of her life. Mary Shelley has deep connections with London: born in Somers Town, she’d visit her mother’s grave at nearby St Pancras and at age nine, she moved to a house in Snow Hill, in the then city’s bookselling area. These places I wanted to find, as a way of acknowledging my respect for her achievements and, well, for simply surviving the life she’d had. As Seymour says in her preface, “Places… are the key to understanding” and, at that moment, I could only agree with her.

The house in Chester Street SW1, where she died, can be found in the Blue Plaque guide but not 41 Skinner Street where she spent some of her most formative years and, indeed, met and fell in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley. And so I decided to spend an afternoon of that weekend in London, tracking down these houses and finding my way around the back streets of London.  Here began the first of many journeys to discover, as Seymour had earlier found, that “what begins as a curiosity becomes obsession”. I understood Miranda Seymour’s lovely description of being at Shelley’s house on Skinner Street, where she found herself “walking the streets of London in a daze. There are no paving stones beneath your feet, no cars, no office blocks. You hear the clatter of iron wheels, smell the horse dung, see, in a sudden swish of black silk and the glimpse of a shawl, Mary and Claire hurrying down a narrow street towards the carriage where Shelly is waiting in 1814, to lead them to adventures such as these two impatient, headstrong young women have only read about in novels.” So walking around, A-Z in hand, locating the Skinner Street house and Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s place of marriage and burial, opened London up to me in a new and wonderful way and I realised the historical wealth of women’s lives that were quietly contained in this great city.

Years ago, working with one of the GLC Women’s Committee groups (where are we all now?)  I tried to initiate some research on Blue Plaques for women  because I was exasperated by the endless number of plaques to blokes of whom most of us hadn’t even heard, yet there were so few plaques to credit the many remarkable and famous women in our history. Today, there are more Blue Plaques to mark houses of significant women but it’s still disproportionately a male preserve. For instance, at 46 Gordon Square where Virginia Woolf lived, there’s still only a plaque for Maynard Keynes. I wanted to revisit that idea of commemorating women’s contribution to our culture and history by marking their existence on a map of London, simply because others have not done so – though I would like to credit Jennifer Clarke’s In Our Grandmother’s Footsteps, Virago Guide to London of 1984 and Katherine Sturtevant and Kate Murphy’s, Our Sisters’ London: 19 Feminist Walks, Women’s Press, 1991, for sharing that endeavour.

There have been so many wonderful women who have lived in London at some time of their lives or other, that I have grouped them together thematically. Rather than a relatively cumbersome book to carry about, with pages to flick through, backwards and forwards, I designed a pocket sized map for portability, using quality paper for durability and environmentally friendly inks and printing processes because they are available. The first map is on historical Women Artists because they were my first passion. (The second map is on Women Writers, with other categories to follow.) Inside, the map has addresses how to visit houses (many of which still stand) where the women lived or worked, providing transport details and directions. The map also provides biographical information and a short contextualising summary about women artists. I’d like to acknowledge Professor Griselda Pollock at Leeds University for her inspiration and the insights that contributed to the women artists’ material.

The Women Artists map locates the homes of artists including the hugely successful painters Elizabeth Vigee Lebrun and Angelica Kauffmann, as well as other less well known artists like the American Patriot and sculptor, Patience Wright, whose C18th waxwork of William Pitt still stands in Westminster Abbey. I have covered a range of artistic practice, from goldsmiths to bookbinders, needleworkers to history painters in order to avoid the traditional primacy of Fine Art which can often obscure the predominantly female arts and crafts skills. Famous artists are included alongside those it might be a pleasure to discover for the first time. The second, Women Writers, map follows a similar concept of including ‘stars’ with less well known but equally interesting women from the C17th to C20th who have lived and worked in London.

The maps are intended to be an enjoyable and useful tie-in for historians, researchers, practitioners, students or those with a personal interest in the subject or the women.  It’s to enable us to more easily explore our past by combining cultural pilgrimage with the pleasures of biographical history, allowing for a more intimately engaged and targeted experience of London, beyond the usual landmarks.

The map is an all women project with graphic artist Timi Van Houten designing the layout and illustrator Judy Stevens contributing the striking original portraits which bring the women to life on the page. Together with the text, I hoped to make a positive contribution to the women’s movement by validating our history and achievements in a concrete and user-friendly way.

And finally, the idea is to offer the Women Artists /Women Writers in London  maps to select women’s organisations and institutions only to sell, should they wish,  in order to contribute to their under- funded, valuable work.

Julie Harper (c) March 2013

 Julie Harper  taught English, Film Studies and Art History at a 6th form college for many years and now combines freelance English skills tutoring with fieldwork for an independent research company.

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Women and politics was high on the agenda at UN CSW 57, with attention being paid to politics in its broad and narrower sense. ‘Gender Sensitive Parliaments’ , discussing and debating the way to chage the culture of parliaments to ensure their responsiveness ‘to the needs and interests of both men and women in their structures, operations, methods and work’ was one topic holding enthralled all attending that side event. Another CSW 57 side event, also run by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU),  covered the way in which parliaments around the world have taken steps to ensure representation, or greater representation, of women as members, as cabinet members, as speaker, as whips, and in other posts of parliamentary authority.

Aotearoa/New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant women the vote, acceding in 1893 to women’s demands for the introduction of real democracy, where ‘democracy’ had, in the past, referred to government by men alone. South Australia was the first state-entity in the world to grant women not only the vote, but the right to stand for Parliament. In 1894 the South Australian Parliament had before it a Bill to extend the vote to women and one member, seeking to disrupt the process and impede passage of the Bill, introduced an amendment whereby the vote would be complemented by the right to stand. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for the democratic cause, the Bill passed – with both rights included.

In 1902 Australia became the first country in the world to extend the vote to women, along with the right to stand for Parliament. In 1903, three women stood in the Australian election. Although none succeeded, Vida Goldstein – the first woman to register to stand for the Senate, gained a goodly swathe of votes. She stood three more times over the years, up to 1920, despite not gaining a seat.

Just as men do not accept that the right to vote is sufficient – Parliamentary representation must be possible for all men, or at least all men are entitled to seek parliamentary places – neither do women accept that the vote is enough. Democracy means that women and men must have the right to vote for women or men as members of Parliament. Democracy means that women and men must have the right to stand for Parliament.

In the 1970s, the Australian Women’s Movement raised the slogan: ‘A Woman’s Place is in the House – and in the Senate’. This encapsulated the demand for democratic representation: women should be able to take their place in the lower house, the House of Representatives, and in the upper house, the Senate. The demand extended, too, to the state and territory legislatures when they came into being in the Northern Territory and the ACT (Australian Capital Territory – Canberra).

Although women were elected to state Parliaments, beginning with Edith Cowan in Western Australia in 1921, the numbers were few. Women were elected to the federal Parliament for the first time in 1942 – Dorothy Tangney going into the Senate, and Enid Lyons into the House of Representatives. In the 1970s for the first time three women sat in the House of Representatives – Joan Child from Victoria, Ros Kelly from the ACT, and Jeanette McHugh from New South Wales, being elected in 1983. Although Joan Child had been elected earlier and other women had sat in the federal Parliament from other states at other times, Jeanette McHugh was the first NSW woman ever to be elected to that Parliament.

Why so few, and why has it taken so long for women to be elected? Australia has for the first time a woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, yet this came about not by chance but through the Australian Labor Party’s adoption on affirmative action in the parliamentary sphere. In the late 1980s, the ACT led the way, adopting a 50% standard in local legisature elections. There, the voting system enabled this to be introduced relatively simply: with two seats, Canberra and Fraser, and a ‘list’ system, the proposal was that lists should be constructed on a ‘woman, man, woman, man’ basis down the list. Women gained first place on the ballot because that is the way the party voted, so that there was no need to promote women artificially over men on the lists. Yet the principle was established.

It was more difficult in the states and NT, and federally, for Tasmania (with the Hare Clark system) alone operates under a system similar to that in the ACT. All other jurisdictions operate on the basis of ‘one seat, one member’. In the 1980s, however, ALP women organised to ensure passage through the ALP National Conference of a resolution committing to a quota of 30% women preselected for all state and federal elections. Joan Kirner, first woman Premier of Victoria, was a leading figure in this struggle. She and others established Emily’s List (Early Money is Like Yeast – it helps women rise) to provide funds for women candidates who adhere to feminist principles, in particular the right to abortion.

The UN CSW 57 side event looking at getting women into parliament covered a number of ways in which parliaments and legislatures have sought to effect this change. The British Labour Party runs ‘women’s lists’ – where women only are entitled to stand for selection – and not only in unwinnable seats. Women’s lists must be run in winnable and safe seats, too. Burkina Faso adopted a policy of granting public fund bonuses to  political parties succeeding in having women elected under their banner.  Other countries have set aside a certain  number of parliamentary seats for women, some have introduced quotas – which must be met by having women stand and win seats representing general constituencies, some have simply called ‘quotas’ ‘targets’ – on the basis that ‘targets’ are more palatable than ‘quotas’ which is taken to imply the use of coercion or at least a firm hand. ‘Targets’ as seen as ‘softer’, something to be aimed for rather than (necessarily) achieved.

It may be significant that it is generally ‘newer’ democracies that have taken the most significant steps to ensure women’s  parliamentary membership. Whether they have set down rules in constitutions or statutes, or simply articulated policies, many African countries, in particular, are leading the way to ensure that parliaments are not populated by men alone. In this, they are following rapidly in the steps of Scandinavian countries, with Rwanda having topped the list in having more women than men in the parliament and cabinet. Beginning with a quota requiring no fewer than 30% of women in parliamentary seats, at the first election under that regime, women held 44 of the 80 seats.

In the 1980s, Senator Susan Ryan of the Australian Parliament commissioned research into voters’ views of women and men parliamentarians. The outcome was salutary. A majority said they preferred female to male politicians, as they believed the former to be ‘more trustworthy’ and ‘honest’. Voters were more prepared to put their and their country’s future into the hands of women. Clearly, political parties which do not recognise the importance of promoting women into parliament and thence into positions of authority and power at all parliamentary levels, are missing a sigificant feature of politics today.

Promoting women into safe and winnable seats will bring to the parties so doing, the opportunity of taking power and governing the country. On the basis of Senator Ryan’s research, they will also be ensuring that the country’s governance will be all the more positive, productive and progressive.

Jocelynne A. Scutt (c) March 2013

Jocelynne Scutt’s book, Taking a Stand – Women in Politics and Society, was published in 1996 as one of the ten volumes, so far, in the ‘Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives’ series.  In the volume, women speak of their involvement in politics, whether standing for parliament, campaigning for women’s rights, engaged in the struggle to end violence against women, or as members and officials active in the trade union movement.

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What problems do archives raise in trying to reconstruct the lives of women who leave no written record? My first contact with these problems relating to sources can be traced back nearly 40 years ago to my post-graduate studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada. As part of my Master’s course I took a module on Slave Societies.  The tutor, Michael Craton, had written a seminal text on slave resistance  in the Caribbean, Searching for the Invisible Man.  It was this text that gave me the inspiration for the research into African and African Caribbean slave women that was transformed into my first book.  Where was the ‘Invisible Woman’ and what was her contribution to slave resistance?  What I discovered was that slave women were far from ‘invisible’;  they  existed in parliamentary papers and reports, contemporary published accounts, illustrations  and unpublished diaries, plantation records and ship’s logs and registers in various archives. But such sources revealed the slave woman of the white imagination, what Maya Angelou described as a ‘fabulous fiction’ of multiple, predominantly negative, identities.

Archival sources and published accounts provide descriptions of slave life refracted  through white, mostly male, eyes and, on the surface, reveal more about the preoccupations, prejudices and fantasies of contemporary observers than the realities of slave women’s lives. The same may be said of accounts by white women, pro-planter and abolitionist, for whom female slaves reinforced their own sense of racial and class superiority.  Additionally, such sources recorded only aspects of slave life that directly related to European interests. Slave owners had little interest in the culture of the slaves unless it directly threatened those interests. Moreover, there is evidence that slaves were keen to protect certain aspects of their lives from prying white eyes.

Nevertheless, we can glean insight from archival sources by reading them against the grain and with a fresh eye.  For instance the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a small-scale slave owner in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century, are often cited in relation to sexual exploitation of slave women and related cruelties.  Yet his diaries can also enable us to piece together the lives on his long-term slave ‘wife’, Phibba, and her close female kin, their entrepreneurial activities and contribution to the slave community life.  The women in Thistlewood’s world were clearly immersed in the shadowland of African rituals of which whites had little knowledge or understanding.

Thistlewood’s diaries are exceptional in their richness and detail but, in general, when working with archival and other sources, we can only catch glimpses of women’s inner, private lives, as opposed to their public persona as economic units of production and reproduction.  Thus such sources provide but limited insight into how female slaves subjectively experienced the trauma of enforced migration and the Hobbesian fabric of their everyday lives. Can we ever really get into the minds of women such as Thistlewood’s ‘Old Sybil, bit with a spider….delirious [and] singing her country’? Arguably, to gain a more rounded understanding such women’s lives and those of their free descendents in the African diaspora, we must also incorporate interdisciplinary sources such as anthropological and archaeological evidence.  Perhaps more controversially we need also to draw on oral traditions, and ‘sites of memory’ which embrace cultural forms such as dance. The value of such sources in reconstructing the histories  of oppressed groups who leave few written records now has fuller recognition. Searching for the ‘invisible woman’ also demands a degree of what the late Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘imaginative empathy’ to compensate for absence of sources.  But in using less conventional approaches one is exposed to criticisms stemming from a deep prejudice on the part of historians (often male) who are wedded to the archives and orthodox history writing. This raises the question as the whether there is a hierarchy of subjects deemed suitable for allegedly ‘real’ historical research. At the top of this hierarchy are studies of essentially masculine power and privilege, for which ample archives exist, whilst working class, Black and indigenous women, marginalized or absent in such archives, are located at the bottom.

My latest research has moved on to the lives of African and African Caribbean women in the era of late colonialism post 1918 and I have made extensive use of the rich archival sources at LSE relating  to colonial development and decolonisation.  Sources for this period are plentiful. However, I have encountered similar problems with the ways in which African women are represented in white writings and archival collections such as personal diaries.  The official archives are either silent on women or reiterate historical stereotypes going back to the slave era. Women focus primarily when they are seen as a barrier to modernizing development policies, or a threat to colonial stability as with the Women’s War in Southern Nigeria in 1929.  An important development in this era is the expansion of archives left by women. This reflects the emancipation of women after 1918 which enabled them to more fully participate in academia and the colonial project. Yet white women continued define their own superior identities in relation to African women with whom who they found little common ground and this is reflected in archival collections.

In conclusion, I have always had a difficult relationship with the archives, in particular the allegedly authoritative, official archives.  I recognise the importance of archival sources but also the need to subvert them, to read between the lines, and to go beyond the contemporary discourses and knowledge frameworks in which they are embedded.  I am irritated by dismissal of what are regarded as less valid sources that can help illuminate silences in history, particularly the invisible women of the past who are usually not part of the consciousness of the originators and gatekeepers of archives. This raises important issues relating to the very nature of archives; is there a gender bias in the way they are selected, catalogued and prioritised in relation to historical worth? Who determines what subjects are historically valid?  Are women’s archives, including the letters, diaries, life memorabilia of ordinary women, regarded as less valuable than men’s as sources of ‘authoritative’ history?   Here lies the indispensable value of the Women’s Library as a unique resource to protect and promote sources for researching women’s and gender history that can challenge the masculine bias in archival and other sources that are fundamental to working with the past.

Barbara Bush (c) March 201

Barbara Bush is convenor of the Women’s History Network and Emeritus Professor, Sheffield Hallam University.

This was my contribution to a panel discussion on ‘Working With the Past’, organised by Asiya Islam, Equality and Diversity Adviser, London School of Economics and Political Science,  on the 12th March to celebrate Women’s History Month and to promote  the rich Women’s Library archives, recently relocated to LSE library. The other panel members were Sally Alexander and Kate Murphy and the three brief presentations generated a lively discussion about archival research. Thanks to Asiya and her colleagues the evening was a great success.

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