Thesis August

Chapter 1 Introduction Section 1.1: ‘A fit place for women’? Section 1.2: Problems of sex, gender and parliament Section 1.3: Gender and the Parliament, 1995-1999 Section 1.4: Expectations on female MPs Section 1.5: Outline of the thesis Section 1.1: ‘A fit place for women’? The Sydney Morning Herald of 27 August 1925 reported the first speech given by a female Member of Parliament (hereafter MP) in New South Wales. In the Legislative Assembly on the previous day, Millicent Preston-Stanley, Nationalist Party Member for the Eastern Suburbs, created history. According to the Herald: ‘Miss Stanley proceeded to illumine the House with a few little shafts of humour. “For many years”, she said, “I have in this House looked down upon honourable members from above. And I have wondered how so many old women have managed to get here - not only to get here, but to stay here”. The Herald continued: ‘The House figuratively rocked with laughter. Miss Stanley hastened to explain herself. “I am referring”, she said amidst further laughter, “not to the physical age of the old gentlemen in question, but to their mental age, and to that obvious vacuity of mind which characterises the old gentlemen to whom I have referred”. Members obviously could not afford to manifest any deep sense of injury because of a woman’s banter. They laughed instead’. Preston-Stanley’s speech marks an important point in gender politics. It introduced female participation in the Twenty-seventh Parliament. It stands chronologically midway between the introduction of responsible government in the 1850s and the Fifty-first Parliament elected in March 1995. Until 1925 (for 70 years or half of its life) all the parliament’s members were males. Preston-Stanley (Hansard Assembly 26 August 1925: 369) remarked ‘We have been told that Parliament is not a fit place for women. I am not prepared to say that it is so. But if it is so, then it is the most serious indictment that can be made against men, for has not Parliament up till today been an institution of their own making?’ Whether the gender environment of the New South Wales Parliament 1 has been affected by the presence of women remains unexplored. There have been far fewer female MPs than male MPs. 2 By the final months of the Fifty-first Parliament in 1998, only twenty-six women had 1 Hereafter ‘Parliament’ means ‘the New South Wales Parliament’. Where other Parliaments are referred to, this is specified, as for example ‘the Federal Parliament’. 2 Eighty-four males were elected to the Assembly at the single election in 1995 (Smith, T. 2000b: 44). 1 served as Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) 3, and of those, sixteen (about three- fifths) were members still. Their number then exceeded that of women Members in all previous fifty Parliaments. To the extent that personnel create institutions, female Members of this Parliament potentially had an historic opportunity to influence the parliamentary culture. This raises the question of whether the parliament was regarded as a ‘fit place’ for women in the middle of the 1990s. Unfortunately, it is unclear what this claim means. Initially, it is relatively straightforward to examine the ways that current Members perceive the parliament and their roles in it. It is more difficult to interpret these perceptions taking into consideration the specific political context and utilizing contemporary scholarship on gender politics. Section 1.2: Problems of sex, gender and parliament Exclusive concentration on women produces scholarly problems and imposes unfair expectations on them. This study broadens the focus to include men and views gender as a form of behaviour rather than as a characteristic of MPs. It tests the hypothesis that the Parliament privileges certain types of behaviour as ways to operate successfully in its specific environment. The study does this by examining critically ‘gender in the Fifty-first Parliament’. No systematic study of gender has been attempted in the New South Wales Parliament and so this thesis produces new data on this topic. The study has several objectives, each of which will contribute to existing scholarship in broader areas. First, it will test the extent to which parallel studies of gender politics are applicable to this specific case. As it is partly a study of the influence of gender in parliamentarians’ role perceptions and behaviour, it will contribute another set of data to those related fields. Secondly, by focussing on the New South Wales Parliament, it will contribute data on this relatively neglected area of study. By concentrating on parliament rather than on related fields of politics such as party competition, leadership or issues, it makes important findings about the institution. These findings are relevant to studies of representative institutions generally. Thirdly, by adopting a broad methodology, this study will make findings about the assumptions behind recent trends in studying parliamentary behaviour, and particularly gendered behaviour. This aim and these objectives are important. Given a careful approach, they are also achievable. In the final quarter of the twentieth century in Britain, the United States of America (USA) and Europe, especially in Scandinavian countries, women entered parliaments in sufficient 3 The official Parliamentary title for Members of the Legislative Assembly is ‘MP’. Here ‘MP’ describes all Members of the bicameral Parliament and ‘MLA’ and ‘MLC’ are used to distinguish Lower House Members from Members of the Legislative Council. 2 numbers to attract scholarly attention. Since the appearance of works by Currell and by Kirkpatrick in 1974, many studies have reflected an understanding that the behaviour of MPs is influenced by their personal role perceptions. Marian Sawer’s (1986) inquiry into role perceptions among Australian female MPs is used here to approach the general literature (see Section 2.3). Document study and direct observation are used for triangulation to check the interview data and to evaluate the significance of gender in the mid-term role perceptions of Members of the Fifty-first New South Wales Parliament. This specific case study will supplement existing studies of MPs elsewhere and test whether findings about the role perceptions of MPs generally apply to New South Wales MPs. While females cannot have direct input to parliamentary procedures unless they are present, it remains to be seen whether their ‘presence’ (see Phillips 1995, 1996) is sufficient to influence parliament’s ‘procedures’ or ‘products’ (Thomas 1994: 10). Preston-Stanley’s arrival removed the assumption that Parliament was an exclusive male domain denied to people of her sex. The importance of the sex of the MP as a determinant of behaviour however, should not be assumed. The arrival of Preston-Stanley and her female successors is interesting but their presence is important politically not so much because of their biological characteristics as because of their behaviour. For a generation of observers exposed to the literature of second wave feminism, the record presence of women in the Fifty-first Parliament (for most of the term 29 women among 141 Members) raises subtle issues of gender politics and demands a critical approach to studying the impact of gender on the institution. While sex is primarily a biological category, gender is a concept that necessarily includes aspects of behaviour. It is argued below that an understanding of gender requires that it be distinguished from sex rather than conflated with it (see Section 2.2). Sex remains a useful starting point for studying gender and the presence of women MPs produces prima facie demands for critical attention for two sorts of reasons. These relate first to trends in scholarship and secondly to popular assumptions about the way MPs behave. First, the study of parliaments is a dynamic field. The increased numbers of women MPs after 1995 is a development that challenges paradigms. Friction results when women meet resistance from male dominance. Some female MPs have complained that male dominance exists and so male dominance has subjective reality, but it has not been identified in any serious studies that look beyond men’s overwhelming numerical superiority. It is possible that 3 a paradigm of gender neutrality hides male dominance of the parliamentary culture beneath sexed assumptions and questions (Smith, T. 1997). 4 Secondly, difference has been an important component of arguments for increasing the numbers of female Members in Australia’s parliaments (McGarity 1994, Reynolds 1995, Kernot 1996). While these arguments have a normative rather than empirical basis, female MPs might be influenced by such assumptions. Such arguments require close examination to decide whether embedded assumptions of sex-related behavioural differences accord with the experiences of New South Wales MPs. It is important to ask ‘Does their difference make a difference?’ (Saint-Germain 1989) and whether MP sex balance has ‘policy consequences’ and implications for ‘the legitimacy of the political system’ (Jones 1998: 3-4). In the absence of specific studies of the New South Wales Parliament, it is necessary to examine works on gender from other contexts. The dearth of specific literature is not surprising given that New South Wales has not led nationally in women’s political achievements. One example concerns Presiding Officers. Joan Child was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1986 (Swain 1997) but it was not until mid 1998 that the first female presiding officer was elected in New South Wales. Virginia Chadwick (Liberal) achieved election as Council President when her predecessor resigned and apologised for being affected by alcohol (Daily Telegraph 30 June 1998). Scholars concentrate on ‘firsts’. There are works on South Australian suffragists (Haines 1992a), the first Senate candidate Vida Goldstein (Bomford 1996), the first MP Edith Cowan (Bulbeck 1996b), and the first Premier Carmen Lawrence (Eveline and Booth 1997), but none of these was from New South Wales.

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