Women and Politics

by Sue Green

The entrance to this workshop area contained a large display of photographs and biographical details of all the New Zealand women who have been members of Parliament. This was interesting and effective and obviously the result of a great deal of work.

At the commencement of the workshop, the 120 women present were each given two handouts, One, entitled 'Political Lobbying', prepared by Christchurch N.O.W. The other handout was an outline of the workshop, in particular details of a play 'A Woman's Place.' This play was performed for the first ¾ hour of the warkshop. Using four characters and a narrator, the play showed woman's position over the past century, by depicting a 'middle class' family in several eras—eg. in Kaiapoi in 1928 when Elizabeth McCombs stood for election to Parliament.

This play, along with the display, was intended to provide a springboard for discussion. The women then split up into fourteen groups for discussion purposes. The group I was in contained a variety of women (eg. a young mother from a state housing area in Palmerston North, and Mary Pickering, former Mayoress of Christchurch.) However, like the majority of those at the convention, it was a fairly homogeneous group in that all the women seemed 'middle class', well-dressed, capable of vocalising their ideas and fairly politically aware. Several were members of a political party.

I found that most of the women in the group disagreed with my ideas of the involvement of women in politics. They felt that the answer to women's problems lies in more women gaining office in local body and national politics. There seemed to be a feeling that as long as the person had two X chromosomes in each cell, it didn't matter too much about the politics. My point that I would rather have Mr. Rowling as Prime Minister than Margaret Thatcher was not received favourably (one woman said, 'oh, but she's very feminine').

The feeling of the group (later reflected by the larger meeting) was that men could not represent women's interests, and all those involved in the abortion debate should have been women. When I pointed out that the woman could have as easily been a member of SPUC as a man, the women got very upset. There seemed to be little agreement with my view that involvement of women in politics must start at the grassroots level with things like door-knocking and street meetings. Rather there was an automatic (and to me, naive) assumption that women will naturally represent the interests of other women.

The workshop then reconvened as a whole and the leader of each group presented the main recommendations the members had agreed upon (if they could agree).

This workshop was well organised and a large amount of work had gone into its preparation—I found the discussion an interesting experience but a frustrating one due to my own political beliefs.