Girls can still do anything

Only 25 years ago, women were hardly seen or heard in the public arena. Michele Hewitson talks to Marilyn Waring about feminism past and future.

WHAT do women want? A spot of sovereignty over the husband would be a start, decreed Chaucer's Wife of Bath in the middle of the 14th century. In the last week of the 20th century, what Dr Marilyn Waring would like would be for people to stop ringing her and asking questions about feminism.

But she's a good sport about it: "Look, if you'd got me when I was young and eager and energetic, I had all the answers. Now I'm too old: a middle-aged body and a middle-aged mind."

It's all nonsense. And it's the same spiel she spun for the BBC when they came knocking to ask her to participate in an end-of-the-century roundup by 40 world visionaries.

Did she do it? Of course she did. Because Waring, who entered parliament at 22 in 1975 and quit, battered by the sexism she encountered, in 1984, is only 48 (although she has to think hard to remember).

And despite having to carry the title of New Zealand's youngest-ever MP with her into the 21st century, it is
her reputation as an internationally renowned economist that gets her on lists like the BBC one.

The visionary is, after the token protest, more than happy to take a glance back. What did women want when Waring entered politics in her early 20s?

"Well, it's fairly extraordinary 25 years later, when you remember how it was. It's easiest to sum it up like this: women couldn't be jockeys, firewomen, I don't think we had any judges, we couldn't be aeroplane pilots or air traffic controllers. The list was phenomenal. Now it just seems really ludicrous.

"We didn't have the matrimonial property act, the evidence amendment with rape laws, we didn't have the human rights commission. Heavens above, pay equity wasn't in the language. There were no rape crisis and refuge centres. It's 25 years. It's not very long ago."

And women, says Waring, were not seen, their voices not heard in the public arena.

The young girl who was Marilyn Waring grew up in the tiny farming settlement of Ngaruawahia. Her dad was a butcher, her mother worked at McKenzies (the chain of defunct department stores.) At 14, her parents, her grandparents and "the church" decided that she should be shifted from Ngaruawahia High School to attend Waikato Diocesan School for girls as a boarder. Several transformations took place for the young Waring.

Perhaps the most significant of them, though, was the realisation that girls could do anything.

"At Ngaruawahia High, and it wasn't their fault, the best girls would be nurses or teachers. At Dio, if you
wanted to be a rocket scientist, you could be. There was just no question that you could aspire to be whatever you wanted to be."

When Waring left Ngaruawahia High she planned to be a physical education instructor. At Dio she decided she was going to do degrees in law and languages and become a diplomat.

"It became fairly obvious, given my disposition, that diplomacy was not my particular bent," she laughs. "But yes, that was the idea. And I think for a lot of women my age — not that they got catapulted in to parliament at my age — the new wave of feminism was happening and it was very interesting."

Germaine Greer came to visit; books like Susan Brown-Miller's Against Our Will were starting to be handed around; women were taking to the streets in the first Take Back the Night marches. It gave women, says Waring, strong connections within a broad movement.

Feminism meant protest: beginning with the anti-Vietnam War marches through to the anti-Springbok tour marches of 1981.

Almost two decades on, Waring says that there is "a really strong possibility that we have half a generation of young women who wouldn't have a clue what all that's about — they bought the market model, they bought the competitive environment, they bought dog eat dog."

But there are too, she says, a generation of women under 30 who have "just taken my breath away." She saw many of them in action at a 1999 Association of Women in Development conference in Washington.

"They didn't feel any need to play the game: they were articulate, transparent and they had such sophisticated politics. It was phenomenal to know that it [feminism] is so alive and well. It's in better health than we were."

A key to the feminism of the future lies, she believes, in globalisation — a term talked about "only in the trade market sense and that's a real negative. However, in terms of the Seattle protests [at the time of the World Trade Organisation talks], and if you monitor the Net, there is a vast global community participation in politics and people knowing a great deal more about each other. I really do think people are on the move again."

And a future emphasis on international law will "affect women's lives in a quite profound way. And that's largely because international law moves us from a notion of formal equality which says, 'Everybody has the right to ... ' which is just like a market measure to something called substantive equality, which is about outcomes. Not, 'Well everybody has the chance,' but 'Excuse me, what was the result?'

"So you might have a woman Prime Minister and a woman as Leader of Opposition, but if you can demonstrate that for over 100 years of suffrage you have never been able to have more than 38 per cent of women in the House, you don't have substantive equality because you don't have half."

Globally what women really want, says Waring, "is their work burden eased. That is all their work, the whole goddamn combination of it and especially the bits that are drudgery — and they want some recognition for it. And maybe that's in redistribution of revenue.

"If people who do voluntary work spend more non-reimbursable money enabling them to do their charity work than is currently the level of corporate tax-deductible donations to charity, then either those people get exactly the same level of compensation, or the corporations don't get it."

It's an anomaly, she says, that the household, the single largest productive sector in the nation's economy, receives no depreciation allowances for its tools of productivity: the washing machine, the oven, the dishwasher. Simple really, she says.

"Either the single largest sector gets depreciation allowances or, if it doesn't, then nobody else does."
The simple economics make sense. It's a little harder, at the end of a century, to arrive at any definition of what feminism is.

"One of the glories of feminism is that there is no central committee and there are no guidelines."

But she'll settle for English writer Rebecca West's line: "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that
people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."