Ten minutes later I’d packed and deleted all our pictures on Instagram.
The Government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man—not now, not ever.
Only once have I tried to stand up like Gillard. An old fling, now separated by three states and years of space questioned my ‘time wasting’ career choice as we split a bottle of cheap red in a hotel room. And he said, ‘What about kids? You’ll just have to give it up anyway.’ Adamant that things have changed and I wouldn’t be sentenced to a life as a housewife, he rebutted that eventually I would. That there’s really no choice. That nothing has changed. ‘Feminism isn’t even real,’ he argued, draining the last of his glass and reaching for more. ‘Women just won’t stop whining about things. Face it, you just aren’t made to have a career.’ He gestured towards my breasts as if the fact of their existence proved his point. ‘Literally. Men are supposed to be the leaders and so they have the power. That’s just the way it is.’ We’re too emotional, too irrational, too ‘female.’ ‘Anyway,’ he finished, ‘I’d never let my wife do that.’
Excepting Gillard, men have held the prime minister’s office in Australia since federation. The popular argument of people who believe the absence of women in the position is because there just hasn’t been anyone good enough to step up. It’s the same argument Tony Abbott tried to use to explain the void of women on his party’s front bench. In reality, male prime ministers, and even male politicians, are the norm. They’re what we expect. Traditional views about working men, ‘natural’ mothers and the picture-frame family still seriously impact our whole working lives. As Julia Gillard showed, outdated and sexist views about the role of women are not limited to biased or ignorant ineffectual nobodies—these views are held by people who shape our country. These views are held by our former Prime Minister. When faced with this outrage, Gillard rose in parliament. I cried in the shower. As Tanya Plibersek pointed out, it was not individual ‘scuffles for power or the nasty cartoons’ about Gillard that showed just how deep sexism runs in Australia, but ‘the weight of the whole lot of it together’. Thankfully the effects of Julia Gillard’s speech continue to reverberate around the world. The reaction to the enormity of those fifteen minutes was international, vast The top job
and consequential. Gillard’s words resonated both politically and emotionally with people from US President Barrack Obama to John David, a YouTube commenter still using the default blue icon who lamented the ‘woman lost in testosterone town’. Most of Gillard’s support came from new online spaces—the same technologies that allowed her speech to reach so many. Gillard summed up her legacy in her concession speech. ‘What I am absolutely confident of is that it will be easier for the next woman and the woman after that and the woman after that. And I’m proud of that.’ And so she should be.