What impact do women parliamentarians have on the struggle for gender equality? Four women from different countries and different political backgrounds discussed their experiences at the International Green Left Conference held in Sydney over Easter. The panel involved Greens (WA) Senator Christabel Chamarette; Luciana Castellina, a member of the Directorate of the Party of Communist Refoundation in Italy and of the European Parliament; Dulce Maria Pereira, a Workers Party (PT) alternate senator in the Sao Paulo State Assembly in Brazil, and Jeanette Fitzsimons, spokesperson for the New Zealand Green Party and co-deputy leader and of the New Zealand Alliance. Following are excerpts from their presentations.
Luciana Castellina: Mine was the generation which wanted emancipation from our "handicap", because to be a woman was considered a handicap. I felt that being a woman involved in politics was a handicap. In the Italian Communist Party, our problem was that we had to work harder than men; otherwise men would say, "She doesn't work well because she is a woman".
Parliament is a typical neutral institution, and elections are neutral. One man one vote has been a very important democratic achievement, but it also hides the difference between women and men, between rich and poor.
The discussion about parliament has been a difficult discussion among the feminist movement in Italy. How are you going to let the difference appear?
In many cases, even if you get into parliament, you end up working in a neutral institution and it is very difficult to do something different from what is already being done. But at least you make women visible. So our conclusion has been to go into parliament so that people see that women exist.
We had the discussion about quotas. In Italy the feminist movement is divided about this issue. Of course, having quotas helps women to get into parliament and that makes them visible. If the quota is one man and one women, it would be all right. But to accept that women should have only 25% representation is terrible!
I remember being told that among the first pieces of legislation in the People's Republic of China immediately after the 1949 revolution, women were given more power, on the grounds they needed more bargaining power to make up for so many centuries of oppression.
So I would agree to have a quota of 75% women and 25% men, at least for a time. We could come back to equal quotas eventually.
In Italy we now have the first-past-the-post system, but 25% of the parliament is still elected on a proportional representation basis. Of this 25%, the norm which parliament passed (practically without discussion) was that the lists have to be formed in a way that women and men alternate. With this new electoral system, a lot of women were elected to parliament, something we didn't expect at all.
In relation to parliament, we say we are here to make women visible but we do not pretend to represent all women, because that would be impossible. Of course we try to have links with the women's movement outside parliament in order to try to channel their claims, but this is different from saying we try to represent women.
Dulce Maria Pereira: The PT is now 14 years old. The work that women have been able to do within the party is a consequence of the struggles Brazilian women have participated in historically within the left parties and organisations as well as the different social movements.
From the 1940s on, women have been organised especially in the Communist parties. About 50 years ago they won the right for Brazilian women to vote.
From 1964, the beginning of the dictatorship, women got involved in left organisations, progressive branches of the church and various social movements.
In a multiracial country like Brazil, we also have to take into account the many historical differences between Brazilian Indian women and women of European descent.
Women who had been in exile and tortured, and those engaged in the different feminist movements got together and realised that we had to change the concept of representative democracy and work for real participatory democracy. Real power for women means being in parties, in parliament, running for executive positions and organising ourselves as women in the movements.
Women make up 39% of the six major parties in Brazil, and about 50% of the Workers Party. Women have been largely responsible for the organisation of the PT and make up an important social base.
In 1982, when the PT first took part in the elections in a major way, many feminist women and women from different social movements ran as candidates. At that point one of the main discussions was reform of the state, and having women on a specific platform made a big difference to the way the PT was perceived by women.
The polls showed that women started to identify with the party. For the first time, women had a voice, and that meant big changes. We started to talk about race and gender relations and discuss what we wanted.
But we didn't have many women elected. And the women who went into parliament faced all the difficulties we have talked about here, including, for example, not having bathrooms for women parliamentarians!
In 1988 we elected two women to the PT's national executive, including the mayor of Sao Paulo, Luiza Erundina.
The population of Sao Paulo and its metropolitan surrounds is the same as the whole of Cuba — 10 to 12 million. It is a very industrialised city and the most religious centre in the whole country. Yet we were able to elect Luiza, who was very outspoken in the face of her male opponent, a former governor.
Luiza did not begin with majority support from the party, given that she was from a poor family, had a heavy north-east accent, and was, some thought, too aggressive. While she was not the candidate of most of the men in the party, she nevertheless won the preselection.
We then had a very active, sensitive and aggressive women's campaign. And we won!
Luiza is now a candidate for senator with a good chance of being elected in a town where even Lula [the PT presidential candidate] can't get more than 13% in the polls!
We also elected a woman at a port city close to Sao Paulo. This woman was able to shake up the country because of her ability to negotiate without giving up the PT's socialist principles.
The PT has discussed and implemented quotas in the party. From having only five women on a National Executive of 77, we now have 25 women out of 86. There has meant an enormous change for the party.
The PT has the greatest number of women elected at different levels of parliament. We approved quotas for the party structure but not necessarily for candidates. Why? Because we also wanted the chance of building women's confidence and really making sure the whole party worked in cooperation with feminists and women's issues.
Jeanette Fitzsimons: Last year New Zealand celebrated the centenary of women's suffrage with great fanfare. After 100 years, 16% of the parliament are women.
Since 1984 we've had a massive experiment conducted by the new right, led by a Labor government and continued after 1990 by the National government. There are two women in the current Bolger government who have played an absolutely crucial role in this — the minister for finance, Ruth Richardson, who drove through the policies that cut benefits, caused massive unemployment, put many women out of work, introduced user-pays for health and education systems and systematically worsened the plight of women.
When the Bolger government won in 1990, its very first piece of legislation to go through was a repeal of the pay equity legislation which the Labor government had brought in immediately prior to the election.
The present minister of health, who was previously the minister of social welfare, Jenny Shipley, has pursued those policies in an absolutely draconian manner. This has led many people to question just what women do when they get into parliament and even to ask: is there any point in wanting more of them?
From the beginning, the Greens developed a principle of gender balance. Though it's not an absolutely rigid rule, the principle is widely observed.
The Greens have also developed a proposal for our party list. Our list is ordered alternately according to gender, and there are also provisions for ensuring geographical fairness and ethnic fairness.
Within the Alliance, the principle of gender equity was fought for at early council meetings, but we don't have a formal quota system. We have a leadership in the Alliance of three people, two of whom are women. Jim Anderton is the leader and the two co-deputy leaders are Sandra Lee, who was elected last November, and myself.
Sandra was the first Maori woman ever to win a general roll seat in the house. To me that is the start of a recognition that most of the progressive leadership within Maoridom at the moment is coming from Maori women, and that's a really exciting development.
With a commitment to gender equity, when our candidates were selected for the election last year, there was a strong move for balance. The best we managed was 30% women, which everybody agrees is not good enough. There are a number of reasons for this.
One relates to the paradox that parliament is a very male institution — the way it conducts its business is very male and the lifestyle you are required to live to be in that parliament is totally crazy. It virtually requires you to cut off the personal parts of your life and to become in many ways non-human.
Many women are repelled by that way of life and the style of debate which is extremely aggressive and trivial (all they discuss is points of order; they never get to the substance of anything). I think those pictures of parliament make many competent and able women reluctant to have anything to do with it.
Only women who want to be part of that kind of system and like operating in that way are encouraged to put their names forward for office, and that perpetuates the system.
Women need not just to be able to operate, to survive in parliament within its terms, but to change its terms of reference. I wouldn't even consider standing if it were not with the agenda of trying to change the way the whole place operates.
No woman on her own is going to be able to make much impact on the way parliament operates. So there needs to be a strong bunch of people there supporting each other and all with an explicit agenda of changing the way it operates.
There also need to be support networks outside parliament. As you get closer to the parliamentary system, it is easy to lose touch with the culture you came from, with the local community. Women in parliament are going to need networks of women outside parliament who help to keep them grounded in reality.
What can feminists in parliament achieve? I don't think parliament on its own can achieve social change. There is a lot of debate over whether parliament is actually the most sensible place to put your efforts if you want to achieve social change. I think it is an essential ingredient in the mix but I don't think it can achieve very much without a strong grassroots movement in touch with and supporting it.
It's important that women in parliament provide inspiration to women elsewhere that it is possible to make change at government level and in public institutions. The confidence of women generally will tend to improve as they see women in those positions actually having an impact.
The differences between men and women in parliament now may not exist in terms of policy, but they do still, to some extent, exist in terms of personal style. Even those women on the right don't seem to indulge to the same extent in the trivial point-scoring, putting down and personal attacks that other MPs do.
It's also important for women to remember who they represent when they do get into those positions. We should not expect the privileged lifestyle that goes with being in parliament. Because parliament does not recognise those values at all, it is quite hard to continue living in a reasonably frugal manner.
Christabel Chamarette: The Greens (WA) is really "a small is beautiful" story and a story where failure equals success. I hope it will keep meaning that.
We're a very small group that started up on January 1, 1990, with a commitment to challenge the current political system and the current political agenda. We didn't essentially want to get into parliament, but we wanted to raise the issues of environmental responsibility, social justice, peace and disarmament and to present the principle of participatory democracy.
That fourth principle of green politics is the key to moving towards what I also call the feminisation of democracy. Rather than a gender issue, I see it as an analysis of our society and a way of looking at the way our current civilisation has been inextricably linked with the social organisation of patriarchy.
Our civilisation is failing because of a number of assumptions including the limitless availability of fossil fuels and the growth mentality, a reliance on patriarchy as the method of social organisation and the old Newtonian mechanistic views of the world.
The Greens WA brought a different way of operating to parliament. We believe that community participation is vital. We didn't do anything about quotas or gender balance. We regarded gender balance as a symptom rather than a treatment.
When we have a preselection ballot, if we find those selected are three men, three women, we think we are on the right track. If not, we think we went wrong with participation at local community level.
We have a different way of looking at gender issues. As women make up only 12% of parliament, we challenge the whole process of parliamentary representation and democracy. My agenda is geared towards participatory democracy. If we can have equal participation, the decision-making should be equally gender balanced.
We are trying to address accountability of government. The parliamentary process is not representative of the community. A system with 50% plus one is not reflective of the community, not to mention gerrymanders. The Senate is another way of challenging the executive power of government because it is selected by proportional representation.
In terms of Australian feminism, I think we are going down a patriarchal rather than a feminist path. An article in a spiritual journal by a Brazilian feminist theologian summarised where I feel Australian feminism is stuck. She talked about the three phases of feminism. The first is the recognition of our historical oppression.
The second is striving through affirmative action and gender balancing concepts to redress that imbalance. The problem with this phase is that at times it generates an overvaluing of the feminine, a superiority which denotes men as weak, which is what helps to creates a backlash.
There is a third phase which looks at a different way of looking at society, an anthropology that furthers a feminist analysis. This includes a fundamental concern for social justice.
We have to address not only the oppression of women but all oppressions. This is the primary agenda of social justice. This also includes examining and challenging every patriarchal structure which has led to hierarchical decision-making.
I think the Greens WA moved to that third phase accidentally. We started meeting about issues we felt were not being addressed. If we can do things differently, we might be able to do something. Can we do politics in a participatory way? We can't all have what we want, but we have to learn new mechanisms of communicating and making community-based decisions.