The Working Women's Charter, from a feminist perspective
Sue Kedgley
27 May 2009
I first met Sonja in 1971 when I was a delegate at the Labour party conference, held in the Wellington town hall. It was a highly charged event in those days, with intense, controversial debates, including one I vividly recall on abortion, which were personally chaired by Norman Kirk. He refused to allow me to speak, and gave the floor almost exclusively to male delegates.
Sonja quickly took me under her wing and recruited me to the Labour Party Women's committee. We were furious that women's committee reports were always at the bottom of the conference agenda, and usually not considered by the main conference. So we protested this on the floor of the conference, and I gave an impassioned speech, telling the startled mostly male delegates that we women were not prepared to be the sandwich makers of the party any longer.
As a young women's liberationist, it was inspiring to find a feisty, seasoned, older union who was such a committed feminist, and Sonja and I quickly became firm friends and remained so even when I floated off to New York, in the mid seventies to attend an international women's liberation conference, and managed to land a job at the Women's Secretariat of the United Nations. We kept in touch on my regular visits back home, and when I returned to New Zealand in the early eighties—and stayed good friends right through to her death a few years ago.
But I need to make it clear that unlike most other speakers here I wasn't directly involved in the three year campaign to get the Working Women's Charter accepted by the FOL and then by the Labour party because I was overseas.
But I followed the progress of the Charter avidly from New York, and spent hours on my visits home talking to Sonja about the fierce resistance she encountered during her campaign to get it accepted in the Union movement, and the tactics she used to outwit opponents like Tony Neary who were determined to sabotage it, or at least its clauses relating to abortion, and later helping to devise strategies to oppose her arch opponent Connie Purdue, along with SPUC and the entire anti abortion lobby in their ongoing campaign against the Charter.
Many have documented the almost unbelievable battle to get the Charter accepted by the FOL and the backlash it unleashed from the anti-abortion movement. So I wont go over that ground.
Instead, because I have been asked to talk about the importance of the Charter for feminism, I thought I'd start by recalling briefly what life was like for New Zealand women when
Sonja first took the Charter to the New Zealand Working Women's Council in October 1977.
Although the Women's Electoral Lobby had been formed in 1975 to lobby for more women in Parliament, there were still only four women in Parliament in 1977. The Prime Minister at the time, Robert Muldoon, commented, when asked for his views on women's liberation, "could we contemplate the situation where a woman getting equal pay is the breadwinner, and the husband stays home and looks after the children? I don't think we could."
Most women were full time mothers and women made up only about 30% of the workforce. Jobs were strictly divided along gender lines and women were stuck in low paid, menial clerical and factory jobs or in nursing and teaching.
There was virtually no child care available for women in the worforce. Contraception for unmarried women was frowned upon and refused by some doctors, and it was illegal to provide contraceptives to women under the age of 16.
Getting an abortion was a nightmare, being both dangerous and difficult to acccess. Hundreds of women were still forced to travel to Australia, and debate about abortion was raging, following the release of a report by the Royal Commission into Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion, in April 1977, which recommended restricting, rather than liberalising abortion laws. This provoked outrage and protests amongst women's liberation groups.
A few months later, two months before Working Women's Charter was first discussed by the New Zealand Working Women's Council, the National government introduced the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion bill, based on the Royal Commission's recommendations, which further restricted women's access to abortions, making abortion a crime unless authorised by two certifying consultants. The bill was rammed it through Parliament in an all night sitting. Extraordinarily, it is still the legislation governing abortion today.
Following the passage of the bill, New Zealand's only private abortion clinic, the Remuera clinic was closed down (while they tried to figure out how they could operate legally) and the numbers of women travelling to Australia for abortions increased sharply. Feminists set up an organisation called Sisters Overseas Service to help women denied abortions in New Zealand travel to Australia for one and SOS estimated that it helped around 3,500 women get to Australia in 1978.
Outraged by these developments, a petition calling for the Repeal of the Contraception and Sterilisation Act was launched by the Mayoress of Auckland, Barbara Goodman, in 1978 and signed by an extraordinary 320.000 signatures, making it comparable with the huge 19th century Suffrage petition. But it was given only a perfunctory and contemptuous hearing by the submissions committee of Parliament, which turned it down.
Against this backdrop it was inevitable that access to safe abortion, the main focus of the women's movement in the early seventies, was included as a key demand of the Working Women's Charter, even though it was highly contentious, and almost derailed the Charter. It would have been much easier to drop the abortion clause, especially since Sonja herself was ambivalent about it, and certainly the Charter would have been accepted much earlier if she had. But Sonja -and other women in the Working Women's Council -- refused to compromise, and defiantly defended the clause, despite growing hostility from men in both the union movement and in the Labour party—and from SPUC and Connie Purdue's group Feminists for Life.
It's also worth remembering that by 1977, the frenetic activism of the early years of women's liberation movement was running out of steam, and had begun to disintegrate into internal struggles and splits, between radical lesbians, socialists, and other strands. The broad all purpose feminist groups of the early years were being replaced by groups which focussed on specific issues such as violence, health and childcare. Debates were raging about separatism and whether women should withdraw totally from men and form their own all women communities--a theme that dominated the women's liberation caucus in Piha in 1978 and the United Women's Convention, in 1979 --a painful event, for some feminists, and no one offered to organise another one after that. The Broadsheet collective also split apart in 1978 and half the members left the magazine. As Sandra Coney lamented later…"in the late seventies women gave up on the feminist movement. It was simply too frustrating, too painful, too confusing. Any kind of action was impossible while the movement simply tore itself apart from within."
By 1979 too the abortion campaign was winding down after the bitter defeats of the previous year, and there wasn't a great deal of organised national activity going on. And that's one of the reasons why the Charter became a key focus of the women's movement and set the political agenda for the next few years.
It's fair to say too, that issues relating working class women had not been given much priority in the early years of women's liberation, if only because early women's liberation members tended to be middle class students and housewives who were not in the paid workforce. While we espoused equal pay, childcare and pay equity in our women's liberation manifestoes, right from the word go, we were preoccupied with issues such as abortion, sex stereotyping of women, suburban neurosis, the politics of housework, rather than issues that directly related to working women.
Socialist feminists were critical of our individual, rather inward focus, in the early years, our obsession with consciousness raising and our focus on fertility, sexuality, sex role stereotyping, and our lack of emphasis on women working in the paid workforce.
Women were not heavily unionised, either, and the Union movement was still very much a male bastion. There were only 17 women delegates at the 1973 FOL Conference, out of several hundred delegated, and no women were on the FOL executive. Although there were feminists working in the union movement from around 1974, women's liberation had not really reached out in any significant way to ordinary working women before the Charter.
By the late seventies, however, women were getting organised and forming separate women's groups in different unions. And early women's liberationists who had been students and housewives had begun to enter the workforce in significant numbers and most were horrified at the systemic discrimination they encountered there.
We quickly discovered that despite the passage of the Human Rights Commission Act which prohibited sexual discrimination in the workplace, it was still rife. Women were paid less than men, clustered in low paid jobs, passed over for promotion, penalised by lack of childcare and lack of support, as we tried to juggle raising a family with paid work. We found it was incredibly difficult for women to take time out of the workforce for childbearing and rearing, and if we did, even harder to re-enter.
So the Charter campaign was extremely timely and addressed the huge discrimination women experienced when they went into the paid workforce. It shifted the focus of the movement from sexuality, housework and abortion, and onto issues around women's participation in the workforce, just as large numbers of women were entering paid work. And after the acrimony and divisiveness of Piha and the 1979 Women's convention, it provided a new and positive focus for the women's movement, and moved the debate on from divisive issues around separatism and abortion to the down to earth, practical concerns about women in the workforce.
Although imported it from Australia and focussed on working women, the Charter drew on various women's liberation manifestoes that had been produced in the 1970's -in its call for access to contraception and fertility control, day care, and free, safe and legal access to abortion, freedom from discrimination and equal educational opportunities for women, and this widened its appeal..
This was quite deliberate. Sonja's aim, as she explained in Bread and Roses, was to join together women at home and her sisters in the paid workforce.
And I think she succeeded to a great extent in doing that, and the Charter became a manifesto, a rallying cry for women in the late 1970's. When the FOL finally adopted the Charter, in 1980, it was hailed as a major victory, a milestone for all women, and women all over New Zealand celebrated its passage. It raised women's hopes and expectations, and it felt as though women had achieved something incredibly important -although of course it took years to implement its provisions of the Charter and some have yet to be implemented today.
Many women -and some who are here today like Hazel, Margaret Wilson-- campaigned long and hard for the Charter. But it was Sonja's drive and utter determination -and her political astuteness -that was pivotal in driving it through.
At the start, Sonja and some of her close advisors like Mary Sinclair, really didn't really think they would get it accepted. But the more resistance Sonja encountered, the more determined she became. A lesser person might have given up along the way, at some of the outrageous sexism and opposition she encountered, but Sonja refused to be put down, and simply wouldn't give in. The jaw would go out and the glint would come into the eye. Eventually, Mary Sinclair believes, she wore her opponents out.
Sonja, and other women like Therese O'Connell, spent three years travelling all over New Zealand to speak to whoever was interested -no matter how few. In the process, they took the Charter to ordinary women all over New Zealand-including thousands of women who until then had been largely untouched by the women's movement. In the process they recruited hundreds into the women's movement -women like Lianne Dalziel, Mary O'Regan and many others who went on to become influential in the movement.
To get the Charter accepted by the different unions, Sonja drew on the vast grassroots network of women she had built up over her long years of involvement in childcare movement, the peace movement, the union movement, the Labour party and the women's health network, and was able to ensure that unexpectedly large numbers of women turned up to any crucial Trades Council discussion.
Sonja was different to many of the younger women in the women's movement. She was charismatic and inspirational, but she was also very practical and down to earth and she brought the women's movement to a very basic, human level. And this helped to ground the movement, to deepen its roots, expand it into the union movement and to ordinary working women around New Zealand.
Sonja was also the first women to attempt to take the feminist agenda into the heart of the male establishment, into two influential but still male dominated institutions, the union movement and the Labour party.
Before this, the feminist movement had existed on the fringes of existing power structures. We had met in numerous women only conventions and conferences, but it had not occurred to us to go right inside a large male dominated institution and demand that it accept our goals and our agenda. I was not only an audacious act. It marked a new stage for the women's movement, a focus on trying to get existing power structures to change.
Certainly, there is no greater tribute to Sonja than that we are gathered here today, discussing the Charter, its significance and its impact on New Zealand society, thirty years later and the pivotal role she played in getting it accepted in New Zealand. The Charter was Sonja's baby and it encapsulated everything she believed in and everything she had fought for in her life. She looked upon the Charter as her most important life's work - the battle of her life, as she described it in her autobiography Bread and Roses.
Interestingly, however, she never referred to it in her maiden or valedictory speech in Parliament. Perhaps by then she felt disillusioned by the slow progress in implementing the 12 goals of the Charter. Or perhaps she felt she had done her bit and it was time to pass the baton to other women.
Sonja cut her political teeth on the Charter, and became adept at out foxing her opponents in the union movement. She enjoyed the political intrigue, and was immensely proud of the way she out foxed her opponents in the union movement. Her campaign for the Charter attracted so much support that she became Vice President of the FOL in 1982, and later on a Member of Parliament.
It is testimony, too, to the enduring nature of the Charter that so many of its provisions are so relevant today, and that so many issues women were grappling with in the late seventies, we are still grappling with today.
Sonja hoped that once adopted, it would only be a matter of time before the agenda was systematically implemented. But she was also extremely pragmatic and realistic, and believed in doing things one step at a time.
There's no question that the Charter influenced the detailed and far reaching women's policy the Labour party released before the 1984 election, and helped shape the agenda of the 1984 labour government and the new women's ministry.
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Unsurprisingly, its adoption provoked a major backlash by right to lifers, led by Sonja's one time friend and fellow unionist Connie Purdue, who had been an early supporter of women's liberation, but had fallen out of the movement and started Feminists for Life in the mid seventies. Feminists for Life and SDPUC railed against the Charter, and presented a 28 thousand signature petition to Parliament, claiming the Charter was a threat to traditional family life and would result in children being dumped into childcare centres 24 hours a day like battery hens, and escalating abortion rates.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Charter is that it is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. Despite the huge progress women have made in the past thirty years, there is still so much unfinished business, and we are still grappling today with many of the same issues we were grappling with then.
It's incredible that abortion is still such a contentious and divisive issue, and that no political party has had the courage -or the stomach -to seek to amend or update the 1977 Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act—or that it is still being challenged by SPUC, this time through the judicial system.
It's incredible that low paid, female dominated occupations like aged care are still largely ununionised and casualised and exploited as a result.
Its extraordinary that the workplace is still shaped around men's needs, and male values; that it has still not changed to accommodate women's role as mothers, and that women are still expected to participate as if they had no children at all.
Its incredible that New Zealand women have only three months paid parental leave -while other countries like the Nordic countries have a one year or more.
Its incredible that flexible working hours are still the exception, not the norm, and that the Charter's call for flexible working hours to help women more easily combine paid work and raising a family has only just been legislated for, in my Flexible Working Hours private members bill. Its incredible that despite this many employees seeking to work flexible hours still encounter resistance from employers who want flexibility on their terms, not employees.
It's incredible that clause 14—calling for paid family leave to enable time off to be taken in cases of family need -is still denied workers and is not even on the political horizon.
Its incredible that we are still fighting for equal pay for equal work, and that women still earn only 85% of men's wages; that the National government has just got rid of the Pay Equity Unit and shelved two pay equity investigations. It's like 1990, repealing the Pary Equity legislation, all over again.
Its incredible too that while a third of MPs are women, Parliament is still at heart a male bastion, still dominated by male bullies, male values, male games and male agendas.
So the battle that Sonja and the Charter began remains unfinished business. And we are confronted with huge challenges today—a National party government which wants to undo much of the agenda we have won. Economic recession which could easily see women last hired and first fired, once again.
And finally there is the challenge that Margaret Wilson discussed in her valedictory speech in Parliament last year.n "There is still no fundamental recognition that equality means equality of difference, not equality for women to be like men.
This will be the next major challenge. Can the experience of women be incorporated in such a way that we have real choices that extend beyond survival within a system still controlled by the male reality?
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