‘Women need to know of politics, power’

Press, 9 August 1985, Page 5

‘Women need to know of politics, power’

Learning to use the system is the second step for women; the first is becoming aware of politics and power, according to Marilyn Waring’s newly released book. “Women, "Politics and Power.” Women had to be aware that politics were not confined to Parliament, she said in Christchurch yesterday, while on tour to promote the book. Politics spilled into every area of women’s lives — legal, social, environmental — and power came from women making their own political decisions.

The book’s first few chapters are almost a “do-it-yourself’ manual showing women how to beat the system by using it, with power. So how to awaken that power Marilyn Waring feels is inside every woman? “Look, it starts inside yourself. For lots of women, political decisions start in their homes,” she said. r , The niggling feeling of unfairness women sometimes got putting others first — always having the burnt chop at tea-time and spending Saturday running the children to sport then having house-cleaning for recreation — could turn into „ “power” decision when women said, “Stop! No more!* Two golden rules of making these political decisions were never to take a strategic step without knowing what the next step would be and never taking a step H you would end up where vou started, she said. * “It has to be more than looliing at a pile of dikhes on a fine Sunday and gbing

to the beach instead. You have to know what you are going to do when you come back and find the pile still there ... and it is useless to do them, you haven’t gained anything from deciding not to do them in the first place.” Ms Waring said she saw the book as an effective political tool for women. “In nine years of politics, I had access to a lot of information and knowledge of power which other women don't have access to,” she said. “They don’t have to take it up but I think it is important I empower them by giving them access to that information and knowledge. “I am saying that not every women will get to Parliament, but that does not mean that women are not going to have power.” Other chapters of the book relate her experiences and agonies over the 1981 Springbok rugby tour, the election-forcing nuclear-weapon-free zone debate of 1984, and the United Nations Decade for Women.

A haunting chapter about leaving Parliament, written in March, 1984, hints at what Ms Waring endured during her three terms as a member. One senses the hurt from the baptism of fire, but Ms Waring does not wallow in it. Instead, it is work on abortion debates, the price of milk, the nuclear issue, under-used Government department housing ... and work on issues for her Waipa electorate; by-passes, new telephone exchanges, doctors for rural areas.

“My constituents were my kind of succour,” she “At the end of the week

when you looked at what had not been achieved and asked, ‘What have I changed?’ there was always the lives of the people. A fight won for a new post office, a family’s mortgage problems solved. “They were real.”

Ms Waring said her in-

volvement in women’s issues started while at university. “At that time the women’s writing was Germaine Greer and books like ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’,” she said. “But there wasn’t a lot of political consciousness about them at that

stage.” Her "radicalising” came from being exposed to the lives of ordinary New Zealand women while in Parliament, she said. “I have not had to undergo half the horrors some women do ... suburban women. Stuck away Jn a

dormitory suburb planned by men who have no thought for women’s lives. No bus routes, no community services nearby, nothing. “Sometimes I think it is really funny when men attack "me about extreme radicalism,” she said. “I laugh because ordinary women

taught me to be a radical — becoming radical did not come to me from on high. “It was moving round the country, hearing the women's voices” — voices on issues the men in Parliament would not acknowledge or did not know about, she said.

In 1980, trying to get continuing Budget assistance for Rape Crisis centres and women’s refuges, male caucus colleagues would ask: “What is a Rape Crisis centre?” she said.

“It is vitally important that women make men aware — take away men’s power to say, ‘l’ve never heard of it’,” she said.

Ms Waring said there had been no period in history when half the world’s population — women — had not been oppressed.

“Those woman characteristics ... intuition, caring ...

have to be strong weapons for women,” she said. “I think they are so strong men are afraid of them.

“All this oppression, all these years — what are they afraid of? Honesty? Love? Caring?” she said. “Yet these woman characteristics are the hope of the world.” The women’s movement was more rapid now than at any other time and perhaps the whole of humankind could see the movement about women saving themselves would be the saving of the world, she said. “But we have only just started. We have hardly left the front door,” she said. “It is a long way from not giving ourselves the burnt chop to, non-proliferation (of nucleafJJyeapons) but that is where we are going.”