Edition 40
WOMEN & POWER
- Published 4th June, 2013
- ISBN: 9781922079978
- Extent: 288 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
In a generation women have taken control of their economic fate, risen to the most powerful political positions in the land and climbed to the top of the corporate ladder.
However, there still remains vast inequality between men and women across all measures, from economics to opportunity to security. Does access to power equate to actual power?
In WOMEN & POWER, Griffith REVIEW explores the changing relationship between women and power in public and private spheres, here and abroad.
Are women accepted as equal partners in politics in Australia? Would the introduction of quotas mean that men with higher merit are overlooked?
Should a woman act as ‘one of the boys’ in order to get ahead? Can a woman be too good at sport? Are women their own worst enemy?
Does the cut of Julia Gillard’s jacket matter?
WOMEN & POWER brings provocative and insightful perspectives on these questions and many more through a fascinating mix of memoir, reportage, essays and fiction.
Contributors include Anne Summers, Chris Wallace, Mary Delahunty, Jo Chandler, Mischa Merz, Tegan Bennett Daylight and many more…
In this Edition
Standing up to P
WAYS OF THINKING about women and men usually stall in a 'maze of false dichotomies', poet Adrienne Rich said many years ago.[i] So let's delay entering the maze and remain here for as long as we can instead, in the open sunlit fields of...
Liars, witches and trolls
IT WAS SURPRISINGLY sunny the Sunday morning in October when we bumped into the PM. On a broken suburban footpath I nearly tripped over the leash that restrained her cavoodle puppy. We were walking and talking, my daughter and I, on Mugga Way, the...
Cracking the dress code
GERMAINE GREER HAD been responding to a questioner on the ABC's Q&A program (March 19, 2012), who asked what advice the panel would give to the Prime Minister Julia Gillard on her image problem. Gillard's style was dry and somewhat terse, Greer said, but...
Solidarity and silence
I TYPE IN 'Aceh' and find a slew of photos depicting the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Buried among them is the occasional holiday snap of the white sand beaches of Pulau Weh, the wet season surf at Lhok Nga. When I add the...
Fear of the Q-word
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT QUOTAS to increase the number of senior women in business seem unreal. It is as if instead of living in contemporary Australia, we have stepped through that mirror with Alice, and are making our way through Looking Glass Land, talking nonsense. Given...
Back to base
TINA IS BEAUTIFUL and hopeful, but she tells me she checked herself into hospital at the age of nine to escape her stepfather's sexual abuse. She says she had no idea this desperate cry for help would lead to many years in foster care...
At that time in history
YVONNE DE CARLO was a Canadian-born, American movie actor. The famous beauty was at the height of her film career in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1956 she won a leading role in Cecil B De Mille's epic movie The Ten Commandments. Cast as...
Mothers know best
KOWANYAMA'S FIRST CANTEEN opened in 1973. It was little more than a window, with a noisy throng of men outside, all flashing cans and elbows. Officers from the Queensland Aboriginal Affairs Department rationed the daily limit, which began at two cans each, increasing over...
Madame Butterfly’s revenge
'She had enough long black hair, Japanese hair, to keep on drowning him forever,' – Richard Brautigan, Sombrero Fallout; A Japanese Novel (Simon and Schuster, 1976)PHIL, WHITE, MALE, in his early middle years, looks me up and down. 'Your long black hair, that's very...
Do not bend
THEY ARRIVED BY mail the other day in an A4 envelope from the National Archives of Australia bearing a stamp that said: Do not bend. The cardboard folder said: Your story, our history.Impatient, I tore it open, licked my finger and leafed through the...
Top girl
'The best man in England.' Ronald Reagan on Margaret Thatcher'For £3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel to dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person.' Frankie Boyle CARYL CHURCHILL'S AWARD-WINNING play Top Girls, was first...
On the rigs
The environment is unapologetically male. It is also isolated and basic: all everyone does is sleep-eat-work. I found it relatively easy to acclimatise given my studies and interests, but I underestimated the impact that being the only woman for most of my time, in a group of between twenty and sixty men, would have on me. I found it more challenging than I expected to navigate work/life nuances on the rigs. There are not many other places in the world where a woman is made more aware of her gender: where you must learn to find the balance as a woman in such an overwhelmingly male world.
The up and down nature of ladders
MARY AND I spend a long time tying the sign on the hood of her rusty station wagon. It has taken me days to paint the big board and we most definitely don't want it to fall off on the way to Red Hill....
Homeopathy
TRUTH IS AS truth believes. When the piano needed tuning and the blind piano tuner came to the house, and sat down, and tuned the piano, and when he'd finished was given a cup of tea (in a plain glass cup on a plain...
In my father’s house
THERE WAS NO sign on the door of my parents' bedroom that said 'keep out', but I knew it was not a place to visit, at least not for long. There was a smell to the room, of stale perfume, my father's cigarettes and...
Broken
Selected for The Best Australian Essays 2013 FOR NEARLY A decade, my art has been concerned with aspects of female identity and sexuality and the way both are shaped by the expectations of a society drip-fed images of male-idealised female roles through pervasive, unrelenting advertising...
Getting on with it
IT IS 1953. In Paris, Simone de Beauvoir launches the term 'women's liberation' in her groundbreaking The Second Sex, the UN adopts the Convention on the Political Rights of Women in New York, and Margaret Mittelheuser quietly refuses to make tea for the men...
Taim bilong ol meri?
IN 1975, AS Papua New Guinea claimed its independence and imagined its future, officials set about commissioning a Parliament House for Port Moresby which might embody the spirit of the newly sovereign nation. It was a challenging task in a pulsating democracy of 850...
Is it hard to surf with boobs?
When she was reigning World Champion, Layne Beachley was also the female surfers’ official representative. This meant that even on mornings she wasn’t competing, she’d be on the beach at 5.30 am, the only woman, battling it out on behalf of the other female surfers. ‘The female surfer representative has to be very strong willed,’ says Beachley. ‘I remember arguing constantly with the male surfer rep, the male head judge and the guys’ sponsors, arguing about which conditions we were going to get.’
Risky business
NICKI IS ONE of my growing stable of female boxing students. She was wrapping her hands to begin a training session when she asked me if she'd ever be as strong as a man. When I told her probably not, she was deflated, but...
Snake eyes
HE INTRODUCED HIMSELF as a photographer when he'd pulled away from a group of men to tell her how good she looked. The comment wasn't sleazy – just a matter-of-fact statement he'd followed up by pointing out what he thought was working on her....
Firebugs
I HATED JUDY'S first boyfriend, as expected. He was oddly shaped, like a sweet potato. His clothes were exactly wrong. Judy had arranged for us to meet him at Circular Quay one Saturday morning, so that the three of us could go to the...
Sound the alarm
THERE'S THE TUG of it in her stomach, always, a heavy thing. Sarah's hot, clammy like she knows she shouldn't be on a day like this – nearly forty years old and yet every month the worry like something the hormones make you forget...
Up-skirt
A YOUNG WOMAN walks down the street towards an unremarkable terrace house wearing a fetching combination of op-shop style and nonchalance. Her upper lids are lined; her brunette hair falls in layers around her pretty face. She opens the gate, knocks on the door...
Morning song
THE WOMAN WHO stands on the door-step is short and chunky. Her legs are like an elephant's. They go up from her feet and down from her hips without contour or curve. Her hair is coloured a bright hot red. Henna hair: curly, messy....
She plays as beautiful
Before battle she brushes her hair /a hundred strokes and sour breath/ Unfolds a vintage blue teal dress from lady beetle tissue Throws two dice on a leather place mat looking for a set of sixesScents of collection /her favorite is branded as "Judy...
Pack a suitcase
Pack a suitcase and find me. I'm here in rooms strewn with small purses of coins and stale cigarettes that my lungs won't take in anymore. In here, I've found a small light out from my window that I've been staring at for hours...
Featured Contributors
Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a Sudanese diaspora writer, broadcaster and award-winning social advocate. A former mechanical engineer, she has published...
Mary Delahunty
Mary Delahunty is the author of GRAVITY: Inside the PM's office during her last year and final days (Hardie Grant,...
Anne Summers
Anne Summers AO is a journalist and author whose eight books include the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police,...
Chris Wallace
Chris Wallace is an ARC DECRA Fellow at the National Centre of Biography, School of History, ANU and a...
