Margaret Fitzherbert So Many Firsts: Liberal Women from Enid Lyons to the Turnbull Era, Leichhardt, Federation Press, 2009 (286 pp). ISBN 9-78186287-717-7 (paperback) RRP $39.95. There have always been brave women among Liberal politicians— from Florence Cardell-Oliver in 1939, the sole parliamentary voice against banning advertising of contraceptives in Western Australia, to Judi Moylan and Senator Judith Troeth standing up to the Howard Government's demonising of asylum seekers. It is often said there are not enough serious books about conservative politics. Margaret Fitzherbert is making a serious contribution to remedying this deficiency, at least in relation to Liberal women. This book is a history commissioned by the Menzies Research Centre (the Liberal Party think tank) and written by a Liberal Party member and former ministerial staffer with serious political aspirations. Only last year, Fitzherbert challenged a sitting member for preselection in a safe Victorian seat. F...

This article explores institutional and other factors facilitating the substantive representation of women in parliament. It engages with a range of indicators of substantive representation, including process/ responsiveness indicators, legislative/policy outcomes and attitudinal alignment of women representatives and women in the community. It presents an Australian case study of a successful initiative by a cross-party group of women parliamentarians to facilitate access to the abortion drug RU486. It finds that critical mass, critical actors and a critical juncture were important but so was institution-building, particularly the under- studied role of parliamentary groups.

During the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, abortion amendments were debated in both Houses of Parliament. Analysis of the parliamentary divisions reveals that the majority of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs went through the progressive lobby while the majority of Conservatives voted for the more restrictive positions. Arguments for women’s descriptive representation which rest on substantive representation – those that link the presence of women representatives with policies that are “for women” – appear, in this case seriously questioned, as party is found to trump sex. By analyzing parliamentary debate contributions (participation and content) in addition to parliamentary votes, and in both Houses of the UK Parliament, this article reconsiders the role of the sex of our representatives. Not only do women over-participate in the division lobbies and vote in a more liberal fashion than their male colleagues, debate contribution analysis suggests that women MPs’ and Peers’ interventions are substantively different from men’s. Accordingly, we maintain that whilst women’s absence from Parliament might not have affected the legislative outcome in 2008, their presence was critical to the way in which the issue of abortion was discussed. It is women representatives who center women in debates about abortion, conceive of it in terms of women’s rights, and seek to protect women from reforms that would constrain their access to abortion and might force them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

2008

This thesis interrogates the abortion debate in New Zealand and New South Wales over the period 1970 to the present from a feminist perspective. The arguments of this thesis are five fold. First, it argues that abortion was the central issue for second wave feminists in the 1970s because they believed that until women had complete control over their bodies any other gains made by the movement would be of little significance. Second, feminists who did not support abortion law reform left the mainstream movement and set up their own groups because that movement was not prepared to tolerate a diversity of opinions on the abortion issue. Third, not only was abortion a central issue for feminists; it became a central issue for parliament, illustrated by the establishment of royal commissions in both New Zealand and Australia to investigate abortion among a number of other issues. Fourth, from the 1970s New Zealand women travelled to Australia for abortions. After the 1977 restrictive law...

Parliamentary Affairs, 2021

The Australian House of Representatives contains far fewer women than men. But is this because parties of left and right discriminate against women or because voters do? Using a new dataset comprising 7271 House candidates from 2001 to 2019, firstly, we find that the percentage of women candidates is increasing, but is consistently higher for parties of the left than the right. Secondly, women tend to be selected more by parties of both left and right in unsafe seats. Thirdly, all else being equal, voters reward women running for Labor with over 1400 votes more, are neutral towards those of the Liberals and Greens, but tend to penalise women standing for the Nationals. We conclude that, overall, it is parties, not voters, driving under-representation of women in Australia's lower house.

The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2014

Research Highlights and This article Explains how a historical account may be usefully combined with an analysis of the constitutive representation of gender in order to provide insights into the substantive representation of women; Provides an empirical account of how MPs favouring restrictions on legal abortion have historically constructed women as victims of unethical doctors in order to undermine the foundations of the 1967 Abortion Act; Helps explain recent attempts to strip abortion providers of the ability to provide counselling; Demonstrates that when set against the medicalised regulatory regime established by the 1967 Act, the contributions of pro-choice MPs may be criticised as problematic attempts to reconcile a feminist abortion politics with the status quo. In 2011, Parliament debated an amendment to the government's Health and Social Care Bill which would have mandated that abortion counselling be provided by independent organisations. While many attacked the ame...

There is an underrepresentation of women in Australian politics-media commentators, political scientists and politicians themselves acknowledge this. Major party pre-selections are one of the factors contributing to this underrepresentation. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the non-Labor coalition of the Liberal Party of Australia and The Nationals (the Coalition) differ in their approach of the matter of gender when undertaking the pre-selection of candidates for federal elections. This essay discusses the importance of gender representation in parliament, the three major parties approaches to gender representation in politics, including a brief history women's participation in the parties and the impact of these policy approaches on the gender balance of the federal Parliament, beginning with the ALP followed by the Coalition parties

Women's Studies International Quarterly, 1979

Synopsis--This paper has both theoretical and empirical aspects. In the theoretical section the ideology of feminism is discussed. It is argued that feminism can be divided into reformist and revolutionary wings. Hence on the one hand those who argue that feminism is inherently bourgeois possess a too narrow conception of feminism while on the other hand, those who see it as providing, by definition, a radical challenge to society have neglected the limitations of both liberal and conservative feminism.