Julia Gillard: why I made my misogyny speech
It’s a rare political speech that, two years after it is delivered, can still be quoted verbatim around the world. But the former Australian PM Julia Gillard’s famous diatribe against misogyny was that speech. And it’s striking that every woman I spoke to about interviewing Gillard this morning declared unprompted how much her words meant to them.
In 2012, in an impassioned attack on her opponent, the then opposition leader, now Prime Minister Tony Abbott, she called time on the sexists who had made her time in office a misery.
Lest anyone forget, here’s what she said: “I was offended when the leader of the opposition went outside in the front of parliament and stood next to a sign that said ‘Ditch the witch’. I was offended when the leader of the opposition stood next to a sign that described me as a man’s bitch.
“I was offended by those things. Misogyny, sexism, every day from this leader of the opposition. Every day in every way, across the time the leader of the opposition has sat in that chair and I’ve sat in this chair, that is all we have heard from him.”
In an exclusive interview with me today, her first British TV interview since she left office, she revealed the anger that prompted her to make that speech, and the release she felt after delivering it.
She told me: “When I was prime minister I was very much priding myself on ‘this is water off of a duck’s back’ of all of this criticism, even the most gendered of criticism. But looking back at it now I think it does somewhere inside you make a difference…I think it showed too by way of release when I gave what became known as my misogyny speech when my sense of frustration about some very gendered criticism just welled up and came out in a gush in the moment.”
There were many, shockingly, in her own country who accused her of “playing the gender card”, covering up for her own political weaknesses by changing the subject. But what she said has had a powerful impact. It needed to be said then, and it still needs to be said now (and she says more about it in her new book, My Story).
If you doubt that, look at the violence and abuse meted out to women around the world, from Isis militants in Iraq and Syria, to Boko Haram in Nigeria. And if anyone in the west consoles themselves at how much better life is for women in the UK, America or elsewhere, look at the Twitter abuse the Labour MP Stella Creasy got for her inoffensive campaign to get Jane Austen on the bank of a UK banknote.
The sexism is there too, in a more subtle way, in the fashion designer Stella McCartney’s claim this week that her latest collection celebrated “the softness of a woman, and her fragility. Strength on its own in a woman is quite aggressive and not terribly attractive at times”.
It’s that kind of double-standard – that it’s OK for men to be tough, decisive and authoritative, but for women it’s quite another matter – which inhibits women like Julia Gillard as they claw their way to the highest office in the land. And if they do, against all odds, get there, they’ll likely as not be faced as she was with placards from political opponents calling on the public to “ditch the witch”, and accusations from other rivals that she had decided to remain “deliberately barren” by focusing on her career instead of having children.
So yes, no wonder she admits to be consumed by “murderous rages” about the sexism she endured in office. And no wonder it took its toll on her. But it struck a chord that still resonates.
As she told me this morning: “Even when I’d sat down having delivered the speech, I didn’t have any sense about how it was going to resonate beyond the parliamentary chamber. The House of Representatives here, like the House of Commons, is a bear pit, it’s a very theatrical, gladiatorial environment and I knew on the day that I delivered the speech that it had landed with a great deal of force because the opposition were dropping their heads, the opposition leader desperately looking at his watch thinking when will this be over.
“So I knew in that chamber it had had a lot of effect. But it wasn’t until I walked back to my office – and phones were ringing, people were emailing and dashing up and down corridors – that the wave of reaction both in my country and around the world started to become clearer to me.”
It could be argued she’s a better feminist than she was a politician. Perhaps in these days when politicians are reviled and mistrusted, that’s not a bad legacy to have.
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