Pandora’s Boxers: Crikey's "serious questions" about women

“The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy, nowadays it means rank subversion," Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch, 1971.

On the whole, I like Crikey and its editor Jonathan Green. Green runs one of the few lively and independent voices in big Australian media and I enjoy their skewering of Australian political and media sacred cows. However, I did not think much of the “serious question” Green asked on Twitter last week. Why, he pondered, don't women subscribe to the online newsletter? Crikey has about 15,000 annual subscribers who pay $100 or thereabouts for a news and current affairs email five day a week. 70 percent of these are male, says Green. According to Green the “unbalance was weird.”

There were five reasons I didn’t think much of his question.

Firstly I am disposed to be cynical and say this is a disguised advertising ploy. Green may want to get people talking, but it wouldn’t hurt to lift his readership by 5,000 people. Secondly there is an assumption that the ratio of male to female readers is somehow an important matter that requires fixing and not merely a reflection of individual taste. Thirdly, if Crikey’s content is geared toward males, then they can solve it themselves. Half of their newsroom are female, as deputy editor Sophie Black reminds us. Though Black wanted “more talk on this”, perhaps they would be better served with more action. Fourthly the question ignores the cost of Crikey and the time investment required to read it. It is a great publication but also a luxury that requires discretionary wealth and time to take up the subscription.

But the fifth and biggest reason I didn’t like it was that Green was doing the “annual airing” of the whole tiresome battle of the sexes argument without a clear agenda as to where it might lead. What then did Green want to see as an outcome if it wasn’t simply about getting more readers for Crikey? Did he not know that many women would use this as an opportunity to remind Green that equality of the sexes remains a distant dream in 21st century Australia. As “a journalist since before you were born”, there are issues Jonathan Green might have been able to foresee.

But there were many who did take Green’s question seriously, including Crikey’s own Scott Steel aka Possum. The writer of Pollytics was inclined to do soul searching about the gender mix of his own readership. He said the ratio of male to female comments on Pollytics and fellow Crikey pseph blog Poll Bludger ranged “between about 4 to 1 on a good day, through to 10 to 1 depending on the topic.” He also bemoaned the “lack of big female political bloggers” and would eventually run into heavy traffic when he damned Hoyden About Town with the faint praise that they “touch[ed] on politics occasionally”.

And then the argument spun off in all sorts of directions. Lisa Gunders took the question head on. Assuming an acceptance of Steel’s premise (which she did not necessarily share), she mentioned two factors. Women wrote about different forms of politics which wend “under the radar”, she said. But the biggest reason was a lack of time. “Women are still carrying the major load in terms of housework and the relational work required to keep a household running these days,” she wrote. “Much of this work isn’t recognised and is so piecemeal that it chews up hours without you having anything to show for it.”

Sarah Stokely noted the women bloggers were there but could not be seen. She linked to Geek Feminist’s question “where are all the men bloggers?” which effectively skewered this particular blindness. Larvatus Prodeo also used the metaphor of sight and the male gaze. Anna Winter’s post there suggested that women were creating alternative niches in the public sphere away from the sexism, the "shrill and angry tone”, and the dismissal of women’s experience they find in the “hard politics blogs”. Winter said that if men were noticing the absence of women wherever they go, then “perhaps the more relevant question is why they are avoiding you”.

Hoyden About Town also weighed in about invisibility. Viv (Tigtog) and Lauredhel’s blog is one of the heavyweight feminist Australian blogs and its comment ratio is closer to 70 to 30 percent in favour of women. But unlike Crikey, it seems to be happy enough with the split, and does not indulge in any hand wringing about changing it. Lauredhel posted five of the comments (three men, two woman) from the Pollytics thread which its readers ripped into. Softestbullet wrote that Jason Wilson’s “Big-p Political” comment means “about dudes.” Lauredhel pointed out that woman also post about gardening, and food, and parenting, and life. “For me,” she wrote, this was “part of that is a deliberate political strategy.”

FuckPoliteness, as the name of the blog suggests, was not inclined to give much truck to Crikey’s arguments. While the big P penis people discussed big P political issues, said the blog's author, women were “just discussing media, law, rape, issues with the medical profession, disability politics, invisibility, breastfeeding discrimination, conduct of politicians, live blogging elections, internet censorship, race politics, divisions in feminism, transphobia, homophobia, talk back radio, life/work/study/family/friends/leisure balances, and about a million other things.” She said that the public sphere that existed in the comment sections of blogs such as Larvatus Prodeo was a race to the bottom where women faced aggression and smug superiority.

That blogger may want to fuck politeness but she does want a place where she could discuss these issues in “open and respectful ways”. But males are everywhere and do not always behave well – despite the best efforts of Crikey, Pollytics, Jason Wilson or Larvatus Prodeo. In a snark-infested internet, perhaps an open and respectful public sphere can only be found in a forum moderated by women. As Lady Psyche in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Princess Ida reminds us:
Man will swear and man will storm-
Man is not at all good form-
Is of no kind of use-
Man's a donkey - Man's a goose-
Man is coarse and Man is plain-
Man is more or less insane-
Man's a ribald - Man's a rake,
Man is Nature's sole mistake!

Ada Lovelace

Today, 24 March, is Ada Lovelace day; an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. And who better to write about than Ada Lovelace herself, a 19th century woman who vies with Grace Hopper as one of the great female pioneers of computing.

Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815, the daughter of Lady Annabella Byron and the British Romantic poet Lord Byron. Ada never knew her “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” father (the description given to him by his lover Caroline Lamb). The impetuous Byron and the logical Annabella were an ill-matched couple. He called her the Princess of Parallelograms and they parted on bad terms. He died in Greece in 1824 when his only daughter was just eight years old.

By then it was clear that Ada was extraordinarily talented. She could solve difficult maths problems and was intrigued by numbers, equations and calculations. She was also fascinated by the mystery of flight and was determined to create a set of human wings in an involved process she called “Flyology”. Her worried mother invited three unmarried female friends to live with them in Mortlake hoping they would be a good influence on her brilliant but wayward daughter. But Ada hated the three chaperones as interfering busybodies and spies who watched her every move.

The first love of her life was William Turner who was employed to teach her shorthand. Ada was now 16 and just two years younger than her new tutor. They got along well despite the overbearing chaperones and she accepted William’s proposal of marriage. The pair eloped but were quickly caught. William was banished from the house and never seen again. Ada decided that from then on she would keep her love for numbers.

Aged 18, she was introduced to Charles Babbage at his house in London’s Dorset St. She was among a crowd of visitors to see the inventor’s latest creation the Silver Dancer. The Dancer was a lifelike clockwork toy which did a never-ending cycle of pirouettes. Young Ada was fascinated by the Dancer and wanted to know more about its strange creator.

Babbage was the original nutty professor. He had invented shoes that could walk on water, a method of delivering messages by overhead cable, a machine that played noughts and crosses, a means of checking the condition of railway tracks and lights to enable communications bete ween land and sea. But his lasting claim to fame was the Difference Engine. After being entranced by the Silver Dancer, Ada then spotted the Engine which was the size of a large trunk and resembled a giant clock. It contained hundreds of cogs and wheels which were numbered from 0 to 9. Ada labelled it the Thinking Machine.

The Engine was incomplete and Babbage never finished it in his lifetime. But he did show Ada how it worked and soon it was spitting out numbers 8,10,12,14 and so on, each time adding 2. Babbage and Ada quickly struck up a partnership and she signed on to help him build the next stage: an analytical engine. She spent two years making the necessary calculations and solving complex problems for the prototype of what was the world’s first computer. But Babbage could not afford the tubes needed to complete it.

Aged 20, she met and married a Warwickshire man Lord King who was also known as William Lovelace. They had three children: George, Annabella and Ralph. But Ada was not a great mother. She became ill unable to eat or sleep. But she continued to work with Babbage. The inventor had adapted the punched cards used by Jacquard, the French silk weaver. The cards would be used to feed in the information to the Engine to make the calculations. It would be Ada’s job to describe how the Thinking Machine would work based on the translations of the Italian philosopher Luigi Menabrea. After two years she published “Menabrea: Sketch of the Analytical Engine”.

The book was an immediate sensation and Ada became as famous as her late father. She was 28 and at the height of her powers. But illness and death were not far away. She suffered bad stomach cramps and headaches and made it worse by a dubious magnetism cure. In 1851, a uterine examination revealed “a very deep and extensive ulceration of the womb”. She died a year later of cancer, aged 36. But her legacy to the computer would live long after her.

In May 1979, Commander John D. Cooper came up with a name which the US Department of Defence’s High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) could accept for their new programming language: It was to be called “Ada”. HOLWG contacted Ada’s descendent Lord Lytton for permission to use the name. Lytton was enthusiastic and pointed out that the letters “Ada” stood “right in the middle of radar”.

Bare Boned: a study of women in television news

Feeling like I’ve just consumed a guilty pleasure, I finished the last page of the book “Boned” today. On the back of the anonymously-penned novel was the overblown claim to ‘blow the lid off the world of network television”. It didn’t quite do that, but did land a few telling blows. At the heart of the book is the claim that commercial television news and current affairs is a testosterone soaked world where women are hired for their sexiness and have a use-by date when they turn 40. While the novel takes a broad brush with its two decade arc of the protagonist’s life story, it is too full of stock heroes and villains to ever move far beyond a thrash read. Yet I found it no less enjoyable and important a read for that.

The 2008 novel pitted the feisty heroine and journalism degree graduate Kate Corish against the blokey culture at fictional Australian TV station “Channel Eight”. Corish overcomes the sexism of her bosses to rise to the top of the news and current affairs game but finds her career is threatened as she approaches her 40th birthday. Reviewing the novel for the Sydney Morning Herald Tony Wilson says the best thing about the book was the title but that the Corish character was too good to be true, “a gun foreign correspondent, better than any I remember from any of those 6.30pm current affairs shows”. But the novel has aspects of a roman à clef. Many media, including News.com.au claimed the plotline was a thinly veiled rehash of the 2006 axing of Channel Nine’s Today show co-host Jessica Rowe.

Rowe’s axing was mentioned in the extraordinary affidavit (pdf) of Mark Llewellyn, the then head of Nine News who was asked to take a major pay cut in 2006 following the death of former station owner Kerry Packer. The affidavit documented the events leading to his departure from the network and popularised two colourful phrases into the language. Firstly there was the “shit sandwich” Nine’s new CEO Eddie Maguire asked Llewellyn to ‘swallow’ with a $350,000 pay cut. Then there was the colourful gerund “boned” which meant sacked (but with sexual overtones). The phrase was apparently used by Maguire (though he denies it) when he asked Llewellyn: “What are we going to do with Jessica [Rowe]. When should we bone her?”

Ever since then, the concept of boning has seeped into the lexicon. Earlier this year, a Channel Nine spokesperson denied that Sydney’s newsreader Mark Ferguson was being sacked by saying “He’s not being boned. He’s on the payroll. There’s no blood on the floor.” It has also spread out from the media into other industries. Last month, The Age suggested that AFL team Collingwood’s coach Mick Malthouse might be boned “to use Eddie-speak” (a reference has a double edge as Maguire is also the Collingwood president).

But it was women who mostly bore the brunt of "boning" as Jessica Rowe knows only too well. The career of Tracey Spicer also bears some resemblances to the fictional Corish. In 2006 Channel Ten sacked her by email just weeks after returning from maternity leave after 14 years with the network. Nevertheless she claims to have met no-one remotely like Corish in her 20 years of television. Spicer says that many women have survived in television despite being childless and single. She claims the author is either a man who worked in TV rooms 20 years ago when “female newsreaders were hard-drinking players who gave as good as they got” or else it was a “doyenne of women's magazines who's decided to venture into that dreaded genre, chick lit.” Either way, she claims the scenarios outlined by the novel are out of date. “What 40-something television presenter devours coffee, cigarettes and Red Bull for breakfast?” asked Spicer “More like an egg white omelette, herbal-tea- for-my-complexion then Botox for brunch.”

Besides the two candidates mentioned by Spicer, there are several other possible authors all with substantial motivations for writing the ‘tell all’ book. In April 2008, the Sydney Daily Telegraph said the leading contenders included Jessica Rowe, sacked Nine News reporter Christine Spiteri and former Nine creative services director Mia Freedman. However it also produced a larger suspect list that include the affidavit writer Mark Llewellyn, former Nine news presenter Kellie Connolly, former Ten newsreader Tracey Spicer, former Ten Big Brother host Gretel Killeen, former Today Tonight host Naomi Robson and (surely the most unlikely) former Nine CEO Eddie McGuire. Crikey favoured Killeen who has authored a number of books, mostly for children and was dumped as Big Brother anchor in 2007 despite much personal popularity.

Whoever it was, the novel raises useful questions about the role of women in television. The list of disgruntled sacked possible authors is also telling and shows many women have a difficult time in being taken seriously in their media careers. This applies both behind and in front of the camera. A 1993 National Working Party on the Portrayal of Women in the Media study found women are most associated with human interest, leisure and crime issues and are portrayed mostly as victims, witnesses or random bystanders. It is arguable that not much has change in the last 16 years. Women are still objects to be “boned” by men in authority. Even the critical Spicer admits the novel has some home truths. "Kate wasn't fuckable any more,” she said. “And she knew only too well that was fatal for a woman in commercial television, no matter how impressive her resume.”

Helen Garner's The First Stone

Author Helen Garner has applied for the police summary in a Geelong case involving a prosecution witness in the trial of triple murderer Robert Farquharson. Garner told the Magistrate she hoped to write a book on the Farquharson case. The book will be the latest in a string of acclaimed non-fiction books about aspects of Australian culture especially involving sex and the legal system.

By far the most famous of Garner’s non-fiction output was her controversial 1995 book, The First Stone. Taking its title from the Gospel of John 8:7, this was an intensely personal account of a sexual harassment scandal at Melbourne University's prestigious Ormond College in 1992. The case was brought by two female students against a college master, who Garner called Colin Shepherd (in real life Alan Gregory). The students claimed Shepherd had made sexual advances in during a party at the college. After a much publicised court case and appeal, the charges against Shepherd were dismissed. However anonymous leaflets spread around the university insinuating he was capable of further crimes. In the end, Shepherd lost his job as Master of Ormond College.

Garner was fascinated by the facts of the case and wanted to learn more. Garner thought of herself as a feminist but she said “it shocked me now…I felt so much sympathy for the man in the case and so little for the women”. She harkened to her own experience when in 1972 she was sacked from her teaching job for discussing sexual matters with her students. Garner said she was less interested in the guilt or innocence of Shepherd than in the reasons why the women went to the police. She wondered why instead the women didn’t fight back with their own weapons of “youth and quick wits”.

Garner interviewed Shepherd at length and attempted to track down the two female students to get their side of the story. She met the director of the University’s counselling service, a lady known only as Janet F. (none of the parties to the case are identified by name except for Shepherd). Janet met all the players in the case and was impressed by the integrity of the two students. But her report on the case for the university was criticised by the students’ supporters as being too sympathetic to the master. According to Janet, the young women who teach in universities are angry at the notion that someone would “invade” another person sexually. It was a matter of exerting power. And they see sexual harassment as a crime, it was important to punish the perpetrators.

Garner met Shepherd shortly after he lost his job. Prior to working at Melbourne University, he worked at the less conservative Monash. Shepherd said he brought Monash attitudes to the Ormond College job and ‘addressed feminist concerns’ by appointing several females in key positions and instituted an equal opportunity policy. Shepherd believed there was a conspiracy against him and that when he lost the initial case, some of the girls’ supporters at the college held a party to celebrate. Shepherd admitted he had been drinking at the party and danced with the two women. But there was no sexual contact. He blamed the subsequent media attention for destroying his career.

Much of the rest of The First Stone (pdf) documents Garner’s failed attempt to contact the complainants. One of the teachers she met said she was disappointed by the “position” Garner was taking. A “cordon sanitaire” had descended between Garner and the women. Garner became frustrated by what she called those “who expected automatic allegiance from women to a cause they were not prepared even to argue”. Another emissary, known only as Fiona P, said she tried to keep the matter out of the courts but failed because the college structure was “basically males”.

Another of the women’s supporters blamed the lack of clarity in the court result for the problem. She said there were people on both sides “with barrows to push”. The women’s officer of the Student Union said the structures protected Shepherd and the college. She said the procedures gave the complainants an apology and a cessation of the behaviour. But she said the system lacked “retribution”. One graduate told Garner that sexual harassment was “always going to happen” but it has to become “more acceptable for women to get angry” about it. What women needed, she said, was some protection against being made to feel uncomfortable.

Garner believed the university feminists had conflated the matter from harassment to violence. They were trying to make a very broad range of male behaviour into a criminal matter. She worried about the impact on such activities as flirting and said that feminism was “meant to free us, not take the joy out of everything. At the end of her book, Garner lamented that if only the women had “developed a bold verbal style to match their sense of dress” then none of the consequences would have happened. In her view they were afraid of life.

Critics called the book an ‘attack on feminism.’ Garner was widely vilified and her description of one form of modern feminism as “priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving” did not win her many friends. According to Green Left Weekly, the book is “is much less about a sexual harassment case than it is an argument against feminism. It caricatures feminism and then shoots it down in flames. Garner has sought retribution on the wrong subject.” The writer has a point. But she forgets that Garner has legitimised the grievances of women but sets them in the context of what Daphne Patai calls “the unpredictability of Eros”. The book remains an honest, personal and useful examination of the complexity of the relationship between sex and power.

Veiled agenda: Wearing the Hijab

To veil or not to veil? The question over whether Muslim women should wear the hijab is on the front line of Islamic-secular relations in nations across the world. In three different continents, Kyrgyzstan, Canada and Nigeria are the latest contested battlegrounds for use of the traditional Muslim headgear. The Kyrgyz education ministry has officially banned the practice on school grounds and have imposed a fine of 700 soms (about $19) on the family of infractors.

Meanwhile the Youth Minister of Nigeria’s mainly Muslim state of Kano has denied the state government issued a directive for female students of all religions to wear the hijab. Over in Canada, politicians of all political parties have protested a recent decision by Elections Canada to allow veiled voters to participate in the upcoming federal elections without having to lift their veils.

According to Turkish sociologist, Nilufer Gole, veiling is the most salient emblem of contemporary Islamism. She says no other symbol reconstructs with such force the ‘otherness’ of Islam to the west and its use shows the insurmountability of boundaries between Islamic and Western civilisation. Gole also says that female dress codes have always been the litmus test of modernity in Islamic societies.

Her words are quoted in Geraldine Doogue and Peter Kirkwood’s study of the relationship between Islam and the west entitled “Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting age-old Beliefs and a Modern World”. While the book addresses many controversial issues in relation to Islam, the chapter on the hijab and whether Muslim women are oppressed is possibly the most disputed. Doogue and Kirkwood interviewed many prominent Muslims for the book and found great diversity among Muslim women on clothing choice.

Baroness Pola Uddin, a Bangladeshi born British Labour politician (and the first Muslim woman in the House of Lords), told the authors she was puzzled by the decision of English Muslims to take the veil. She said her home culture has produced many female engineers while the women she knows are not passive and would not consider taking up the veil.

Turkish TV journalist and filmmaker Ayşe Böhürler, meanwhile, deeply shocked her family when she wore the veil that had been cast aside for two generations. She did not see her act as casting aside the secular reforms of Kemal Ataturk. Instead she saw her actions as the next logical step: by linking progress with an accompanying religious commitment. It was both a protest against Western ideas of modernisation and an affirmation of a collective identity.

Another Turkish interviewee, Professor of Sociology Ayşe Öncü, was not so sure. At her university in Istanbul, women students were debating the issue in detail: not only whether to wear the veil but if so, what version: full cover up or tied scarf. Öncü was worried that gender segregation would become a state policy. Geraldine Doogue believes that Muslim women are being encouraged to be anxious about their bodies and the whole idea seems suspiciously like self-loathing.

Wearing a veil was a Persian Zoroastrian and then Byzantine fashion which only made its way into Arabia after Mohammad’s death. There are no injunctions in the Koran about wearing the hijab. There is only one passage in the Koran (Sura 24: 30-31) about the need for modesty and it applies to men and women. Both men and women should “lower their gaze and guard their modesty” while in addition the women "should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof.”

The recent rise of the hijab is puzzling to western women, where dress codes have tended to become increasingly less modest. For many in the west, the hijab is a symbol of oppression against Muslim women and is a reminder that in some Muslim societies women are second-class citizens who cannot attend universities, are not allowed to drive and are victims of honour killings, circumcision and domestic violence. Ayşe Böhürler rejects this analysis. “For me it means freedom,” she said. "I do not want to impose my values on others and my own daughters will be free to choose whether to wear it or not”.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: apostasy on tour in Australia

Somali born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali told a packed Sydney Recital Hall last night that Muslim schools in Australia should be abolished. Speaking at the Sydney Writers festival amid high security, Hirsi Ali said Australians should ask why there is need for Saudi Arabian financed Muslim schools. “Young people should be groomed to be Australians first, to see their nationality first not religion," she said.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in 1969. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the leading figures of the Somali Revolution which finally led to the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Ayaan is Magan Isse’s fourth daughter and her name Ayaan is the Somali word for “lucky”. Magan Isse was imprisoned by Siad Barre shortly after Ayaan was born. But he escaped six years later. The family fled Somalia and after short stints in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia they settled in Kenya.

Hirsi Ali was educated in Nairobi where she fell under the influence of an Islamic religious teacher. Ayaan wore the hijab with her school uniform and was in favour of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In 1992, Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery. She claims she was given in arranged marriage to a distant cousin in Canada. In preparation, she went to join family members in Dusseldorf, Germany. There she claims she worked out a plan to escape the marriage plans and fled to the Netherlands where she claimed asylum.

On her Dutch asylum application, Hirsi Ali gave a false name and told authorities she was a refugee from camps on the Somali-Kenyan border. Hirsi Ali was that false name as her birth name was Ayaan Hirsi Magan. Because Somalia was in the grip of a civil war and famine at the time, the Dutch accepted her application. Hirsi Ali took courses in Dutch and took various short term clerical jobs. After learning the language, she worked as a Dutch-Somali interpreter for refugees and studied political science at the University of Leiden. She gained her master’s degree in 2000.

In her time at university, Hirsi Ali was exposed to new ideas that sorely tested her devotion to Islam. Then after 9/11 she suffered revulsion when she saw Dutch Muslims celebrate the attacks. She wrote a book called De Zoontjesfabriek (The Son Factory) which outlined her views on women, Islam and integration, and she quickly became a public figure with appearances on TV debates and news programs.

In 2002 she was introduced to Gerrit Zalm. Zalm was then Dutch finance minister and a member of of the market liberal party VVD. The VVD is a centre-right libertarian party. Zalm urged Hirsi Ali to join the party and stand for election. She was elected in 2003 and continued to attract controversy over her new views about Islam. Among her suggestion was that Muslims be screened for terrorism before being accepted into a job. She was also critical of the position of women in patriarchal Muslim societies.

In 2004, she wrote the script for a ten minute film called Submission (a direct translation of the word “Islam”). The short film was directed by Theo van Gogh. In it a Muslim women is beaten by her husband and another is raped by an uncle while verses from the Koran unfavourable to women are projected onto their bodies in Arabic. Two months after Dutch TV aired the film, van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by a Moroccan immigrant Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri implanted a knife in his body with a five page note attached which threatened Western governments, Jews and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Hirsi Ali went into hiding for three months. She emerged in 2005 and demanded to live a normal life despite ongoing death threats. Readers Digest nominated her European of the Year in 2006. In her acceptance speech she urged action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. In the wake of the Mohammed cartoons controversy, Hirsi Ali joined a group of 12 writers including Salman Rushdie who signed a manifesto which warned against Islamic "totalitarianism".

But her life began to unravel in May 2006 when a Dutch TV program Zembla exposed the fiction of her asylum application. Hirsi Ali was forced to admit she had lied about her full name, her date of birth and the manner in which she had come to the Netherlands. The Dutch media she could lose her Dutch citizenship thereby rendering her ineligible for parliament. An official investigation corroborated the TV report and Hirsi Ali resigned from parliament.

Although the Government eventually ruled she could keep her citizenship, Hirsi Ali moved to the US to take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-thank based in Washington with close ties to the Republican Party. Here she remained under the watchful eye of security guards after threats from US based Muslim organisations. Her protection is carried out by American security personnel commissioned by the Dutch Justice department.

In April she incurred the wrath of Pittsburgh imam Fouad ElBayly who demanded the death sentence for her when she arrived for a lecture at the University of Pittsburgh. "She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death," said ElBayly, who came to the US from Egypt in 1976.

Her current visit to Australia has also attracted controversy and attracted angry remarks from local Muslims. Islamic law lecturer at Sydney's University of Technology, Jamila Hussain says Hirsi Ali’s ideas are extreme. “She's obviously had some dreadful experiences, but they're not typical, “ she said. Nada Roude, of the New South Wales Islamic Council also claims her visit has the potential to incite hatred. “Anyone who causes harm to our society because they have the right to express their opinion is not welcome,” she said.

See Emily Play

The inspiration for the influential women’s lobby group EMILY’s list died earlier this month. Her name was Harriet Woods. Woods narrowly missed out on becoming the US first female Democrat senator when she came from nowhere to narrowly lose a Missouri senate race in 1982 to incumbent Republican Senator John Danforth. Woods died of leukaemia aged 79 on 9 February.

Woods was the only Democratic woman in the nation running for the Senate in 1982. She won the 1982 Democratic primary without party support. Despite this, she was running neck-and-neck with odds-on favourite Danforth in the final weeks of the race when she was forced to cancel TV ads because she ran out of money. Her senate defeat, although heartbreaking for her supporters, proved to be a catalyst for a new movement. Ellen Malcolm, a Washington public service activist was exasperated by Woods' eventual loss. "Out of that, I brought a group together and said: 'This is crazy. How do we elect a woman to the Senate?” she said.

The obvious answer was money. Malcolm decided to answer the question herself and founded a new organisation in 1985. She called it EMILY’s List. EMILY is an acronym not the name of a woman. It stands for Early Money Is Like Yeast because that’s what “makes the dough rise”. Malcolm’s goal was to elect more pro-abortion rights women to state and federal offices. Initial results were mixed. With Emily’s financial backing, they helped Woods run again for Missouri in 1986. Although Woods lost again, EMILY’s second candidate Barbara Mikulski was successfully elected to the Senate in Maryland.

EMILY’s List quickly grew into a powerful campaign organisation. It now has 100,000 members and describes itself as the “nation's largest grassroots political network…dedicated to building a progressive America by electing pro-choice Democratic women to federal, state, and local office”.

EMILY’s List celebrated its 20th birthday in October 2005. There was a lot to celebrate. In 1986, there were just 12 women in the House of Representatives with no female Senators or Governors. By 2006, the number of Democrat House members rose to 43, there were nine Senators and six Governors. The group which started in Malcolm's basement is now housed in headquarters with 70 full-time staff members. The group ended 2004 as the largest single source of donations to candidates in the country; through its members, the group directed nearly $11 million to pro-abortion rights female candidates.

EMILY’s List is now a major player in the US political scene. According to the Centre for Responsive Politics, a non-profit group in Washington that tracks money in congressional elections, EMILY’s List spent $24 million in the 2004-2006 election cycle, more than any other independent political action committee in the US. This figure does not include funds political action committees associated with national party committees have given out to congressional candidates. The List’s executive director Ellen Moran said her group's track record "speaks for itself”.

The situation improved again after the November 2006 midterm elections. With the Democrat taking control of the Senate for the first time in 12 years, Nancy Pelosi became the first female majority leader of the House. Pelosi credited EMILY’s List for her successful candidacy in California in 1987. Earlier this month, Ellen Moran, executive director announced EMILY's List will be helping Hillary Clinton campaign and raise funds for her presidential campaign.

Others are now trying to replicate this success internationally. In 1996, EMILY’s List was set up in Australia. It has provided financial, training and mentoring support to candidates in State and Federal election campaigns. It endorses candidates who support “principles of equity, diversity, pro-choice, and the provision of equal pay and childcare”. It claims the success of 101 new women MPs into Australian parliaments in the last ten years. Although not affiliated with the ALP, current party deputy-leader Julia Gillard played a role in the foundation of the Australian branch. Gillard remains a public advocate for the organisation.

Harriet Woods, who started the ball rolling, did eventually gain political office; serving as Missouri’s lieutenant governor before being elected president of the non-partisan National Women's Political Caucus. Woods eventually taught at various universities and published "Stepping Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women" in 2002. Her most famous saying was “You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims”.

Betty Friedan’s legacy

A few months ago Betty Friedan died on her 85th birthday, 4 February 2006. Friedan was one of the most important feminist activists and writers of the 20th century who changed the way the world looked at women with her most famous book “The Feminine Mystique” written in 1963. Mystique was a landmark work which stated that women were victims of an all-encompassing system of values that urged them to find their fulfilment and identity only through their husbands and children. The book debunked the myth that women were happy only in their family roles.

In 1921, the year after American women won the right to vote, Friedan was born as Bettye Naomi Goldstein in Peoria, Illinois. Friedan called her hometown “the middle of the middle of America”. Her father Harry was a jeweller. Young Bettye's family was comfortably middle-class and Jewish. Her mother Miriam worked for as a women’s pages editor for a local newspaper until her career was ended by married. Miriam suffered from various ailments unti she was forced to run the jewellery business when Harry Friedan became ill. As a result, her own health problems disappeared.

Young Bettye got involved in journalism at college. She went to Smith College, Massachusetts, the largest women’s college in the US. There she edited the college newspaper and she mixed with Marxist and Jewish radicals before graduating in 1942 with highest honours. Then she went to Berkeley for one year before leaving to work for leftist journals. She married Carl Friedan in 1947 and took on his name as well as dropping the second e from Bettye. They had three children and their marriage lasted 22 years until divorce in 1969.

While pregnant with her second son, she was sacked from her role as editor of UE News, the journal of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. When she attended a 15th year reunion of Smith college alumnae, she ran a survey of her classmates. Her article on the survey and how most of them never reached their college potential was rejected by every editor she submitted it to.

She decided to rewrite the article in the form of a book and The Feminine Mystique was born. It was published in 1963 and became an immediate bestseller. In 1966 Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), which was dedicated to achieving equality of opportunity for women. She led the 500,000-person Women's Strike for Equality in New York in 1970, on the 50th anniversary of women winning the right to vote. As a result, she helped found National Women's Political Caucus (1971) which campaigned for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. She wrote The Second Stage in 1981 which assessed the status of the women's movement. By the 1980s feminism had ceased being her primary focus, and she spent her last decades focused on issues of aging, families, work and public policy. The Fountain of Age (1993) covered the psychology of old age and countered the notion that aging means loss and depletion. She published her memoirs Life So Far in 2000.

Friedan was one of the first women to question Sigmund Freud’s theories in relation to femininity. In Chapter 5 of The Feminine Mystique she pointed out how hysteria was a problem of Freud’s time irrelevant to 1960s America. She dismissed ‘penis envy’ as an homme manqué theory based on Freud’s Victorian attitudes. Friedan argued that the feminine mystique itself was elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion which ultimately stifled women’s prospects for growth and independence.

She was controversially opposed to gay rights and disliked "equating feminism with lesbianism." In 1969 she coined the term Lavender Menace to describe the threat she believed they posed to the Women’s movement fearing stereotypical “man-hating" lesbians would give many the chance to dismiss the movement's relevance. By 1977 however, she no longer saw them as a threat and pledged her support for the lesbian rights motion at the Women's Conference held in Houston, Texas.

Friedan was known for her abrasive personality. Germaine Greer believed that Friedan had a very high opinion of herself and brooked few disagreements. Greer may be guilty of a snarling envy here but while acknowledging her breakthrough role in women’s liberation, Greer didn’t agree with her ethos: “What Betty saw as sexuality, I saw as the denial and repression of female sexuality.” Others too have taken a revisionist position on The Feminine Mystique. One anonymous thesis on the book gives it plaudits for its groundbreaking and pioneering positions before pointing out 79 statistical deficiencies around women’s status as wives and mothers in the book as well as their participation in higher education and the labour force.

Friedan’s leftwing past has also come in for some criticism. A Smith college professor Daniel Horowitz wrote a book entitled "Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique" in which he questioned her background as a typical suburban housewife. He states her descriptions of suburban life which she described as "a comfortable concentration camp" had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than with any of her actual experience as a housewife or mother.

The organization she founded, the National Organisation for Women, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Current NOW president Kim Gandy says, "She sparked a movement that is larger and stronger than ever — made up of women who expect equality and equal opportunity for ourselves and our daughters, and the men who stand with us."

In her Washington Post obituary, she was praised by Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation: “(Friedan) was a giant in the 20th century for women and most significantly was a catalyst for change in the American culture…She defined the problem, and then she had the courage to do something about it."