our laughter has been honed 'til it gleams like an axe

The apparently endless fight for fair pay and pay equity and musings on 70s activism

The title is a front page headline from a Canadian anarchist feminist newspaper of the 70s. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the title of the publication to credit it or the author of the relevant piece. That was when I was, or could have been a character in Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, along with my friends. It was like reading our own story. The counterparts to the characters in north America existed in real life in real New Zealand. As recognisable as their fight for survival, their several times a week meetings together to tether their lives to something solid, something that had eyes to see them, ears to hear them, shoulders to lean on, shoulders to cry on. And during the cavalier suburban days, while men worked in paying jobs, we provided other arms to hold each others children for an hour or three, or very rarely overnight, while someone kept a medical appointment or attended a job interview or class, or sat an exam, or tried to get a bank account in her own name, or visited a loved one in hospital, or met a lover.

We raised consciousness, held meetings about childcare services, abortion, sexual freedom, women’s health care, education, and equal pay for equal work. We donated money to SOS, Save Our Sisters, the organisation that enabled women to fly to Australia for an abortion, unattainable in New Zealand. We organised dinner parties, where the men came along as plus ones for the women in a welcome change to the male work colleagues and their wives routine of middle class life.

We cried when Joan, died of breast cancer in her early thirties. She had put off treatment to finish her university course. We cried when, each time, yet another woman, somewhere, was murdered by her partner. Don’t you love her madly when she’s walking out the door. We collected furniture and baby gear for single mothers. We babysat their children. We belonged to trade unions when we had small jobs. We attended political meetings to ask questions about feminist issues. We sat for hours talking in our cars after we had stopped to drop off another woman at her home, eventually turning the engine to idle to get the heater going, as the coldness of mid night bit.

We didn’t hold cake stalls. We didn’t apologise for our views or our voices. We didn’t hold our breath, either. We didn’t give in to pressure to be smaller, quieter, less demanding, more compliant to the norm, whatever that was imagined to be. We performed street theatre with joyful rage.

We went out to talk to Lions and Rotarians about women’s liberation. That involved tolerating a hell of a lot of clattery locker room brashness delivered by grown men behaving like fourteen year olds on a windy day. Veiled threats. Thinly disguised sexual passes. Ridicule. I see now that these men felt so bad for not understanding the issues. So they turned it on us. Andrew Tate Super Lite.

‘The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what’s really going on here: control. The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power.’ Alok Vaid-Menon

Alok is talking about trans and non-binary gendered people, but his view and philosophy applies to (cis) women, and always has. The way we are supposed to look has always been used when our detractors can find no other weapon, or have exhausted the list of things that are wrong with women who want to live full lives, with full human rights.

It still goes on. We see it in the denigration of women in public life, the take down of Jacinda Ardern, Julia Gillard, Sanna Marin, for example, for whom public service as Prime Ministers of New Zealand, Australia and Finland respectively, meant continual vitriolic gender based abuse aka misogyny. Gillard’s own Party joined the clamour for her removal. Marin had the audacity to party. Ardern embodied kindness, in her seamless life between private relationships, motherhood and political leadership. How dare she?

Meaningful work for women at all levels, in all spheres is accompanied by abuse, usually lower pay than male counterparts, or low pay because more or less everyone in the industry is female. Atttempts by women to redress that imbalance and violation always brings personal attacks, always includes critique of her shape, form, expression through her clothes and hair style, even, in Jacinda Ardern’s case, aspects of her facial structure. These are ways to try to force women, all of us, to modify ourselves to suit a monolithic narrative of acceptable womanhood, that in its various cruel expressions, stretches around the world schlooping up women into clothing police vans, providing excuses for defence lawyers in rape cases, enforcing hem length in high schools, demanding pink and blue for babies - assuming a binary that is only mythical - trying to enrol older women in dowdiness, insisting on sexualised clothing for young women, or on the other hand accusing them of intention to do harm or invite harm with it. This is all about control and power. It necessarily affects us where ever we are. We’re identifiable, targetable, and easy to take from.

We marched for affordable childcare.

We marched for legal abortion to end the coat hanger botch up versions.

We marched to reclaim the night from rapists.

We marched for equal pay for equal work. We spent hours doing the maths, being fair, recognising female dominated industry, noticing that even there, men were in the top roles often enough; so much equivalence and recognition and back bending, and what about the economic worth of bearing and raising children and actually putting edible food on the table, and cleaning the house? Never taking for granted that women’s work wherever it is done has value, because power does not acknowledge that fact. The size of the conditioning. The enormity of the conditioning.

These things matter here and now, because this year, in a bilious reflection of what is happening in other parts of the world, New Zealand’s Right wing government coalition-of-the-hateful, aka National, ACT and New Zealand First Parties, has just put its big fists in the coffers to scoop out an eye-watering multi billion dollop of money that should be contributing to and supporting further pay equity deals for women. The billions of dollars thus stolen, is ostensibly to pay for Defence Department helicopters. Or something. Does it matter what? Funding intended to contribute to fairer wages for women is treated as an open available fund to plunder. Backed, of course, by urgent legislation to gut that which supports pay equity in the relevant employment areas affecting teachers, nurses, midwives, care workers. So, the entire lobby for pay equity in Aotearoa-New Zealand just got kicked in the teeth. That metaphor is not too violent or exaggerated. Kicked in the teeth while enablers quickly pulled the rug out from under.

We know very well, and it is well researched, documented and pretty much uncontested that the economic disadvantages women live with seed and feed the trauma of current and future generations. Poor pay and conditions contribute so much to women’s stress and consequent poor physical, emotional, and mental health outcomes. Eighty percent of auto immune disease is in women. Factor in intersectionality and we see in NZ that Maori and Pacific women fare measurably worst among women here in all spheres of life. Not paying women adequately for their work exacerbates all the structural problems. The rhetoric of Right wing governments attributes poor outcomes as individual failing, as lassitude, as lack of character and asserts that all of the social determinants cascading from inadequate wages and the high cost of living can be ameliorated by determination and hard work. This is the central lie put about by the wealthy and powerful to push blame for their own disadvantage onto vulnerable people in a system which deliberately manufactures disadvantage.

Women’s work matters to everyone. Fair pay and pay equity matters to everyone. That this is still a central issue in Aotearoa-New Zealand in the way it is today is a tragedy and a crime committed by the current government. I think things are about to get noisy.

if you have never stood with the oppressed there is still time - lift them

Copyright 2017 by Rupi Kaur, the sun and her flowers, Simon and Schuster UK

Except Rupi Kaur’s poem, above, copyright Karen Sole

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Karen Sole is a member of the International Institute for Complementary Therapists, and of the International Systemic Constellations Association (isca-network.org), and a member of ANZCI, the Aotearoa New Zealand Constellation Incorporated. She took her first training from Yildiz Sethi yildizsethi.com of familyconstellations.com.au. Karen's profile can be found on the above organisational sites. She participates in monthly professional supervision, facilitator member constellations of ANZCI, ISCA, and informal international groups of experienced credentialed facilitators.