This year we are taking Women’s Suffrage Day to the Twittersphere to hear what you think about how Kiwi women are faring 119 years after we won the right to vote.
I feel sure that Kate Sheppard, the woman who led the charge and graces our $10 note, would have some opinions to express if she were alive today.
But sadly, she’s not! So we want to hear from you, by posting your comments below or on Twitter from 8am tomorrow morning, 19 September 2012, using the hashtag #wwkst – What would Kate Sheppard think?
Kate Sheppard fought for New Zealand women’s political and economic independence and thanks to her more than five generations of women have now been able to influence decision-making through their vote.
There are things that we have achieved that I think would make her smile, like Marriage property laws, Equal Pay laws, the election of the first woman, Elizabeth McCoombs to Parliament and many more including Mabel Howard as the first female cabinet minister, and our female Prime Ministers Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark.
But there are some things that I think would make her frown. What would she think about female accountants being paid 30% less on average than their male counterparts in 2012? Or about the National Council of Women, which she founded, supporting the removal of working women’s rights in the first 90 days of employment? What would she think about the fact just 6% of private company boards having female directors; or that just 32.5% of our House of Representatives are female, when women make up 51% of the population?
I think she’d say there’s work to be done.
And there are some things she would be down-right angry about. Like our rates of domestic violence, or the fact that 270,000 Kiwi kids live in poverty, or that in 2011 voter turnout was the lowest since the 1880s at just 65%.
I think she would expect more from this government and more from its Minister of Women’s Affairs. What do you think?
Households where women don’t have the choice to work…
… instead, they are forced to work in minimum wage roles just to keep their families afloat.
I really wonder too..
Kate Sheppard would wonder why the women of 2012 are so diminished in their ability to band together for a common aim – as they did in her day. She was no lone pioneer, she was just the representative and spokeswoman for a very hard working group of women from all parts of society. A group of groups, from churchwomen to women wanting reform of the alcohol laws or the industrial working conditions, and all points in between.
What those women learned the hard way was that men are only too willing to ignore reason, or justice, when a cause is being pleaded for, but that the power of numbers will get through to them, eventually.
And it’s a lesson that women today need to learn, if they want to turn some of those ugly statistics around. No one’s going to hand them power or justice voluntarily. It’s not going to arrive by courier or email. They have to push as a group to change laws and change attitudes. A joint effort is what it will take.
Go for it, ladies. Band together, and do it now. Our brothers need help to run the country and its businesses properly. That’s what we needed in the 1890s and that’s what we need now.
That’s what Kate Sheppard would be thinking.
Good on Labour for capturing Kate Sheppard as our own! Since we don’t have much living political leadership I think we should capture a few more dead cultural icons. How about Ed Hillary and Ernest Rutherford?
I think it’s time Labour stood up for the rights of women. How about a woman leader? I reckon you’d be much better than the all of the davids combined, Sue!
My friend Kate will be appalled at the fact that the female Minister of Social Development, Pauly Benefit is breaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:
‘Everyone is born free and equal in dignity and rights.’
Why does Pauly pick on those people whose dignity is being compromised as they do not have equal access to jobs, and the right of a suitable job with a living wage as jobs have been and are being destroyed?
When we finally got universal suffrage we would never have believed that an apparently educated woman would be foisting such draconian punitive measures on fellow New Zealanders, in what was to be the most progressive egalitarian society on earth.
If I were Kate Sheppard I think I’d be annoyed that Curren can’t spell my name correctly after all these years
Kate Sheppard may be wondering how easily todays women have bought into the same “capitalist” paradigm that has “look out for number one” as a basic tenet of fife nowadays….
She may well point out that the one major difference between now, and then, is that women today have the choice as to how they make their way(in new zealand at least)…. bad choices are not forced on them like previously… disguised as traditional social mores…..
Is the plight of women today any less insecure than men? In this country, I suspect the downward spiral into the hand to mouth existence the ruling classes would be “relaxed” about overseeing on behalf of it’s peasantry is having a suppressing effect on all sectors of “average” society.
Regardless of whether we are witnessing the (hopefully)last, great, destructive convulsion of the old order as it finally gives up any claim to legitimacy……Women, indeed all of us need to look to each other to see the people, rather than competitors, and start reclaiming our communities back, so we can get on with what we started in the thirties…..
@innie… why bother with that stuff? say something real for once…
For a person born in the first half of the 19th century when she thinks about poverty in the 21st century it might not be anger that is elicited, but marvel. She may marvel that the impoverished today have electric lights, refrigerators, indoor plumbing, and indoor toilets. The concept of poverty that she would have been familiar with, actual material privation, is not what is referenced today. Instead relative measures of income are. As in a recent report on childhood poverty which despite defining poverty with reference to material deprivation does not actually include any child-specific measure of material deprivation. I’m glad to see they are actually working on such a measure though.
As to the low voter turnout; I’m sure Kate Sheppard would think differently to me, but I for one am glad that fewer New Zealanders decided to vote for power-hungry politicians of any political stripe, whose aim is to exercise power over the lives of others, and that fewer New Zealander’s acutally care about the sordid world of politics to engage in a process in which they have such an infinitesimally small chance of influencing the outcome.
There was a photo of Kate Sheppard’s house in the Press the other day. From the look of it, I don’t think she’d be a Labour voter…….
She would be infuriated to find that Pay Equity has not happened, and that women are not on Boards in any numbers; and she would be angry at the levels of poverty that impacts so severely on the lives of women and children. She would be angry at benefit Cuts and unfair employment practices. The level of domestic violence would appal her.
Shew would be angry at women who do not support other women, and who in fact cut out the possibilities they themselves benefitted from (that means you, Paula Bennett).
She would say there was still a very long way to go.