Feminism demands and enables a personal response to modern challenges

In the case of our first female prime minister, who seems no less jingoistic as male predecessors and shows no more compassion to asylum seekers or to people of the same sex wishing to marry, feminist historians might well conclude that her greatest contribution to changing attitudes lies in the fact that she openly and honestly brought a de facto relationship to the Lodge.

My researches into gender politics give some idea of how much remains to be done to advance feminism. While 'gender' and 'sex' are often confused, it is useful to define gender in terms of behaviour and sex as a characteristic of individuals. While the numerical presence of males and females in politics makes sex an interesting variable to investigate, it is behaviour that needs criticism in order to produce change.

Very often however, political practitioners and theorists alike have translated 'gender politics' as 'women in politics'. This misinterpretation has several implications. First, only women have gender. Men are then normal politicians and normal human beings. Secondly, only women use gender while men do not. Thirdly, women are the problem and it is they, not the system in need of change.

The backlash against feminism is remarkably similar to that against pacifism. Neither pacifism nor feminism has ever been allowed to have great influence and yet critics assure us that both ideologies have failed. States readily use the military as the first option in international disputes although the most predictable outcome is that the military will need to be deployed yet again before long. Feminism has had very limited impact on the masculinism of the military, which demonstrates continually that it operates on misogynist principles.

It is not only the militarists who resist change. Monarchs, mullahs and moguls cling to traditional sources of power. It was the British crown ultimately that dispossessed Aboriginal peoples and destroyed their cultures. The fundamentalist clerics of Islam and Christianity deny the equality of the sexes. Business corporations have been slow to admit women as CEOs and board directors.

A nascent men's movement has found it difficult to become established while the agents of backlash tell men that feminism and not masculinism, is the source of their problems. While many feminists might justifiably feel exhausted, there remains a great need for the critical insights provided by feminist thought.