Activism, Feminism, Politics and Parliament by Margaret Wilson (review)

MARGARET WILSON’S memoir is an immensely valuable and insightful read about parliamentary politics. With a judicious tone, Wilson documents her feminist political life, particularly her efforts to achieve equality for women during her nine years as a member of Parliament in the Fifth Labour Government.

In the opening chapters, Wilson describes the Catholic, lower-middle-class, small-town family values that shaped her childhood and the event in 1965 that radically changed her life. To survive bone cancer, Wilson had her leg amputated above the knee in her final year of high school. She reveals: ‘I learnt to walk … and began a lifelong struggle with phantom pain – a misnamed form of pain that is very real’ (p.22). Despite the constant strategizing required to participate in systems that exclude disabled people, Wilson decided being disabled would not define her public life. This decision was likely reinforced by disbelief in the reality of her pain. The challenges for a woman studying and teaching the law, and then entering parliamentary politics, ‘was a big enough disability’, she states, ‘it seemed unproductive to focus also on the politics of disability’ (p.25).

Wilson was one of only seven women in an Auckland University law class of 200, graduating in 1970. With reference to the texts that inspired her, Wilson explains how her feminist principles were forged during her study, research and teaching of the law, and her involvement in trade union and women’s movements. Wilson was active in the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women, the Select Committee on Women’s Rights and the Working Women’s Charter, but by the late 1970s committed herself to pursuing an equality agenda for women through the Labour Party.

As Wilson climbs the Labour Party hierarchy, elected Party President in 1984, the book’s narrative moves away from grassroots movements to the parliamentary space, and stays there for the remainder. At the heart of this narrative is the terrible irony that as Labour Party women put women’s equality firmly on the agenda, another Labour Party faction, led by Roger Douglas, gained support for neoliberal policies to solve ‘New Zealand’s economic woes’ (p.63). In defensive terms, Wilson describes the difficulties of keeping lines of communication open between the government, caucus and party as divisions deepened, and as the government excluded the party from any role in economic policy setting. Jim Knox is represented in unflattering terms, without explanation of the issues confronting working-class trade union members or acknowledgement of the Federation of Labour’s Alternative Economic Strategy.

Wilson stepped down as Party President in 1987 and devoted her energies to making women’s policy a reality in the Employment Equity Bill, enacted in 1990. This victory proved short-lived, as the incoming National government sped up neoliberal reform, repealing the Equity Act first. As Wilson laments, ‘neoliberalism provided a policy context for the reinforcement’ of already entrenched ‘patriarchal attitudes’ (p.3).

Wilson spent most of the 1990s in academia, as dean of the new Waikato Faculty of Law, Te Piringa. At Helen Clark’s request, she agreed to stand as a Labour Party List MP in Tauranga at the 1999 election. The strength of Wilson’s work lies in the detailed account she gives of what life is like as a member of Parliament. She unpacks the sexist and ableist process of constructing a political image: as phantom pain ‘dogged my every waking moment, I was told repeatedly I did not smile enough’ (p.120).

Wilson devotes four chapters to her roles in Parliament: Minister of Labour, Associate Minister of Justice and State Services, Minister in Charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations and Attorney-General. She details the difficulties of advancing policies to legislation in a neoliberal environment where senior officials, business, the media and the politics of perception were deeply obstructive. Quietly proud of her achievements – ‘reform of the employment relations framework; the human rights regulatory framework; the legal rights of same...