Celebrating the way paved by women

It’s been 125 years since women won the right to vote in New Zealand. It’s a fantastic achievement, demonstrating our small but mighty nation’s ability to be world-leading in many ways.

It always makes me feel a bit warm and fuzzy on the inside knowing the place in which I come from was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote.

But not because women were given that right, but because there were women, 24,000 of them in fact, willing to put pen to paper and take the first steps towards gender equality in New Zealand.

While I’m humbled and grateful to see the strides women have made in the past 125 years, I also find myself sometimes exasperated that we’re even still having the conversation about gender equality.

There are still too many places in the world where being born a woman, a situation that no-one has control over, puts that person at a disadvantage from birth.

Look at Saudi Arabia, where just this year women have been afforded the right to drive. This year. 2018. In 1893 we gave women the right to vote but in 2018 one nation agreed to let women drive cars.

I’ve heard some naysayers say that it’s cultural tradition, that things are done differently in other parts of the world. Yes, that’s absolutely true to an extent, but let me be clear: cultural practices and gender oppression are not the same thing.

It comes down to choice. There’s nothing wrong with not driving, with having children and taking time off work, or doing the household chores as a woman. The point is those things have to be your decisions, and not an expectation because of the gender you were born with. Equally, all of these decisions are perfectly acceptable to make if you’re a man. It’s only been in the past couple of years that I’ve realised I’m a feminist, and I probably always have been.

I remember about four years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I was a feminist. I vehemently denied that I was because, saying that I couldn’t be one because I didn’t have an issue with gender roles, to a certain extent.

My friend asked me if I thought men and women should be treated equally, to which I said yes, and if I was okay with women being expected to do certain things in life because of their gender, to which I said no.

‘‘So you’re a feminist, then?’’ she said. It took me a while to realise she was right; I’d simply been poisoned by the misrepresentation that meant being a feminist must also mean you’re septic about men. It doesn’t. Being a feminist does not mean you’re a man hater.

For me, being a feminist means men and women are on the same playing field. When it comes to decisions being made around them, gender is never part of the conversation. After all, we’re all just people, aren’t we?

As we celebrate Suffrage 125, I think it’s important to thank those who have paved the way, even the seemingly insignificant things, because it’s all leading toward the common goal of gender equality.

Thank you to Kate Sheppard for leading the women’s Suffrage movement.

Thank you to all those women who signed the Suffrage petition submitted to Parliament in 1893.

Thank you to our three female Prime Ministers, all of which have been in office during my lifetime, who have showed everyone that a woman is more than capable of leading a country and showed me as a little girl that a woman in the top job was perfectly normal.

Thank you to my mother who demonstrated to me at a young age that having children didn’t mean you gave up career aspirations, when she went back to retrain as a nurse when my sister and I were at school.

There’s a ways to go before we reach gender equality, but for today, let’s celebrate women and toast to our past achievements and the milestones yet to come.