By Rosemary McLeod

Feminists are out in force this weekend in Wellington, and they’ll be crowing. The Janus Women’s Convention celebrates 30 years since the United Women’s Convention in the capital in 1975, a Great Leap Forward into success.
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I don’t blame them if they’ve come to gloat. There’ve been victories un-dreamed-of 30 years ago that warrant war dances of victory.

The ’70s feminists gathering in Wellington have achieved more than they ever dreamed of, all in the time it took to abandon crimplene flares and take to designer black. To be a woman has become an advantage anywhere near policymaking and power; to be a politicised lesbian a passport to success. The suffragettes of the 19th century wanted only votes, but women who attended the 1975 conference wanted nothing less than social revolution. And amazingly, they got it. For some.
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“They don’t have families. They’ve got nothing but the ability to plot. I’ve gotta take my kid to soccer on Saturday, they don’t. So they just go and have a parlez-vous francais somewhere and a latte, whereas we don’t get to plot, we’re just trying to get our kids to synchronise their left and right feet,” Tamihere complained of today’s clubby female power elite in an interview with Ian Wishart of Investigate magazine.

Many women, sidelined by demands of home and family still, would agree. They may look up to the four aces of power as they’d look at Martians: three of them are childless, and the fourth is independently wealthy. Feminists may run the country, but childcare is not tax deductible. There are creches at Treasury, parliament and universities for elite workers – but not for female cleaners and factory workers. How come?
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Parenting can now write fathers out of the script, and not just through the domestic purposes benefit. Future generations will rejoice at being the turkey baster products of gay men and women who never had emotional ties. I know women, fanatical about animal rights and genetic engineering, who’ve dashed with warm sperm in teaspoons – or turkey basters – to their waiting girlfriends. They say teaspoon conception is spiritual and romantic, when done with incense and candlelight, but I’ve noticed that all-female “parents” separate as often as anyone else, and someone’s still left holding the baby. The middle class women who dominated feminism in the ’70s have done very nicely, it’s true, and experiments such as the teaspoon one have been fun. But what of less advantaged women from the wrong side of the tracks, less interesting heterosexuals? What of women who were too busy pushing carrot puree into babies’ faces in 1975 to sing along with Helen Reddy?
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Feminists choose strange poster girls. I still don’t understand how killers Gay Oakes, who poisoned her partner, then buried him in her garden, and Tania Witika, who stood by while her two-year-old daughter was tormented to death by her de facto husband, became heroic figures to the sisterhood. Yet saintly figures they were for the defence of battered woman’s syndrome in the ’90s: Witika left prison in a limousine. I saw their stories as a sign of how feminists often want it both ways: power without responsibility. Just blame men. Even if you killed them, it’s their fault.