Parenting the Nation: Prime Ministers Dual Roles As Parents and Leaders and the Changing

Parenting the Nation

Prime Ministers’ dual roles as parents and leaders and the changing understandings of power, family and gender in Australian society.

Bethany Phillips-Peddlesden
July 2012

Project aims

The research I conducted during the Australian Prime Ministers Centre Summer Scholarship contributedtowards my History Honours thesis. I was interested in examining the tensions in Australian society between family, gender and power through an analysis of the negotiation of the public/private divide and family as both a personal relationship and public institution. I did this by focussing on three influential individuals in Australian society, Prime Ministers Robert Menzies, Bob Hawke and Julia Gillard. This examination of the ways private and public understandings of gender influencehow politicians are understood is of particular interest in the current political climate, with the recent election of Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

My thesis was divided into three chapters exploring the relationship Menzies, Hawke and Gillard had with parenthood; their understanding of the role of family both as a private relationship and as it relates to their politics; the use of family within their political ideology and campaigns; and the effects their presentation of masculinity or femininity had on public perceptions of their leadership.This study was intended to fill a gap in the ways in which politicians, their gender, values, families and political strategies have been understood and changed over time in Australian society.

Research Findings

Menziestenure as Prime Minster was shaped by discourses that privileged authoritative, paternal masculinity as the natural manifestation of public power within Australian society. His political rhetoric framed family as the central tenant of Australian political and personal values, locating women as citizens within the home while reinforcing the public domain as the province of men.By linking masculine roles with public success in order to fulfil private responsibilities, Menzies was able to appeal to the private man and woman as the basis for their public engagement with the political sphere. In encouraging citizens to conceive of themselves primarily as mothers or fathers instead of as workers, Menzies was able to undermine the Labor vote by denying class as a category in Australian society whilst simultaneously appealing to a middle-class ethos in order to create a political base for non-Labor.

Menzies was found to have a close relationship with his family, in particular his wife and daughter, and to place much value on the (gendered) separation of the public and private spheres in his own life. At the same time, it is clear that the contradictions inherent in such a public/private divide were exploited during this era in order to obscure the political use of family labour(both within the home and in public work) and to provide a ‘humanising’ view of politicians as ordinary family men. As such, the concept of the traditional family, with distinct spheres of work and domesticity presided over by a male breadwinner, framed Menzies’ family interactions, performance(s) of masculinity and Liberal Party rhetoric and allowed him to exploit the tensions within the public/private discourse to his own political advantage.

During Hawke’s tenure as Prime Minister, his otherwise hyper-masculine public persona allowed some display of ‘feminine’ emotional traits without it being overly politically damaging. His aggressive masculinity, leadership position and womanizing contrasted with his frequent tears and confessions of familial shortcomings and reflected wider contestations of public/private gender norms.

An examination of Hawke’s relation to his own family reveals that while commitment to equality was being championed by many during the 1980s, real change at the level of the individual, family roles and the actual implementation of equal opportunity policy was much more fragmentary and contested.

While interest in politicians’ private lives and family relations increased during the 1980s, private behaviour and public leadership ability were still considered separable for male politicians like Hawke. While feminist critiques of the division of power within the family and wider society saw women increasingly involved in the public sphere during this time, masculinity continued to be assessed by the fulfillment of public responsibilities and maintained a primary connection between women, the private sphere and family roles.

An examination of the media treatment of Julia Gillard as the first female Prime Minister reveals continuing contestation of the legitimacy of female power within 21st century Australian society and the appropriate gendered attributes for politicians.The changing understanding of the relationship between private and public allowed male politicians to more easily exploit their traditional link to the public sphere and their family relationships, while women continued to be disadvantaged in the public sphere by the understanding of their ‘natural’ role within the heterosexual family in the private sphere.

As such, while Gillard attempted to highlight her family relationships and ‘normal’ heterosexual partnership to counter criticism of her non-normative status as an unmarried, female Prime Minister, her emphasis on her strength and political abilitywas ofteninterpreted negatively in light of her gender.While the numbers of female politicians has increased in Australia, norms of leadership are still largely predicated on masculine behaviours and women face a balancing act between displaying leadership qualities and remaining acceptably feminine.

Sources

The APMC library provided a convenientconcentration of background material, such as biographies, and along with the advice provided by APMC staff was a very good starting point for my research. I found the National Library to be the most useful collection, in particular the Manuscript and Ephemera sections and the material available on Menzies. The opportunity to discuss relevant collections with the National Library staff, as well as the facilitation of visits to the Parliamentary library’s collationsof media sourceswas also very helpful.

The support from APMC staff and other scholars was very important in facilitating my research and feeling part of an important intellectual endeavour. The opportunity for research afforded by the APMC Summer Scholarship was invaluable in the completion of my thesis and I greatly appreciated the opportunity it provided.

Biography

After completing a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in History and Literature at the University of Melbourne (with concurrent Diploma of Modern Languages) in 2008, I returned mid-2011 to undertake an Honours degree in History. After completing this, I intend to begin a PhD in the area of Australian history. I have a particular interest in women and gender in Australian history, which focused the topic of my thesis and research at the APMC.

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