Anna Funder keynote: International Women's Day 2024

A copy of Anna Funder's International Women's Day 2024 keynote at UTS. Published with permission. 

It is a great honour for me to be standing here today with my colleagues, friends, and all of you at this great university. I thank Vice-Chancellor Andrew Parfitt, Interim Pro Vice-Chancellor Amy Persson and her predecessor, Professor Verity Firth, for this opportunity, and I am very much looking forward to the discussion with Associate Professor Vijeyarasa and Professor Siminski. 

I am part of a generation before pointy, painted nails and false eyelashes were standard glamour. I have a wardrobe of fairly androgynous suits in different colours – blue, red, white, green – my husband says I dress like a Wiggle. But today, I stand before you in this extremely uncharacteristic bubblegum pink dress doing something I never imagined I’d do in my life: channelling Barbie. Less the doll, more the movie. Let me tell you how this happened. 

Buy a copy of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life by Anna Funder.

Last year, my UK tour for WIFEDOM started with a publishing team lunch. I was extremely jetlagged but had to stay awake for an evening event, I took myself off to see BARBIE. Afterwards, I walked straight out of the cinema and, in an act of mad, sleep-deprived solidarity, bought this shiny pink number. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to wear it ever since. Today’s the day.

Barbie is a work of genius. Part of its cleverness is that the movie posits two worlds. 

One, in which Barbies (women) can be anything they choose to be. They are supreme court judges and park rangers, doctors and barristers and presidents, dentists and pilots and plumbers. 

And another, the real world, represented by contemporary LA, where men are central and women are peripheral. In the real world men run the corporations and the country; they have most of the power and most of the money and most of the leisure time. When Ken, who comes to the real world with Barbie, quietly asks a businessman if patriarchy is still working as well as it did here before #MeToo, the man leans in and whispers, ‘We’re doing it well, just hiding it better.’ 

Men working on a building site feel entitled to humiliate Barbie as she passes by, just for fun and to make sure she knows her place in this world. This is the kind of frontline, basic abuse that is the most obvious way that patriarchy tells us, loud and clear, on the street or in the boardroom that men are central and powerful, and women are to be defined by them, in their interest. 

In our world, Barbie comes to feel ‘ill at ease, conscious … but it’s my self that I’m conscious of’, she says. She feels ‘a definite undertone of violence’ and ‘a sense of fear … though without any specific object’. A school mum explains this that this is the normal feeling of anxiety being a woman involves, as we are overloaded and responsible for so much, though relatively powerless in the wider world.

Ken says, ‘I feel amazing.’

One of the reasons I never had a Barbie doll was that my mother was a feminist. In our household, we thought that things were getting better for women and girls. Indeed, my mother’s work as a research psychologist contributed to changes in Australia’s taxation system so that divorced fathers would contribute to the financial support of their children. We assumed that the Barbie world, where women would be central to themselves and able to do anything, was coming, at least to our progressive, rich, post-Whitlam corner of the planet, pretty soon.

But it has not come. Yet.

People at this great university and many others, in think tanks and governments all around the world are occupied with this question. We know that the world needs the talents and time of women to be a just place, as well as to improve our nations’ economies, while looking after the planet. We see progress in women’s equality going forward by some measures, though stalling or going backward in others. 

When I was a little girl in the 1970s and a teen and then a student in the 1980s, it would never have occurred to me that the male idea of the world would express itself in tsunamis of anonymous, horrifying and pathetic misogyny online, expressing the terror that being male will cease to mean being superior to a woman.

Or that pornography would become about choking and doing other things to women that cannot be about pleasure or love, but plainly about pain and submission. 

Or that poverty, globally, would be predominantly female.

Or that Chanel Contos, who was not a gleam in her parents’ eye, would have her work cut out for her calling out a culture of sexual assault among the most privileged gilded youth of the nation. 

Or that there would be such a thing as a gender pay gap in the 2020s, let alone in many industries, one of nearly a quarter of pay difference, double if you include bonuses. 

Or that women would continue, by powerful, unspoken social expectation, backed by punitive tax measures and a privatised childcare system, to bear the burden of being both unsung CEO and labour force in the home: generally doing double the work of life and love and care that keeps families going. And all this, right here, in what is by many measures the richest but at the same time one of the fairest countries on the planet.  

As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me. But as a woman and a wife, her life terrifies me. I recognise in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining herself and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time, which are indispensable, are made invisible. 

In WIFEDOM, I also examined another world, the one of the marriage of Eileen O’Shaughnessy and George Orwell 80 years ago. It was fascinating to me how the work of a brilliant, highly educated woman could be, apparently, invisible to her husband at the same time as it was, intellectually and practically, indispensable. Eileen kept George going domestically, supported him financially, saved his life in the Spanish Civil War, had the idea for Animal Farm as a novel, which she worked on with him each day, making it, he thought, the best of his books. But he never felt the need to acknowledge her in any way, and nor, really, did his biographers after him.

As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me. But as a woman and a wife, her life terrifies me. I recognise in it a life-and-death struggle between maintaining herself and the self-sacrifice and self-effacement so lauded of women in patriarchy, which are among the base mechanisms by which our work and time, which are indispensable, are made invisible. 

Time is valuable, because it is finite. So, as with all other finite commodities, there is an economy of time. Time can be traded, bargained for, snuck and stolen. A weekend is finite – as any parent trying to juggle space and a portion of time within it with a spouse will tell you. A life is finite. Access to time, as to any other valuable good, is gendered. One person’s time to work is created by another person’s work in time: the more time he has to work, the more she is working to make it for him. To examine a marriage of eighty years ago involves the faux-comfort of distance (surely we are more evolved than that?) along with a frisson of horror: things have not changed nearly enough. 

Every society in the world is built on the unpaid or underpaid work of women. If it had to be paid for, it would cost, apparently, US$10.9 trillion. But to pay for it would be to redistribute wealth and power in a way that might defund and de-fang patriarchy. 

How is it that all this work, so indispensable, can be invisible? One reason is because patriarchy attaches the work of care to the definition of what it is to be female, and not to what it is to be male. An example: decency was a core value to Orwell. When we say a man is a ‘decent bloke’, ‘or a good bloke’ we mean that he is a man of his word, trustworthy, a good friend. When we say a woman, wife or mother is ‘decent’ or ‘good’ those things have other meanings, which are attached to the care, work and time she gives those around her. You can be a decent bloke without doing any domestic or care work. But you could never be a decent a woman, mother or wife without caring for others. This is the swift and dirty trick of patriarchy: to attach work done for others to the definition of what it is to be you. It’s not really ‘work’; it’s just you proving you’re a decent (female) person.

There are many individual exceptions to this situation. Single-parent households where one person (most often, a woman) does it all. Heterosexual and homosexual couples in which the work of love and life is shared more equally. And we live in an age in which the gender binary (along with what it is to be a ‘good’ woman, or a ‘real’ man) is being challenged. Maybe a more fluid understanding of gender will eventually also free us not only from the fictions of what it is to be female and what it is to be male but also from the assumptions about work and care that those definitions carry. 

Like lifting people out of poverty or into literacy, we need social measures – free childcare and reform of the tax system for a start, and measures to ensure the removal of the barriers to women claiming equal representation in every sphere, including, of course, the boardrooms and parliaments of the nation. 

I am married to a wonderful man who’s emotionally astute and deeply engaged with our children and our domestic life. Craig and I share the financial load; we share most things in our lives. For him, care is central. But our experience is that the patriarchy still allocates a lot more of the care work to me – either to do or to raise in a conversation and delegate.

I don’t think we can or should be tackling this issue of male entitlement to women’s domestic labour one marriage at a time. It is no longer a private matter. It is an epidemic of inequality, and it needs a society-wide response. In the same way that at the end of the 19th-century society decided that everyone should be literate – a huge social change – and instituted free public primary education and free lending libraries, we need to decide, collectively, that society should have the benefit of women’s work and time, and make it possible. 

Like lifting people out of poverty or into literacy, we need social measures – free childcare and reform of the tax system for a start, and measures to ensure the removal of the barriers to women claiming equal representation in every sphere, including, of course, the boardrooms and parliaments of the nation. 

I am not saying it will be easy. Power and privilege were never given up easily, only taken justly. 

Possibly the most fictitious element in BARBIE, is how easily Ken gives up power, after he took it illegitimately. 

He says he didn’t really like it. ‘At first,’ he tells Barbie, ‘I thought the real world was run by men. And then I thought it was horses, but then I realised that horses were just men extenders.’ 

Patriarchy is the man extender, the imaginary horse they ride about on. We – especially many of you in this room – know what to do to get them off their imaginary steeds and to invite them to share with us the work of life and love and our time together on this planet. 

Time, as I say, is valuable, because it is finite. It’s time this was over.

Thank you so much for your time today.

Watch the International Women's Day 2024 event recording

Copyright: Anna Funder.