Hansard

I commend Joan McAlpine’s speech, from among many powerful speeches. I know what courage it took to say what she said, and many women will be proud of her.

As ever, I am proud to take part in the debate to mark international women’s day.

I look back on my young days, when I had begun to realise what inequality for women meant. I reflect on that time and remember it as a time of tough challenges. I remember, too, the optimism and exuberance—the excitement of the possible. I yearn for such optimism now, in a world in which some of the debate around women’s rights is so difficult, and where labelling women and impugning women’s motives has become an unpleasant and corrosive habit among those who ought to know better.

International women’s day should be an occasion on which to remember the battles that women fought for equality, on which to reflect on where we are on women’s ability to achieve their potential, and on which to reaffirm our determination to speak up and speak out for women’s rights, so that our sons and daughters might live their lives as they choose, rather than their lives being determined by stereotype and expectation.

International women’s day is an opportunity to celebrate the past and the women through the generations who were not just pioneers, but who made change possible—who showed that women could be lawyers, doctors, engineers, adventurers and inventors and not just wives and mothers, and that they could wear whatever they liked. They include women who fought for equal pay, maternity rights and the right to work.

Those women include, in my generation, women who exposed the living reality of women, whose life chances were entirely shaped by the violence of the men in their lives—survivors who exposed the reality of domestic abuse, violence against women, sexual abuse and rape. We have seen the shocking truth of women being made refugees in their own communities, women fleeing violence, and women staying and living with it because it was “a domestic”. All too often, women were seen as the authors of their own destiny, and rape in marriage was not even a thing.

We celebrate the women who campaigned against male violence and the women who created the refuges in their own time and with their own resources, and who supported survivors of male violence. They did that without the agreement or sanction of Government or the state. Where they led, society, and we, now follow, by legislating for and resourcing women’s services that are rooted in that understanding.

The importance of that legacy cannot be overstated and must be protected in all that we do here. We celebrate the women who took the battle into the political domain to tell their brothers that women’s rights are fundamental to an equal society, rather than something to address once that equal society has arrived, and that women’s rights are not a bonus. They did so to change the laws on employment, inheritance and discrimination and to win the argument that male violence against women is not just personal but is the very stuff and purpose of politics.

We celebrate the women who won the argument for positive action for women’s representation in order to ensure that equality and women’s rights are woven into the fabric of political action, and that women are in the room when decisions are made.

Make no mistake—those conversations, debates and arguments were never easy, but women did not flinch from them—and we should not flinch now. No step on the road to equality is ever easy; no power has ever been ceded without resistance. That is as true now as it ever was, but energy and passion made change happen, so we need such energy and passion now.

In reaffirming our commitment to women’s equality, we acknowledge how much further we have to go. Women remain disproportionately carers and low paid. Our girls outperform boys in education, but they do not run the world. Women still face violence and abuse and are still coerced, abused, humiliated and killed in their own homes. Just read the newspapers: across the world, women face female genital mutilation, trafficking, being forced into prostitution, being denied access to education and are even blamed for their own murders. Routinely, rape of women remains a weapon of choice in war.

In reaffirming our resolution to achieve women’s equality on international women’s day, I will draw a lesson from my lifetime: that is, the clear need for women to organise in defence of our own rights and the importance of women-only spaces for providing safety and places to plan. The right to women’s spaces comes directly from an understanding of need and from experience, and must be protected. Our history tells us that when women speak up, speak out and organise, they change the world for the better for all.

Let us celebrate women’s day by celebrating all the women who have had the courage to change the world. There is much left to do.