Alert observers of federal politics will have noticed that independent Kerryn Phelps, new MP for the seat of Wentworth, chose purple as her campaign colour. It is a colour of (among other things) women’s suffrage, and as historian Clare Wright points out, Phelps’ categorisation of her victory as “a return of decency, integrity and humanity to the Australian government” also harks back to the suffrage movement of the early 20th century.

But what would those women, who fought so long and hard for the right to vote, make of the role of women in our political parties today?

According to Wright, they would be rolling in their largely unmarked graves to know that women joining the ranks of parliamentarians barely changed their male colleagues’ outlook and demeanour at all. One of the suffragists’ arguments was that women were needed to “clean up” the muck of politics through their inherent female qualities of munificence, rectitude and sobriety — as well as maternal skills of negotiation, conciliation and care.

Perhaps women voters and MPs haven’t turned out to be the democratic disinfectant that had been hoped for, or perhaps the muck was just too entrenched. In any case, she says, working for political equality remains the most potent pathway to reform.

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