Blaming misogyny for women leaving politics is misguided and patronising

The recent elections in Finland were notable for that rare thing: not one but two levels of misinterpretation. The first was that the loss by the ruling Social Democrats represented some form of epochal repudiation of progressivism — however, the country has multi-member electorates and eight parties with significant numbers of seats. The Social Democrats actually had a 2.2% swing to them, but the victorious National Coalition took a 3.8% swing and edged them out in seat numbers. There were swings within the left and right.

The second misinterpretation was that prime minister Sanna Marin had been punished at the ballot box for being a young woman. Marin, aged 34 when she took office in 2019 and generally well-regarded, had caught some flak for being videoed doing some particularly naff voguing on a night out. Zoe Williams of The Guardian leapt on the result to suggest that misogyny was wot done it — even though there was a swing to Marin.

Weeks earlier, Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, had suddenly resigned after 10 years in the job — and with the possibility of a new independence referendum in the offing. Misogyny was the cry; the trolls and online abusers had got another one. And the first and greatest expression of this was when former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern resigned in February after five years in office. Ardern, having governed through COVID and imposed strict lockdowns, had been subject to a true tsunami of abuse that would have flattened anyone.

The trouble with these explanations is that all three of these women are professional politicians and political lifers in tough, professional, factionalised parties. They’ve risen to the top in a context where you’ve got to be not so much thick-skinned as scar-tissued (Gough Whitlam’s description) to even have a chance at such. And in the latter two cases, there were very good reasons why they quit, and these had nothing to do with online abuse or wider misogyny. 

Sturgeon quit, saying she had given her all, nothing left, etc, even though she had been flying and forceful months earlier. What had got her was an encroaching scandal around Scottish National Party (SNP) fundraising (her husband, an SNP heavy, was arrested on charges last week), which followed on from a messy stuff-up. Sturgeon had passionately championed a pro-gender-self-definition bill, which passed in the assembly but had divided the SNP and Scotland.

But then the Sturgeon government was confronted with the Isla Bryson case. Bryson had been charged with raping two women — one in 2016 and one in 2019 — when known as Adam Graham prior to her transition to being a transgender woman, which she identified as by the time of conviction in 2023. Bryson had been on remand in a women’s prison, but was moved pretty quickly to a male prison after conviction. The rapid action left Sturgeon looking foolish and hypocritical and weakened her defence against the corruption scandal. Her support within the party disappeared, and she was gone.

Something similar happened to Ardern. In late 2022, she was saying she wasn’t going anywhere. In 2023, she was gone. What had happened in the interim? Christmas had happened, and the inner party had time to look at the numbers — which were not great for Labour, even worse for its leftish program, and terrible for Ardern. The likely explanation is that her faction decided she had to go, and, a good team player — and a possible repeat future prime minister — she went. Her deputy, a factional ally, replaced her, the leftish program was largely dumped when she was, and Labour is now back in the game in NZ. 

So the chorus of claims that misogyny had destroyed these women didn’t ring true. There seemed to be a disjuncture between the way in which many women commentators viewed the matter and the political frameworks in which people like Marin, Sturgeon and Ardern had made their lives, and the personal qualities used within it. Both Ardern and Sturgeon used the misogyny charges to drop a bucket on the right, which seemed the act of political stalwarts using anything at hand to gain a point. Sturgeon had been a major player in the political destruction of Alex Salmond, the man most responsible for the SNP’s revival from fringe to mainstream. Ardern had worked in Tony Blair’s cabinet office when he was preparing the Iraq war based on obvious lies and implicit racism about non-white deaths. 

It seems reasonable to argue that between these women and their supporters is a wider gap of viewpoint and basic comportment to the world than there is between powerful men and male observers. Many, many men want power, few get it, and most imagine you’d hold on to it by all means. The women who want power in the same way are, one suspects, a smaller group, and those who aren’t in it have relatively less identification with those who are. 

The upshot is that decades after the emergence of second-wave feminism, there is now a sufficiently large pool of women who want power, seek it out, do what needs to be done to keep it, and who don’t need any excuses or special pleadings made for them. Yet in the current framework, they are being assessed by the logic that prevailed before second-wave feminism: that women are too sensitive to be in positions of power. Notwithstanding the extra blast of misogyny they do get — which they can avoid far more easily than most; it is not as if prime ministers do not have people to screen social media if they want to — the attempt to conscript strong leaders into a world-attitude they do not share surely creates a circle of vulnerability and victimhood that projects outwards. 

We may well say that women and men overall have different settings with regard to public life. But that does not seem to require a re-Victorianisation of attitudes that not only tears strong women down in the service of a culture of complaint, but contributes to the undermining of robustness as a cultural value overall. No one gets to run a Labour or Nationalist party in government without being tough as all get out. It’s just faintly possible that when you rush to swathe these women in fragility, behind the screens of power you may find they’re having a bit of a laugh at it all. 

What pressures do you think women in politics face? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.