A fighting spirit
“I had to apply myself to this. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself or have them say women are not up to it.”
She was known to many as the “slip of a girl” who went on to trigger the downfall of the Muldoon government. Marilyn Waring had entered parliament at just
23. Not so extraordinary, perhaps, in these more enlightened times, but back in 1975 she was a rare case indeed. In a photo on the cover of her latest book, Marilyn Waring: The Political Years, she looks boldly out at the camera, the sole woman amid a sea of grey-suited men, most of them more than twice her age.
The Political Years is a must-read for those who want to understand the workings of parliament. An account of her nine years in government, it is gritty, honest, raw and uncompromising, much like its writer.
These days Marilyn Waring is internationally respected for her ground-breaking work on defining how the success of economies across the world rests on the unpaid work of, largely, women. She is described as one of the world’s leading feminist scholars (a title she dismisses as sexist; “I’m an economist,” she insists) and is currently
