Ms Represented marks the centenary of this milestone in Australian political history. The four-part series explores a century of women’s struggles and successes in the masculine world of politics. It centres on interviews with federal politicians past and present from across the political spectrum. Sarah Hanson-Young speaks openly about the slut-shaming and harassment she has faced throughout her career. Kate Sullivan tells us about the feminine image her colleagues required her to project: she had to become the long-haired, more demure and approachable ‘Kathy’. In a powerful and confronting moment, Linda Burney reads an excerpt from Hansard that drives home the racism and exclusion of Indigenous peoples on which the Australian nation is based. These interviews are interspersed with rich archival footage that reminds us of the importance of preserving Australian women’s histories.

Ms Represented is at its best when it brings together shared experiences and challenges where gender is a stake. A striking moment comes in the second episode, ‘Being There’. Historic interview footage shows South Australian Nancy Buttfield describing what it was like to be the only woman in federal parliament in the mid-1950s. She tells an all-too-familiar story. ‘I’d make a suggestion of something. It just wouldn’t hit the deck,’ she tells the interviewer, but ‘two or three weeks later one of the men would make the same suggestion and away it would go’. Host Annabel Crabb notes that this sounds ‘quaintly old-fashioned’ – but not as much has changed as we might like. In a seamless montage, several of the interviewees explain this idea of ‘gender deafness’, sharing remarkably similar stories. Winning a seat at the table doesn’t necessarily mean being heard at that table.

This is a constant theme: women being silenced yet striving to find their voices and change the status quo. The series does an excellent job of revealing what it is like to be a woman inside Parliament House, including the highs and the lows. Yet, its title notwithstanding, the series focuses on the representatives rather than the represented. The story we get is one in which those who are elected to parliament are the main movers and shakers, the real agents of change. But fully understanding the gendered history of politics means looking beyond Capital Hill, too.

We know that these women’s electoral successes were embedded in broader social and cultural shifts, made possible only by much wider political movements. This story is encapsulated in one of the series’ historical figures, Vida Goldstein. ‘Getting There’, the first episode, explains how Goldstein unsuccessfully contested elections in Victoria five times between 1903 and 1917. What we don’t learn is that she was heavily involved in women’s suffrage activism before turning to politics. She collected signatures for the women’s suffrage ‘monster petition’ of 1891 and even travelled as far as the United States to discuss the cause with such prominent figures as President Theodore Roosevelt. Understanding her activism, not just her political career, is vital.

Across the twentieth century, broader social movements prefigured women’s parliamentary representation. In the series, the election of women to parliament in the 1970s seems rather spontaneous. In fact, intense political activism from the 1960s on a range of issues created the perfect conditions. Harnessing that wellspring of activist energy for the feminist cause, the new Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) surveyed MPs and candidates about issues that women deemed important. WEL also gained a foothold at the centre of power in Elizabeth Reid, women’s adviser to Gough Whitlam and the first person to serve in such a role. For several women, including Susan Ryan and Margaret Reynolds, collectives of empowered and determined women helped to pave the path to parliament. (Germaine Greer babysat Ryan’s young children while she worked.) Not every feminist liked the idea of ‘femocrats’ thriving within institutions designed by and for men, but nevertheless these leaders made significant advances for Australian women.

Once inside the system, parliamentary women have negotiated complex identities as women, as party members, and as individuals with other loyalties, affiliations, and experiences. Anne Aly, the first Muslim woman in parliament, tells Crabb that the ‘problem is, the system doesn’t know how to deal with that complexity. I know how to deal with that complexity. I’ve lived that complexity all my life.’ Women of colour in parliament, like their peers in the wider history of women’s political struggle, have had to negotiate multi-layered identities – and continue to face obstructive attitudes – in conventionally masculine spaces.

Faced with systematic mistreatment, parliamentary women have been, or have felt, required to prioritise party loyalty over any imagined ‘sisterhood’. ‘There are many times when you’re saying, “This is perfectly normal. Everybody’s happy”,’ Julie Bishop explains, while deftly nodding and shaking her head to demonstrate the art of deflection. Negotiating multiple identities and loyalties, some women have thrived in parliament by ‘maintaining the party line’, while others have dared to be different and accepted the risks.

Again, the history is illuminating. In the 1890s, suffragist campaigner Rose Scott told her peers that women should avoid the constraints of male-dominated political parties. Thousands of women went on to join the major parties, but their parliamentary ranks remained overwhelmingly male. Ms Represented rightly records an example of women MPs’ casting off the shackles of partisanship for a shared cause in re-securing access to abortion drug RU486 in 2006. More recently, Independents such as Cathy McGowan, Kerryn Phelps, Rebecca Sharkie and Zali Steggall have given new life to Scott’s vision of the less partisan parliamentary woman.

Ms Represented was conceived as a project to mark one hundred years of women in Australian parliaments. Given recent revelations about the sexist and abusive behaviour that continues to take place within Parliament House, the series is a timely addition to the groundswell of pressure for reform. Some have examined the series in a functional light, assessing whether or not it assists in ‘building bridges’ for the next wave of women MPs to cross. However, we should not simply view its story in a purely pragmatic manner. Reflecting on the treatment of Julia Gillard, Australia’s first woman prime minister, Cheryl Kernot suggests that it reflected something in ‘our national psyche’. A masculinist culture was built into that psyche over time. Reforming such a culture requires both a critical mass of women and a critical mass of histories to bolster them.

Ms Represented is currently airing on ABC iView.

Michelle Staff is a PhD candidate in the School of History at the Australian National University. Her work focuses on feminist activism in the 1920s and 30s in an international perspective. Joshua Black is a doctoral candidate with the National Centre for Biography, ANU. His Honours thesis (2018), entitled ‘For What Purpose?: The political memoirs and diaries of the Rudd–Gillard Labor Cabinet’, investigated the relatively unexplored field of political memoirs and their position in Australian political historiography. His doctorate is entitled ‘The Political Memoir Phenomenon: Federal political life writing, 1994–2020’. He has also worked in the field of Higher Education equity and support.