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This was published 7 years ago
Deborah Conway: Why equality remains the battle cry of women everywhere
By Deborah Conway
I wasn't crawling by the time the 1960s had dawned, and by the time I was walking my parents weren't listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.
The music of my formative years was from Broadway – Rogers and Hammerstein, Rogers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, and Maurice Jarre's evocative soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia.
Deborah Conway Credit: Marco Del Grande
The Wiggles hadn't been born yet and even Play School hadn't been thought of. My listening pleasure was Lionel Bart's Oliver! and Alan Sherman singing comedy tunes that played well in the Catskills. I also had albums of Dumbo, The Nutcracker Suite and the utterly terrifying story of The Pied Piper, which gave me so many nightmares that it was eventually banished from the record collection, never to be heard again.
I loved women singers, the huge voices of Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli; and I loved TV shows with women in leading roles. There were plenty of them in the first iteration of the "Golden Age of American TV" – I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. Even Get Smart and Greenacres would have been nothing without Barbara Feldon and Eva Gabor.
Deborah Conway with a gold record in 2001. Credit: Peter Wells
I think it's fair to say that I found women infinitely more interesting than men; men were associated with sport, endless Sunday afternoons of World Wide Wrestling and VFL, both of which my papa loved to watch but which bored me to taking refuge in the cold back spare bedroom with my sister, where we would design caves made of chairs and quilts, lined with cushions. Inside, we would make up games and eat indoor picnics.
When it was time to start school I attended my mother's alma mater, an all-girls school that holds true to the idea that girls are every bit as capable as boys. Not once in 12 years did I believe I was limited in my choices by anything other than my own imagination.
An education is not just school. Besides family, there are the friendships you make – the ones that let you down and the ones that last are equally as educative. There is the pleasure of finding out that you're good at some things. And there is the tender coming-of-age awkwardness of discovering attraction.
It was abundantly clear even then with all those crazed hormones pinging off each other that boys were even less equipped than girls at managing them.
Deborah Conway performs at the Melbourne Busk Protest against Radio National program cuts in December. Credit: Stefan Postles
My parents always encouraged me to be bold in my choices, although when I did what in hindsight looks obvious and chose to join a band my father felt confronted enough to send me to see a psychiatrist just to make sure I hadn't lost my mind.
The medical professional and I agreed I hadn't, and to my father's credit he accepted my gift to him of my first Gold Album Award with tears of pride and joy in his eyes.
Feminism to me as a schoolgirl, a teenager, a young woman, and now an older woman was – and is – as natural as democracy.
The rub is that democracy is not a natural state either, but one that we in our world take as so blindingly obvious as the best path that it is beyond question. It is frequently pointed out these days that democracy is not perfect but it is far and away the best option we human beings have come up with so far.
Feminism in my interpretation is an equality of opportunity, not a predetermined equality of outcome, because that skates dangerously close to socialism and for as long as I have lived all the attempts of that ideology have failed miserably.
So many journalists have asked me over the years about my role models, and whether it was difficult to play music in a world dominated by men.
My answer was that role models were plentiful enough – Joni Mitchell (hey, I could just stop there), Carole King, Debbie Harry, Chrissy Hynde, Suzanne Quatro.
But I want to add now that in other ways it was liberating not having a lot of role models or pioneering precursors. How much more difficult for a man to have to assert something original among all that had gone before him?
As for the trope of needing to project a vulnerable sexuality for a record executive to sign a woman, it was certainly not true in my experience.
No one knew, no one knows now what it is that will climb the charts and what will get the kids downloading your song. And while equality of opportunity is more available than ever with the advent of new technologies that make every budding musician potentially an engineer, programmer, producer, record company and marketing guru, the outcome is just as serendipitous as it has always been.
There are most definitely still fights to fight for feminism but in our western liberal democracies I think with some exceptions they are largely won.
These days the enemy of feminism is a lack of appetite to take on appalling practices that still occur in the fear that to call them out would be to appear culturally superior. What bollocks!
Equality of opportunity is the battle cry of women everywhere. It is incumbent on those who have opportunity to not tolerate the absence of it for those who don't.
Deborah Conway will be part of the 2017 Good Times Tour with other music legends, The Black Sorrows with Vika and Linda Bull, Colin Hay (Men at Work), and Mental as Anything. The tour kicks off May 17 in Darwin and will perform in 15 Australian cities.