Julie Bishop’s exit clothed in a clear message on women in power

Julie Bishop and shoes inset

There is quite a bit of commentary around today, re: Julie Bishop’s shoes. Also her white, valedictory dress, but let’s start with the shoes.

The media noticed the sparkly pair of pumps Bishop wore to announce her exit from politics.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison likewise made much of them, in his hat-tip speech.

“Her successor will have big shoes to fill and we know that Julie has the best shoes,” he said.

And the response on Twitter went like this:

• “The best the PM can come up with is ‘Hmm, classy chick, she wears nice shoes’.”

• “As much as I despise J Bishop’s politics, I deplore the reduction of her career to what she wears.”

• “So Julie Bishop is resigning. OK, fine. But can we please talk about her achievements rather than her damn shoes?”

Here’s the thing, though.

When a woman puts a pair of shoes like that on her feet, she really wants you to notice, and not just the shoes.

She wants you to notice everything, meaning all of her: who she is, where she’s from, what she’s done, how she moves, the shape she’s in.

She wants you thinking about where she might go next.

There’s no hiding your light under a bushel when you’ve got bling like that on your feet.

Let your light shine, so that men might see your good works.

Also worth noting is the fact that the shoes were gold.

Not red, like the exit shoes she wore when she quit as Foreign Minister (exit shoes, because Dorothy wore a similar pair, to get herself the hell out of Oz.)

Gold is the colour of victory. Bishop wanted you to see her as somebody going out on top, or at least on her terms.

Now to the dress.

It was pure white, and that was no accident, either.

Early suffragettes wore white, to signal purity.

They didn’t want men to think they were ball-breakers. They weren’t going to abandon hearth and home. They still intended to be sweet, and mellow. They just wanted the vote.

That’s all been turned on its head: women in politics have, in recent years, taken to wearing white as a statement about their right to exercise power (see: Hillary Clinton, who often wore white on the campaign trail, and the Democratic congresswomen who wore white during Donald Trump’s most recent state of the union.)

For sure, Bishop also just likes being a woman, by which I mean, she likes dressing up, and having men notice her.

Not everyone approves of that kind of thing, saying it’s far better for women to go low-key in Canberra, and in the workplace more generally.

Head down, bum up, do your job, get yourself noticed for that, and not for your shapely calves.

Bishop likes being a bit sexy, and that’s her issue, and also her business.

But yesterday’s outfit wasn’t about that. It was a visual statement: Bishop was making a point about the importance of having women in positions of power in Canberra, and about her own achievements as deputy leader and the nation’s first female foreign minister, and she was doing it not through the ear, but right through your eye.