Marilyn Waring: The Political Years
About this ebook
This is an autobiographical account of Waring’s extraordinary years in parliament. She tells the story of her journey from being elected as a new National Party MP in a conservative rural seat to being publicly decried by the Prime Minister for her ‘feminist anti-nuclear stance’ that threatened to bring down his government. Her tale of life in a male-dominated and relentlessly demanding political world is both uniquely of its time and still of pressing relevance today.
About the author
Marilyn Waring is a Professor of Public Policy at Auckland University of Technology. She was elected to parliament at the age of twenty-three and was MP for Raglan and then Waipa for nine years. In 1984, her promise to cross the floor and vote for the opposition’s nuclear-free legislation prompted Prime Minister Robert Muldoon to call a snap election.
Waring has held fellowships at prestigious overseas universities, including Harvard, worked as a development consultant throughout Asia and the Pacific, and served on the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Council of Creative New Zealand. In 2008 she was awarded a CNZM for services to women and economics. She has been awarded Suffrage Centenary, Commemorative and Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee medals, the 2014 NZIER Economist of the Year award and the 2018 Sheffield award for Visionary Leader at the Deloitte Top 200 awards.
In the years since Waring retired from parliament, she has written Women, Politics and Power, Counting for Nothing, In the Lifetime of a Goat, Who Cares? The Economics of Dignity, and Anticipatory Social Protection.
