Beyond the glass ceiling: The material culture of women’s political leadership

Abstract

In October 1992 a female federal Australian senator made headlines after she displayed a poster that depicted a woman with a smoking gun over the caption ‘so many men, so few bullets’ in her Parliament House office window. In one newspaper article, titled ‘Make My Day’, it was reported that Parliament House authorities had received complaints that the poster in question was offensive, and asked for it to be removed.² The senator in question, Jocelyn Newman, was a senior parliamentarian from the conservative side of politics who was making a strong statement in favour of women’s representation in an overwhelmingly