In June 1999, the Labor Party’s deputy leader, Jenny Macklin, argued
that cartoons such as the following two of Meg Lees were offensive
and demeaning to women politicians because they reflect the
cartoonists’ limited and unimaginative view of senior women in
politics. For Macklin, women politicians are stereotyped as
housewives, or objects for male sexual gratification, rather than
depicted as ‘the politician that is the woman’.1 These claims are
worth examining and are done so here in relation to cartoonists’
caricatures of some senior women politicians, in particular former
Democrat leaders Meg Lees, Cheryl Kernot and Natasha Stott-
Despoja; former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner and the
phenomenon that was Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.Pert
