The women who changed the world

Julie HoskingThe West Australian
Camera IconJane Caro’s latest book, Accidental Feminists, explores the legacy of women over 55. Credit: supplied

It’s the morning after the night before and Jane Caro can’t wipe the smile off her face. The author, speaker and columnist can add DJ to her CV, after entertaining a crowd at the Sydney Festival.

“I got asked to do it by these two fabulous young men who were DJ-ing for the artists’ afterparty. I thought ‘well, that’s something I’ll never get asked to do again’,” she says with a laugh. The JC set list included Pet Shop Boys, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and KC and the Sunshine Band — “all the old school stuff I love”. Naturally, the proud feminist finished off the night with an anthem for the sisterhood, Sisters Are Doin’ it For Themselves.

If you think spinning the decks isn’t something a self-respecting 62-year-old should be doing, Jane couldn’t care less. As part of the generation of “accidental feminists” who changed the world, she has no plans to trudge off to the bingo hall in her sensible shoes and make way for the sexy young things. The whip-smart social commentator, who won last year’s Walkley Award for Women’s Leadership, has been speaking up since she was a girl and she’s not about to shut up because she’s reached society’s age of invisibility.

Rather, she will continue to advocate, in particular, for those sisters who can’t do it for themselves. In her latest book, Accidental Feminists, Jane explores the legacy of women over 55, a generation who almost accidentally revolutionised society, something she was driven to write about because of the lack of awareness for this “extraordinary thing” that happened to half the population — “that this was the first generation of women ever in the history of the world to have mostly earned their own money for most of their lives”.

“It was also my horror at discovering that women over 55 were the fastest growing group amongst the homeless, and my realisation that the change in women’s circumstances had not benefited all women equally and that many women had fallen by the wayside — far too many women — and that there was a profound contradiction.

Read more...

“This generation of women were brought up to believe that someone would look after them, and then they were adults in a world that expected them to look after themselves. And so for some women, and I think it’s more about good fortune than good management, they grasped their opportunities and they have been able to look after themselves. For other women, they haven’t been as fortunate and they have found themselves in a profoundly difficult situation.”

While on the one hand, Jane was surprised to find just how much money women are predicted to control — “there are some estimates that by 2039 two-thirds of the wealth in the US will be controlled by women” — she says it was heartbreaking to hear the stories of women who have cared for others all their lives and now find themselves unemployable in their 50s and 60s. Having worked at best on an ad hoc basis, often in low-paid caring roles, in between rearing children and “keeping house”, they have little or no superannuation and find it increasingly difficult to get a job in a market that favours the young.

“They were discouraged, actively discouraged, women, when I was young, particularly working-class women, from getting an education or getting any skills,” she says. “I remember my father-in-law saying to his daughter ‘you may as well leave school because you’re just going to get married and have children anyway’. This is the kind of world that we grew up in and people assumed that it would go on being like that because it always had been like that, that women’s lives were defined by who they married.”

Which, she says, makes it all the more horrifying that these same women have been abandoned. “They have to go on Newstart and are forced to apply for jobs every week that they know they have no chance of getting. And so they are not just being paid an absolute pittance but are being mortified and humiliated on a weekly basis,” she says. “These are the women who did what those men told them to do: put other people first, stay home and look after your kids. If you do work, do it as a kind of support to your husband, your role is in the home and at the hearth, caring for others. And that’s what they did, and their reward for that is to be ritually humiliated in their old age and kept in a state of high anxiety and fear about whether they will have a roof over their heads. That absolutely got to me in the guts.”

She is still inundated with stories from women who are terrified that if they lose their job, they will lose their house. “They make a career out of house-sitting or pet minding. Many of them have gone back — and this isn’t just older women, many older men are doing this — to the way they lived in their youth, which is in share houses.”

Camera IconThe Accidental Feminists by Jane Caro (Melbourne University Press, $33) Credit: supplied

In a chapter entitled Hags, Crones, Witches and Mother-in-Laws, Jane writes that women of a certain age are called names in an attempt to shut them up. “We are superfluous to requirements, meant to accept our invisibility without complaint.”

So why doesn’t she conform, particularly considering the vicious nature of trolls on social media? Aside from the fact she has become an expert blocker, Jane says she was simply raised to speak up. “I was basically taught if you saw an injustice you didn’t just ignore it,” she says. “I know it’s not easy. And the more important it is to speak up, the less easy it is to speak up, and that is the reason that people don’t do it — it is hard and it is confronting and it is scary but if we don’t do it, then the problem will just remain.”

In Accidental Feminists, Jane advocates urgent policy changes to help those women on the margins and to ensure future generations do not face similar disadvantages.

“We must urgently close the earning gap between men and women,” she writes. “We must offer fathers incentives to spend at least some part of their children’s infancy at home as the primary carer. We must stop undervaluing women’s work, whether it be at home or in feminised industries or anywhere else. We must value caring work properly. Without it, society would cease to function. We must also do something about the out-of-control cost of child care. If we make these changes, we may avoid seeing another generation of women suffering poverty in their old age as a reward for caring.”

Jane argues a lot of women are simply too tired to be able to push for change. “When you make women so totally responsible for the care and responsibility of children, sick people, disabled people and elderly people, it’s a really nice way of making sure they are exhausted and don’t have a lot of time to devote to activism. It is a neat little way to keep them from doing other things,” she says.

She is optimistic and pessimistic about the future. “The world is on a kind of tipping point,” she says. “Are we going to decide to move forward into a new kind of world which is more egalitarian, which is about real merit, which is about real fairness, which is about caring for the environment, which is about making things more equal than less equal, which is about looking at the long-term consequences of what we do and not simply looking at each individual out for himself. Or are we going to go backwards? Are we going to turn and look back to an authoritarian path?”

With climate change “nipping at our heels”, Jane doesn’t think we have time to waste. Has she contemplated joining the political fray, as some were urging her to do late last year?

“I’ve sort of been persuaded that I am probably more useful outside because I’m free to speak as I want. But at the same time, I kind of feel bad because I think you can’t have good people being dissuaded from going into politics because it’s nasty.” Especially when she is on the receiving end of plenty of nasty commentary anyway. “Yes but I don’t have to tout for votes. But we’ll see what happens. I’m certainly happy to encourage other women to stand for office. And I also want to do whatever I can to move us towards a kinder, more compassionate, more equal, more thoughtful, more generous-spirited future.

Accidental Feminists (Melbourne University Press, $33) is out now. Jane Caro is a guest of Writers Week, February 18-24, see perthfestival.com.au

Get the latest news from thewest.com.au in your inbox.

Sign up for our emails