Accidental Feminists Read online

  ACCIDENTAL

  FEMINISTS

  JANE CARO

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2019

  Text © Jane Caro, 2019

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2019

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Text design and typesetting by Megan Ellis

  Cover design by Design by Committee

  Cover image by Josh Durham/Bigstockphoto

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  9780522872835 (paperback)

  9780522872842 (ebook)

  To Ralph

  May we continue to grow old together

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 Daughters of Feminism

  2 Hags, Crones, Witches and Mothers-in-law

  3 Dutiful Daughters, Wives, Mothers and Grandmothers

  4 Gold-diggers, Beggars and Thieves

  5 Women’s Work

  6 Slags, Sluts, Gossips and Staceys

  7 Invalids, Liars, Hysterics and Madwomen

  8 Vessels of Repulsion

  9 Loss and Lamentation

  10 Past Our Use-by Date

  11 Invisibility v. Independence

  12 Rebels, Resistance Fighters and Role Models

  13 Strategists, Policy Makers and Problem Solvers

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  The generation born after World War II are usually referred to as the baby boomers. The boomers, both male and female, have had a huge impact on the world. They were bound to, I suppose, considering when they were born and their sheer numbers. However, it is boomer women who, in my opinion, have really made the greatest and most lasting difference. They have changed everything but they didn’t grow up expecting to be revolutionary. They are the accidental feminists.

  They are the first generation of women in the history of the world who have mostly earned their own money for most of their lives. That, in itself, is revolutionary.

  They are also my generation. I am a tail-end boomer, born in 1957. I grew up when they grew up and have lived through the world the boomers were raised in, absorbed the messages we were sent about our futures, and experienced the way all those seemingly immutable assumptions were blown out of the water. It’s been a hell of a ride, and it’s not over yet. Nevertheless, I somehow feel as if the revolution that has occurred in the lives of women remains relatively unacknowledged. It’s as if each step forward is regarded in isolation and many people still seem to live with the expectation that any day now, women will go back into their box and live the way they always used to. I don’t think that is going to happen, and this book is my attempt to explain why.

  It is also an attempt to tell the life story of my generation of women. As I was raised in Australia, it focuses on the experiences of women from that country—but I do not think those experiences are radically different from those of women over fifty-five in other parts of the Western world. We all lived through and benefited from the technology that changed our opportunities and the way we were able to contribute. The two particular technologies that enabled us to live such different lives are reliable contraception and the tampon. We also lived through and benefited from what is called the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, when I was still an impressionable teenager. (The first wave of feminism was the fight for the vote.) We are currently living through what will probably end up being called the third wave, and it is accelerating the change in women’s lives at a speed that makes my head spin.

  I have been an active participant in the changes in women’s lives, as a rebellious teenager, a university student, a career woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and—always—a feminist. I have also been a grateful beneficiary. Like many of my peers, I have lived a much more interesting, varied and exciting life than almost any woman from the generations who came before me. But this book is neither a memoir nor a biography, although where my own life and experiences have seemed relevant I have not hesitated to draw on them. Rather, it is the story of a generation who grabbed their unexpected opportunities and ran with them.

  But this book is also the story of two fates, because not all the women of my generation have benefited in the same way. Far too many of my boomer sisters now find themselves staring down the barrel of a poverty-stricken old age. Indeed, it was my horror at discovering a few years ago that so many of my contemporaries had been left high and dry that motivated the writing of the article that led to this book.

  I began by asking myself why so many women of my generation were doing well and, conversely, why so many were doing badly. I am not sure I have found the definitive answer, but what I have found is that society has not kept pace with women. Indeed, I argue in these pages that many sectors of society have done their damnedest to hold back women every step of the way. Many remain hostile to women’s economic independence and set up all sorts of barriers to women having the same chances as men, even while they deny that any such difficulties exist. I hope that I have been able to expose just how high, wide, thick and deep these supposedly non-existent barriers remain. These obstacles—some are the legacy of the world we grew up in, some are brand-new hurdles set up specifically to slow us down, some are conscious and some are unconscious—accumulate and so make women vulnerable throughout their lives, but particularly as they age.

  As I explored the story of my generation, I did not restrict myself to research, reports and discussions of a formal, academic or theoretical kind, although of course you’ll find plenty of those referred to in these pages. I wanted to hear first-hand from the women themselves. To that end, I sent a questionnaire to a range of women from my generation, some who were living in precarious circumstances. Some of the women generously responded to those questionnaires, and their thoughts, experiences and ideas enrich this book. As I promised them, I have disguised their identities, giving them false names and, in some cases, dividing the experiences of a single respondent among a series of fictitious names. I have done this out of respect for them and their privacy, but the words I quote are verbatim. I want to thank all of the women who trusted me with their answers, both for the time they took and for the honesty of their responses. The book would not be the same without them.

  I also want to point out that in this book when I refer to ‘women’ I am referring to everyone who identifies as a woman. I am not discriminating on the basis of race, social class, education, creed, sexual orientation, gender at birth, age or anything else—not consciously, anyway. If you present yourself to the world as a woman, as far as I am concerned you are one. Women are not a job lot. We are as varied as all other groups of human beings. What we share is the burden of assumptions that are made about what a woman should be like, what she should do, say, wear, think and express. To be a woman, no matter your background, is to have to fight for your territory in a way that most men never have to. We even have to fight a seemingly endless and repetitive battle to retain control over our own bodies. Women of colour, of course, women who live with a disability, poor women, migrant women, trans women and no
n-heterosexual women must navigate all the usual prejudices and barriers against their gender and then some. Many women must fight multiple levels of bias and discrimination including ageism. I have tried to pay due respect within these pages to the different degrees of difficulty women face while also wanting to emphasise the universally limiting effect of sexism. This has not been easy, but I have done my best. Like every author, I hope that all my readers, including male ones, can identify with the stories of struggle and triumph I tell. After all, every human being, regardless of age, gender, race, religion, or accident of birth, wants to be treated fairly, and that’s all this generation of women have been fighting for—even if, as the title of this book implies, they have sometimes engaged in that fight without quite meaning to.

  When I point out how revolutionary this generation of women are and how big a deal it is to be the first generation in history who have mostly earned their own money, people invariably respond with surprise, and even this reaction is an example of how little notice we take of women’s lives. How often are women who fight for their own rights told that they should put their efforts on hold as long as there remain others who are worse off? Women are always being asked to put others’ needs ahead of their own, which is a brilliant way to make sure their own needs never get met. What happens to women is still seen as peripheral, of minor importance—even trivial. Serious matters focus on men, apparently. In fact, I now believe that feminism is really a centuries-long fight by one half of the human race to be taken seriously by the other half.

  I hope that when you have finished reading about the women who have changed everything, you will take them and what they have achieved very seriously.

  1

  DAUGHTERS OF FEMINISM

  Her name was Kerrie (we were all called Kerrie, Debbie, Jane, Lynne or Sue in those days). It was 1972 and we were fifteen and reaching the end of what was then called Fourth Form. They call it Year 10 now.

  We were both students at a bog-standard, co-ed public high school in the boondocks of Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It wasn’t a posh school, and in those days it enrolled the children of the entire local community. My father was a company director. Maybe Kerrie’s dad was too, or perhaps he was a tradie or operated a small business. Back then, we didn’t know what our friends’ dads did and we didn’t care. Our mums generally didn’t do paid work, unless you were the unlucky offspring of the ostracised and whispered-about ‘deserted wife’. The term ‘single mother’ was not used because it was dads who took off, not mums. Mums couldn’t, no matter how miserable or mistreated they might be. They had little choice: not only did they rarely earn any money, but the social stigma attached to a woman who left her family (black eyes and bruises notwithstanding) was terrifying.

  Kerrie was in tears. We were about to do our School Certificate, which was a much more significant exam then—when most students left school at 15 and it was their highest educational qualification—than it is now, but that wasn’t the problem. Kerrie was a bright girl. She’d worked her way up from the bottom classes in First Form (Year 7) to the top English class. She knew she was going to ace the exam. Kerrie was distraught because her father had just informed her that no matter how well she did in the School Certificate, she would not be going on to Fifth and Sixth Form. He could not afford to have both his kids out of the workforce for another few years, and as she was ‘just a girl’ she was the one who would have to leave and get herself a job. The injustice of this hit my friend hard. She knew she was a better student than her brother and that she enjoyed school while he hated it. She had ambitions to go to university; he’d rather poke his eyes out with a fork. But he was a boy and she was a girl, and that was that.

  I was outraged on her behalf. My mother was a feminist, a member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, and hardly a day went by without her fulminating about the injustices visited upon women because of their gender. But I was the child of a well-to-do family. No tough decisions had to be made about whether we could afford to let me stay on at school or go to university. I comforted Kerrie as best I could and urged her to fight her MCP (male chauvinist pig, as they were called in 1972) of a father. All to no avail, of course. Kerrie left at the end of that year and disappeared into the ranks of the shop assistants, filing clerks, receptionists and apprentice hairdressers that swallowed more than half of the girls I’d shared classes with.

  Looking back on it, for both the girls and the boys who stayed on for their last two years of secondary education, entering the senior school was a class marker. Our fathers tended to have white-collar jobs and wanted us to have them too, even if we were girls and only expected to work for a few years until we had kids.

  When Amanda, a student at a Catholic high school in the 1970s, thought about her future—something she did very rarely—she says that she ‘hoped to find a spunk to link up with, and didn’t think too much about what happened after’. A ‘spunk’, as I recall with great fondness, is what teenage girls called attractive teenage boys back then. Debbie imagined ‘living a comfortable life’. She says, ‘I dreamed of owning an apartment near the ocean somewhere. I imagined that my hard work would pay off.’ Theresa did well at school and expected to go to university. She says, ‘I expected (hoped) I would marry and have a family one day. I don’t think I really ever thought beyond that.’ Susan’s adoptive father was abusive and frightening, so she barricaded herself into her room and lost herself in sci-fi and horror novels. She also became obsessed with her horse. Nevertheless, she describes herself as a teenage girl who lived ‘just one day to the next. Most of it is simply a grey fog.’

  The Australia of the 1960s and 1970s, the era when I grew up and when most of the women now over fifty did as well, was a different world from today. I suspect that, apart from the labour-saving devices and shorter skirts, men and women from the 1860s and 1870s would not have found much that surprised them a century on. The traditional family was still just that for most people. Us kids called our friends’ parents Mr and Mrs, and never used their first names in the way children routinely do now. We were all terrified of fathers as a species and avoided having anything whatsoever to do with them. This was the era of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, and fathers were often the disciplinarians. My friends would casually talk about ‘getting a belting’ from their dad, a punishment that sometimes involved their dad’s actual belt. Susan’s adoptive father invented horrific punishments for his two daughters, including being forced to walk around the house naked or in their underwear. When as a small child Susan confided in her teachers about her home life, she was taken out of primary school, her family moved house and everyone was told she ‘was a liar who would make things up’. In those days, no-one in authority ever followed up and families were often allowed to just disappear.

  Fortunately, for most of the rest of us, avoiding fathers was not difficult as they were rarely home, even on weekends. My own rather unconventional father (I was certainly not afraid of him, and he never hit us) worked all week and then played cricket for most of the weekend. My mother resented this mightily and—as women’s lib began to make headlines—her discontent was increasingly verbalised. But, and I can’t emphasise this strongly enough, she was very unusual.

  When the current generation look back at the world of my childhood and adolescence, the world I shared with the cohort who are the focus of this book, they see the rising tides of revolutionary social movements—the anti-war demonstrations, the fight against apartheid, the rise of black power, social justice movements of all kinds, the youth-quake in general, and, of course, the rise of women’s liberation. These are the things that stand out, particularly in hindsight. They were also the focus of our nightly TV news—in flickering black and white until 1975. However, they hardly affected most of us at the time. We did what people do as the great tides of history break around them: we jogged along with our lives just as we had always done.

  Most of my girlfriends were not ambitious. They did not expect to have caree
rs. I know this because I argued with them about it as we did the drawback on our Marlboro ciggies, hiding from our teachers round the back of the senior studies block. My girlfriends knew what their future looked like. It looked like their mothers’ had, back in the 1940s and 1950s. They would work for a few years, have some fun, meet a guy (a spunk), marry, save for a deposit on a house or a block of land, and then they’d have kids. Even the girls who wanted to go to uni were all hoping to get teacher scholarships. It was the only job we could think of that worked around having children. Leanne considered being a teacher but decided that ‘because it was a typical job that women did, I didn’t want to do it’. I had a similar thought and did a straight arts degree at uni. But Leanne and I were the exceptions. Most of the girls I went to school with were not feminists. Indeed, the ‘women’s libbers’ we saw on the news irritated them. Their demands and arguments made my friends uncomfortable, perhaps because they drew attention to things they did not want to think about. Many of my schoolfriends’ mothers fed their daughters’ dislike. They saw the slogans, the demos and the demands of feminists as a criticism of their lives as homemakers. They reacted defensively and often actively discouraged their daughters from having any ideas above their allotted female station.

  This attitude persists. Only a couple of years ago, I remember a female school principal (she was well into her forties) telling me with tears in her eyes that when she told her mother she had been elected president of the area’s Primary Principals’ Association, her mother rolled her eyes and asked her what made her think she could manage a job like that. The lack of confidence our mothers often had in their own ability to navigate the world is the poisoned chalice they bequeathed to their daughters.

  It is hardly surprising that the women of the 1950s and 1960s had this profound distrust of their own abilities. Women were routinely infantilised and patronised. Briefly allowed a modicum of agency and value when their labour was required during World War II, efforts were redoubled in the immediate postwar decades to remind women of their inferiority and their ‘natural place’ in the home. Indeed, as civil rights for other groups in the community gathered momentum, particularly in the US, women’s rights, if they were included at all, were literally included as a joke. On 8 February 1964 (what a seminal year it was) an elderly congressman, Howard Smith, who favoured segregation, added an amendment to President Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act. He proposed adding the word ‘sex’ after race, colour, religion and national origin.