Accidental Feminists
by Jane Caro
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Women over fifty-five are of the generation that changed everything. We didn't expect to. Or intend to. We weren't brought up much differently from the women who came before us, and we rarely identified as feminists, although almost all of us do now. Accidental Feminists is our story. It explores how the world we lived in-with the pill and a regular pay cheque-transformed us and how, almost in spite of ourselves, we revolutionised the world. It is a celebration of grit, adaptability, energy show more and persistence. It is also a plea for future generations to keep agitating for a better, fairer world. show lessTags
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To afficionados of the ABC current affairs program The Drum, Jane Caro’s Accidental Feminists is exactly what you might expect of the author: forthright, amusing, full of pithy anecdotes to illustrate a point, and witheringly authentic.
While (of course) not everyone accessed higher education, Caro acknowledges that the Whitlam government’s abolition of university fees was pivotal:
However…
Caro attributes this to ‘flexibility’ — because (again backed up by her statistics) most women still do the ‘second shift’ i.e. the housework, the cooking, the childcare. Again there are also structural reasons like expensive child-care and high effective marginal tax-rates when moving from three to four days a week to full-time work due to the loss of family and child benefits. (p.75)
The take-home message of Accidental Feminists is this: there is a cohort of older women in dire financial straits because of structural and social impediments to financial independence that have affected their entire lives.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/18/accidental-feminists-by-jane-caro/ show less
What was revolutionary about our generation was that the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s is the first in history where most of the women worked for wages for most of their lives. And because money is power, this has changed everything.
While (of course) not everyone accessed higher education, Caro acknowledges that the Whitlam government’s abolition of university fees was pivotal:
If tertiary education was free, it was harder to rationalise preventing girls from accompanying their brothers,show more
especially as so many of us had higher marks. More than that, however, our mothers also began to grasp the chance that was offered to them. It was female mature-age students who radically swelled the ranks at universities during that tiny window of opportunity…(p.71)
However…
[women] tend to be concentrated in lower-status industries and at the lower end of the pay scale. Even more depressing is the fact that previously high-status, well-paid occupations tend to fall in both status and pay when they become female dominated. General medical practice, marketing and human resources (the latter of which once meant a board position) spring to mind. (p.72)
Caro attributes this to ‘flexibility’ — because (again backed up by her statistics) most women still do the ‘second shift’ i.e. the housework, the cooking, the childcare. Again there are also structural reasons like expensive child-care and high effective marginal tax-rates when moving from three to four days a week to full-time work due to the loss of family and child benefits. (p.75)
The take-home message of Accidental Feminists is this: there is a cohort of older women in dire financial straits because of structural and social impediments to financial independence that have affected their entire lives.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/18/accidental-feminists-by-jane-caro/ show less
I think this could be a good read - unfortunately I only dipped into it on audiobook - but I must return to it one day.
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Author Information
12+ Works 329 Members
Jane Caro was born in 1957 in London. She attended Macquarie University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with a major in English literature in 1977. She soon moved into the field of advertising. She appeared on the T.V. show Sunrise, ABC television's Q&A and as a regular panelist on The Gruen Transfer. Caro has worked in the show more advertising industry and lectures in advertising at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at University of Western Sydney. She is an author. Her books include The Stupid Country: How Australia is Dismantling Public Education, along with Chris Bonnor, The F Word. How we learned to swear by feminism, along with Catherine Fox, Just a Girl, What Makes a Good School? Along with Chris Bonnor and, with Pan Macmillan, For God's Sake! An atheist, Christian, Jew and Muslim battle it out, along with Antony Lowenstein, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock, and her memoir Plain-speaking Jane. In 2018, she won the Walkley Foundation's Women's Leadership in Media Award for the nonfiction book she edited Unbreakable: Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Sexuality and Gender Studies, History, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 305.4209 — Society, Government, and Culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Groups of people Women Social role and status of women Standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography
- LCC
- HQ1121 — Social sciences The family. Marriage, Women and Sexuality The Family. Marriage. Women Women. Feminism
- BISAC
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- 28
- Popularity
- 977,007
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 3
