Jane Caro Quotes

Whenever people nominate the world's most important inventions (the internal combustion engine, the world wide web, battery storage), I always suggest the pill and the tampon

I have to hand it to the patriarchy. It has been a brilliant and comprehensive strategy to keep women under control, to create so many hurdles and levels of difficulty - both overt and covert, both in the workplace and in the home, both through the tax system and the lack of services - that women must expend much of their energy just overcoming them and have little left over for battling promotion and higher wages. Exhaustion is a feminist issue.

To be a woman, no matter your background, is to have to fight for your territory in a way that men don't have to.

When I was young, when the women of my generation were in their formative years, we were not taken seriously. Nor, just as damagingly, were our mothers, or our grandmothers.

Women who are over fifty grew up in one world and now must exist in quite another. They are a generation that has experienced the greatest change in women's lives recorded history yet such is our lingering ability to take women's lives seriously that society barely acknowledges that there has been a fundamental shift.

Women over fifty today are the first women ever to have almost universally earned their own money for most of their lives. This is by any definition revolutionary, although it rarely gets commented upon. It is almost as if what happens to women remains largely invisible.

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 accidental feminists.

Every generation builds on the work of the last, and pill or no pill, my generation could not have made the strides they have without all the work done by others. The same is true for future generations, although luckily for them the advancement of women is now snowballing. The legacy of the current crop of women over fifty - the accidental feminists - has given a leg up like no other to their daughter and granddaughters, not least through the #MeToo movement.

Even if you had a feminist mother like mine, you still absorbed the messages about our limited future through the pores of your skin…We were baby-making machines, always had been, always would be, and we were supposed to be satisfied with that. The women who were beginning to assert their full and separate humanity were often caricatured as harpies, termagants and shrews.

Thanks to every generation of women from every culture on earth who ever lived, thanks to every woman who ever voiced a seditious thought or pursued her talents regardless of invisibility, my generation of women have been able to live a life different from that of every woman who came before us.

My current fear is that the message being sent by the level of vitriol surrounding Gillard's flawed leadership (but tell me whose wasn't flawed) is being heard by Australian women and girls loud and clear. And the message is: 'Don't aspire to high office,sweetheart, because we'll flay you alive.'

Far from women as a species being vain, flirty or irrational, overemotional, hysterical, lunatic or morally weak, what strikes me about women and their history is just how damn sane we have managed to stay.

I wanted the kind of life my father had had, not the one I saw my mother struggling to get away from. I thought I was peculiar in this desire, but, as things have turned out, it seems such secret ambition burning in young female breasts were not so uncommon.