Jane Caro > Quotes

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“For those who still believe structural inequality is a figment of feminists’ imagination, let’s recap some of the ways the financial odds are stacked against women. The gender pay gap sits stubbornly at around 18 per cent in Australia. (It gets wider the higher up the ladder you go, by the way). Female-dominated occupations are less well paid than male-dominated ones. Six out of ten Australians work in an industry dominated by one gender. Australia has one of the highest rates of part-time work in the world: 25 per cent of us work part time. Women make up 71.6 per cent of all part-time workers and 54.7 per cent of all casual employees. Australian women are among the best educated in the world but have relatively low comparable workplace participation and achievement rates. And just to add insult to injury, products marketed to women are more expensive than those marketed to men!”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“I believe that women’s liberation—or second-wave feminism, as it is now known—was born from the pill, not the other way around. Safe, effective, affordable contraception allowed half the human race to imagine and create a different future for themselves. That is certainly how it worked for me.”
― Jane Caro, 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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“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.”
― Jane Caro

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“There is an old question, rarely voiced these days, but nevertheless running as an undercurrent beneath the squabbles and misunderstandings that occur in households, workplaces and universities on a daily basis. ‘What do women want?’ has been asked in a bewildered, almost exasperated, tone since women first began to say they wanted more. Yet the answer seems to us to be simple and entirely self-evident. Women want what all sentient human beings want. They want to develop their own talents and put them to good use, to earn and control their own money so they can be truly independent and make free choices. They want to gain status and respect as they prove to be worth of it. To love and to be loved as free and equal adults, to be allowed their human flaws and foibles and not to be unfairly judged for them, and to be forgiven when they fail, behave badly or have trouble coping. To be the subject and not the object. They want, in short, what men want.”
― Jane Caro

“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.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“Oh, and just an aside here, but it drives me nuts when I hear the current federal education minister, Christopher Pyne, say that the people who benefited from free university education in the 1970s were almost all from the ranks of the better off. What he doesn’t say is that they were also mostly women who had been denied the chance of a university education by their fathers, who had preferred to pay the fees for their sons rather than their daughters. Whitlam’s higher education reforms were hugely important for women from the generations before mine and that has had equally important positive results for them, their daughters and our whole society. We should not forget that. Rant over. As”
― Jane Caro, Plain-speaking Jane

“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.”
― Jane Caro

“Feminism is about despising an idea. And the idea is that women are unequal to men. It is that they deserve or should expect the kind of sexism, misogyny and mistreatment that they receive. It is that they should receive this treatment and take it on the chin. It is that any woman who rejects this treatment will be met with aggressive, irrational and sometimes unintelligible scorn. When we are destroying the joint, we are calling out sexism and misogyny. When we are destroying the joint, we are helping establish gender equality. We are destroying the joint, because otherwise, we may destroy the rights women have fought hard to achieve.”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“The famous Howard and Heidi experiment (referred to by Sheryl Sandberg in her 2013 book Lean In) shows that the higher men are rated on skills, the higher they are rated on likeability. The higher women are rated on skills, the lower they are rated on likeability. Neat, isn’t it?”
― Jane Caro, Plain-speaking Jane

“We have to support each other, brothers and sisters. Start where you are, do what you can, with what you have. When you don’t know what to do, do anything. Don’t ask for your rights. That suggests someone else has the power to grant them. Demand your rights.”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“think this is what’s now called ‘diversity’ and is believed to deliver richer and more creative results. It wasn’t seen that way by the advertising ‘creative’ community back then. Far from it. Choosing judges from a larger pool of eligible candidates got me into all sorts of trouble. Even though the highest percentage of women I could get (on the print jury) was 40 per cent, the guys in the industry went into orbit. The list of judges was printed in the industry trade magazine, Campaign Brief, with all the women’s names in pink and all the men’s names in blue! There were editorials written excoriating me for not choosing judges on – ahem – merit! The irony of that was entirely lost on these supposedly clever men. None of them had ever wondered how it was that women had so little merit and men, particularly men just like them, had so much. Maybe they thought they were just naturally superior. I”
― Jane Caro, Plain-speaking Jane

“When women participate politically, joints do get destroyed - joints that treat women as second-class citizens or property, that deny girls education, that claim democratic status while refusing women citizenship, that allow the elites to grow richer and stronger on the blood of the poor and the weak. It's marvellous, actually, the way this keeps happening: women start to lobby and agitate and suddenly all these violent, sexist, racist, unjust, repressive joints begin to crumble.
(Emily Maguire)”
― Jane Caro

“Let’s get this clear up front: women deserve human rights because they are human and they deserve to play a part in political and civil governance because they are part of the polity. No other justification is needed.”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“Dale Spender coined the ‘one third rule’ in her book Man-Made Language. As soon as women are: more than one third of the speakers at a conference; more than one third of the members of the house; more than a third of the authors on the review pages of the papers; or one-third the contribution to the conversations the impression is – for both genders – that women are taking over.1 In late 2012, Chrys Stevenson completed research into how women are represented in Australian newspapers and found, by her comprehensive byline count and content analysis, the percentage of stories written by women with women as the subject, quoting women or using women as an expert or in the photo is between 20% and 30%, similar to findings from separate investigations all over the world.2”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“If we aspire to a national unity built on bringing people together, we must remember the importance of giving voice to these different realities. And that complacency can become complicity if we do not speak out.
(Senator Penny Wong)”
― Jane Caro

“Our political institutions have absorbed the tactics of the tabloids like a giant sanitary product. The domination of spin, with political image managers intricately connected with media personnel, sees our political discussion operate as a subset of the corporate media, and our politicians strategising in much the same way as the media does: asking how do we push and prod and suck up the desires and frustrations of the electorate, transforming them into something that articulates the will of the powerful. It manufactures not just consent, but dissent and outrage and doubt, in a ceaseless production line of images. When the machinery jams, these interests become starkly visible. Jones’s”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“Materialism is also associated with more anti-social and self-centred behaviour. One of the effects of a materialistic disposition is a greater tendency to treat people as objects to be manipulated and used. Materialistic values conflict with making the world a better place and the desire to contribute to equality, justice and other aspects of civil society. Attitude surveys show that people highly focused on materialistic objectives show little concern for the wider world – they care less about protecting the environment and less about their fellow citizens.”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“Economic activities that diminish the quality of the environment and increase pollution harm the communities that are supposed to benefit. Conversely, contact with the natural environment has been shown to reduce stress, improve children’s behaviour and increase wellbeing. Indeed, patients appear to recover faster from surgery when they are able to see plants, flowers and trees. Although we might like to think that the natural environment is a tool at our disposal, that we are entitled, as the Book of Genesis suggests, to ‘dominion’ over ‘all the earth’, we are in fact part of the natural world and, for better and for worse, inextricably linked to and deeply affected by it.”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint

“Not only do women lose their financial independence in this process, their career progression and lifetime earnings even when they do return to work rarely recover. These are among the reasons why motherhood is a well-known point of feminist radicalisation for women.”
― Jane Caro

“Feminism, in essence, is itself a giant female support group, where women (mostly) offer each other support and encouragement—literally, pass on courage to one another.”
― Jane Caro, Accidental Feminists

“Christina was an Aboriginal woman – a poor old gin – who shot her rapist in Heart-of-Darkness Queensland in 1907 and lived to tell the tale. Can you imagine it? Her life matters today because of who she was and what she did: she said I refuse to be your slave, I refuse to be raped, and I will resist, I will not give in, I will fight for my dignity as a human being and as a woman and if you try me then you will meet my wrath. They”
― Jane Caro, Destroying The Joint