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Jane Caro QUOTES

Jane Caro QUOTES

1 " Destroying the joint means building a new system in which it is not OK to allow people to be marginalised, exploited and discriminated against, it's not OK to ignore the needs of future generations, it's not OK to wreck this extraordinary, beautiful, fragile planetary environment that sustains us - our Mother Earth. "

― Jane Caro , Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " The pall bearers were holding Pete's coffin, waiting to walk down the aisle—just like bridesmaids. The music began and they started to move, trying to keep pace with David Bowie's 'Changes'. "

― Jane Caro , The Mother

5 " There's no need to charm your mother, she thought. Which is both a compliment and a burden. "

― Jane Caro , The Mother

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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