I think this could be a good read - unfortunately I only dipped into it on audiobook - but I must return to it one day. ( )

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.

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, 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/ ( )