Opinion
Women have imagined a different life for themselves. Eventually, so will men
Jane Caro
Novelist, author and commentatorWomen have come so far in my lifetime. When I was seven in 1964, the famous 7 Up series began life as an episode for the British current affairs show World in Action. That original episode featured 14 seven-year-olds and, like the filmmakers, I have followed their lives until the present day, catching up every seven years.
It was only as I grew older, however, that I noticed something glaring about the casting. In 1964, the producers selected children from every class in society including a child of mixed race. Yet, they also cast 10 boys in the series and only four girls.
The change in how women think about themselves, their future and their rights has snowballed. Credit: iStock
The reason for the lack of girls, I believe, is because, when I was seven, no one expected girls to have interesting lives. Girls would do what girls had always done, regardless of their class. They would grow up, marry and have children. End of story.
What the producers missed was the revolution about to occur in women’s lives. A revolution that has had an impact greater than the French, the Russian, or any other you care to name.
The reason the radical nature of this change remains relatively unacknowledged is because it is the first to be created by, for and about women. Men still write most of the history and decide what is and isn’t important. With many honourable exceptions, many men find it hard to be interested in women and their lives.
The change in the way women see themselves, the expectations and aspirations they now have about their lives has been miraculous. My mother’s generation, born between the two world wars, had the same expectations for themselves as did the producers of the 7 Up series and of every preceding generation of girls. They would become wives and mothers.
Your own money and control of your own body are the essential ingredients of liberty and independence.
Then in 1960, the pill was launched. Maybe the world suspected how important this new medical technology was, because of all the pills in the world, only one gets called “the pill”.
It changed everything because it changed the way women were able to see the world and their place in it. For the first time, women could control their reproduction. They could decide when or if to have children.
This enabled them to use their education and enter the paid workforce. A pay packet with your name on it gives you independence and purchasing power. It enables you to decide not to marry at all or to leave a lousy one. It enables you to purchase support. Your own money and control of your own body are the essential ingredients of liberty and independence.
My generation of girls were the lucky recipients of the radicalisation and self-actualisation via Women’s Lib that so changed our mothers, teachers and older sisters. We were encouraged to imagine a future that would include marriage and motherhood, perhaps, but also meaningful work, travel, sexual freedom and fun.
In Australia, free university education helped many women of all ages get qualifications that had often been denied to them when cash-strapped parents prioritised opportunities for their sons. My own mother went to uni in 1975 at the age of 44.
The change in how women think about themselves, their future and their rights has since snowballed. We now demand rights our mothers and grandmothers would never have dreamt of. The right to dress, live, vote, think, work, love, speak and behave as we choose. We now demand the right to be taken seriously and have our perspective considered. We don’t always get these demands met, but we no longer feel ashamed or embarrassed about asserting them.
There has been a recent panic over research in Britain and the US showing that young women are now vastly more progressive than young men and that young men, in fact, have become more conservative. It appears to be a global trend, and is hardly surprising. Women, especially young women, are demanding men change. It’s predictable that some men would resist.
However, despite the efforts of the forced birthers (anti-abortion advocates), the “trad wives”, the Andrew Tates, incels (involuntary celibates) and conservatives in general, the change in the way men regard women – and therefore themselves – is inevitable and already happening. The very viciousness of the backlash is proof.
And, just as women have embraced their ability to imagine a different life for themselves than the one forced upon them by the straightjacket of gender, so, eventually, will men. Some of them, many of them, already have. When I was a child, my father would no sooner have pushed the stroller than flown to the moon. Now I see fathers doing every aspect of parenting as gently, lovingly and efficiently as any mother. And a woman, Christina Koch, is about to fly to the moon.
Women have discovered both their potential and their authentic selves over the past 65 years. I expect the next 65 will be about men doing the same.
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