Big Sisters

why old age should be a feminist cause

‘You’re not anybody’s mother, you’re not anybody’s wife, you’re you.’ Fay looked up from her dining-room table, an almost apologetic smile on her face. Her white hair was shot through with grey, her haircut sharp and fashionable. ‘That’s what the counsellor told me,’ she said. ‘And that advice really helped because I felt so guilty all the time. It’s in my nature to help, and when I couldn’t help my husband it was like banging my head against a brick wall. But that’s life; you’ve got to move on. If you don’t move on your life is a misery, living in the past.’

If anyone had cause to be trapped by the past, it was Fay. Some years ago her thirty-six-year-old daughter had died suddenly from a blood clot; her daughter’s partner of eleven years, unable to cope with the loss, ended his life three months later.

‘That left his elderly mother with absolutely no one,’ Fay told me. ‘So I’ve been her carer. She had polio as a child — she was not wheelchair-bound then, but she became so. For fifteen years I’ve been her backup, and she died just in December.’

By the time Fay lost her daughter and her daughter’s partner, Fay’s own son had become increasingly unwell. A few months after her daughter’s funeral Fay went to America with her son’s family, becoming the mainstay support for her two grandchildren while her son had blood clots removed from his lungs. In time it became clear that her son needed a double lung transplant. The transplant was successful, but after extensive rehabilitation he contracted an infection and died. He was only thirty-seven.

‘All I wanted in my life was a close family,’ said Fay. ‘And ours was a bit disjointed. My husband was a bit difficult, and once the children died, I couldn’t help him and he couldn’t help me. You know?’ She sighed, tears coming to her eyes. In the few hours we had spent talking I had noticed that her face was one that fell more easily to a smile than a frown, her eyes scrunching up to make room for her grin. And yet: such grief she held.

‘It was really, really hard, and he started drinking. We were going through the same thing, but in a different way. So that’s when I saw the counsellor. The only way I could survive was to cut myself off from my husband. The counsellor told me I just had to think about myself, and it was very difficult to hear because I’ve always been the sort of person who helps everyone else. But you’ve got your right to be a person.’

Living together but drifting apart, Fay and her husband continued to deal separately with their grief. Fay’s daughter-in-law remarried, taking her life on a different path, which meant Fay didn’t see the grandchildren she had been so close to as often. Soon after, Fay’s husband died of an aneurysm, collapsing while fixing the gas heater in the home he’d built with his own hands some forty years before.

‘So, more or less, in five years I lost half of my family.’ Fay shrugged at me, at the hand life had dealt her. Then her irrepressible smile appeared. ‘But when I tell people, I don’t want them to feel sorry for me. I’m very proud of myself; I feel very, very proud at how I’ve coped. It’s one of the good things of being my age: you have experience in life.’

Afternoon sunlight cascaded through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the new house Fay was living in with her surviving son and daughter-in-law. Outside, the garden was a muddy sea of tufty weeds and discarded building materials. They had knocked down Fay’s old house to build this new one together, and Fay could not be happier. ‘I feel utter delight at living in this house, it’s really lovely. I think it’s payback for me, for what I’ve been through.’

I wanted to acknowledge what she had been through — all of it. But what could I possibly say in the wake of such tragedy? I sat there, holding Fay’s gaze and not saying a word.

‘You know, back then your life was your family,’ said Fay. ‘You didn’t even think about doing things for yourself. But it’s different now.’ She shook her head dismissively. ‘All our lives, the husband was the ruling force, and you just did what you were told. I laugh at the modern woman. There’s no way they’d cope with the life we had when we were young.’

If there was one common theme that repeatedly emerged among the women I spoke to, it was that ageing was a personal freedom. Having inhabited the roles of daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother, it was only in later life that many women felt they had the opportunity to discover their own identity.

It is an existence unfamiliar to many women of my generation — we who have been brought up to believe we can take on any profession we want; that we can choose when to have children (if ever) and with whom; that we can remain single or become divorced without shame. Of course, for many women these options are still out of reach: those who cannot access education, for instance, or those who cannot have children, or those who are refused recognition of same-sex relationships, with all the hurdles to having a family that can entail. Yet for many in their twenties and thirties, life is an intoxicating landscape of possibility, an unexplored future unfurling in front of us, tossing up all kinds of choices. And along the way we arrive at points that are completely new to us — the career-halting glass ceiling, the compromise of marriage and sometimes divorce, the bringing-up of children — only to realise that the territory has been thoroughly mapped after all. So many women have been there before us, and when we approach we find they have left behind signposts and helpful hints; they point out the bumps in the road and steer us away from crumbling clifftops.

But why is this transaction so resolutely one-way? One of the reasons many of the people I approached acquiesced to my request for an interview was that it was so unusual for them to have the opportunity to talk to someone my age who wasn’t family. In the same manner that drove me, they were driven by a curiosity about ‘the other’. In wondering how it was that women across generations had come to have so little to do with one another, I could clearly see that the women who are now elderly have paved the road for those of us coming behind. They are the big sisters pushing the boundaries, creating more room for us to stretch our wings. Yet listening to them speak, I couldn’t help but wonder: as women are implored to lean in to help a sister out, have we younger feminists completely forgotten older women?

Western feminism has had a long and often antagonistic history with the feminism of women in the developing world. While there are aspects of womanhood that cross cultural boundaries — such as the experience of gender inequality and the bearing of children — the way that these issues manifest in the day-to-day life of individual women can be vastly different. For this reason it is accepted and well recognised that feminism is a broad church: for some women, being a feminist may involve advocating for the right of all young girls to be educated; for others, it may be the instigation of boardroom quotas or corporate mentorships to elevate women into managerial positions.

Feminism made the personal political, and consequently feminism in the developed world is often the bastion of young women and their immediate (and legitimate) concerns. It is understandable that many women feel most comfortable fighting for rights with which they personally identify, rather than speaking on behalf of others — as men have so often spoken for them. In Australia in recent times this has manifested in discourse focused primarily on working-age women: campaigns for equal pay, maternity leave, access to child care and IVF, a recognition of and end to family violence, and freedom from sexual exploitation and gender stereotyping. It is the feminism of educated, articulate women — those who currently have the loudest mouthpiece — but in looking at such a list, one could be forgiven for thinking that after late middle age, women have nothing to worry about.

This impression is heightened by the fact that feminism, like many political movements or harbingers of social change, has embraced the online space. Through the use of the internet, overt sexism is now often hauled into the public eye, and consequently even remedied by corporations and mainstream media outlets who are wary of how quickly their customers can access and act on shared information and outrage. High-profile campaigns become hashtags (#destroythejoint, #yesallwomen, #everydaysexism, #distractinglysexy), and social media is routinely used to call women to action. As it allows the publication and communication of a multitude of opinions (and the opportunity for opinions to be unceremoniously shouted down), the internet is lauded as being inclusive; yet too often we forget that most of the world (almost 60 per cent) do not have an internet connection. While older generations are increasing their use of the internet at a heady pace, in many ways online is still the realm of children, teenagers, and those of working age — people who conduct much of their work and personal life online. When this is coupled with the hunger of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, which relies heavily on the online space to create content by taking stories from blog posts and Twitter interactions, it means that the feminist issues currently given the most media attention are those of younger women.

Just as younger feminists typically remain focused on the issues that most directly affect themselves, most prominent feminists of each generation have contemplated the way gender plays out at particular ages only as they have arrived there. At the age of thirty-nine, Susan Sontag wrote her essay ‘The Double Standard of Aging’, lambasting a society that so values youth and beauty that women become increasingly invisible as they age. Sontag was primarily focused on middle-age and the process of ageing, which she named ‘an ordeal of the imagination — a moral disease, a social pathology — intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men. It is particularly women who experience growing older (everything that comes before one is actually old) with such distaste and shame’. Her focus on middle age was apparent in the way she wrote about old age: to Sontag there was a time when one becomes old, ‘actually old’. Regardless of the many more years that might be lived, Sontag imagined the process, or the defeat, as complete at some point in later life — whereupon any existential angst one feels about their diminishing social recognition is presumably put on permanent hold, along with personal agency, until one reaches death.

Germaine Greer’s The Change: women, ageing, and the menopause, published when she was in her fifties, identified post-menopausal life as offering the opportunity to forge a new self free of the restricting expectations of sexual attractiveness that plague the young. Like Sontag’s essay, Greer’s book doesn’t consider old age, nor does it set out to. It asks women of a certain age to embrace their post-menopausal existence — to use the invisibility bequeathed them to become invisible to themselves, eschewing their appearance and their desire to please in favour of personal growth, identity, and freedom. It was this personal empowerment that many of the women I interviewed spoke of, though they seemed to come to it at a later point in their lives.

The Change was welcomed, just as The Female Eunuch had been in 1970, for calling attention to things long accepted and rarely questioned. In that same year as The Female Eunuch appeared, Simone de Beauvoir published La Vieillesse, which was translated into English in 1972 as Old Age. If de Beauvoir, at the age of sixty-two (which she, and society, considered elderly at the time), hoped her book would do for older people as her 1949 book The Second Sex did for women, she would have been disappointed: while The Second Sex was one of the major catalysts for second-wave feminism, Old Age did not cause a major rethink of collective attitudes to the old — despite age being, like gender, a social construct rather than a biological certainty.

When Betty Friedan published The Fountain of Age and Gloria Steinman wrote Doing Sixty and Seventy, they contributed to a long line of feminists who have theorised on what ageing means to women, disregarding the accepted view of ageing as a decline from which one slips towards death, trumpeting instead a triumphant and fulfilling enterprise to be embarked on with vigour. Theirs are important books, documenting women’s experience of ageing and creating space for discussion. However, it is one thing for women to record their experiences as they age, but where are the women to take up the cause?

We younger women have forgotten our older sisters. In Australia, the majority of older people are women. From retirement age and beyond, women outnumber men to the point where almost two-thirds of people aged over eighty-five are women. Which raises the question: is one of the reasons older people are so often ignored and treated as second-class citizens that they are mainly women? These older women are the very generations that secured us the right to be working mothers, therefore giving us the opportunity to push for paid maternity leave; they fought for no-fault divorce, enabling women to leave abusive marriages; they broke ceiling after ceiling and hauled us up after them. We reap the benefits of their hard work even as we turn away from their current needs. Older women’s voices are rarely heard, let alone listened to, particularly in this internet era where the media beast thrives on a hyperactive call-and-response. This, coupled with feminists who are wary of speaking for others (or unaware of the situations older women face), mean that issues affecting older women are going unreported and unaddressed.

One way of solving this would be to make space for older women to voice their opinions. But more effective, and more true to the spirit of feminism, is for younger women to take up the cause of the generations before them. Resolving the difficulties and indignities faced by older people is the responsibility of all members of society; as such, the needs of older women should be considered by feminists of any age. Not because we will one day be there ourselves, but because our mothers, aunts, sisters, and daughters will be there too, or are already.

For many people, old age will not cause great difficulty — the majority of people will carry on living independently and contributing to society in a variety of ways, including paid work, volunteering, artistic endeavour, and caring for others. But for some people old age will compound a lifetime of difficulties and inequalities, and bring with it a raft of new challenges. Issues such as poverty, lack of opportunity, ill health, homelessness, and mental illness don’t disappear with age — in fact, they often become more impairing, as a lack of income results in fewer opportunities for them to be addressed, as well as an increased likelihood of chronic or age-related illness, which can make day-to-day life more difficult.

In turn, issues that affect young women have both immediate and later consequences for older women too.The right of women to have both a career and a family is now recognised, but is still contentious in practice. It is only since 1979 that women in Australia who have been employed for twelve months or more have been entitled to fifty-two weeks of unpaid leave from their workplace while bringing up a child; however, the negative consequences on an individual’s career of taking an extended period out of the workforce have not yet been remedied. The right to unpaid leave was followed by a change to employment standards in 2010, which included flexible working arrangements, meaning that any employee who is a parent or carer of a child can request a change in their working hours — though there is no guarantee that an employer has to act on the request, and it is well documented that women returning from maternity leave often return to lower-level skilled jobs than they previously held, as employers are more likely to allow junior positions to be part-time or flexible. Government-funded parental leave benefiting men and women was introduced as recently as 2011, though the Turnbull government has already made a proposal to reduce the scheme and ensure no woman can access more than eighteen weeks of paid parental leave. Considering the high cost of living in Australia, many families find it necessary to have two incomes, so staying at home with the children on unpaid leave is not an option for many mothers. This situation is intensified by successive governments’ focus on economic growth: where once women were encouraged to stay in the home, they are now pushed to return to work quickly after having a baby, in order to be productive citizens.

When women return to work, one of the major problems that arises is who looks after the baby. Somehow, childcare has largely become a women’s issue (rather than a parental or societal issue), and as a consequence feminists have taken up the cause. For many families in Australia, childcare is either unavailable or costs more than mothers earn so that returning to work becomes a zero-sum game. The issues of maternity leave and childcare do not only affect working-age women and their families but also, quite significantly, older women. The generations who fought to keep working after marriage and starting a family are the same ones now providing many hours of domestic care so their daughters can stay in the workforce. Many women of my age can only go back to work (and have it make economic sense) if their mother or mother-in-law can look after their children. In Australia, over half of grandparents look after children on a weekly basis; almost a quarter of children aged twelve and under are regularly looked after by their grandparents. No matter how the puzzle pieces are shifted about, it’s so often still a woman left at home holding the baby.

Family violence, most often perpetrated by men against women, is another area to which feminists are currently drawing society’s attention. Rosie Batty became a household name in Australia when her son, Luke, was brutally killed by his father after Batty had left the abusive relationship. Since then, Batty has made numerous public pleas for governments, law enforcement, and society at large to end men’s violence towards women. Subsequently, many women, and men, have taken up this cause, and in 2015 Victoria established a Royal Commission into Family Violence. What is not often recognised is how frequently family violence affects older women. The physical and psychological violence some women experience well into their sixties and seventies can be a continuation of a lifetime of abuse perpetrated by a male partner. Violence can also be introduced as people age, caused by adult children and grandchildren who take advantage of a parent’s increasing vulnerability. For too many years, if elder abuse was recognised at all it was seen as largely involving financial abuse, or the rough-handling that can occur in nursing homes or situations when the older person has become completely dependent. Yet recent awareness-raising of the issue has shown it’s much more closely linked with family violence. In Australia, it is estimated that 2 to 6 per cent of older people experience elder abuse, and more than 90 per cent of this abuse may be caused by a relative, usually a son or daughter. As elder abuse often goes unreported, it is difficult to verify its prevalence; however, figures indicate that, like other forms of family violence, elder abuse is disproportionately experienced by women. Unfortunately, beleaguered women’s services are hard-pressed to serve the younger women and children fleeing abusive partners, let alone provide services for older women, many of whom risk becoming homeless or having age-related illnesses exacerbated by the stress under which they find themselves.

In 2012–2013, the Department of Health received 349 reports of alleged or suspected sexual assault of people in residential aged care. The actual occurrence is likely to be more frequent, as sexual assault is notoriously underreported, and it is not hard to imagine how a frail, elderly woman may find it difficult to report such an incident. Norma’s Project, a study into the sexual assault of older women, found that women who had been assaulted were often very ashamed and did not want to speak up, and it was usually necessary for people to report the incident on their behalf. It was also reported that many of the women felt the fulfillment of a man’s desires was part of their role as a wife; that some who were assaulted by a husband or family member were reluctant to do anything about it because they didn’t want to shatter the family life and perceptions of relationships; and that the women were often in a position of dependence regarding income and accommodation.

As well as reporting on sexual assault within the family, Norma’s Project highlighted the alarming situation of assaults perpetrated by care staff, both in residential-care homes and in their own homes (by community support staff who are employed to assist older people). Interview respondents provided examples of inadequate and sometimes negligent responses to allegations of sexual abuse, with the incidents sometimes being discounted as soon as possible, and hushed up so as not to reflect badly on the business of the facility. Incidents of sexual assault in residential-care homes can also be complicated by dementia. When a person with a cognitive impairment reports that they have been sexually assaulted, they are often thought to be mistaken and confused: something that can make them ideal victims for unconscionable perpetrators. Some staff also assume that if someone with dementia is talking about sexual assault, she must be chronologically confused and referring to an incident from her earlier life. Again, it is the young’s inability to imagine a life for the old in the present, so sure are we that all of their being is in the past.

While acknowledging that at any age men can be victims and women can be perpetrators, the sexual abuse of older women is another example of the gendered experience of ageing, and demonstrates how getting older can put people — particularly women — into positions of vulnerability, with grave consequences.

The pay disparity between genders is also an area that is largely fought on the needs of younger or working-age women, yet it has huge effects for older women. For many women, old age is made all the more difficult because of a lifetime of receiving less income than their male peers. This is compounded by the fact that women tend to live longer than men. That most older people are women doesn’t surprise many, but it’s often seen as little more than an incongruity; ageing is usually considered in gender-neutral terms, as something that happens to everybody. But without question, ageing and old age happens to more women than men, which is all the more reason younger feminists should be taking up the fight in arm with their older sisters.

Sharply dressed, with grey hair cut short and a bright pink jacket set off by geometric blocks of red, blue, and green scrambling about on a silk scarf, Valerie was a no-nonsense woman I warmed to immediately. There was an intensity to her, a crackle in the air around her. I guessed she was a woman who was always busy; she spent the entirety of our conversation absentmindedly smoothing a sheet of paper as though taming it, squaring off its edges with that of the table’s.

Valerie had lived in private rental properties all her life, but when she retired, knowing she would no longer be able to make market-rate rental payments, she moved into public housing in Brisbane. She had no real desire to move back to Melbourne, where she’d had an unhappy childhood, but having been diagnosed with emphysema by the time she was seventy-nine, she found Queensland’s hot and humid climate too much for her lungs.

‘I made some enquiries about public housing in Victoria and I rang the Office of Housing to see what the situation was — and they were very nice and helpful and said there was a seven-year waiting list.’ Valerie paused, giving me a wry smile. ‘I thought, I could be dead by then.’

The Office of Housing put her onto the Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG), who found a community housing option in Surry Hills that might suit. ‘The place wasn’t entirely satisfactory. It was very expensive — it was over fifty per cent of my pension — but I thought, the devil drives when needs must.’

The devil in this case was not only Valerie’s lungs, but also one of her public-housing neighbours in Brisbane, a woman with mental-health issues who was convinced that Valerie was out to kill her.

‘It wasn’t her fault — she had her mental-health problems. But it all got a bit much,’ said Valerie. ‘The police were always attending, but there was nothing they could do even though she was upsetting all the residents.’

I thought of the men and women who stalked up and down my street every day, standing sentry at the tram stop, soliciting the commuters for cigarettes and spare change before retiring to the supported-accommodation complex in a nearby street. One woman, Angie, spends hours most Sundays on the bench below my lounge-room balcony wailing loudly, always at herself and whatever she hears inside her head. Her cries sweep through our apartment; she sounds like she is in a lot of pain, and we watch passers-by try to comfort her to no avail — she does not seem to see or hear them. Sometimes a staff member from her accommodation will come and lead her away. And sometimes I sit there at my desk, turning up the stereo to drown her out and hating myself for ignoring another woman’s pain.

‘Governments don’t want to spend money on people who in their view aren’t worth it,’ said Valerie. ‘It’s like prisoners: they fall off the face of the earth once they go to jail. Anyway, it’s not their fault, the people with mental illness, but you get caught in the middle.’

‘Can I ask why you never bought a house?’ The words sounded rude, accusatory. But there was no way to ask without suggesting that things could have been otherwise. Most people of Valerie’s generation managed to buy a house — that’s what the statistics tell me — so why didn’t she? Almost all older people live at home, rather than in a residential-care facility or other institution, and around three-quarters of those aged over sixty-five own their own home outright, with no mortgage. However, with house prices increasing so rapidly in recent years, these ownership numbers are dropping, and more older people are carrying on a mortgage well into their retirement years. It is becoming more difficult to buy a house, and near impossible to afford the rental market on a pension.

‘I never considered buying a house, mainly because I never had money. I didn’t marry.’ Valerie held my gaze. There was something so capable about her: her direct stare, her slightly gravelly voice. She was taking my measure, and I was determined not to be found wanting. ‘Because equal pay wasn’t in, I frequently had a situation where I was sitting at a job for sixty dollars a week and the young man sitting next to me was getting ninety dollars, simply because he was a man. Now, that was terribly frustrating. But that was before the women’s movement got started again.’

‘Were you involved in the women’s movement?’

‘Yes, I was in the Women’s Electoral Lobby for quite a long time. And the Union of Australian Women — they were really bolshie, I liked them!’ She laughed at the memory. ‘Women had a long struggle for equal pay, and we still haven’t got it. And for equal rights. I battled when I was working. I mean, look at the situation in parliament! How disgraceful in this day and age that Julie Bishop is the only woman we can come up with.’

It was not long after the 2013 election, and Tony Abbott had announced his cabinet would include only one female minister.

‘He seems to think it’s alright because women are knocking at the door.’

‘Well, is he going to open it?’ responded Valerie tartly. ‘He’s very quick to parade the daughters; there’s a sort of hypocrisy there, I feel.’

That Valerie could never afford a house and had to rent all of her life would not be so concerning if Australian laws offered longer leases and more protection for renters, and if private rental was affordable on the pension. As it is, to be a woman and a private renter when you enter your sixties is to risk homelessness, no matter if you’ve held down a job your entire life. Valerie told me about a string of jobs she’d held, always being paid less than the men in the same positions. One time she applied for an administration role in a medical fund and made the shortlist. ‘I was talking to the personnel manager and he said, “You realise of course that this job is for men?” And I said, “Well, it didn’t say that on the ad.” And he said, “No, I deliberately left it off. I wanted to see what kind of women applicants I would get. You are the only woman I am going to appoint, but I’m warning you now that you’re going to have a very hard time. Because when I ran this past the supervisors, to a man” — of course they were all male — “they were against it. So you’re really going to be under one thousand eyes … but I think you have some strengths that will enable you to deal with that.” Well, I convinced him to hire me. I took the job, and I wondered afterwards why he didn’t tell me what those strengths were!’ Valerie laughed, hitting the table. ‘It would have helped immeasurably.’

Despite giving her the job, management refused to pay Valerie the same amount as the men, citing expected uproar from female staff who would be jealous, even though they were doing less-skilled work.

‘The boys I worked with were horrified. They said, “How come you’re not getting the same money as us?” And when I told them, they said they wouldn’t put up with it. But what option did I have? And the female staff resented me, because they thought I was getting the same as the boys. One of them was actually very hostile, and when I called her on it, she said, “I think it’s laughable you’re getting paid more than me.” When I told her I wasn’t, she almost went berserk — “Why not?” she wanted to know. “You should demand it!”’ Valerie tapped the table with her pen. ‘Mighty and mysterious are the wondrous ways of human beings.’

Valerie didn’t have the option for superannuation until she was forty, and even once it was introduced she couldn’t afford it. ‘My entitlements were actually more than my salary. So there was never really an option to save money, let alone the possibility of a house. I reconciled myself to it quite young, that I’d never own my own home.’

On average, women in Australia will retire with just over half of the superannuation of men — and it’s not because they’re choosing to work less or save less. Women are overrepresented in low-paying industries such as care work (health, aged care, education, and social services), and are more likely to be working part-time (usually so they can provide informal care to children or ageing parents). For every dollar earned by a man, an Australian woman earns 82.5 cents. There is also the inescapable fact that many women get paid less than men who have the same experience and qualifications. For example, female architecture graduates are, on average, offered starting salaries 17 per cent lower than male graduates. This gap is mimicked, to a slightly lesser extent, in the areas of dentistry, optometry, law, and business. On average, women retire with $87,532 less super than men, with a recent report suggesting that this difference cannot be simply explained away by the industry segregation of women working in areas that are valued less than those men work in, or by labour-force history, or by underrepresentation of women with qualifications in larger firms. The main reason is direct discrimination or, as the report puts it, ‘simply being a woman’.

In 2013–14, women only held 36 per cent of Australia’s total superannuation savings. In fact, women have half the superannuation savings of their male counterparts in all age groups over thirty-five. Superannuation was only made compulsory in 1992, and prior to that private superannuation schemes were available to some employees, mostly male. By the 1970s, only one-third of employees were covered by superannuation, and the women included in this third were only 16 per cent of the population of working women. Considering that almost two-thirds of those who live over the age of eighty-five are women (and this is set to increase), it is a disturbing disconnect. Superannuation is a scheme designed around men, when it is women who are most likely to need it for a longer period of time. (This disconnect, where a young man is taken as the norm, is also seen in biomedicine — most medications are trialled only on young men, completely disregarding the biological differences this population has to those older women and men who are most likely to be prescribed many of these medications.)

The attitudes to women in work that Valerie was confronting throughout the twentieth century still prevail today. Lest anyone think this discrimination is confined only to traditionally ‘male’ industries, it should be noted that in the areas of healthcare and social services, where women make up 78.3 per cent of the workforce, women are paid only two-thirds of the salary paid to men in this sector. These inequalities are amplified over the course of a lifetime, with devastating effects for women in older age.

‘Is there anything you would have done differently?’ I asked Valerie, after we swapped tales of IKEA misadventure, spurred by her laughing recollection of having to put together her flat-packed furniture herself. ‘Any advice you would give to your younger self?’

‘Not to get involved with a particular man.’ Valerie looked down, lining the piece of paper up with the corner of the table. The self-effacing humour had fled. ‘I didn’t know at the time, but he left me pregnant. I was living in Sydney then, and he came back here to Melbourne, ostensibly on holidays, but in fact he was coming back to be married.’

She looked up at me, raised her eyebrows. ‘I would never have been involved with him if I knew he was engaged. I tried to keep the baby — I had her for three months, but I got sick and had to go to hospital. I got no back-up from my family, the situation was too precarious. I gave her up for adoption. My daughter’s now fifty. She’s got a daughter of her own.’

A few years ago, Valerie made contact with her daughter through the Department of Human Services, but a proposed meeting never went ahead after the Department received a solicitor’s phone call demanding explanations of who Valerie was, who the father was, and how long she had known him.

‘They asked me what the relationship was like, between me and the father. Well, obviously it was fairly close, wasn’t it?’ Valerie shook her head.

She never answered the enquiries, and never made another attempt to contact her daughter.

‘I was in a group in Brisbane for relinquishing mothers — it was called Jigsaw — and I told them I had a granddaughter. I was so excited, and I knew she had red hair. But when I got all those questions, I thought, I just can’t do it. I would have told her everything in due course, but a solicitor? Asking those kinds of questions through a solicitor?’

‘Will you ever make contact again?’ The words ‘before you die’ hung, unsaid, in the air between us.

‘I guess it’s one thing I should do before I depart this life,’ said Valerie. ‘Contact the Department and see if she’s asked after me in all these years. But I think that if she wanted to, she would have kept in touch. It’s a matter of regret, but I accept that.’

Months later when I met Valerie for lunch, she told me that she had recently asked the Department of Human Services whether her daughter had been in touch. She hadn’t, but the file remains open just in case.

Valerie’s story is unique but her situation is not. While Valerie was in paid work her entire life, many women of her generation were not, instead being occupied by unpaid care work. This role as an informal carer often begins when a woman is looking after her own children, and it continues throughout the life course as women look after dependent adult children, grandchildren, ageing parents, and, finally, spouses.

While there are many men who care for their ageing mother or spouse, this is most often a role bestowed upon women, and it is a responsibility that cannot be underestimated. As the book editor Diana Athill noted: ‘When I worry, it is about living with the body’s failures, because experience has shown me that when that ordeal is less hard than it might have been, it is usually because of the presence of a daughter. And I have no daughter.’

In Australia, the aged-care and health industries are underwritten by the unpaid and largely unrecognised work of carers. Husbands and sons, yes, but it is mainly wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, and female friends who are providing assistance to frail older people and those with disabilities or illnesses. Regardless of the relationship between the person providing care and the person being cared for, the burden of caring for another takes its toll. In 2015, it was estimated that carers save the healthcare budget $60.3 billion dollars each year, and they do so with little personal recompense. While a carer allowance and a means-tested carer payment give some financial relief, having to provide around-the-clock assistance and supervision means that many carers give up paid employment entirely, or cut back their hours, often taking a lower-paid and less-skilled position if it offers more flexibility. So while the cost of caring is reflected in lost income (and superannuation), it is also seen in lost career opportunities — people who spend a lot of time looking after others are more likely to miss out on promotions, opportunities to gain experience, and overall career advancement. Caring also costs dearly in terms of social life and other relationships, which can suffer under the increased stress and time pressures.

Even in the paid workforce, most carers of older people are women. In Australia, the aged-care workforce is unlike any other: 90 per cent are women; about a third are born overseas, most in countries where English is not the primary spoken language; and, overall, staff are older than in any other industry. On top of the low value society attaches to older people and their care, each of these factors contribute to the sector’s insultingly low levels of remuneration and poor working environments. Nearly half of the interviewees in a government report on the sector said that poor working conditions, including low pay, understaffing, and time constraints, were the most challenging aspects of the work, and a constant source of stress. But the report goes on to say that these issues are well recognised and researched, so there is no need to discuss them further. Have we given up? The report notes that social and emotional skills, traditionally attributed to women, are valuable as they allow workers to be more effective and efficient. That such skills have to be justified by their efficiency worth sums up the problems encountered by the entire aged-care industry. The provision of care has become a service; the service is to be delivered in the most cost-effective manner. Where is the room for kindness in all of this? To call it ‘care’ is something of a misnomer when it is assessed purely in dollars, a measure whose only relation to kindness occurs when it is being given away. This is a feminist issue because it is women being paid poorly for their labour, and elderly women receiving inadequate care as the staff are under increasing pressure.

The de-skilling of the aged-care workforce is a concern, both for the way it limits staff opportunity for advancement and the way it fails to provide adequate care for older people. Over the last decade, aged-care organisations have steadily been employing relatively fewer nurses and becoming increasingly reliant on less-skilled (cheaper) workers. Personal care attendants, who don’t need any formal training (though most workplaces would ask that they are at least enrolled in a Certificate III of Aged Care), now provide almost 70 per cent of care work, which puts nurses in the clear minority. This move towards employing less-skilled workers is driven by cost, and necessity — it is often hard to get nurses to fill positions in aged care because the pay rates are lower than for other kinds of nursing jobs. It’s an example of how society devalues the care work that women provide, all the more so when the people being cared for are deemed of little worth.

Most organisations that provide training in aged care are focused on profit. To this end, they compete with one another to offer the cheapest, shortest courses in a bid to attract more fee-paying students. While national guidelines indicate that a Certificate III in Aged Care should take one to two years to complete, the majority of training organisations offer it over a period of less than one year, with a third of them taking fewer than fifteen weeks. Being so short, most training programs give the students little or no hands-on experience in the workplace. A recent audit found that even if students were given on-the-job experience, most of them weren’t being properly assessed or observed carrying out their tasks. As they haven’t had enough time and experience for their skills to develop, it is little wonder that when these students graduate and start working, they find the job stressful. This is how the competitive market fails the students, the older people who need care, and those training organisations who are doing the right thing by providing quality extensive (and subsequently more expensive) training but cannot compete with those organisations willing to cut all corners in pursuit of profit.

The care ‘industry’ is devalued because it is seen as being women’s work. People-focused and care-oriented jobs that are seen as requiring ‘feminine skills’ are more poorly paid and regarded as less important than those of more traditionally ‘masculine’ industries. The raising of children and all things domestic are not counted as productive in the way that earning a wage is, and by bringing attention to these issues over the years, feminism has brought about huge changes in societal expectations and assumptions. When it comes to old age, though, contemporary feminism has fallen down. Cynthia Rich was one of the first feminists to really focus on women and ageism:

It is not natural, and it is dangerous, for younger women to be divided by a taboo from old women — to live in our own shaky towers of youth … It is intended, but it is not natural that we be ashamed of, dissociated from, our future selves, sharing men’s loathing for the women we are daily becoming. It is not natural that today … old women are still an absence for younger women.

There is no good reason why — outside of our family — we rarely mix with people from other generations, and whether this is a cause or a result of society’s general apathy towards those who seem distant from ourselves is open to debate. But there are plenty of reasons why younger women should be reaching out to older women and making sure that during old age women are not forced to give up hard-won ground: at such a time in their lives, these sisters shouldn’t have to be doing it for themselves.