Newly separated at 31, I felt like a failure. Anne gave me a new perspective

I started my undergraduate degree the same year my youngest child started kindergarten. I was 31 and considered myself a bit of a failure. I was a newly separated casual worker with no savings or assets, and had just moved into a share house, away from my children. I had a second-hand double mattress, three crates of books and a lot of guilt.

But I had a few good friends, and one of them was Anne.

“As a white Australian girl, I was told that I could be and do anything: the only thing stopping me was my imagination. But how could I imagine something I couldn’t see?”Credit: Stocksy

I’d met Anne years earlier, across the counter at Dymocks in Wollongong. She was one of our regulars and would come in to buy the new releases, smuggling them home in her shopping bag beneath the bananas so her husband wouldn’t tease her about her book addiction. She’d bring me the reviews from the newspapers and, naturally, we’d get talking about books. We started meeting for coffee every Friday before my shift and it didn’t take long for our talk to get beyond books.

Over scones, we talked about love, sex, marriage, motherhood, how to make a meaningful life. Most of the time, we didn’t (and still don’t) notice the 40-year difference in our ages. We’ve been friends for more than 10 years now. She gets me. She supported me through my divorce, comforted me through my separation from my children, counselled me on dating dramas and was my cheerleader through seven years of study. To her, I was just coming into my own. I wasn’t a failure, or even a late bloomer: I was just doing things in my own time.

Our intergenerational friendship means Anne has a lot of life lessons at the ready. But though we’re similar in many ways, the worlds we grew up in are completely different.

Anne grew up in a working-class family in Werris Creek, in rural NSW, before moving to the Wollongong suburb of Corrimal in the 1950s. Her father was a fitter and turner, and her mother was a homemaker.

Our intergenerational friendship means Anne has a lot of life lessons at the ready. But though we’re similar in many ways, the worlds we grew up in are completely different.

EMMA DARRAGH

At school, Anne was a good student. “Most students left in year 10,” she tells me. But, despite having no particular aspirations, Anne stayed on to complete the Leaving Certificate. “The only jobs women did were teaching, nursing, working in a shop or an office, or hairdressing,” she says. Working-class girls, outside the metropolitan areas, weren’t really encouraged to pursue education or a profession when Anne finished high school in 1960.

So, Anne worked several jobs before ending up at Australian Iron and Steel in the Port Kembla Steelworks. She’d been a statistician there for a year when, in 1964, she had to resign at the age of 21 because she got married. “None of the married women I knew worked outside the home,” she says.

In the early 1970s, Anne could sense that things were starting to change for women. She’d always been an avid reader, but toddler-wrangling with her young son didn’t leave much time or money for books.

Without a driver’s licence or adequate public transport, she didn’t have regular access to the library. So she bought magazines. American magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, Psychology Today and New Woman. In Ms. magazine she read about Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Part of her wondered if there was some other kind of life she could live.

When her marriage broke up, Gough Whitlam had just introduced the Single Mothers Benefit, but it was a struggle to make ends meet. Anne eventually started a new relationship with another divorcee she met on the dance floor of the Corrimal Leagues Club. But she wasn’t financially independent and didn’t have a qualification. And with no childcare services in her area, she couldn’t go and get one.

Anne remarried but was unsettled and felt her life was missing something. In the 1980s, she found herself at GROW, a peer-support group for mental health. A woman there told Anne that she should be going to university.

So, in 1983, at the age of 40, Anne enrolled at the University of Wollongong. But, like her attempts to hold down steady work, she had to withdraw: public transport still wasn’t reliable or widespread and she had to be home for her son after school.

Anne gets emotional when she talks about her thwarted attempts to continue her education. It is perhaps her biggest regret. Since becoming her friend, I have finished my PhD and published my first book. I no longer work at Dymocks, but as a sessional academic at the University of Wollongong. I enjoy much more agency and autonomy than Anne did at my age.

But even though I’m happy doing things in my own time, I still feel like a bit of a late bloomer. I’ve worked in childcare, admin and retail and, even with a PhD, I’m still casually employed in an industry where insecure work disproportionately affects women.

Still, I do feel lucky. I think about how different our girlhoods were, and how different my daughter’s is from mine. At 17, Bell is on the location tracking app Life 360 and knows where her friends are all the time. She’s acutely aware of climate change and is, of course, on TikTok and Instagram daily. I worry about the damaging messages she’s consuming on social media – I know how bad they make me feel, and I’m old enough and wise enough to know how the game works.

I often find myself nostalgic for my own comparatively low-tech childhood. We flicked through magazines, rented videos, and the TV was there if we wanted to watch it. We were not immersed, inundated, always on. We loved Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford and Baywatch. Most of us had never heard of the Riot Grrrl movement. Besides, it could never compete with the cultural phenomenon of the Spice Girls’ Girl Power.

Unlike Anne, though, I was encouraged to imagine a career for myself. As a white Australian girl, I was told that I could be and do anything: the only thing stopping me was my imagination. But how could I imagine something I couldn’t see?

While I had more opportunities than the women of Anne’s generation, the seemingly insulated innocence of my suburban childhood meant there was a dearth of female role models: if women other than Pamela Anderson were doing great things in the world, I was unaware of it. Besides the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, women’s sport was rarely, if ever, televised. Julia Gillard did not become Australia’s first female prime minister until 2010, when I was 27.

Sure, opportunities existed for girls of my generation, but for many of us the dominant narratives of popular culture limited our aspirations and rewarded our subscription to traditional gender norms, conventional heterosexuality, and the hegemonic beauty standards that demanded we take up as little space as possible. We were supposed to be hungry and beautiful.

Twenty-first-century Australian teenagers are still subjected to a culture that glorifies the nuclear family and objectifies women through unrealistic beauty standards, but they also have instant access to alternative ideas and representations. Although our globalised digital culture poses many problems, it also expands our sense of who and what we can be.

I suppose this is what Anne was looking for when she bought American magazines in the 1970s. Not just new fashions and new ideas but other ways to imagine herself. Other ways to be in the world.

All these years later, Anne survives on the pension. Her son lives far away. She has no assets or superannuation. “I was told by several people that I write with ‘remarkable clarity’,” she says, reminiscing about her university days.

And it’s true, she does. Over the years, Anne would slide her notebook across our cafe table for me to read. “I would like to have been a journalist or to work in the print media in some way,” she says. “A ballroom-dancing journalist. It’s awful to reach a certain age and to think, ‘Well, that’s it, finished.’”

One thing Anne missed out on was having that sense of identity a profession can provide: “Sometimes you don’t know what you want to be until you have been.”

I recently moved to Sydney with my partner. Anne and I still speak regularly, but after the death of her husband in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic, her world has shrunk. Sometimes I am the only person she’ll speak to in a day. I wonder how many other women of Anne’s generation are out there, with so many stories inside them but nobody to tell them to, women who lived the timeline the rest of us are grateful to have avoided.

Every International Women’s Day offers us the opportunity to reflect on the history of women’s rights. We reflect on how far women have come and acknowledge that we still have further to go. But even as we look ahead, we shouldn’t forget those who lived through the past, and at the ways their lives map onto ours.

It’s not just about learning from history: women like Anne are still with us, surviving without the security of superannuation and dealing with the heartbreak of wasted potential, of roads not taken. It’s time we started seeking out their stories.

Thanks for Having Me (Allen & Unwin) by Emma Darragh, is out now.

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