Politics & Power Quote by Helen Garner

Nostalgia is doing a lot of work here, and Garner lets you feel it before she pulls the floorboard up. The opening frames the 1970s as a political weather system: "seething", newly electrified by a Labour government, saturated with the kind of collective hope that makes private lives feel historically significant. It’s the memory of a moment when progress seemed not just possible but imminent, when activism offered a clean story about villains and victims.

Then comes the turn: age, observation, disappointment. The phrase "how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong" is the charged pivot, not because it’s a simple betrayal of feminism but because it signals Garner’s signature refusal to keep moral categories tidy. Subtext: liberation movements can harden into comforting scripts, and those scripts can fail to describe what actually happens in rooms, relationships, and choices. She’s interested in complicity, mess, and the uncomfortable fact that agency doesn’t always look like empowerment.

Context matters. Garner emerged as a major Australian voice in the wake of second-wave feminism and later became a lightning rod for writing that refused the movement’s expected solidarity, especially around sex, violence, and personal responsibility. This sentence contains that lifelong argument in miniature: political hope colliding with intimate evidence, the social project complicated by the stubbornness of human behavior.

The trailing "we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as" is a rhetorical cliffhanger that hints at the lost word: victims. Garner’s intent is to puncture the comfort of purity and replace it with something harder to market but closer to lived experience: accountability without cynicism, feminism without self-flattery.