Caroline Bird (American author)

Caroline Bird (April 15, 1915-January 11, 2011) was an American author and feminist.

She became the youngest member of the Vassar College class of 1935 at age sixteen, but left after her junior year to marry; she later earned a B.A. at the University of Toledo and an M.A. in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin. She married Edward A. Menuez in 1934 (divorced in 1945); married J. Thomas Mahoney in 1957 (died 1981).

Her books include The Invisible Scar (1966), Everything a Women Needs to Know to Get Paid What She’s Worth (1973), Case Against College (1975), The Crowding Syndrome: Learning to Live With Too Much and Too Many (1976), Enterprising Women (1976), What Women Want (1979), The Two-Paycheck Marriage (1979), Second Careers (1992), and Lives of Our Own (1995). Her book The Invisible Scar, about the Great Depression, was named by the American Library Association as one of the 100 most significant books of the year.

Caroline’s 1968 book, Born Female: the High Cost of Keeping Women Down, grew out of an article on discrimination against women in business that was rejected by The Saturday Evening Post. Years later when Sofia Montenegro, an award winning Nicaraguan journalist and prominent feminist activist, was asked how she became a revolutionary, she said that she would never forget the book that had changed her life; she was 16 years old when she read Born Female.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time the term "sexism" appeared in print was in Bird's speech "On Being Born Female", which was delivered before the Episcopal Church Executive Council in Greenwich, Connecticut, and subsequently published on November 15, 1968, in Vital Speeches of the Day (p. 6). In this speech she said in part, "There is recognition abroad that we are in many ways a sexist country. Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn't matter. Sexism is intended to rhyme with racism. Women are sexists as often as men."

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