The cost of women’s liberation

Now due to this feedback mechanism, two incomes are needed to buy a house. This is because the price of real estate depends entirely on how much money is looking for real estate. As the relative number of two-income families increased, then so did the cost of a house. And, as the value of real estate climbed, then so did rents to justify the amount of capital tied up.

In this monster creation of our own short-sightedness are trapped hundreds of thousands of working parents who would prefer a life which could be fully supported by one income as their grandparents had. The woman in unskilled or semi-skilled work simply has a job. In this prison without the bars, there is no delusion of fulfillment for her. If nothing is more priceless than the limited amount of time you have on this planet, then those married women in mundane jobs have been pushed by the new social order into selling something which is priceless.

Of course, the mother alone at home with infants is not liberated - and she feels it. But how worse is the feeling when the time with the children is traded for time on an assembly line or serving on tables.

Sustained by delusions.

Many working women claim that, besides the money, they need the social contact a job provides. But, my mother did not need a job to socialise. The neighbourhood provided the company as no married woman in the street had a job. The economy in her day placed no pressure on the average woman to ever have a job after marriage. Today, even mothers with infant children are in the workforce.

Those women in skilled work claim they need the intellectual stimulus. They overlook the fact that the internet and advances in printing technology have hugely enhanced the opportunity for learning for its own sake. There are now a vast number of courses one can enroll in. As technology made cooking and cleaning easier, as facilities such as gymnasiums and council pools increased in number, as any drudge of being always at home could be relieved by day care centres, the liberation of women should mean having more time for enjoyable activities. The direction women’s liberation has taken is not away from stress - but towards more of it.

Ambitious women wanted to become part of the man’s world - and now they are in it - only to discover that business is the spending of 50 to 80 hours a week meeting the demands of other people, and a good day in a profession is not a day of creativity, but a day when nothing went wrong.

To be able to live with this outcome, the delusion of personal fulfillment has to be maintained - as does the delusion that the high income is necessary to live a fulfilling life. I have been retired since April 1988. I know exactly what real liberation feels like. You are not liberated until you have complete control over your own time.

Men and women have different brain cell networks interacting with different hormones.

Our grandmothers were stuck with the men they married because that was the way society was structured. Now, most women are able to escape the men they do not want. However, the quest for independence was not the main thrust of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. The main thrust was that the traditional roles of men and women should now merge to become the one.

But, the ancient neural networks and endocrine systems were still there - and they say that men and women must have different roles to play. It would seem that to deny the biology is to generate expectations which cannot be fulfilled.

In management positions, the playing of power games is almost unavoidable. As so many women are now in these positions, the traditional male image of themselves as the providers and protectors of the basis of the love and softness in humanity is fading. Putting women in the front line of policing and the military is pushing that image towards vanishing point.