Woman's Plight

Continuing on yesterday’s discussion, women are between a rock and a hard place and I for one do not have a solution.  I was raised to believe that a woman should aspire to a higher education and take on a career if she had the mind to do so.  My father was a real advocate for women being as capable of a profession such as medicine, law or engineering as men.  Reflecting back on that time, the 60’s, I wonder at my father because there were virtually no women in our neighbourhood who worked.  When I was growing up all the mothers on our street, or in the outlying neighbourhood were home.  I should know since I was pretty much everywhere in those days, playing with all the kids and since there were kids in every home but one on our street and if I wasn’t friends with them one of my siblings was I was in a position to know the mothers.  I’d see the mothers hanging out the laundry in the back yard because in those days there were no fences or hedges separating the yards.  In those days there was a breadman who delivered bread and twinkies and a milkman who delivered every dairy product because the family only had one car and as the mother was home she could take in the milk after it was delivered.  My mother had a running account that she paid every Monday (it hardly seemed like credit, that was just the honesty of the day).  My mother baked at least once a week, bread, cake, pies or cookies as did the other mothers in the neighbourhood.  I had never heard of a store bought birthday cake until I was a teenager.

       In that environment of complete homemaking I marvel that I was raised to consider a professional career.  Consequently I cannot fault women for wanting a higher education but it then becomes a double edged sword when she wants to marry and have a family.  How do you keep a career going and yet have the same lifestyle as your mother?  The truth is that you cannot.  No matter how good your intentions may be you simply cannot be in two places at once.  When a woman gets her college or university degree there is an invisible tag that goes with it which obligates a woman to put it to working use.  Rare was the woman in our class who felt that she could just marry and stay home.  In the 1970’s women went out to work whether they were high school or university graduates and they stayed working after they married and after they had children.  How or why that became the norm I cannot say with certain but that was definitely the new trend.  We were liberated.

       Somehow women have made it work but at what cost?  Forget about the toll on family life, on credit overruns and let’s just consider woman’s psyche.  It seems to me as I look around at my friends and colleagues that we are becoming more and more loaded down with duties as the years go by.  These duties are not any different from those of our mothers or grandmothers with the difference being that on top of these obligations we continue to work.  How much more can we carry?  Is it any wonder that women are now suffering heart disease as never before and despite advancements in medical knowledge?

       What do I mean by duties?  Adult children are still requiring attention in ever increasing numbers.  My generation of children went out to work at 18 and few were ever financially under our parents’ care again.  Today, according to Dr. Phil, there is a whole generation of boomrang kids who come back and forth to live under their parents’ roof for any number of reasons.  As well, while my generation for the most part paid for their own university education we are under the illusion that we are obliged to pay for our children’s education.  On top of that we are also now termed the sandwich generation because we are caring for our elderly parents since the country has gone so awry that the system hasn’t enough tax dollars to create affordable senior complexes or provide the medical care they ought to have.  Grandchildren are now part of the family and we become built in babysitters as well as feeling it is imperative to spoil them with lavish gifts.  Besides family obligations we also feel the need to do something for our community so we volunteer time to worthy causes.  Where does it stop?

       If women even have time to stop and ponder what is happening to them they look longingly back at their mothers’ lives and wonder why they cannot have that more leisurely pace of life.  All the lost moments when they might have been playing house with their kids, making doll clothes or wooden swords wrapped in tinfoil, taking them to the park to play on swings, slides and in sandboxes.  Baking a pie for after dinner coffee with the neighbours, neighbours who you hardly know because everyone leaves before daybreak and comes home after dark.  That world is gone now but we have our careers.  Was it worth it?