Back in the 1970s, women got liberated. They became free to have children and work, have careers and generally hone their skills at multi-tasking. I was one of those young Mums. I got up at 5 am, did the washing, pegged it out, vacuumed and then woke the family. Cooked breakfast, ensured that everyone was showered, dressed and fed. I then drove the kids to school, went to a very challenging job, came home, cooked dinner, collapsed into bed and faced the ex telling me that he couldn’t understand why I was no longer fun in bed.
Fun in bed? Hell, I had put in 16 hour day and was buggered. All I wanted to do was curl up and sleep.
The liberation, to me, was actually a prison. I felt that I was too tired, after working and being a mother to be a wife. Hell, I had no time to be me.
Decades ago, people didn’t have time to get stressed. I once read an article written by a woman who had 7 kids back in the ’50s. She said, “Stress? I didn’t have time to get stressed. I was too busy with life to get stressed.”
The 1970’s Women’s Liberation Movement was a con job, and we fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Instead of one job, I got two. Instead of doing one job well, I did two jobs adequately. I was running on empty, all of the time.
By the 1980s, my parents had moved in across the road from us, and they took up the slack. They picked the kids up, got the girls to bring in the washing, helped to prepare the meals and take the load off me. I could work later into the evening and stagger in at 10pm, knowing that the house was under the Grandparent Rule.
Now, in 2019, my daughters are the liberated women who declare themselves feminists. They are liberated and both highly qualified in their fields. They earn good money and they have kids.
Yet they, unlike me, do not get up at 5am to do the chores and wake the family. They have cleaners who do the housework. They buy prepared food – a pizza or similar and call for everyone to “dig in”.
The dining room table is no longer “set”. The washing is no longer pegged on the line. The Sunday Roast is something eaten at Christmas and on special occasions – and normally at Grandma’s place.
They think nothing of paying $7 a pop for “take out” coffee, and the world is going to end in 2030 unless we vote Green, but off they chug to work in their 4WD 6 cylinder gas guzzlers; they jet around the country burning Lord knows how many carbon credits or whatever they are called these days…. and then they tell me that I am out of touch with reality.
They vote Green and believe that all refugees deserve to be here and they seem blissfully unaware that they are working their guts out to support these refugees, to the detriment of their own family.
My philosophy has always been Equality. If they want to donate their money to ‘refugees’ instead of the wellbeing of their own family unit, that is their choice.
But I wonder.
I wonder why two women brought up in a conservative home are so very left leaning? Was it their education? They went to a school that, back in the 80’s, taught them about FGM… enlightened nuns, to be sure.
Was it the universities they attended? Was it that the world has embraced social media, and those of us who visit Whaleoil are smaller in number than those who are addicted to texting, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter?
Yet even that does not make sense… Trump won the USA on social media.
No, I somehow think that it comes down to the fact that they are from a generation that is too far removed from the trauma of Vietnam, the horror of WW2, and the ramifications of war in general.
War was on TV – the Gulf War was streamed and, as missiles soared in the sky and Stormin’ Norman spoke, it was surreal.
My offspring have never known war. It has only ever been a thing on TV. Like 9/11.
They have never known war. I have, through my parents. Maybe what we need is a war so that these folk can get a reality check?
After all, we have two generations who have never known the horror of the reality of actually confronting the consequences of inaction.
Complacency is a very dangerous path. And women could make the difference – if only they could get back to being women and not feminists.