Tuesday 13 May 2014

Abortion - not in Texas and not in Northern Ireland

I read the recent ruling that women from Northern Ireland will not be allowed to come to England to have abortions. And I know from friends who live there that abortions are not legal any more in Texas and that there are very few women doctors.
Then we have the two hundred abducted schoolgirls and on and on and on. Germaine Greer famously said that women have no idea how much men hate them.
I read something yesterday that women now have a saying  'You can't live with men … oh, well, there it ends.'
No wonder really. The married women's property act is not so very old. It makes me tired to think how badly women have been treated by men always.
Yesterday on Radio 4 - I can't remember the woman's name, forgive me, I was hurtling up the M6 at the time - anyway, she decided to get married and only then saw that her father's name and profession would be on the marriage certificate and not her mother's. So if she can change this she will marry her boyfriend.
And it occurred to me that I still don't understand why women marry now. If I was young now or asked to marry I would refuse. There is no benefit in marriage for women. Why bother?  You give up your freedom, you end up looking for your husband's socks, he has stupid hobbies like watching football or cleaning out his pigeon cree - no, actually I like pigeons so I would probably be up there with him, waiting for my favourite pigeon to come back from wherever he'd gone to. Dear God.
My mother put three hot meals on the table every single day. She washed floors at ten o'clock at night and this was a woman who 'married well'. Dear God, meals and bloody floors. She had to marry well, she had no option, she lived in a backwater, she had no qualifications. She was very good looking.
Would she marry now?  I don't think she would. I think she would have the poultry farm she always longed for, no honestly she did and not spend her life bringing up her feckless children and putting plain food on the table because her husband did not like anything else.
She had no money to call her own for thirty years. At best we are loved, at worst we are taken for granted and that's here, not in some dreadful place where we can't show our faces.
I think that the only way for women to live now is to have their financial independence, to decide what they will and will not do. And please, let's be honest, all those gorgeous little people, they grow up into obnoxious adults and make you wonder why you bothered.
So I haven't put the argument well or if at all here. The only thing I know is that nothing would induce me to live in Northern Ireland - where one politician said 'we look after our women here' - excuse me while I throw up, or Texas where apparently the state does not allow women say over their own bodies.Women are adults, they are as intelligent as men and there is very little they cannot do but for some reason even though you can now kill other people in the armed forces there are lots of places where you are not allowed the freedom of your own mind and that is always inexcusable.
So remember girls you need education and a job first and always because if you have your own bank account the world is yours.

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