I remember the battle cry of the 1960’s, “Women are equal to men!”
And to prove it, we abandoned our homes and children and we went to work.
But I had a friend once who made another choice. She was married to a very traditional man, and she assumed the traditional role of woman as wife, mother, and homemaker.
They were preparing to leave for an overseas trip one day, and I stopped by to see them off. She stood at the door, all the suitcases were lined up, her husband and his friends were discussing arrangements, and I turned to her and asked, “Who’s driving you to the airport?”
“Oh, I have no idea, she said. I let the men work those things out.”
Inside my own head I was thinking, “What?” I had never heard of such a thing — let the men work things out?
You see, I was raised by a feminist.
I was raised to believe that a woman could do anything a man could do, and we would do it just to prove it.
For example, when I was 17 and tried to replace the brakes on my baby blue Karmann Ghia. I had taken auto shop in high school, and I knew exactly what to do.
I bought all the parts, I had the directions written down, I jacked my car up, but I was too weak to get the lug bolts off.
There are some things men will always be naturally better at than women.
Brake jobs are one of them.
My friend was a trained surgeon, but she chose not to work for the sake of her family. She knew that she wouldn’t have the time to work and provide a home with a heart.
And she reasoned that the integrity and preservation of her family were more important than her job.
I didn’t understand her choice at the time, but I understood it later.
Tragically, my friend died young while her last child was only six. I think of her often and the choices she made. Had she continued being a surgeon, the time her children had with her would have been even less.
So where has feminism really gotten us today? The divorce rate is at fifty percent. Children come home to empty houses, and women now have two jobs instead of one.
While there is nothing wrong with a women working, there is something wrong with a society that promotes women as equal to men and devalues a mother‘s presence in the lives of her children.
We are not equal to men and we have a country of disgruntled children to prove it.
