wimmins lib?

Over the years we have seen the social standing of women in society changing. at the end of the 19th century we had women not being able to vote, hold office, divorce her husband on the same grounds that he could her and many many more inequalities. Those was clearly wrong and had to be address and from the suffragettes to the female eunuch we saw many movements to bring about this change*.

This change of law and society in general could not come about without a change in attitude. The days of women being seen as the weaker sex had to go. This in theory is a good thing but had some strange side effects that no-one could have predicted.

If we are to achieve full equality we must accept that there are no such things as "mans job" "women's role" etc. There must be nothing out of bounds for either sex. The 2012 Olympics will be the first to feature women's boxing, only a hundred years after women were first banned from running the marathon on the grounds that "their wombs might fall out" and other such nonsense. Indeed, women were banned right up until 1984!

When we look at the idea that there should be no activities that should be considered "male domain" or "not something a woman should do" we need to look at all activities, even the bad ones. In the late '90's we saw a rise of what was called laddette culture, personified by girls like DJ's Zoe Ball and Sara Cox. these were girls who would going clubbing, get drunk and behave like any normal bloke would on a Saturday night including getting argumentative, eating kebabs, random hook ups etc.

This was a sign that we had crossed the point at which women stopped wanting to "men" things because they were previously told they couldn't because of their gender and were now wanting to them simply because they wanted to do them. While this seems a very very minor semantically point it is actually an earth shatteringly important part of our cultural history. It meant that we now had the first generation of women that did not understand, let alone follow, this idea that as a woman, they had a set list of rules by which to live by that was different from the men.

In my own life this has manifested itself in my wife leaving me with the kids and my sister leaving my brother-in-law in the same way. It seems anyone over the age of 45 see's this as very strange that a woman would leave her children to go back to the single life and yet they are perfectly accepting of a man doing it. Those under 45 on the whole see this a couple splitting up and the kids, for the sake of a stable environment stays with ONE of the parents and doesn't see any problem in it being a man (except that its quite rare)

I wonder if Mary Shelly Wollstonecraft would have done anything different if she had known that the movement she started all those years ago would have lead to this?

I don't think so and I would have to agree with her. After all, life is not a Disney movie full of happy endings.