'A Woman’s Place\r'

'â€Å"A char charwo patchs gravel is in the station. ” This is a real old look, and has today I speculate come to mean some liaison very(prenominal) specific. When pack use this expression today, it is usu ever soyy in ridicule of some iodine else, and suggesting that they go very old-fashi atomic repress 53d and reprehensible touch fighters. The nonion is that pack who actu on the wholey turn everyplace that the axiom is true, believe that all wo manpower should be passd to perplex in their stands, and non go come out(a) to field, or pick up c beers, and that they should busy and confine themselves with tidying up and decorating the abode, to leave it a attractive place to be for their husbands who impart appreciate this.On top of this, they must do the cookery and washing. If this is what the saying means, and thence I dissent with it. The saying refers to a very braggart(a) and complicated topic: that of populates roles in federation, and if I were forced to state that I whatsoever reserved or disagreed with the statement, then which invariably settle I gave would be a step-down so dandy that it would be untrue. However, I whitethorn surprise you by stating that I am more than in contract with the statement than against it. The standard modern font-day belief seems to be that the saying is wrong. Modern large number also seem to believe that those who agree with the saying consent old-fashioned views.Actually, I depend that there is a admiration between modernity and older ship set upal on this issue. The notion that a wo bit must wedge at home and shoot no occupation, and instead drive a adequate nest is a modern one, not an old one. forward the industrial revolution, and right back to the blow up of farm, the home was not as it is straighta flair. there were no incidentories. Clothing for everyone was make in homes. There were no machines for spinning yarn, no automatic looms, no huge forgeplaces employing hundreds of hatful dyeing and sewing cloth. Instead, there was what we flat call â€Å"cottage indus pass judgment”.A regions cheeses were made in the homes of the locals. A woman who was sound at making cheese or sewing could earn currency this course, and she would depart at home. There was no river basin between the home and range. There were no office blocks, throng did not commute, and no one was stopping women from working by confining them to their homes. Similarly, the modern home, in which a couple might live, is a modern thing. Homes until very recently were places where many plurality lived. Rich the great unwashed had servants, and poor people had extended families, lodgers, and withalk on the labor movement of expression afterward severally others minorren.Homes were not lone(prenominal) prisons as they whoremaster be for the modern homewife. The idea that the home is a nice place to stay in and be proud of, and spend ca pital on, is also quite modern, and of great convenience to the different DIY chains close to today. Some great houses of the very wealthy were show-pieces, and employ for entertaining, only for the common man, the house was a place where the roof kept his bed and place dry, and the floor was made of earth, and one means was a pig pen, and another was for weaving. My quality is that people should act in any(prenominal) way is nigh similarly to make them quick.Coercion tends to prevent happiness, and drop by the waysidedom tends to promote it. I do not commend that a womans place should be forced on her, I think that women should be free. I also think that if they were truly free to pick the path that would for them lead to the superior contentment, that many more of them would end up not going out to work. The hold situation in modern Britain strikes me as inconvenient for the fostering of happiness. Whereas formerly a man could with a simple stock wear himself and his wife and family in a home, today more or less couples rise that both(prenominal) of them be consecrate to work full meter to reach a decent house.How batch this be a good thing? Do women go out to work at the check-out counter of a supermarket because they rage it? No, I suggest that they do this because they think that they need the bills. Would it not be arise around that they did not look at to do this? If they were free, would they not prefer something else? House prices rise and hail dramatically. In recent times in Britain, they buzz off risen very sharply. They ca-ca been subject to a inflationary force peculiar to themselves.In a given atomic number 18a, there ar only so many houses. If everyone buys a house there for ?10,000, and each home is paid for by one persons compensation, then maybe this situation could breathe stcapable, or just follow the widely distri exclusivelyed pattern for inflation. But if later a couple, both of whom be working, buys one house for ?12,000, then the next person in the argona selling his house forget know that it is possible to get ?12,000 for it, and so exit instruct his estate gene to get this get along for him. Soon, all the houses bring â€Å"worth” ?12,000, and the cycle repeats, with the prices going ever upward until after a plot of land the only way to afford a house there is to pay for it with the net profits of two jobs, and all the women have to work. be the people of that bea now deeper? be they happier?Some of them might be, plainly for most the situation is that they do not have much or any more spending money, merely instead money tied up in the aforesaid(prenominal) homes as before that today make up more, and now the women are all working, which makes everything difficult. truly a couple of(prenominal) of the women will work at home, so the house will be empty most of the time. The thing itself that all this is for †the house †gets enjoyed l ess not more. childcare becomes a huge problem.Many women will find themselves chasing their tails, trying to earn more so that they can afford to pay for child carers that they need because they are at work trying to get adequacy money to pay for childcare. tribe who argue against a womans place universe in the home are often well-educated people who sign great inte slumber in their careers. It should be remembered though that most women are not highly career-oriented, educated and intelligent. working(a) the till at a supermarket is not a career, it is a job. Whereas an educated woman might get great terminus from working as a animate in a hospital, I do doubt that this is why many women use up to scan in tins of baked beans for a living. Half of births are potent. This is unlikely to heighten in the foreseeable future.There are areas in Britain where the traditional virile jobs have disappeared. Mines and blade works have closed, the force is now very small, and m achines have taken over the jobs of many men in what few shipyards and car factories are left. Nevertheless, men dumb seek these sorts of job. Most new jobs are taken up by women. In many places, this leads to a great amount of male unemployment, and a discontented underclass of unemployed males is not good for a stable and peaceful society. Would it not be mend to have those men doing something utilitarian that gave them self- wonder and purpose? clasp have spring upd instincts that make them do things for women. They may not endlessly realise that what they do is for women. instead often, they may feel that the reverse is true. manpower drive recklessly. This is not good for society. growth has favoured men who take risks and show off, however, because in the past these men passed on the most genes. Today, selfish men drive in like manner fast and endanger us all, but the drive in them that makes them do this comes from the fact that women of the distant past were impress ed by skill and daring. Today, men get a kick out of being able to support women.They also get a hefty kick in the trustingness and self respect if they cannot do this. It is usually remarked that men do not like to marry women who earn more than they do. purchase order at large does not respect the kept-man. Given that this stems from deeprooted instinct, it is incredibly unlikely that this will change in the near future. We could try and educate people to respect kept-men, and kept-men to be happy being kept, but this would be going against the whit of human nature. sure it is much conk out to go with the grain of human nature.This way, rather than having a state that can tolerate the situation, you will have a population that will be happy. This may strike you as a ridiculous opinion, and an entirely subjective conclusion, but I must point out that there is a fundamental divagation between the two states of being. In one, you have people who know that they ought to believ e a certain thing because they have been told to, and who perhaps (though probably imperfectly) go along with this. With the other, you have a population that gets an endorphin rush from what it does.In our ancestral past, people did not have to ingurgitate in forms. They did have to copulate in order to pass on genes. Consequently, we did not evolve to get a pictorial mental high from form-filling, but we did evolve to get something of a pleasant sensation from copulation. Today, we have to fill in forms, but no amount of education can make formfilling fun, because our brains simply do not have a mechanism for releasing pleasure chemicals for form-filling. Our brains do, however, have very powerfully hard-wired mechanism for rewarding sex.By the same system of logic you cannot educate men to be happy about being kept or women to be happy working in an office while a funny looks after her kids. You can, of course, find exceptions. Somewhere, there is a happy kept-man, and a wo man for whom photocopying forms is a continuous source of joy. I am writing about the great major(ip)ity of people. One thing about the saying â€Å"a womans place is in the home” is that people find it belittling. To them it suggests that women are lesser things, not clever enough to do anything more than dust and cook. There is zilch in the statement that says this.If another saying were â€Å"a mans place is in the army”, or â€Å"a mans place is in the factory”, would people similarly think this an insult to the intelligence of men? I think not. There is nothing essential to the saying â€Å"a womans place is in the home” that means that women are stupid. That tie comes from the history of ideas †from old arguments that have been used to suggest that women are inferior. Let us forget them. An awful lot of work has been done on human intelligence, and one consistent result is that the average man and average woman are of enough overall intelli gence.Success these days is rated in male terms, it seems. To become high rank in an organisation is high status and good, and to be applauded. To earn lots of money is spectacular too. To be high-profile, assertive, and otherwise masculine receives kudos and to be domestic and content is seen to be contrary to this. It is a great outrage that women seem to see success in the same terms. To be self-respecting, they now are made to feel that they have to advance as men. That they usually find that they are not as good as men at being male they often put down to mischief and unfairness in society.If the only way they can succeed is at being male, and they are competing against men, then they will perpetually lose. Similarly, men competing in a egg-producing(prenominal) world will always lose. Indeed, society is biased that way too, as any man who has tried to get custody of his children after a divorce will tell you. If women will always lose, then they are likely to end up dis content. Surely it would be better to go with the grain of human nature, and offer them a feminine form of success. We live in a money-driven frugality. To eat, most people have to buy food from shops. Mothers need money to raise children.For the representative woman, there are two ways of getting it: from a man, or by earning it herself. Clearly the better of the two is from a man. You may be shocked to read this, but I really do mean it. If a woman can delegate the task of getting money to psyche else, and by this method end up with the money she needs, then this is sure enough easier and better for her than having to maintain the simultaneous tasks of bringing up children and working. People may admire working returns, and say, â€Å"how ever do you manage it? ” but I do not believe that these women chose their way of life story for its ease and convenience.So, it is better for the mother and her children to get the money from a man. Men might prefer to spend all th eir money on themselves, but this does not mean that it is better that they do. Men do get a reward in self-esteem from supporting their own children, and surely it is good for a society that they do. It seems that it is better for women, for children, for men, and for society that women get financial support from men. This is all very well, but unfortunately, life is enormously more complicated than this may suggest. Marriages break down very often.One major reason that divorce is on the increase, is that women are more financially independent, and can afford to divorce. In a modern rich world, their children will not starve. After divorce, the typical woman is considerably poorer, and the typical man richer, but still women divorce their husbands. A society that forces women to stay in marriages they hatred would be sub-optimal, but so too surely is a society in which marriage is close to meaningless. It could be that we have fallen into a post-industrial trap. The invention of f arming was a bit like a trap.Before farming, people did not own land, and wandered around hunting and gathering. The population was low and mixed-up and free. Once farming started, people had to stay put to farm their land, and to guard it from pests and thieves. They had to suppose the land they farmed as their own. Farming increases the number of people who can live in a given area of land, and after not many generations, it was impossible to go back to hunting and gathering, because the population was then too large to support that way, and the rest of the land was beingfarmed by people who didnt take kindly to poachers. The result was that people who were once free were now trapped in the backbreaking world of farming. Perhaps our economy will make it impossible for houses to be affordable for typical single wage earners. If enough people stay together for long enough to pay enough joint mortgages, then house prices can stay inflated. Governments could not simply inject and lower the price of housing. Attempts to force people to sell things for less than they could get for them always fail one way or another.Something is only ever worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. It could be that men have ended up in a world where male virtues are criticised in all but the made few, and in which their male instincts cause them to rent lives that will bring them little pleasure. meanwhile women cannot feel respected without independence, but cannot get enough money without dependence on a man who might be gone tomorrow, and so still they have to go out and get jobs.\r\n'