I've moved! Sorta...

Ok so basically, Blogger is not so brilliant for displaying/sharing photos/pictures. Which is sort of a shame given that this blogs raison d'etre was to display mah drawin's. SO I'm moving my sketches and comics to a Tumblr account but ne'er fear, I'm keeping blogger for written blog entries and other stuff.

Also it seems to be easier to use.

Anyway, in case you're saddened by the move (yeah, right), here is a picture of Marlene Dietrich to cheer you up:

"Women"

I've just finished watching the second episode of the BBC programme 'Women' which was entitled 'Motherhood'. Having watched the first episode 'Libbers' over breakfast, I was keen to see what they had to say about motherhood vis Feminism. 'Libbers' was very interesting as it managed to give a more complete overview of the Women's Lib movement than I had so far gained through reading various texts by individual authors (Germaine Greer, Susie Orbach, Simone De Beauvoir, Marilyn French, etc). It was also refreshing to see Germaine Greer talking about Feminism, rather than say Cheryl Cole or fabrics, and her role within the movement.

Sadly 'Motherhood' was less interesting or maybe just less interesting to me because I knew all of it? All the women in it were middle-class, only one couple wasn't white. I know that as a middle-class, white woman I can't object to the inclusion of white, middle-class women on a programme about feminism. However, I do object to the fact to the exclusion of other women. Maybe only middle-class women agreed to be in the programme? But, whilst I believe that feminism is relevant to anyone who identifies as a women, in fact to anyone, regardless of gender, who believes in equality, you could argue that feminism is less important to middle-class white women purely because they come from a position of privilege that is not enjoyed by women from other sectors of society.
It also focused on married couples with children, apart from one couple who had separated. Clearly, in an hour long programme you can't address ALL the issues raised by motherhood for ALL women, I wasn't expecting that, but I found myself getting bored of the succession of well-educated, middle-class women in their large, expensive houses, 2.7 children and 'yes, I'd say I was a feminist' well-educated, middle-class husbands.

Anyway, the upshot of the programme was that in the majority of the couples, the women did all the housework (cooking, cleaning, shopping, rotas, 'running' the household), childcare and some of them also had full-time jobs. The two exceptions were: a couple where both man and women were surgeons, who had a nanny on weekdays (though the woman always had her mobile with her in surgery in case the nanny called); a couple where the woman worked full-time to support the family and the man was a house-husband.

I didn't need to watch an hour-long programme to tell me that the division of labour in family households is about the same as it was in the Fifties and Sixties. I was hoping that there might be some exploration of why the status-quo hasn't really changed apart from now women often work in a profession on top of doing housework. Why the women felt that they ought to be there to bring up their children, and if they didn't both they and the children were missing out on something fundamental, whereas the men didn't seem to feel that.

My conclusion, was that maybe instead of women needing to be empowered to throw of the shackles of domestic drudgery and enter the workplace, men ought to be empowered (?) or persuaded of the benefits of raising children and keeping the house in a nice state. Though if you saw my room you'd know I'm hardly the meticulous housekeeper my sex ought to have genetically encoded me to be. Anyway, if men felt that it was perfectly acceptable and right to want to stay at home by the hearth, instead of being the breadwinner, maybe fewer women would 'choose' to stay at home.

Anyway, I think the main reason for my disappointment in the programme was that, for me, one of the main obstacle to feminism now is the biological fact that women have babies and this seems to mean that they are more inclined to stay at home after giving birth and look after the children. Is this link between mother and child stronger than that between father and child? And if so, why? Is it biological? Or is it conditioned? And I was hoping that THAT was what the programme was going to address, rather then telling me (and presumably anyone who would watch the programme) what I was already aware of.

If anyone knows of any recently published books that address this please let me know. Other than The Beauty Myth, which though excellent (if you haven't read it I highly recommend you find and read a copy RIGHT NOW) I have read it. Also it was published in 1990 and that was TWENTY YEARS AGO. So that's hardly 'recent', it's nearly as old as I am.