Reading this sent chills (the good kind) down my poor old male spine, made my eyes water (I still have problems letting myself cry), and put a smile on my face.

I'm one of the lucky ones whose kids are still close enough by to have regular social contact. Both daughters are professionals, one happily married (and takes no patriarchal crap from me) and one happily divorced and unwilling to fudge the male commitment issue again, but still looking.

Between them, and their gang with whom I get to socialize, I do not frequently get into discussions of attitudes on love and marriage, but I do get to observe. Most in that immediate group have done better than I did with love and marriage. Yes, sometimes the females are "Our lady of perpetual disapproval." And, yes, sometimes the males are bossy bastards. But less of each than I was accustomed to seeing in my generation. The occasional teasing about male and female chauvinst pigism is a reminder both that the 60s "it's all the man's fault" is crap but also "you guys better remember we’ve learned about that."

And making love last is still hard work. “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties” is still the best single set of insights I know. In it he expresses a hope that maybe religion will return one day with a protected erotic component. I keep hoping, too.

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As a New Zealander, 21 in 1960, I have trouble relating to the ‘downtrodden, helpless women’, and the great goals of feminisms.
I grew up in Poverty Bay, and the ‘old people’ — probably in their late fifties, early sixties, were the pioneers. They opened up this part of the country.
For those of us who grew up in large families, or in my case a medium family, but often enough we had foster babies, for my mother believed that there ought always be a baby in the house — who saw obviously pregnant women, a toddler on one hip, a washing basket on the other, never ever developed the ‘weak, not tough woman’ blindness.
I grew up with girl s who rode far better than I did, but then girls do ride better than boys up until they about 12 or 13 years old.
Later the girls I knew went shooting, and raced to be the driver on the way home, who went poaching fish with us, and later still a few who fought with as much skill and aggression as any male.
The first car I ever saw driven with the skill of a competition driver was one of these ‘pioneer women’. I was droving horses and was sitting out where I could see ‘Gentle Annie’, the biggest hill in the area when I heard the snarl of an engine as the gears changed and saw this Peugeot flying up the narrow twisting road.
This was in the days of ‘yank tanks’ in New Zealand and nobody drove in the manner of a competition driver!
I know the cry of ‘but the woman was home with all those kids!’
True enough. However when I was young most men worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and at least half a day Saturday. Then most walked, or rode a bike to work. There wasn’t a lot of day left for them to help in the house .... even if they were inclined too.
Certainly my father cooked, washed dishes and washed clothes in the rare times he was at home in daylight. He was a blacksmith/farrier and had a shoeing run which kept him away most of time.
‘Selfish males’ were not really the cause of the, in some cases, endless stream of babies. The fertility cycle of the woman was much more the governing factor.
Contraceptives were woefully unreliable. People were much more inclined to be governed by the dictates of the church, if they were catholic.
The pill alone, without the women’s movement would have made huge changes in society.
While there were undoubtably restrictions, ridiculous restrictions, upon women, their perception that they were discriminated against in business always seemed to me to be ignoring the obvious fact that
most men never rose above a very basic level. It was much more a result of the structures of the working world, than it was an actively repressive intent.
I spent some time living in Malaysia and was fortunate enough to be more or less accepted, as a frequent visitor, into an extended Chinese household. Talking with the women of the house, it was a ‘progressive’ household, but the men still ate separately from the women, and I asked about this, and the commonly held view that the women got to eat the ‘leftovers’ or the ‘scraps’.
An elderly women, and authority goes with age, asked: ‘Peter, do we look stupid? If you were doing the cooking, would you live on scraps?’
I learned that even where the woman, or the women of the house have the business brain, the man in the eyes of the outside world ‘handled the business’.
But trust me, it was a facade.
On the other hand the women ran the affairs of the family, and that was no illusion!
To conclude, when I was 8 or 9 or so, the MP — member of parliament — of this rural community was a Mrs Tombleson, who, looking back I believe would be in her forties at the time.
That was in the mid 1940's.
I was never under the impression that there was anything that a woman couldn’t do!

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I intentionally try NOT to analyze the way we are evolving, but, I'm very curious, so I pay close attention. I'd like to share an interesting story, you can take from it whatever you like.
My boyfriend is a phlebotomist and does blood drives on a bus that travels to different towns and businesses. He has collected several donated stuffed animals for people to cuddle with while they give blood. He says most people are thrilled to have one.
Only a few people feel they are too 'tough' to want one. The ones who feel this way are not men, but, women.

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I have a mother who also gave me feminism. It is still one of her favourite topics, so long as it has to do with the unequal division of chores around the home.

I'm 35 and she's almost 60 now. Things have changed. Her feminism doesn't include anything that has to do with reproduction anymore, since she can't get pregnant and I'm now married.

Her feminism has forgotten the poor - male and female both - since she's a boomer and a landlord who just wants tax cuts.

Her feminism has abandoned the immigrant population. She seems to believe that they are all in gangs, or want our healthcare, or dont' care about my country.

Her feminism excludes the young. They (we) are all ungrateful punks who don't know respect and can't stop whining.

And recently, her feminism has no place for me. The very person she converted to it, she has now declared "too hard to deal with." I am too political. I care about stupid irrelevant things. I should just let her alone and be a martyr, there suffering as she sees it, having to look after aging parents and take care of a 50's husband.

I try to help her.
She tells me I'm crazy.

What of this woman? A feminist? My mother. Disappeared.

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Oh Courtney, thy narcissism runneth over. You find yourself "standing over the sink washing my boyfriend's dishes even though I made dinner," and it "scares the shit out of you." That's an interesting reaction. Meanwhile, there are those of us, husbands and wives alike, who wash so many dishes -- and there's so much work to go around that no one has the energy to keep score about who made dinner -- that being scared shitless never occurs to us.

You write down your oh-so ponderous post-feminist thoughts about a perceived inequality between the sexes when, in fact, you're just pissed off about having to do the dishes. I don't blame you; it's a pain in the ass. But it has to get done. So, while the rest of us go about the unglamorous but essential work of raising the next generation, enjoy wallowing in your angst.

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Mothers Day was originally a call for peace. Code Pink has been in DC suing the government to stop the wars. All of us daughters and mothers need to take our feminism in hand and join our sisters in the streets, in the Congress, and clean our House, Senate, and White House. So much angst, and all that, when women realize their power and realize that feminists love men, women, and children and agree that men have the same power as women. That means, we are all in this together and we had better stop fighting with each other over crumbs and beads and go tell our public servants to serve us since we hired them to do a job, not rip us off. If you can't get to DC, go into your local area and make noise, petition, shut down the war machine. Get out of the handbasket, for heaven's sake! love,Eliz

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