"I feel women may be better off and better educated today....well those with the chance to take up higher education may be,"

Even if I hadn't gone to university I still would have been better off and better educated than my grandmother and her sisters, who left school at 12.

"but as far as a making a "career for themselves" is concerned women have simply swopped "slavery" to their children and home, for slavery to the economic system."

Well, I trained to work in a sector that I absolutely love. But even for my mum, having a career (even one she didn't like that much) meant having her own money, and the freedom to spend it on the things she enjoyed doing - not having to rely on my father to decide what he thought was best for her. When I compare that to my ex-mother-in-law, who got a housekeeping allowance from her husband every week when her children were growing up...earning your own money is, by comparison, incredibly liberating.

"Many women are now the main breadwinners in a family and as such are manipulated into mortgages, insurances, credit and all the tricks used by capitalism to rob people of a life."

In those times before women had careers, these things still hung over us. The husband took on the mortgages, credit, insurance etc, and the wife had to support him in every way possible to ensure he could go out and earn his wage. If the husband didn't meet the family's financial commitments, a wife might take in washing or do a whole host of hard, inflexible and poorly-paid jobs to make ends meet, in addition to looking after the home and the children.

"Many women have also lost their most precious purpose, the nurturing of their children."

This idea of the stay-at home mother who had nothing better to do than look after her home and raise her children is a relatively recent construct - especially where the working classes are concerned. Go to the National Trust's Back-to-Back museum in Birmingham, and you can see how working-class women took on all sorts of work, much of it light industry or piece-work which could be done at home. In the countryside round where I live, they would have sewed stockings or done frame-knitting in their cottages. The work was demanding because the levels of production required were high. So, far from sitting beatifically around the fire and teaching and nurturing their children, women in the past were working hard to maintain their homes and often taking on extra work to supplement their husband's wages. Meanwhile, their kids were running wild in the towns and the countryside, pretty much dragging themselves up.

"Every where we see children, even young babies dumped in creches, left with father, or dumped on long suffering relatives."

As I have pointed out previously, plus ca change. Of course, in the past many generations lived in one house and the older generation often helped in a more hands-on way to raise the younger ones - there was no real concept of the "long-suffering" relatives. It was just part of life. Moreover, nowadays flexible working is becoming far more common, so there is a lot more home-working and flexi-time than there would have been even a decade ago.


"All this, not to emancipate women, but to confinethem in the same shackles filled by their hasbands for so long."

Well, I would argue that instead of having to do poorly-paid, unskilled work, women can now choose degrees that interest them and well-paid careers which, quite often, they love. For example, both I and my ex-husband have eventually chosen to work freelance, meaning that our time is very flexible, we are around quite a lot, and our daughter gets fantastic benefits from both of our careers (she goes to festivals because of my job, and travels the world because of her dad's). Importantly, my financial independence and ability to maintain my own household meant that, when my marriage finally failed, neither my husband nor I was trapped, geographically or financially, in a situation neither of us wanted. We could separate reasonably amicably, and were able to move on with our lives. In the past, one of the reasons for the lower divorce rates is that many women couldn't afford to leave, nor would many men have been able to financially sustain two households. And a household where two parents are miserable, even at each other's throats, and are only still together because they can't afford to separate, is no place to raise children.

"If women really want to be free to fulfill themselves completely, then, as in every other facet of life, the system must be changed."

Well, that's the case for men too, surely. But until we overthrow capitalism, we'll all just have to soldier on, making those compromises I mentioned earlier and doing our best.