Valium for the Soul

All this is so very important. You have cleverly expressed the frustrations and questions that need addressing for women to be able to make a 'choice' in the pure sense of the word. All the statistics prove that the unevenness in our society isn't even being addressed. Your questioning of 'What makes a family' is very important. Family, community , is, in the end, what makes us human.
NO wonder you are exhausted.
I wish there were more like you in politics, in leadership, running businesses and heading families.
You are an inspiration.
Your children are very fortunate to have you as their guiding light.
I could go on, but I am with you ...nuff said.

 

my mum works full time and had 2 kids without ever working part time. we never missed out on her.
She had me relatively young and managed to continue having a career. women work too hard.

I think alison is right that women havent been able to clearly articulate the high demands on their time and redistribute their workload.

 

It is very nearly endless, the list like that.
I don't have any clever solutions or comments, but I agree wholeheartedly with you there are myriad problems.
Interested to see this essay when you get it finished.

 

love your work blue, you know i really think you've got the makings of a, er...aww....let me see...6000 word essay here! you know you don't have to have all the answers, just show your professor that you're grappling with the big issues in this (eg definition of family) and you're bound to win them over. being devil's advocate you could say that women have brought this inequity upon ourselves given that we fought for equality which means we earned our own money, which marketeers and advertising gurus exploited knowing that we would become even more savvy consumers able to pay for our own things without having to ask our husbands. This massive increase in consumerism may account for our obsession with material items such as playstations, computers, etc, thus contributing to the high levels of mediation in our human interaction and a loss of ability/desire to initiate and maintain face to face contact with our neighbours - with our community. but there again i'm only being devil's advocate.

 

I can relate so easily to these issues having been there/done that. As I see it, there is only one real solution, and it won't help you now. It will, however, help women in the future. And that is education.
Women may teach their children about fairness and balance and the 'new ways', (we certainly can't depend on men to do that....tongue in cheek here) but it needs to come from elsewhere as well.
A lot of learned behaviors come not from home, but from school and friends. Times changed years ago when women entered the work force in record numbers. And yet traditional roles didn't. Well *ahem* they should have changed but they didn't.
How well I remember some comments: 'What? its Saturday, its my day off!" What does that mean? As the female I can work all week, drive kids around, go to school functions, Dr appt's, shopping, yadda yadda and then do all the house cleaning on Saturday mornings. Ok, when's my "day off"
Here's another: "No, I can't *keep* the kids while you work late I'm golfing this afternoon. You'll have to find a babysitter." Uh---and why would that be?

Well I must be careful or I will go on and on about men, and I am NOT a man basher by any means. I know that not everyone has the same experiences. So want to make that clear. That's just some of the issues I've noticed coming from within the family.

The workplace itself is another matter. For instance, on our yearly performance evaluation forms there's a box for 'willing to come in on off day, willing to work over late' etc So, now we're evaluated not only on the job we do but by the job we don't do on our time off. I can't for the life of me figure that out.

Anyway Blue, I'll run you out of room here on this topic, but I just want to say something about balance. There will never be balance for you! You're a woman. You're a mom. Men can learn to take on more of a parenting role, we may somehow get society/work to tweak its collective thinking, but down deep you're still the woman and you're still the mom, and no matter how much help you have, there it is. There's some inner thing that I have no word for, that comes with it (being female....and no it wasn't just a hot flash) You can however IMO achieve a semblance of balance. Let go! Make time for yourself. If it means letting something be left undone, so? Learn how to say, so what?

 

wow, you've got a lot of the big ideas there! good job listing them! i'm curious about a few things first before i can give hopefully good advice. first, what kind of essay is it? for instance, for what class are you writing it? is there a page limitation? what kinds of sources are needed (scholarly, peer-reviwed journals, or will newspapers and the like work)? how long do you have to complete it? will you be doing a review of the literature or interviewing people or both?

all those questions aside, presumably, you'll need to narrow it down, acknowledge that it's an immense issue with many perspectives and tons of extant literature, and choose a few themes to address. it's an exciting topic, one of which you could make infinite numbers of careers, but start here, start with what interests you most, or maybe what seems like a good starting point, the crux of the issue. maybe you look at the history of marriage roles or the women's rights movement, or the changes (or lack thereof) that occurred post women's movement. remember also to take into account cultural differences (i.e., Australia vs. other cultures, race/ethnicity differences, religious differences, political differences, age/generation/cohort differences, etc.) even if you simply acknowledge in your essay that differences may/probably/usually exist between these groups (if you don't hve space, time, interest enough to research it), that's an important part of good research.

best of luck! i think it's a great project and sounds like fun! by the way, though, women by and large have been trained to multi-task in ways men haven't due to how they've been expecte to perform in society - balance is never easy!!! ;)