I have come to the conclusion that actually I am a pretty rubbish feminist. When I want to be, I can get on the highest of horses and expound the arguments with the best of them, however at heart, I realise that actually I am a 1950's housewife manquée.
I was having a chat with Dad while sat in traffic on the way to the Sistine Chapel while him and Mum were over (totally irrelevant, sorry) and we were commenting on the differences in the options that are open to me as opposed to when they were younger. It seemed actually rather lovely in their era - the done thing was to get a bit of a schooling but really this was just biding time until the main event: They left home, got married, had children. If you were a man, you got a job. If you were a woman, you had and then looked after the children. And practically, that was it for the next twenty years, at which point you cashed in your British Telecom shares, made a fortune when the Building Societies privatised, sold your house for an obscene profit and had a great time while you were still young enough to enjoy it.
The point was that it sounded lovely. All their friends were doing the same thing, the kids were all around the same age so could play and grow up together and there was no restless quest for something better because that was your life. I am sure that there are plenty of my friends and peers who would run vomiting and screaming from the room to hear me say this - but I envy that life. I have heard Russians and Romanians lamenting the loss of the State-controlled lives they had - there were no options, and life was so much more certain. Not that I am comparing the pre-feminist woman's lot with Communist Russia, we weren't sent sent to gulags if we didn't fancy popping out a couple of sprogs and knocking up a stew every now and again for supper. Hopefully you get the point I'm making, however.
Now we have so many options and possibilities that the fact that you haven't done anything spectacular or worthy by the age of 40 is just another reason to beat yourself up. With expectations come responsibility and I am not sure my feminist sisters in the '70's actually realised that for someone like me, taking away some options is not really a bad thing. In fact, it is positively beneficial and doesn't leave me feeling like a total failure for not living up to their hopes and dreams. Is it just me? It would suit me to go back to 1950, I have never really achieved anything noteworthy other than bum around having a good time and I think I would suit a pinny. I have seen lots of the world, which I do believe is a good thing, and would not have been thinkable in my parents' day. However, I would have had my children young and have my middle-youth to enjoy my sightseeing, with the added bonus of all the lovely windfall cash in my pocket.
It's a conundrum that has come into focus as part of my Passing Forty Epiphany, and one I am now really too old to do anything about. I can still get the pinny, though. Cath Kidston here I come.
