Emancipation...

Women have come a long way from those old days where they were more or less objects to be owned. This is from the current book that I am reading, a book about Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I...

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts, and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even even she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even when she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.

Excerpt from The Other Queen, by Philippa Gregory

From a conversation with colleagues... we were just talking about how each of us wear so many hats now, and how we've had to multi-task, like it or not. We work outside and at home. And all of us agree that it's tiring. Yet none of us want to give up the former for the latter. It's not just the financial independence that work offers but the opportunity to get away from the home. Both places can be maddening but one tends to eat you from the inside more.

The above extract stands true to many I would think. There's a saying that marriage is a bed of roses... I bear in mind that roses come with thorns. Being pricked by thorns can be excruciatingly painful cos big or small the thorns, they hurt nevertheless.

Look into any studies and you will find that most of the housework is still done by the wife. Somehow men still feel that their main job is just to go out and work to bring back the dough. And that the house is the woman's domain. When I send and pick my girl from tuition, I find that a disproportionately big number of 'drivers' are mothers. How many of us can say that their husbands will pick up the broom (or vacuum) to clean the floor when it is dirty or even pick up stuff that clutter the floor? The number is few. And these are the nitty gritty things that sometimes drive us up the wall.

Women in history... I can't help but conclude that women seem to be more on the 'losing' end of everything. Women and emancipation?? The need for emancipation is the proof that there is inequality. This is after all still a man's world.