What women want is an end to hectoring by feminists

[emkana]

do you agree?

I think the reason it's being put down so much is due to the continuing economic uncertainty... Get us all back in the kitchen so that men can do the work etc.

Reading that, I couldn't help thinking that a fair amount of men would also like to stay at home during the day rediscovering traditional crafts and spending time with their children. But, oh look, someone has to earn the money.

Bet that the Times only thinks staying at home with your children is a good thing if it's done by a woman whose husband earns over £50k. Staying at home on benefits would not be an inspired rejection of materialism, but lazy scrounging.

I think I'm just fed up with being hectored. Not by feminists necessarily but by anyone with an axe to grind on how I should behave as a woman. Motherhood seems to bring out the opinionated hectoring types in their droves. Used to be it was just your mother or his mother driving you nuts with unwanted advice on child-rearing but at least you could put the phone down. Now we've got the information super-nag-way of pressure groups, 'tsars' and endless contradictory surveys all seemingly out to pop your bubble when you thought you were doing quite a good job really.

I think we need a bit more feminism, to be honest. Give today's girls a bit of something to aspire to and keep fighting for equal treatment. Take it above the level of working vs not working and instead help out the women in our society for whom 'equality' is a distant dream. The ones threatened with marriage overseas, forced to cover themselves from head to foot and at risk of being killed if they disobey... that's where the fight should be now.

oh i like hectoring
challenges the brain
all you need to see is how right the feminists werein the 70s to make oyu appreciate an argument that makes you feel uncomfy

"Motherhood seems to bring out the opinionated hectoring types in their droves"

God yes! I'd rather be hectored by a feminist than a bloody childcare 'expert'.

Atlantis...I agree with everything you say..

HH is an annoying hypocrite who is only out for herself...

Dittany;

You are not always right...alot of women will agree with the article...

You have called the journo a "stupid woman"

OMG....

Feminism never did take everyone along with it. For every woman burning her bra in the 70's there were two or three stood on the sidelines tutting 'she'll be sorry when she's 40 and her tits are brushing the carpet'

We need a few extremists to get the ball rolling with any movement, we need people in power to legislate for equality and we've all benefited whether we 100% subscribe to the cause or not.

I think the article has a point however. If the one-world view doesn't take into account that women don't necessarily want to be shoe-horned into a particular path then there will be bad policies enacted and some ... like the bystanders watching the bra-burning... thinking that this 'doesn't apply to me' or worse. The author may have handed baby over to nanny and gone straight back to work initially but - like a lot of people - adopted a different way of life in the end.

""I did hand my own first baby over to a full-time nanny so I could go back to a job in television with foreign travel."

So it's OK for her to do it for her oh-so important job in TV with the necessary foreign travel (ooh get her) but everyone else (apart from the alpha women) would prefer PT work.

Fuck off. I had no problem going back to work full time. I didn't feel guilty and I don;t feel guilty 14 years later. And I am so not a middle class alpha woman.

Minette - you do not speak for us. I am actually trying to think of any woman that you speak for. You are out of touch and columnists who spout drivel like you are far more damaging to women's causes that shrill, strident and hectoring feminists.

I don't want to read the article just now because chances are it will wind me up just before bed. (am in Oz, not weird)

However - my version of feminism, as others have probably already said, means that I have the choice to be a SAHM without being written off as a human being, without being looked down upon by other people or having other people otherwise denigrate my choice.

I worked for 25 years, then I had DS. I choose not to work outside the home now. That does NOT mean I reject feminism - it means I have the choice (and am lucky to have it). What I would prefer is for people to value my choice as much as they value returning to work - and I'm talking about everyone from the local busybody up to Government here.

V well put dittany - absolutely agree. Get v irritated with conflation of high-status-high-pay jobs with feminism (not that they bear no relation to each other, but they are not the same thing). The sort of feminism I subscribe to is as concerned with elevating the status of traditionally female work as it is with enabling women to do traditionally male jobs.

Policywonk - that's Kiki, the French frog, from Hector's House.

Hector was a dog - a bloodhound, I think - and dull yet dependable. Kiki was his dizzy neighbour who used to chat over the wall from the top of a ladder.

One of my favourite children's TV programmes in the '70s though I now suspect it was a subtle conduit for patriarchal values and damaging stereotypes about nosy French female amphibians.

dittany...you fascinate me and I'm not sure why....

Thanks Tallulah, that's unexpectedly thorough

but what is wrong with Hectoring?