Echidne Of the Snakes - The Question

Women can balance their own work, their partners' work, the children, the parents and grandparents, the Thanksgiving turkey, the birthday cards, the care of the sick, the need to look young and sexy, the dustbunnies under the beds, the school menus, the parental chauffeuring services. They can balance all that, somehow, while walking on the tightrope of cultural femininity, the demands of a labor market which still assumes that every worker has a little lady at home to give succor and psychological counseling and cleaning services. And then the woman-haters write how women don't have the same genius as men do, how no woman has ever invented something like the automobile or designed a great church, how women therefore are obviously biologically incapable of anything but -- well --- playing the role of Girl Fridays for famous men.

So I'm angry. How very awkward for me. But really, why can't we keep the limelight on the real question Ruth Marcus asked, for longer than one fleeting second: What can be done to make the sexual division of labor within families more egalitarian? And if we don't want to make those changes, how do we provide women with equal opportunities in other spheres of life? The answer must not focus on all the ways that women alone could somehow achieve that. Days are still only twenty-four hours long, even for us of the girly persuasion.

It's here