… for The Pompous Git. In March, he released Dr John Young’s memoir, Going Down Another Lane. On 1 July, John’s sister Heather Goodare’s Foiled Creative Fire will be publically available. Yesterday the press proof of This Gardening Life arrived from IngramSpark. In researching the many essays on science and climate change The Git penned on his old blog, he discovered the entry for when he started This Gardening Life — it was in 2002! From the same era:
Feminism is one of those words that contains an apparent self-contradiction. My free Word Web dictionary defines it as”: A doctrine that advocates equal rights for women”. Not “equal rights for people, regardless of sex, colour, marital status, age etc”. Just… women. By implication that means non-women, that is men, should not have equal rights. If it is meant to stand for “equal rights for everyone,” we already have a perfectly good word for that: “egalitarian”. So, the word feminism is either redundant, or about anything but equality, or equal rights.
The early agenda of the feminists in the 1960s and 70s was apparently a logical extension of the suffragette movement that resulted in women achieving the vote and property rights. The demands of the new movement in the early 1970s were for:
* equal pay
* equal employment opportunity
* free contraceptive services
* abortion on demand
* free 24-hour childcare
The Whitlam government in Australia, before being effectively torpedoed by the CIA, managed to introduce legislation to provide equal pay for equal work and significant moves were afoot regarding the rest. Since Australia, like the US, is a federation of states, the provision of equal pay for federal employees affected only that minority employed by the federal government. Nevertheless, the Women’s Electoral Lobby had proved itself a potent political force in a major federal election and continued to have similar effect on subsequent state elections, as well as public opinion. There were few who took South Australian, John Petch’s “lunatic fringe” label seriously. In The Git’s instance, it made him want to vote for the “lunatic fringe” on the grounds that the lunatics currently in charge were noticeably deficient by most measures!
The demand for equal pay met with considerable approval from many, if not most. Women who performed the same task as a man to the same measure of competency, logically should receive the same remuneration. The Git often made the observation at the time that if there were to be a financial reward for belonging to a particular sex, then women should be the recipients, not men. The women in his employ were more punctual, less likely to turn up to work inebriated/hungover, had fewer absences and were less inclined to leave without notice. They never achieved the same heights of performance as the best of the men, but were far more consistent from day-to-day and week-to-week. They were generally also far less demanding of my time and easier to get along with.
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The Pompous Git 