"Thought for today:
"I often feel that women have a harder time in life living the roles that they adopt and those ascribed to them by their male counterparts.
As the bearer of children, they carry an enormous responsibility for both the advancement or decline of civilisation; the birth of future generations.
In an ideal world girls would be provided with every available opportunity to grow naturally from childhood into the responsibilities of adult, lover, wife and motherhood and yet, far too often before their minds and bodies are ready for it, they miss out large sections of their youth and have to abandon their dolls and childhood dreams to more adult chores of life. Even before they have barely reached the stage of pubity, they experience male pressures to be sexualised into 'baby dolls' and 'bunny girls' for no other reason than to gratify man's urges and sensual pleasures. To resist such pressure is often to stand out as being labled 'odd' to the other girls as opposed to the more accurate description as being 'different'.
Next comes boyfriends, babies and marriage; quite often in that order and rarely as the result of any planned execution. In times of economic depression there is too often no job to work at, no place to live that can be called home and very little nourishing food to eat. With a child/children sometimes younger than three or four to daily care for, the only jobs that are readily obtainable and will put bread on the table is the part-time occupation that the woman can obtain on minimum wages, working the most inconvenient of hours.
Not surprisingly, years of accumulated stress that accompanies such a life exacts the inevitable price of advanced aging, robbing her of her previous good looks and fetching mannerisms. Such change often prompts the husband to turn his eyes elsewhere. He tells himself that 'because she has let herself go' she cannot be bothered about their marriage and their relationship, so he too 'lets her go' and invariably runs off with the younger woman who amazingly still exhibits the capacity to dream of a happy life and future with her man.
In this grossly, unfair society of ours which is still predominantly male run, I see too many females who have never experienced the privilege to master one role in their life before they have had another thrust upon them. I know too many women who still have too much of the little girl inside them because they were rushed out of childhood before their time; I see too many mothers whose overbearing level of responsibility prevents them ever discovering the individual they were meant to be and know of too many wives who would have been happier to have mothered one or two children instead of the four or five they gave birth to and the immature husband they found themselves saddled with.
With such confusion of roles and the 'guilt' that women are encouraged to experience when they are physically unable to carry out all these responsibilities competently, is it hardly surprising that finding one's 'individuality' for a heavily pressurised, overworked and overmanaged woman in today's world is harder than grabbing a hole in the centre of a doughnut?" William Forde: October 24th, 2014