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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
We were raised with the belief that the answer to all life's problems was the husband, the family, the happy home … You got a bit older and some bloody bird called Germaine Greer went and ‘burned her bra’. And all of a sudden they're saying, ‘Yes, the husband, the family, the home, the happy life, you can have that. But you can have a career too’ … I got a bit confused at that stage … But then I found my prince, my knight, whatever you want to call it, the dickhead that I married.
(Jillian, a supporting mother participating in the Jobs Education and Training Scheme, in Arnold 1991:89)When their mothers' fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they will not have to ‘beat themselves down’ to be feminine … They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women.
(Betty Friedan 1965:331 in The Feminine Mystique)Just as Jillian found her prince (who turned out to be a ‘dickhead’), in 1971 over three-quarters of surveyed women under 35 years of age felt that a woman's ‘most important role in life’ was as a mother, whatever her career; the percentage who so opined falling to less than half a decade later (Glezer in McDonald 1990:13).
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