The Female Evolution

                                                                     

Was just watching the movie "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" on TCM.  At one point in the movie Dina Merrill and widowed father Glenn Ford are on a first date...feeling each other out about the male-female relationship.  Dina says "the man I marry will have to accept me as an equal; I don't want to stand behind him, but beside him".  Glen smirks, then says "well, look, we just gave you the vote...I'm not sure we're ready for your image of wife as equal."

I cringed at that, and immediately began wondering how big that cringe comes from a woman hearing that same line today.

We've come along way, most of us men kicking and screaming.  In fact, I believe the balance has come a bit too far...so many metrosexual males who appear just a bit too feminine and recessive for my tastes.  But then I'm an old fogie so who cares about my opinion.

I know my mother was certainly not the submissive type..she once was when married, but I don't believe any woman who has to raise a family on her own has much room for "submissive".

Still, outside our family, I'm sure my mother was looked..and frowned upon for her single mother status.  Divorce was looked upon as such a massive failure when I was growing up, and I'm sure our mom suffered some of the slings and arrows that came with divorce.

A few years ago I wrote a blog titled "In 50 Years We'll All Be Chicks".  In that blog I lamented our current state of society where latchkey kids roam the streets and the internet at will.  And I cursed the current state of a "material world" where collecting "things" seem to be more important than raising kids.  

So, while women were certainly repressed in those days, something good came from it; someone was home for the kids.  Yes, I know that is not a good excuse for repressing the dreams of women, but maybe someday we'll as a society, begin to "self-actualize" and evolve into a society where at least one parent is home with the children, whether male or female.

In my "senior years", no longer much relevant in deciding societal values, I'm kinda stuck smack dab in the middle of this gender revolution.  I've read too much to buy Hillary's "war against women" and I suspect there are lots of old codgers like me who've seen how far women have come, have cheered them on along the way, but believe we need to resolve some of the problems that came from that liberation.

Hopefully, we'll resolve them in a manner acceptable to everyone.  Certainly, if we don't we're all in big trouble.