A rchive Date
[ 01-03-2001 ]
Category
[ Art & Literature ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[Book's theme takes women back decades
By Denise Hay - For London Free Press
March 1, 2001
Having suffered through the visceral pain of The Rules, a staggeringly successful bestseller from a few years ago that listed the wily, coquettish things women were to do to land a man, I am now faced with The Surrendered Wife. The pain is back.
Author Laura Doyle, a self-proclaimed critical wife, realized she had to do something drastic to save her marriage. The results of biting her tongue and catering to her husband were so encouraging ("I had the man back I married!"), she wanted to share this transformation with the rest of the shrews of the world. Her pink Web site is peppered with excited accolades from readers claiming the rejuvenation of their marriages, and this, it would seem to Mrs. Doyle (she changed her name to her husband's as part of her surrendering process after nine years of marriage), is proof positive she's on to something.
It appears that decades of women suffering abuse and imprisonment in their efforts to attain basic rights have brought us to this humiliating and regressive conclusion. What a proud moment.
The alarming progress of religious fundamentalists in getting out the message of men regaining positions as heads of their families is bad enough. Now we have to watch the appalling spectacle of women hoisting themselves onto this patriarchal bandwagon.
Doyle advises all women to give up financial control of the household to their husbands. She says, and I quote, "Before, if we wanted to go to a movie, I worried whether we could afford it. Now I don't worry about it. He pays for the movie and dinner. It's like perpetual dating. All I have to do is say yes and go." The husband must be allowed to do things his way, because any criticism will be construed as a lack of respect for him. She even states that if he misses his freeway exit - it goes without saying that her husband is always driving - he should not be told he just missed it and rather they should continue until the state line looms into view. Doyle calls that showing respect. I call it stupidity.
Perhaps the Mrs. Doyles of the world have forgotten a few little milestones in history that have brought her to this exalted state of actually making her own choice.
Up until 1870, married women in England had no property rights. In Canada, women only became eligible for appointment to the Senate in 1929. Not until 1940 could women vote provincially in Quebec.
An equal rights amendment was introduced in Congress in the U.S. in 1923 and got nowhere. To this day, not enough states have ratified it.
Until 1947, any Canadian woman who married a non-Canadian lost her citizenship. This was not the case for men.
Restrictions placed on married women in the work force were not lifted until 1955 and the Labour Code did not amend the rights of employers to dismiss female employees because of pregnancy until 1962. The handing out of information on, or the prescribing of, birth control was still entrenched in the Criminal Code until 1969, and abortion was not legalized in Canada until 1988.
Women have been discriminated against in the work force, denied access to universities and dissuaded from careers, consistently paid scandalous wages, forced to obtain abortions illegally, summarily dismissed from jobs due to pregnancy and shut completely out of the electoral process. None of these were corrected until well into the 20th century.
The only thing more enraging than the male backlash against feminism is women pining for the good old days of prescriptive happy marriages. Feminism, so goes a popular argument, has allowed women to succeed so well it has damaged relationships between the sexes. Men, in effect, have been emasculated, and to regain that harmonious domestic bliss, women need to allow their husbands to reassert their genetic right to be in charge, even if they miss huge freeway exit signs.
I am now looking at a picture of Sylvia Pankhurst, the British suffragette who was a key figure in gaining equality for women in England. She is being beaten by no fewer than 10 men, two of whom are police officers. One is about to bring a cane down upon her head. I wonder if Laura Doyle has ever seen this photograph.
Denise Hay is a London freelance writer. Her column appears every other Saturday.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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