(photo- Nicolay)
Today is International women’s day and to celebrate I’d like to quote a little from a gem of a book I picked up recently. I ordered “life begins at forty” in my quest to turn forty in style, as some of you will remember – it’s coming quick, less than a month to go so I thought I’d better start doing my homework.
To my pleasure and surprise Walter B. Pitkin has a few things to say on other topics too, so I’ll share some of them. Before you throw the computer out of the upstairs window, I’d like to say, if it’s any excuse, that the book was published in 1932.
“Every Western land is swarming with idle women of middle age whose children have gone off to college or else to work and whose husbands have sunk deeply in the miry ruts of their own business offices. How they sit around wringing their hands, these unhappy women! How they dash hither and yon, joining clubs, signing petitions, mixing cocktails, reading best sellers, touring Europe, doing anything to flee from that boredom” Sounds like heaven to me, who’d be unhappy about touring, reading and mixing cocktails? Bring it on I say.
Sadly education is not the answer, apparently “college makes women physically and socially unattractive”, although if Walter had come us weaving home from some of our university bashes he would have had a valid point.
My favorite must be “were women to take half as much pains in preparing their conversations as in fixing their hair for dinner, life would be merrier – and there would be fewer divorces and murders”. One can only imagine he’s referring to Mrs Pitkin’s reaction when she reads this.
While it would be useful to question whether we need a day that celebrates half the world’s population (why not just have a world people day?) or wonder whether the plight of women in some parts of the world deserves celebrating, Walter does unwittingly help us to realize that, at least for a lot of the world’s female population, life has improved over the last seventy odd years, whether you're forty or not.
