Indeed one’s issue is always a cause of vexation.

We have dealt with this particular problem in a way that our family has done for generations.

Peregrine, Percy, Auberon, Bertie and Montgomery were each sent off to boarding school as soon as Nanny had them toilet trained. Bertie was a bit slow and he hung around the estate like a bad smell (and he was) until he was nearly two. Drove us quite insane. Fortunately an endearing streak of madness runs in the family so none of our chums at the club were any the wiser, though there were the occasional times we would have liked a well pressed hunting pink shoulder to cry on.

Our family is fortunately possessed of a damn fine pool of eligible second cousins so the girls were easily enough dealt with. We had them all married off by the age of four – well before they began losing their looks and started reading.

Mind you, young Petunia gave us a few anxious moments what with having inherited the ‘homely look’ gene from Livia’s great maiden aunt, Clementine. Luckily me young nephew Algie has always been a bit light on in the 20/20 vision department, so we ran Petunia by him the week his monocle was lost down the back of the sofa. He seems happy enough with the deal and he’s already been blessed with seven strapping lads all under the age of eight. Five of them are already at Sandhurst.

Sorry to go on like this chaps, but this subject gets my dander well and truly up the family flagpole.

Dammit all, young lasses fortunate enough to get a kick-start in life with a hyphenated name should be out there promoting these simple, self evident solutions instead of banging away on an Olivetti, confusing unfortunate womenfolk barely able to button up their own boots let alone read.

Indeed one’s issue is always a cause of vexation.

We have dealt with this particular problem in a way that our family has done for generations.

Peregrine, Percy, Auberon, Bertie and Montgomery were each sent off to boarding school as soon as Nanny had them toilet trained. Bertie was a bit slow and he hung around the estate like a bad smell (and he was) until he was nearly two. Drove us quite insane. Fortunately an endearing streak of madness runs in the family so none of our chums at the club were any the wiser, though there were the occasional times we would have liked a well pressed hunting pink shoulder to cry on.

Our family is fortunately possessed of a damn fine pool of eligible second cousins so the girls were easily enough dealt with. We had them all married off by the age of four – well before they began losing their looks and started reading.

Mind you, young Petunia gave us a few anxious moments what with having inherited the ‘homely look’ gene from Livia’s great maiden aunt, Clementine. Luckily me young nephew Algie has always been a bit light on in the 20/20 vision department, so we ran Petunia by him the week his monocle was lost down the back of the sofa. He seems happy enough with the deal and he’s already been blessed with seven strapping lads all under the age of eight. Five of them are already at Sandhurst.

Sorry to go on like this chaps, but this subject gets my dander well and truly up the family flagpole.

Dammit all, young lasses fortunate enough to get a kick-start in life with a hyphenated name should be out there promoting these simple, self evident solutions instead of banging away on an Olivetti, confusing unfortunate womenfolk barely able to button up their own boots let alone read.

It told me all sorts of gobbledegook indicating we don’t like your comment.

Bloody Bolcheviks!

An error occurred:

Rebuild failed: Writing to ‘/home/www/dox.media2.org/www/castironbalcony/index.html.new’ failed: Opening local file ‘/home/www/dox.media2.org/www/castironbalcony/index.html.new’ failed: No such file or directory

It wasn’t the questions, it was the assumption that when your kid was about one was time to go back to work that I struggled with. I don’t know many women who’ve stayed at home as much as I have (apart from my sister), and the women who asked me about work were not judging, but they had not looked beyond their own choices.

Of course, I’m not suggesting this about your post. I think everyone makes the right choices for their family and (financial) circumstances. While I never felt bullied, I did feel that my choice was considered a little quaint.

Yes, well I did say anecdotal evidence wasn’t much chop, didn’t I! I come up with my experience from my world and someone else comes up with something different. You really need figures for accuracy – and I don’t think anyone is going to find accurate figures on rude comments about ones home/work status anytime soon.

But both Zoe’s and the “fiancee’s ” experiences come under the heading of Bloody Insensitive People who come up with unasked for opinions based on what they consider to be the norm (or perhaps the ideal as well). This is a perennial problem with bloody insensitive people no matter what topic they’re addressing.

Therefore, while the comments you’ve described are perhaps stupid and lacking in imagination, they cannot be described as Bullying by the Entrenched Feminist Establishment by any stretch of the imagination, IMO.

It’s just that a certain measure of maternity / parental leave has found its way into the working milieu (thank God) so this has created a situation where a lot of people are preparing to go back to work at the one-year mark. Therefore, the bloody insensitive annoying person will determine that you MUST get a job at 1 year / stay at home with your kid because your brain will atrophy / your child will become a neurotic Woody Allan clone.

Annoying assumption, perhaps. Failure of feminism, no.
Christopher Bantick, a conservative, published a similar shorter piece in the Age a couple of days ago. According to him his wife received a right grilling (although we must allow for conservative exaggeration when whipping up a nice moral panic). Far from nodding my head in recognition for the time I wasn’t employed and had a small child, I found myself thinking what tools their friends must be – maybe that’s the part of their life that needs to change.

I also need to mention the fact that “Feminists” (real feminist writers, I mean, not Shirley Conran) on the whole support choice. It was feminism that gave us parental leave after all, and it is feminists who are working to extend it and increase the family friendliness of the workplace a la Finland (See “Canny Compassion). Hardly anti mums at home. That’s a point I didn’t stress enough in my post.

The structure of taxation and social security in Australia, also, has deliberately been set up by the Howard government to encourage one spouse, usually the mother, to stay home. So to say the zietgeist is so against SAHM’s is quite inaccurate.

Sedgewick, once I stopped laughing, I noted your comment actually did get through twice and I suspect any trouble you had was caused by Media2′s move to the US. Yes! Our Server has moved and we are now part of the evil empire.

IMO the most convincing position from which one might argue for the worth of mothers (or fathers) staying at home early in their kids lives comes from what one might loosly call a ‘conservative’ position.

The conservative position on this is hardly for fawning on the kids is it? Its for love, attention and discipline. To get anecdotal for a moment, my own experience of comparative parenthood is that its mostly the working mums who say “Oh don’t hit cheryl with that rock darling”.

Its the stay at homes, who understand that children appreciate discipline. To generalise again to make my point, the stay at homes don’t tell stories in which their children figure as adversaries, and as equals. They’re neither. Whether you own it or not, there’s resentment in the way you tell your story.

I expect people will think this is a rave – I don’t have all day here to try to put what I’m saying more clearly – but I’d be interested to see if anyone out there gets what I’m trying to say. If they do I think they’d agree with it.

I won’t respond in detail to your rave (yes, you’re right, it is) as it’s a mishmash of confused thinking and assumptions not supported by the actual text, e.g. as a feminist I am adversarial to men. If you had time to skim the archives you’d see that is not the case. But we do get persnickety having to point it out again, and again, and again.

The “resentment” you complain about was about Joanna M-S, Ross, Hausegger and the rest of their underqualified, opinionated ilk being given column space to crap on about what mothers ought to be doing (badly) and what constitutes feminism (extremely badly), while other unqualified and opinionated people like me have to do it for n