100. Women Have Always Been Equal to Men in Italy...

Except in the home- where they reign supreme!

By now, people who indulge in my articles have learnt to read between the lines. So when I say that women have always been equal to man, I am referring to their capacity of pulling their share of work since it had in the past been credited that it was the male species that worked and the woman... well, she just stayed home- she didn’t ‘work’. This is not true, apart from the fact that housework is a real and proper job that should come under the same classification as that of “paid” work,

but women were, they are, equal to man in Italy, in the field too.

Women, from time immemorial, apart from putting on the pot on the stove powered by the logs the men cut down and women stacked, also dug the earth, spread out the manure, raked in the hay, milked the cows. So when I hear modern women complain that they do a full time job outside the home and then they also do all the work in the house, I ask myself: “What has changed?”

A lot has changed, indeed. Women no longer have to go down to the local river and spread their laundry on the washing board and rub, scrub and soap. They don’t have to put the pot on the stove or anywhere else for that matter because they go to the deep freeze for an answer to their daily bread... nor light the fire and gather up the cinders, put paraffin in the oil lamps, milk cows, dig the ground and pull up the potatoes, trample grapes to make wine, heat up the water to put in the tin bath, hang out the washing, scrub floors, wash up plates, make-up beds...

Women now have everything at their finger tips, washing machines, even dryers, dish washers, proper loos, baths, hot and cold running water, electric light, central heating, air conditioning, and even if they do have a gas cooker, they don’t cook anything on it. They have electric kettles and instant tea, coffee, or whatever that doesn’t need half an hour simmering. They don’t need the church bells to wake them up or run a mile or two to send a message to someone, or to get a packet of sugar from the only grocery shop in town. They don’t need to feed the chickens, gather the eggs and eventually wring their necks- because that was their job too.


And now they don’t even have to cut the grass, rake it in and make hay. Sometimes I think my mother was born with a rake and scythe in her hands. No indeed, because nowadays the gentlemen do all this strenuous activities with the proper instrument, that certainly is no comparison to the rake and scythe. However, the male may be required to clean the instrument which may involve some effort, but that is the most that is required of a man nowadays

Nonetheless, old habits are hard to die and when you were taught as soon as you could walk how to use a rake, a woman used it to the point that it has remained part and parcel of her innate culture, something she cannot do without even in the 21st Century. Hence, you see these august women dotting the local landscape as if they have just stepped out of the past.

So I really do not see what all the fuss is about. Women in this century have never had it so good. The Western world woman, and by that I refer to any woman pertaining to a country rooted in the Anglo-Saxon culture, has hubby who does the washing up, hubby who cooks shepherd’s pie, hubby who will run her bath water- hubby this, hubby that, hubby anything except for that which hubby was born to do- be a man... is it any wonder that there are 3 out of 5 marriages that break up or 2 out of 3- quite honestly I’ve lost count of the statistics. All I know is that there are no longer “families” any more- you know the sort- mum, dad, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles... identities. A child nowadays has no family identity, he has so many aunts and uncles that he hasn’t a clue which stork dropped him off into this metropolitan disarray. Is it any wonder that if not half, certainly close to it, of our youngsters are either drug dependents or hooligans?

I’m not advocating that hubby shouldn’t do the washing up, but I am also saying that the missus should put the spuds in the pan sometimes and provide a proper meal and a nice environment for all the members of the family, the first being herself to benefit from a clean house and a healthy meal. Most marriages break up simply because one or the other of these elements were missing, not if one performed well or not in bed.