Replying to a comment on:

Timing (Free verse) by Dovina

In another age, I would have married young, To a pre-selected man from my village, had too many children, broken my back with my hands, died early, rested beneath the second of three crosses behind his house, while our hated king lived on a far away hill. I would have believed in servitude and done what the priest said, until my husband came home drunk, layed me and fell asleep. Then I would have hung a red lantern for seafare to Paris.

Ranger 17-Oct-06/4:20 AM
Well okay, if you're not deeply Catholic or something like that, maybe birth control should be made more available and acceptable. But you've then got to tie that in with the aforementioned shift in attitudes, and more importantly, with a change in circumstances for those people who you're talking about. And that change in circumstance won't happen if you just target the ordinary people. What power do they have?
You say that women in this sort of situation would prefer to have fewer children. That may well be true at present, but it's a potentially cyclic desire. We're seeing it happen here; women wanted, and to an extent got, the power to have their own careers, lives, freedom and something vaguely approaching equality with men. And it's backfired spectacularly for some, who've got to the point where they've decided they now want a family, but can't have one. A rising number of women are now eschewing the career opportunities in order to return to having a traditional family. That's how I was brought up so my view is probably blinkered, certainly, but in 5 or 10 years we could be seeing a large percentage of women actually wanting to be housewives with 3 or 4 kids. And the same could easily happen in the parts of the world we've been discussing; after a decade or two of liberty, women may begin to actively want to return to being mothers-of-many. In which case, won't we be back to where we started?

As for the typos, I'll admit to the second, should have had a space, but 'themselves' really annoys me. 'Work it out for them selves' doesn't make sense to me. The self is the possession of the individual, right? So 'my self' and 'your self' should in the plural become 'their selves', surely?




Track and Plan your submissions ; Read some Comics ; Get Paid for your Poetry
PoemRanker Copyright © 2001 - 2024 - kaolin fire - All Rights Reserved
All poems Copyright © their respective authors
An internet tradition since June 9, 2001