Congratulations to the upwardly mobile women!

Now that you can afford your own house, nannies and housekeepers, and can accumulate and strategically scatter a few boy toys around the estate, your men can finally just focus on being great fathers and lovers. Equity restored - win-win for all.

1) I asserted that we have already had a failed cycle of feminism, lasting roughly from the 1860s to the late 1940s, in which women were able to enter the professions. Scout replied: "I can't think of a single lawyer or doctor during this period. Perhaps Richardson could enlighten us."

So here goes. Let's take America as an example. The first woman doctor graduated in 1849. The first medical school for women opened in 1850 (in Philadelphia). In 1870 the first state university began accepting female medical students (Michigan). By 1884 four out of sixteen medical students at the precursor of Stanford were women. In 1899 it was 10 out of 34. In 1914 four of the 13 graduates at Stanford medical school were female. However, by 1937 the percentage of female students had fallen to about 5% and this figure was maintained until the late 1960s.

Lawyers. In 1870 there were only 5 female lawyers in America. By 1880 there were 75. Between 1880 and 1910 there was a "huge percentage increase" which no-one has yet tallied.

After the late 1940s women chose to enter the professions in much smaller numbers. I don't claim to be able to prove why in a scientific way. But there are two factors which I think are worth considering.

First, after WWII a large number of men were being demobilised, so there was no shortage of labour. Second, the first wave of feminism left a lot of highly-educated women unmarried and childless, just as the second wave has done. I have read articles from the late 1940s in which women asked "Was it all worth it?" and answered no. The mood seemed to shift decisively away from a destabilised family life; note too the shift from the androgynous fashions of the 1920s, to the wonderfully feminine look of the 1940s and 50s.

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2) Ena revealed a major contradiction in her thinking when she wrote that "We will not become fully human until we value the female experience of the world as much as the male." Is this the same Ena who went to such lengths to argue that there are no male and female qualities, only human ones? How are we supposed to value a distinctly female experience of the world if the categories of male and female are thought to be of trivial importance or, worse, are thought of as an oppressive, rigid, straight-jacket?

3) Laurie, Western women have never been "chattels". The word chattel means moveable property. If women had been chattels then there would have been shops or markets where women could be bought, sold or traded.

Nor do I believe that a young, hopeful person who has not been jaded by the coarseness and instability of modern relationships would settle for the kind of unisex "partnership" you speak of. For proof, see this survey of 5000 teenage girls:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1066298,00.html

In short, 90% of the girls surveyed believed that their future husbands should provide for them, and 85% preferred the idea of relying on their partner for financial support rather than being an independent career girl.

To throw my own experiences into the ring, I had the misfortune of circulating amongst arts degree women in the early 1990s, when feminism was rampant.

It's certainly true that these women were looking to stay independent and single, and I found them impossible to date. But fast forward ten years, when such women had turned 30, and things were very different.

They now wanted men with good jobs, and they wanted time off to raise a family. The "Neanderthals" like myself were now highly appreciated and the going was good. In fact, there weren't enough of us to go around - a lot of my wife's friends met these modern guys who strung them along as girlfriends, but who would never quite commit to anything more.

Mark Richardson,

I hope you realise how your comments could enrage our equitable sisters - feminists and females alike. I can almost see Scout’s psychopathic stare, dilated nostrils and the accompanying froth. R0bert as usual, will offer his metaphoric shoulder rubs while Maximus is likely to come out swinging with all that dangles.

No, indeed, women were not 'traded' in markets. But they were legally the property of first their fathers and then their husbands. (Or brothers/uncles/cousins if they did not marry). And dowries were, particuarly for upper-class women, a form of pricing and exchange. Further, things like the old theory that there was no such thing as rape-in-marriage show that women were the property of the man, that her original 'yes' at marriage was considered to rend her permanently at the mercy of her husband.

That article did not provide any rejection of the aims of feminism - the right to vote, own property, work in a relevant profession. It did suggest that young girls wanted to have babies and be looked after - but so what? I'm sure that a teen I too would have said I wanted to have babies by 25 and have a husband to provide for us when the bub was little - it seems a long way away then. As a teenager, even as a ninteen-year-old, twenty five seemed OLD!

But, in my group of male and female friends aged 22-30, all well-educated, the idea that either men or women should exclusively be the bread-winner is scorned. A friend who is pregnant at the moment (aged 27) is planning on taking four months maternity leave (her paid mat leave plus annual leave saved up), then returning to work. Her husband is taking a year off to look after bub as he has less stable employment. And no-one looks at this arrangement and considers that either of these people is somehow doing anything wrong. They seem to exemplify what feminism was meant to achieve (to me)- equality without strict gender roles, where both men and women can do what suits, not what is traditional.

Dear mark,
May i suggest you check your dictionary? Qualities and experiences do not mean the same thing at all, so there was no contradiction. Of course women have different experiences of the world - you know, like giving birth, breastfeeding, menstruation, menopause - but they do not necessarily have different qualities, gender specific ones, that is.
And Laurie is absolutely right about the - relatively recent - appalling legal status of women. Until the married womens property act in the mid 1800s, a woman had no right to her own money, no right to object to domestic violence, and, if she left an intolerable situation, no right to her own children- even to see them. Conjugal rights - a form of legal prostitution - where if a man had married a woman and therefore financially supported her, she had no right to refuse to have sex with him ( even if another pregnancy would mean her death - even when contraception was illegal) - were only abolished in the UK in the last twenty years.
And Glenwriter, I am sorry your marriage ended badly. Not all women respond to the same things anymore than all men do, and not all women are nice, or behave well, any more than all men are.
Maybe the two of you just weren't suited and, if she really didn't want to be married to you any more, sad though it is, sometimes you just can't make someone be happy with you, or content in their situation, even if you turn yourself inside out to please.