I will second what R0bert says.

GlenW, can you explain what you do not like about ens’s last comment. It seems quite fair and reasonable (no pun!)

Robert and Reason,
When a couple comes together, one dominates. Pun intended.
It must be and it is just as certain as death and taxes. Two dominant leaders will fight such as Hawke and Keating did as well as Howard and Costello. There is no such thing as equality.

The two in a partnership agree that there is equality. That does not mean that equality is as true as fact. It isn't. It is just an agreement to keep the peace.

Ena says her husband takes the lead on some things and then she does and it depends on who knows more about it. No, that is not true. It depends on who is dominant at that time.
It is called "wearing the pants". Who wears the pants in a partnership is not about who knows more. One may take the pants off and let the other wear them, and then that person takes them off an let's the other partner wear the pants.

Whatever happens, one of the partners wears the pants more than the other. It is not the more intelligent, it is the more dominant who wears the pants more than the other while the other stands exposed. That is an agreement. It is not equality. Equality does not exist.
Difference exists. Viva la difference . . . or is that "le". There are many who know more than Kim Beazley. Julia Gillard for one!

Glenwriter, I think you mistake the meaning of partnership for leadership structure.
Neither Hawke or Keating, or Howard and Costello were/are partners. One was the leader one was his subordinate.
A marriage based on this kind of heirachy is going to end up being mighty unpleasant for the subordinate party eventually.
Perhaps you have never been lucky enough to experience working in a true partnership, I have many times. As an ad writer I always worked in a two person team with an art director. The best and most productive of those relationships was when neither tried to dominate but both appreciated each others equal but different talents and strengths and the relationship ebbed and flowed accordingly. My marriage has worked in a similar fashion. Perhaps such real partnerships are more creative than the old dominant/subordinate model. Who dominated in Rogers and Hammerstein or Merchant Ivory, for example? Most medical and science researchers work in partnership - as teams. i am now co-authoring books and it is wonderful to feel that neither of us must dominate, must ' control" things all the time. Oh, and this has worked in both male/female and female/female partnerships and I've watched it work in male/male too - professionally and personally.

GlenWriter, there is another alternative - one which will have times which don't work well but which better equips the participants for those times.

Working in partnership - the scenario ena described where the normal decision making process takes into account factors like
- who is best equiped to take the lead in making the decision
- who is most impacted by the decision
- what does my partner think of this

A mutual working together based on both people respecting the other rather than seeking to exert control over them. Admittedly a scenarion some people just don't want to try but one which involves far less conflict than one dominating the other.

I had a good example the other night of the power of this in a recreational situation.

We were playing with a Mensa quiz, 30 questions and if you can get 23 you are potentailly a genius. Apparently only two mensa members have only ever got the 30. I started on my own and stalled at a respectable number with a couple of answers I was unhappy with. Then two of us started on the remaining items, some corrections, a bunch of new answers and only one item without a viable answer. A couple of the new answers came from me despite me being stalled earlier.

Two of us working together did far better than either of us on our own could have achieved - (We were both wearing pants at the time if that is relevant).

R0bert

Ena,
The blurb here says:
"Jane Caro is a Sydney writer . . ."
There is a quantum leap from an ad writer to a writer.
Sssshh!

The world is more old-fashioned than you think, Ena, Laurie and Scout.

When I defended traditional marriage, Laurie wroted about me "wishing for an age which is long gone"; Scout claimed I was "longing for the good old days when men were men and women knew their place"; and Ena opined that I was yearning for a past, but that there was "no going back".

As it happens, I'm not "yearning" for traditional marriage, I'm living it. My wife often expresses her gratitude that she is not forced to go out to work and can look after our son full-time. We have a good life together.

Nor are we alone. All of the eight families in my wife's mothers' group (randomly selected) are broadly traditional. The men are all full-time committed careerists, none of the women are. Two of the women work part-time (one from home two afternoons a week); one works full-time, but only reluctantly as her husband's wage is limited by child-care payments to his ex-wife.

This traditionalist pattern confirms the research of one of your fellow feminist writers, Linda Hirshman, who tracked the marriages of some well-educated New York women and found that only five out of 30 were in full-time paid work, with over half not in paid work at all.

http://www.ozconservative.com/gettingitstraight.html

Laurie and Scout, I notice that you associate traditional marriage with female subservience. That's not how I see things. There are easier ways for men to dominate women than committing to a lifetime of work and family responsibilities.

If men prefer traditional marriage it's because there is a distinctly masculine role for them within such a model and because they want to preserve the connection between mother and baby for the benefit of both.

Even Germaine Greer eventually came to defend the traditional family on such grounds: she wrote in 1991 that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and complained, in contrast, of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".