Sir, - John Waters's offering of September 30th plumbed new depths. For someone who disclaims being a "patriarchal male" he gives a good impression of one.
He asserts that in the past the inclusion of women in the economic and political hierarchy would have been "deeply destabilising of society." He seems to be under the illusion that jobs requiring physical strength have been performed heretofore solely by men, that until the last decade women were perforce sidelined, not by the attitude and laws of a society which considered them to be inferior, but by their lack of muscle. (Hauling water, harvesting, cutting and carrying turf, bearing a baby a year, etc., etc., requires little strength and endurance, as we know).
During the two World Wars, women did, in fact, go into the factories. They kept them, their countries and their homes going while the men were at war. Of course, when the wars were over, they returned to their proper place to tend the fires they had kept burning while the men rebuilt the world men's politics had destroyed.
If we were to believe John Waters, women were never really oppressed. History, as we know it, is all part of a feminist plot.
On the opposite page Kevin Myers blamed feminism for the rise in house prices. I wonder why the two said gentlemen don't move to Algeria or Afghanistan, two countries that are certainly aware of the danger posed by women to society. Steps have been taken to counteract the threat that human rights for women would have caused to the orderly running of those countries.
Maybe it's not too late for Ireland. If we close the girls' schools, remove women from the workplace and pass ownership of women back to their menfolk as was the law (fact, not allegation), perhaps we too can stop the rot. - Yours, etc.,
From Christine Stacke
Athboy, Co Meath.