Madam, - It was refreshing to read Niamh Brennan's piece on non-career women (Opinion, August 7th). Her honesty - and ambivalence - helps to ease the rivalry between the career and the non-career woman.
And rivalry there is: deep, unspoken, hidden, insidious. The young woman today is being constantly reminded that since the now automated cradle needs no further rocking, she should apply her talents where they would be best appreciated - in the workplace. Here she will find fulfilment, self-development and, of course, money.
The country needs her, the economy will fold up without her - this she is told invariably by women who themselves are belting up the career ladder. "Look at me" is the message: see how job, career, children and home can be managed. All this serves only to make stay-at-home sisters feel like hopeless under-achievers or just plain lazy.
On the other hand there are the full-time home-makers (their number is dwindling daily) who speak so smugly of home and hearth, and lose no opportunity to stress the importance of kissing better the bruised knees of their toddlers. As they untie their apron strings at the end of the day and sit reading the bedtime stories, they assure themselves that their sisters in the business suits are really missing out on what Henry James calls "the deeper rhythms of life".
How unusual then, to find a successful career woman such as Niamh Brennan admit that maybe she hasn't all the answers, maybe the world wouldn't be a better place if everyone followed her example. She praises without condescension the unpaid work of those who are full-time carers of children, elderly parents, the voluntary work done by those who have time, since they are not in full-time employment.
Women can be their own worst enemies, and for the young woman today, trying to cope with the complexities of her life is difficult enough without shades of envy, guilt, criticism, thrown across her path - and that by fellow women. New theories about getting it right are dished up daily by the pop psychologists, but in the end there is really no road map; each one must choose what is best in her case.
As for feeling ambivalent - is there any other frame of mind for the thinking career woman who is honest with herself? Except, of course, for the woman who must go out to work full-time, to put the bread, minus jam, on the table. - Yours, etc.,
AIDEEN CLIFFORD, Lynbrook, Glasheen Road, Cork.