"Not one single case of throat irritation" for Mommie Dearest way back when. Even so, we'd still walk a mile for a Camel.
That thing about 51 per cent of American women's not living with husbands caught our eye. Some of our best girlfriends -- like ourselves -- are still married after all these years, but others no longer live with husbands, several twice married and divorced. Some we have known have lived long enough to see their beloved Alzheimer's or otherwise disabled hubbies put in "homes" or even up and die. Then there are the sexy gals of all ages we know and love who live with some wonderful guy without tying the knot and -- according to our reading of the tea leaves of the NYT article not to mention our own secret sources -- the best of the bunch, those who have long since launched their wondrous grown offspring and now keep their own homes and visit the man of their dreams when they will. That doesn't even begin to touch the group once known as "old maids," the members of the fair sex who for whatever reason never married, the ones Barbara Boxer disses as "not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family." As Mrs. Hammen in Airplane! famously said, "At least I have a husband."
In our view, American women's domestic arrangements are combinations of individual choice and happenstance, all made possible by this land of the free and home of the brave. We can't help but think of our mysogynistic fellow human beings of the Islamic persuasion who say that all women -- one of Allah's own creations! -- even those with PhDs, are "deficient." How is it that he created the camel, "absolutely perfect for what it needs to do," and then blew it on the helpmeets of this wondrous thing, man himself? We rest our case.
If one believes as I do that Allah and God and G-d are the creation of man rather than the other way around what can one expect. Women and men can be wonderful beings or slobs. My observation is that those in the first catagory are the more satisfied with life.
Posted by: goomp | January 16, 2007 at 08:15 PM
You know, of course, that those numbers are fudgey, right? They counted as "women living outside of marriage" girls 15 and up. They also counted wives whose husbands were in Iraq or Afghanistan as women outside of marriage. Widows, too. All that to get to the magical 51% they were seeking.
Posted by: Ruth Anne | January 17, 2007 at 10:52 PM
I've never married and now, at age 64, the desire to do so is pretty much extinct. Part of my reasoning involves two factors: I'm a Catholic (divorce not an option unless you're a Kennedy) and I was unable to have children and knew that from the age of 21 - so my criteria for choosing a possible mate had some differences from the average female's choices.
Do I consider myself less because I couldn't have children and, as it happened, also never married? No, not at all. I took a different path because of the luck of the genetic draw which denied me the ability to bear children - but my beloved nephew who is serving in Iraq is no less dear to me than if he were my own.
And Barbara Boxer is a vicious, self-serving, babbling idiot!
Posted by: Gayle Miller | January 23, 2007 at 10:38 AM