A quote a day for Women's History Month: 9th March

[W]hen it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

Perhaps no book can answer it completely: but what I am waiting for... is a book that starts off on the assumption that all sorts of goads and bribes are necessary to get some of us up off the hearthrug and doing the housework at all.

Katharine Whitehorn, 'Nought for Housework', in Roundabout (1952)

O the wonderous Katharine Whitehorn! Well before the advent of the so-called 'second wave' of feminism, indeed, during what is often considered a time of invisible feminism, she was slashing away in her columns with incisive wit about the inequities of women's position in society. E.g. on the attitudes of banks towards women, on abortion law reform, on women in the workplace, etc etc. She also fought the corner of women whose lives are full of domestic disarray, and assumptions that women were naturally good at the domestic arts.

Perhaps I am getting old and cranky, but I came of age when there was a wonderful array of women journalists telling like it was, with both passion and humour. There don't quite seem to be any contemporary equivalents.