INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

As I write, thousands of women will be marching to mark International Women's Day. One of them will be Mary Partington, of the Left Women's Network, who has an excellent letter http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/08/gender in today's Guardian pointing out that most women are still fettered by the twin bonds of capitalism and lack of adequate childcare.
The sharp-suited "career women", as she points out, are a tiny minority and what we need is better wages, and policies to address the real gap in gender and economic equality.
Mary is from a different generation to mine but when I think of the issues we raised in the 1970s and 1980s not much, fundamentally, has changed.
Yes, we have maternity pay and far more generous arrangements for maternity leave. But the fundamental block to women advancing as they could is still issues like the crippling cost of childcare and low pay.
For the past 30 years, since I left university, I have been able to support myself financially and earn a reasonable living . I own my own home , have significant savings. But that's probably because I never had children and never had to face the dilemmas they bring in terms of competing with men professionally and economically.
A generation back, my mother had to leave a reasonable job in the Post Office when she became pregnant with me and spent the rest of her life doing low-paid part-time jobs to supplement the family income. Let's not kid ourselves. That's still the lot of most women today.
So good luck to the marchers.
International Women's Day commemorates a 1908 march through New York by 15,000 female textile workers demanding better working conditions.It actually took the deaths of 140 women in a sweat-shop three years later for the law to be changed to give them better working conditions.
Those terrible conditions may not be prevalent today. But there is still plenty to fight for........UPDATE: Here'sthe pic of Maryand othr LRC women on the march...

A LIFE OF CONTRASTS.....

Have been working all day.....first a restaurant review which I should have finished two weeks ago. Then a reluctant 90 minutes jawing on about the joys of organic make-up for a lifestyle magazine ( it pays the bills) . And have just spent the last hour trawling the internet for a piece I'm doing to mark the 100th anniversary of the first International Women's Day in 1908. As this requires rather more thought than the previous two, I think it's time I clocked off ........