Equality by Bonnie Le Hamilton

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last few weeks. It started on Christmas Day. I had company for lunch in the form of a cousin of mine and my sister-in-law. At one point I went into my bathroom and instantly knew that my cousin had been in there. After using the facilities, I went back out and said to him, “In this house, we put the lid down.”

At the time I put the issue on the fact I have a cat, but in reality, I’ve been putting the lid down for years. The issue started years ago when Tom was still alive. And it began with the age-old argument all wives understand. Yelling at your husband about leaving the seat up.

Tom, like most men, didn’t always remember. But on this occasion, Tom looked me in the eyes and said, “It isn’t fair that I’m the only one adjusting the seat.”

That stopped me because he was right. But how could we possibly make it fair? Women always need the seat down, but men more often need the seat up. What was fair?

It took me a little while of thinking it over, but it seemed clear, the only fair thing was for both us to have to adjust before using the facilities. Meaning the lid, not just the seat, had to be put down after every use. So now, if you walk into my bathroom and the lid is up, I wasn’t the last one in there. On Christmas Day the seat was up, so it was obviously not my sister-in-law.

But that got me thinking about the feminist movement today. I’ve listened to some of what they have to say, and well what they want isn’t equality, but rather superiority.

Ladies, we all are human beings, period. No one is superior to anyone else. If you feel as though you are, you have problems.

Though I have to admit some women are just misguided. They listen to the rhetoric about how women get paid on average less than men, but that is a bull. Go to any company or the government and look at their published pay scales. Do they list separate pays for men over women? Of course not! The men and women working for them get the same pay for doing the same job.

So why do the feminist say men get paid more?

Simple. They are taking the AVERAGE pay of all working women and comparing that to the AVERAGE pay of all working men. In other words, they’re comparing apples to oranges, instead of apple to apples. You see, the problem with averaging is, you are not taking into consideration that women gravitate to jobs like daycare, teacher, secretary, nurse, while men tend to gravitate toward jobs working on oil rigs, mechanics, lawyers, and doctors.

The problem isn’t unequal pay, the problem is unequal distribution between all the occupations. And I think that’s more an issue of personal choice rather than sexism. Though I have to admit there are issues with women breaking into a traditionally male-dominated field, I might point out there are also issues with men breaking into a traditionally female-dominated field.

How often do you think of a nurse as being female?

Men can be nurses too.

Teachers have swung from being male-dominated to being female-dominated, and now I think it’s finally equaling out, but I remember the first time I ever had a male teacher, he was the only one in the school. I was in junior high before I ever saw more than one male teacher in the school, and there were still more women.

And yet, in American history men were often the teacher when our country first started. Nathan Hale was a school teacher. He wasn’t the only one. But as we expanded and families were more spread out, the chore of teaching the children fell to the mothers, and once places were settled enough to have a school, they generally picked one or more of those mothers to do the teaching. Starting a tradition that women were the teachers.

Though at some point they went from having mothers do the teaching to having young unmarried women do it. And they were expected to quit once they married. So even that has changed a lot.

It’s also traditionally men who were doctors and women were nurses. We just need more women to choose to be doctors instead of nurses, and more men to choose to be nurses. Both are worthy jobs.

All I’m saying is that men and women in the same job do get the same pay. And equality isn’t about one side having special privileges or the other. So put the lid down!

Happy writing everyone.