The Rural Voice, 1981-08, Page 30HY- EST
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PG. 28 THE RURAL VOICE/AUGUST 1981
GISELE IRELAND
A promise
to schlurp over
Lady Diana is not going to promise to "obey" Prince Charles
in her wedding ceremony. That doesn't surprise me. I haven't
been obeying for seventeen years and we are still together. The
word OBEY always reminds me of dogs.
You send them to obedience school to
learn to obey their masters. Women
should respect, love and cherish their
mates but OBEY?
At one time ladies had no such choice.
In the days of yore when a woman was
traded for a well balanced sword and a
trusty steed she considered the command
carefully. If she had all her teeth and
didn't look like five miles of gravel road
she made it easy for her father to barter
her off. If the only time she was easy on
the eye was in pitch darkness, her father
usually had to hand over land and gold to get the man to take
her. If she didn't obey her husband, there was always the
convenient convent around the corner where she could be
incarcerated and labelled as unstable. Women were considered
chattels, and treated as such. The woman owned nothing and
was dependent on the benevolence of her master. I wonder if
banks got their mortgage ideas from that period?
When men and women fought side by side to forge this
country of ours some ideas changed. They obeyed sometimes. If
the couple were out slogging down trees for their new mansion
and the chief axe swinger yelled "hit the dirt" they obeyed for
safety reasons. Either he was a lousy tree feller and it was going
the wrong direction, or there was an arrow heading your way.
Traditionally, men stepped to the fore, shielding the weaker sex
from danger. While the bear took the first swipe at the male who
dropped his weapon during the panic, the woman usually loaded
the thing behind his broad, strong back and proceeded to blow
the bear's head off. They gave up the idea that a lady had to
swoon into a faint when her sensibilities were affronted. It's not
much of a turn -on to have a slobbering bear revive you, with the
idea of having you for the main course.
Once women learned not to obey men with their mode of dress
they improved their lives a lot. The days of six and eight
petticoats and whalebone corsets maybe enhanced your feminine
attributes, but they made you almost immobile with your chest
shoved under your chin and spilling over the top and constricting
your innards to agony. Those ladies would have been a pleasure
to take out for a meal. Three teaspoons of anything would fill
them. There was great furor when women discovered pants. You
could walk in them, and not trip over anything and sit in them
and travel in comfort. They were shocking to the males. This is
almost a perverted sense of rationalization on the men's part; the
idea that bosoms spilled all over the place are preferrable to
bottoms displayed in pants. At least the bottoms were covered.
I vaguely remember having the word obey in my marriage
vows. It was one of those promises that you kind of schlurp
over, and think about when you've not got anything else to
occupy yourself with. Myself, I'll think about obey with more
consideration when my husband approaches me with a leash and
a rolled up newspaper.