Hooray for the Baby Daddy

I like Jude Law, I really do. He's handsome, he has a great voice, and he's a wonderful actor. But it disturbed me when the many press stories that he was about to become a father for the fifth time was  greeted with nothing but hoorays and congratulations and what-a-wonderful-person comments on Facebook. Literally every celebrity, media outlet and even my friends were posting this as good news.

I'm thinking, if this was a woman having her fifth child with the third father, two of whom she not only didn't marry but didn't even stay with long enough to still be in the relationship when she got pregnant, after cheating on her first husband and leaving her first family, we would crucify her. She'd be called a slut, irresponsible, a horrible person, and not fit to be a mother. And those are probably the nicest things she'd be called.

Courtesy zimbio.com

"Whilst they are no longer in a relationship," Law's rep said, "they are both wholeheartedly committed to raising their child."

What? He's wholeheartedly committed to raising a child with this woman, the last woman and the first mother of his three children? Seriously? Is anyone buying this? It's just not logistically possible if what we're talking about is raising a child. But then I realize that isn't what we're talking about. All he is expected to do, as a man, is to pay for the cost of raising the child and show up every once in a while to take them on an outing. And that's the other side of this double standard: What a woman does for her children is never enough and what a man does is insignificant as long as he pays up.

A Husband's Permission

The sixties may seem like an aeon ago, especially to young women. But in the span of human history, it isn't very long ago and the changes that have happened between then and now are monumental. The young women of today who don't want to call themselves feminists may not realize what the feminists of the sixties achieved. To see what they came out of to where we are today is astounding.

Courtesy CNN

They literally brought women into the world. We were sequestered away as an accessory of husbands. Our job was to keep that home and that's it. Women didn't have choices like we do now. And if they did choose to do something different, rest assured that their way was made very difficult.

When I was in college, one of my professors told us that when she was first married (in the seventies) she went to the local library to get a card and was told she needed her husband's permission. As a married woman, she had the rights of a child! So, as a reminder, here are five things women couldn't do in the sixties.