3. You Don't Own Me - Lesley Gore 1963

You don't own me
Don't try to change me in any way
You don't own me
Don't tie me down 'cause I'd never stay

 

‘Where’s my dinner woman!?’ my uncle ranted at his wife after coming home at about ten o’clock at night.

            During this event I, along with the rest of my family and my uncle and aunt’s kids, was an observer. Not a, then seventeen year old, influencer. Not a participant. Not a contributor. Just an observer as I witnessed my parents stand compliantly by and my aunty attempt to brush off her husband’s petulant demands to be fed.

            While my aunty diplomatically pointed out to my uncle that he could get himself something to eat, I was gob-smacked that my parents had stood there and watched my mum’s sister have to defuse the situation as my uncle became more and more irritated at his dinner not being produced for him. My cousins, on the other hand, didn’t even raise an eyebrow, presumably because this was how things rolled in their family.

            My aunty was a stay-at-home mum. This may have placed heightened expectations on her to provide domestic services for the family during extended hours. However, I also had a sneaking suspicion, even at age seventeen, that my uncle liked to have my aunty on-call to provide for him as was his want, and that he liked the idea of keeping her dependant on him as a financial provider for her and the kids.

            I was lucky enough to have been raised by two working parents. While this meant that neither of them were particularly available for me as a kid, and I definitely didn’t have the opportunity to participate in out of school activities. It did provide me with an opportunity to become a fully functioning independent adult. That said, in the eighties having two working parents meant that of an evening my dad would go home after a long day at work and put his feet up. While my mum would go home to start her second job as a housewife cooking meals, doing laundry and a bit of cleaning.

            While in 2020 this family situation would seem very skewed – in my domestic arrangements my partner, a qualified chef, does the cooking, I do the dishes and we both hook in to clean the house – when my grandparents retired, Pop got to enjoy a carefree retirement, while Nanna got to continue her domestic duties into retirement.

Thinking back to the apparent situation my aunty found herself in during the 1990s, I have not spent my life thinking that ‘Oh my God! A woman!’ needs a man to provide for her, and I definitely have not been attracted to controlling types that want to be sole bread winners, final decision makers, heads of family, or whatever other old-school roles society felt men fulfilled. Yet I’ve had female friends that had very real security issues around the size of their man’s take-home pay. One of them even used it as a key criteria when surfing potential partners on internet dating sites.

‘He doesn’t earn as much as me’ were  words often heard during her escapades. This friend definitely saw herself as a modern, progressive, professional female, but she obviously still wanted the security of having a male that earned more than her.

Finally, in the twenty-first century women have made it through not being allowed to work. Not being allowed to be educated. It not being worth us taking a place in a learning institution or workplace that could be taken by a male. Not receiving equal pay. To today in Australia women are, on average, higher educated and, in theory, have the same employment opportunities. However, my friend still desperately sought a guy that earned as much as she did. She also sought someone that was larger than her ample size, someone that would put her on a pedestal, someone that was just as highly educated as her (she has three post graduate qualifications) and someone who could sympathetically handle all of her neuroticism.

Don’t tell me that chivalry is dead. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUjeR01wnU