Raising your f**king family - still women's work?

Gah this day just keeps getting better and better.

First women are being chided for not being Julia Child, but now we know the reason for our failure in the kitchen is because we work and thus don't have time to carry out our family responsibilities.

Stuff is carrying another wire story in which the head of the girls' school association tells us that young girls need to be taught the 'realities' of trying to have a career and having children and that we can't have 'it all.'

Gah! It's like feminism never happened.

Can we all please get over this assumption that it is only women who must sacrifice their careers because childcare/house work is women's work. Yes biologically dictates that it will be the mother doing the labouring and breastfeed, but that's only one part of looking after your offspring and managing a household. There's the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping and those seemingly never-ending piles of laundry.

And perhaps instead of schooling girls in the 'realities' of parenthood and work maybe, just maybe, we could teach teenage boys that they should not automatically expect women to do all of the child-raising and housework if they want to have children or for that matter a partner at all.* And perhaps we could even, shock horror, teach boys** about the ins and outs of parenting in order to better equip them for this role.

Oh and while I'm on a roll, perhaps we can do something about that wage gap so that a woman's career isn't the one that is seen as more expendable because she earns less.

* But then you'd also have to bust another pop-culture meme that men don't want children and do so to placate us women-folk with our clocks a ticking.
** Yes, yes and girls too.