Typewriters Oppressed Women

Teddy Bear Teacher Returns To UK A British teacher jailed in Sudan for letting her class name a teddy bear Muhammad has spoken of her "ordeal", after returning to the UK.

Hurrah! Hurrah! Thanks to all the publicity and the vigorous interventions of our politicians and many leaders of the Muslim community, our teddy bear teacher is now back home.

BUT ...

Plight Of Five Kidnapped Men To Be Covered Up The UK government has condemned a videotape issued by the kidnappers of five British men held captive in Iraq.

The five men were seized on 29 May from Baghdad's finance ministry building by gunmen disguised as police officers.

you have never even heard of these men, right?

They have been held captive for more than six months but, of course, you have never even heard of these men, right?

No vigorous interventions of our politicians and many leaders of the Muslim community there, eh?

The Foreign Office spokesman said: "No matter what the cause, hostage-taking can never be justified."

Oh really?

Then, presumably, and for example, the prison at Guantanamo Bay can never be justified.

What a load of hooey.

Of course hostage taking is justified.

The Americans have justified it for years!

When you are at war, taking hostages is part of the deal. It always has been.

 I am going to take Germaine Greer as a hostage

In fact, I am going to take Germaine Greer as a hostage when I finally flip my lid and decide that I can take it no longer. And then I am going to point this huge pistol at her ever-expanding backside and make her dance naked around the kitchen singing,

Angry Harry is so wonderful,
Angry Harry is so right,
Angry Harry is my master,
He is my lovely shining light.

And then it will be days and days of cooking and housework for her!

"Angry Haaaaaarrry. I'm waiting for you."

OMG!

And, in fact, I got very close indeed to planning her kidnap last night.

I had recorded what turned out to be a great documentary on the Hubble Telescope, and I had settled down on the sofa most happily with a nice cup of tea and a whole bar of chocolate in order to be comfortable while I luxuriated in all those amazing images of space.

Unfortunately, however, this Hubble programme was on the BBC, and my video recorder had picked up the last two minutes of the previous programme.

And what did I see? - a woman talking about typewriters - you know, those olden things with keyboards that had real life bits of metal that struck a carbon ribbon on to paper to make imprints of letters.

Oh look. Here's one!

And guess what this woman was telling us about typewriters?

Hold your breath and take your heart pills, because you are not going to believe it ..... 

Typewriters were used to oppress women.

Yep: Typewriters were invented to oppress women.

I nearly died.

I kid you not.

And, apparently, because of typewriters, women all over the world wherein typewriters were deployed suddenly found themselves even more oppressed than they were before - if such a thing is possible.

You see, these poor women - millions of them - were hauled out of their homes - by force I presume - to work in offices up and down the country, so that they could earn a buck or two.

And this was oppression of the most heinous kind.

You see; before the invention of typewriters, women could stay at home and say, "Oh dear, life is much too tough out there. Only a man can do those jobs." But when typewriters came along, women discovered to their horror that there was some real work that they could actually do, and so they no longer had an excuse to sit at home chatting all day.

In other words, they were psychologically oppressed out into the workplace.

Sacre Bleu!

next week there will be a BBC programme on how vacuum cleaners oppressed women,

I suspect that next week there will be a BBC programme on how vacuum cleaners oppressed women, because the arrival of vacuum cleaners meant that women felt obliged to vacuum their carpets.

And the week after that we will probably hear how public transport ruined women's lives by making the workplace more accessible. 

And by the end of the series I expect that we will discover that all of the advances in medicine were also designed to oppress women because by living longer and healthier lives women would end up doing more chores!

"This is outrageous," they will soon be complaining. "No longer can we die of cancer, consumption or reproductive complications. We have to go out to work! I am a victim. I am a victim. Oh cruel world. Oh vile men."

Anyway. The evening's viewing was not entirely soured.

The Hubble programme was fantastic, and then I watched a horror film called The Descent, and was positively delighted to see six feisty feminist-type womenfolk being bitten horribly to death and partially devoured by a hidden tribe of gruesome flesh-eating zombies who dwelt in dark caves.

It was sheer bliss!

I mean; just look at that feminist's face.

Does it not fill your heart with sheer joy to see that pain?

Of course it does.

In fact, I must watch the gory bits again the next time that I'm feeling depressed.

In slow motion.

It'll cheer me up enormously.

 You think that I'm joking, don't you?

The idea that typewriters oppressed women because they gave rise to work that women could easily do seems preposterous, doesn't it?

But look at the context of the times in which they lived.

Quote ...

"The desire to free oneself from work was common to all classes and both sexes.

Dr Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College, London, has studied the diaries of 5,000 women who lived between 1860 and 1930.

During that period, the proportion of women in paid employment dropped from 75 per cent to 10 per cent. This was regarded as a huge step forward for womankind, an opinion shared by the women whose writings Dr Bourke researched.

Freed from mills and factories, they created a new power base for themselves at home. This was, claims Dr Bourke, "a deliberate choice. . . and a choice that gave great pleasure."

Yep. You can discount all the feminist lies about women being kept out of the workplace by wicked men in those times, because the truth is that women wanted to avoid work.

Unsurprisingly.

And then these things came along!