More From Martha [antikvár]

IntroductionOnce again, dear reader, Martha the Faint-Hearted Feminist takes pen in hand to pour out her heart and various other of her internal organs (spleen, bile etc.) to her enviably liberated friend Mary, her sister under the skin. To recap:Martha (38), erstwhile wife of Tom, the oldest hippie in the world, and mother of two, Jane (18) and Ben (16), is presently married to Josh, a civil servant, with whom she has produced a relatively new Baby (going on 2). Tom has vanished into darkest Cornwall with a variety of adoring nymphets, where he is writing his projected best-seller A Flasher's Guide to Feminism and from whence he sends few words and fewer pennies to his one-time near and dear. Martha, slightly dented, soldiers on in London, coping as best she can with the vagaries of family life in the Eighties which can be pretty damn vague, no member thereof being entirely clear as to the role he or she is expected to play. Even the cat has lost full confidence in her cathood and faints now and again from the strain of wondering if she should try to be a dog. Only Josh, meticulously turned-out at all times, is perfectly at ease in his God-given position as Head of Family, Breadwiimer and Man. Or would be, if only his mysteriously restless wife and her offspring would see it his way and grant him the proper respect due to his central importance in the scheme of things.Mary, on the other hand, being younger than Martha, was free, white and twenty-one when the tidal wave of the Women's Movement surged across the Atlantic and hit these shores in the late Seventies (I'm Betty, Fly Me). She was therefore ideally placed to shape her ends to the new currents and meet liberation head on. Her consciousness held proudly on high, she vowed never to succumb to the blandishments of men and never to join the ranks of trammelled women bound by matrimony to unreconstructed husbands whose children they had borne and whose houses they wife'd. Instead, she devotes herself to the women's cause, unhampered even by the minor exigencies of the human race the base from which she militates is a rent-free squat in a Northern city where she lives in ideological