Chapter 14: Democracy & WomenParliamentary power passing to women; Trend will lead to Parliament dealing with ‘private home’ issues; Highjack of the ‘public house’ and inability of the women’s parliamentary power to control The Money Power; Lysistrata and Aristophanes; The Shavian and Randian Woman.
Women are indifferent poets, Coleridge once commented, because they rarely or never thoroughly distinguish between fact and fiction. Plato would have understood this remark.Representative Democracy is destined to put the ladies in the parliaments. This need not be a bad thing. But the ladies will deal only with those matters of the private home that are in the ladies domain. Since these have been much neglected, everyone will gain if they are successful.
But is the power of a public parliament a sufficient tool for such a job? And what of those matters of the public house that are the traditional male domain? Will these be neglected and thrown without a fight to the invisible grasping claws of the Megamachine?
Or worse, will the ladies deal with such matters in their traditional way by trying to order the men to get on with it?
Is it the men or the women who send the young men to war? The evidence of Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands Adventure and Indira Ghandi’s Indian Empire do not augur well.
Lysistrata would have had much too much sense to stand for parliament. And Aristophanes would have been more than a little perplexed by the antics of both the Shavian and the Randian woman. Not this way, he would have exclaimed!