Once again Mina Kaye has left me sputtering in disbelief after reading her letter headlined, 'Today's women motivated by pure greed' (South China Morning Post, October 9).
Several months ago she used these pages to champion exclusive men's clubs - advocating bigotry, snobbery and sexism as desirable qualities espoused by persons of refinement. This time she expressed admiration for Raymond Hung Man-wo's antediluvian argument to keep women 'in their place' at home and out of the workplace.
The temptation is great to logically address each and every misguided point in Ms Kaye's letter, including each instance of vitriolic name-calling ('troublemakers', 'selfish', 'worse than even the animal kingdom', 'Prozac-popping mothers', etc), but this space and my time are too valuable for that.
Instead, I ask Ms Kaye to consider a few issues. Men have never been obliged to make a choice between career and family - why should women have to? Just because a woman wants to have children, why should she have to content herself with housework and 'arts and crafts'? What is it to prevent a husband and father from sharing equally in the responsibilities of homemaking and child-rearing? Are men too incompetent, too self-absorbed or too exalted to take on these duties and perform them with the same devotion expected of women? I would also like to offer Ms Kaye a brief history of women in the workplace in the second half of this century. Most wives and mothers were content to stay at home, until husbands began announcing they were 'bored', or 'unfulfilled', or whatever euphemism they chose as an excuse to dump their wives and pursue other women and the 'Playboy' lifestyle. Many of these husbands then did everything in their power to minimise or avoid financial responsibility for their families.
The impoverished women left behind had little choice but to enter the workplace to support themselves and their children. The proportion of women who 'took their husbands to the cleaners' financially through divorce is so small that it is almost mythical.
Who can blame women now for wanting to maintain financial independence? It is simply foolhardy to depend entirely on the benevolence of another person for the survival of oneself and one's children.