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Notes -
Oh no, a middle-class housewife is living in a "comfortable concentration camp".
I think perhaps the author has no fucking clue what the original concentration camps were like, and that the Boer women in them were not living dreary lives eating peanut butter sandwiches with their children. And that working-class women often combined paid work outside the home alongside child-rearing and home-making duties, because of economic necessity.
"Woe is me, I have food, shelter, clothing, and the looming shadow of the bailiffs repossessing our goods is not over us, but I'm bored because my life is easy and convenient. How much happier I would be working in a job outside the home!"
two decades later "Woe is me! I have to work outside the home and be a housewife and home-maker as well! And that's only if I can find a man who wants to marry me! I thought we were supposed to have it all!"
I'll weep tears over the hard burdensome toil of the women expected to "chauffeured Cubs and Brownies" when this book tells me the author had direct experience, like my mother, of living in a house with no running water and hand-washing the clothes for herself, husband, two kids and bed-ridden mother outside in a plastic tub - all of which I saw as a child.
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