"A starter wife is for life"

Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 2010-04-05 14:16

Article here. Excerpt:

'It’s not often that my heart misses a beat at the six o’clock news, but the other day when the newsreader announced “a victory in the Court of Appeal for first wives” I almost dropped my gin. I am a supporter of the First Wives’ Club — remember the sublime film with Sarah Jessica Parker as an undernourished marriage wrecker and Goldie Hawn facially immobile with Botox? — and we seldom have much to cheer about. But the case of Philippa Vaughan was one to reckon with.

Her victory was summed up in loaded terms in one newspaper: “Ex-wife wins £215,000 . . . 25 years (heavily underscored) after her divorce.” The implication is that the best-before date on your ex-wife status expires long before the quarter-century mark and especially if your former spouse has moved on to another wife.
...
Okay, we’re talking about well-to-do people on both sides here; this isn’t a case where either mister or missus would end up poor, even after paying the eyewatering legal bill of £400,000. (The chief lesson of this case for the rest of us is, as ever, to beware any involvement with lawyers.)

But it’s the principle of the thing that matters, and that principle is that the marital commitment isn’t something you can discard at will. For Vaughan, the yearly £27,000 he paid his first wife from their divorce in 1985, and the payout now, are a disagreeable reminder of the day he said “I do” to the query whether he would have and hold the lady, for better or worse, till death did them part, back in 1967. Philippa Vaughan was merely holding him to the latter part of that commitment.'

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Google "Melanie McDonagh" and see other essays she has penned. No surprise, she is an advocate of "traditional roles" for the sexes, but of course, with the option for women to do something else if they really want to. In short, she likes women to have few responsibilities but a lot of the benefits associated with life in "modern times" and/or being married to a man who works largely for her upkeep. But to be fair, she sees that women have this much responsibility if they are married: to be "good wives" -- but that is it. However like many "socially conservative feminists" she also believes that women should have all the same opportunities men have while men should have only the opportunities they have had traditionally.

In short, she's like the other slave-master on the ship arguing with the gender-feminist slave-master about how exactly to hold the whip. If anyone thinks she is not that type of person, I ask you to read an article she wrote here wherein her concluding lines went:

'The last thing we should be doing is bullying people to breed less. The population controllers have to be put back in their box. You know, Augustus Caesar had a tax on Roman bachelors. With due allowances for gay men and professional celibates, there’s lots to be said for the idea.'

'nuff said.

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Submitted by Matt on Mon, 2010-04-05 16:28