We have lived for perhaps over four thousand years with the Bronze Age ethical assumption that women were inferior to and were merely the "chattels" of their men folk. While this ethical consideration was introduced merely to give these new Bronze Age warriors the means of being certain of the paternity of their sons, it has coloured our thinking about women ever since. Men's brains are wired for a dogged, single-minded, competitive approach to one problem at a time; in modern management they make the best trouble shooters and war lord managers, setting targets and "kicking ass". Women's brains are wired for the less competitive multi-tasking required over many thousands of years of running a home; in modern management they make the best general managers of multi-faceted enterprises (and the best deputies to war lord managers, keeping them from being overwhelmed by detail). It has been the lack of competitiveness and the sheer drudgery which has kept women "in their place" for so long. Individually the wives of great men have frequently blossomed, but only when there were enough servants to raise them above the drudgery, and allowed them to "manage" the domicile. The typewriter provided "suitable" work a step above domestic drudgery and began to bring women into the fringe of the general job market; but it was the First World War which first saw them taking over men's jobs (and trousers) in the factories, as their men went to war. Women's quiet return to domesticity at the end of WW1 was rewarded with the vote, but their potential as general labour had been seen. WW2 saw them not only in the factories and on the farms but driving ammunition trucks through the blitz, delivering aircraft, manning anti-aircraft guns and being trained as agents to be dropped behind enemy lines. The biggest single change, however, came with the domestic labour saving devices of the second half of the twentieth century. Women were suddenly released from the vast amount of the drudgery of running a home, and became available to compete in the general labour market. Food was being marketed "ready to cook", it no longer took three days backbreaking labour to do the family wash. Clothes and other goods became cheaper, becoming throwaway items, and making and mending simply disappeared. With a high proportion of women working, the bronze-age ethic began to be seen as outmoded, to be replaced hopefully by equality of esteem and equal pay for equal work. But what of the women who were not wives? What of the widows and spinsters (and more recently the separated and divorced, when they came to be seen as the "victims" of marriage rather than just as "bad women")? They too were drudges, but where, like the better off wives, they could rise above this, they too found a management role. The tradition of the draconian maiden aunt who was always there, she birthed the babies, nannied the children, nursed the sick and laid out the dead; she took charge of the household when the wife was with child, was sick or had died. These women too were liberated by the typewriter, two wars and the domestic labour saving revolution. But these women, when they had few family ties, were also able to put their domestic management ability on the open market, using their lifetime's skill to take charge of the households of others. Gone are the days when a poor widow or spinster who could not make ends meet and needed a roof over her head, would work as a housekeeper for a pittance. Today there are benefits, pensions, widow's pensions, her own superanuation, a husband's superanuation now going to the widow instead of stopping when he died; the safety net is getting better and better. Today she can work to keep a car, buy presents for her children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Today there are a whole series of Agencies dedicated to finding her these jobs, Irish Aunts being just one.
