>???????????? It’s been some time since I’ve blogged, so I feel like I’m jumping into the ocean without knowing the temperature, but here goes.

I’m a fifty-something woman who has been married, not had a family, always had a career. I remember going to University to study a degree in Textile Marketing and being one of four females out of a class of forty.  Women’s liberation just started to penetrate my corner of the world as I reached my late teens and started in higher education. I noticed it but I was sufficiently absorbed in myself that it didn’t seem to be anything to do with me and my career education. Today I look back and wonder just how blind I was, and how much the world changed for women like me. 

But I also see that the world changed for everyone. Many men took the opportunities that were presented and took on career choices that they wouldn’t have considered before.  We now routinely accept that men are nurses, men are midwives, men are househusbands. This stands well with the career choices of women as bankers, women as engineers.

What else changed? For me, lots of things. I found that my role in my personal relationships was radically different from that which I had been taught. I read the books I read in childhood and find that mothers made meals, fathers went to work and earned money, girls wore dresses and boys were bossy. Today we can move any of the roles and actions between genders in many households and no-one sees anything peculiar.

I want to explore some of these things in the next few weeks and reflect on how it makes our lives different - and how much our lives have stayed the same. I want to see how factors such as higher education and education online affect men and women. There’s fun to be had during this process, as well as some interesting social comment.

And of course, how much being men and women affect how we think and what we are; and the interaction between the two.  Particularly the interaction between the two.