have taken the rap for being the obstacle to women’s confinement, when it is children who are the barrier to her independence. Parents do not love their children any less than they did in previous decades, but children are receiving forty percent less time with their parents than they did thirty years ago. Children are coming up short in this time of lost identity. They are caught in between the rising number of divorces and visiting fathers, or having no father at all. Opposing forces that are telling mothers they need to be working or staying at home and other issues have put mothers at war with each other. Finally, the combination of women in the workforce, single parent families, and men struggling to find their nurturing father role has put children at loss. Fox-Genovese puts it perfectly, “These days the ability to enjoy ones children has become a rare and precious freedom that too few [people] enjoy and too few people recognize as freedom at all.” Many Americans are lost in a storm of doubt and discontentment. There are no easy answers or quick fix solutions, but a place to begin would be for men and women to stop blaming each other for their unhappiness. Simply put, all people need to do for themselves what fulfills and rewards them and remove themselves from what does not. It is idealistic that all men and women will put down their imaginary weapons and live with mutual respect for each other. But if we did, we would not have a word like ‘feminism’. In the words of Nezahualcoyotl:Even jade is shattered,Even gold is crushedEven quetzal plumes are torn…One does not live forever on this earth:We endure only for a instant! Works CitedBaywatch. NBC series. 1991-98.Carabillo, Toni, Judith Meuli, and Jane Bundy Csida. Feminist Chronicles 1953-1993.Los Angeles: Women’s Graphics, 1993.Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Albuquerque: U of N.M. Press, 1994.Chafetz, ...
