Fertility and gender equality
The conclusion drawn at the end of the article How gender equality is helping France to higher fertility rates (27 March) would have been surreal if it didn’t follow so closely the standard “progressive” script regarding children, women and working life. The reader was told that, “The fertility rate is high in European countries where family norms are flexible, women feel free to work, pro-child policies are generous and childcare is well organised – in short, in countries that have come to terms with gender equality.”
So gender equality for the writer means mothers returning to the labour market, their children going into daycare and fathers continuing to be absolved of any full-time childcare responsibilities? In fact, men only appeared in the article in the form of expert interviewees, rather depressingly for more than one reason. Moreover, in common with similar articles on the same subject, no mention was made of child psychology and the needs of small children in terms of love and attention, with the writer seemingly believing that the more children under the age of three in daycare the better.
I am not disputing in the slightest the value of the items listed in the above quote, but it’s a mistake to confuse these with mature gender equality, while the failure to contemplate how the gendered nature of childcare could be changed within the home was inexcusable.
In Finland, one of the countries the writer praises, one parent at a time is eligible for a small but not insignificant amount of money from the state if they care for their child at home at any point after the family’s paternity and maternity leave runs out until he or she turns three. Of recipients, over 95% are women.
Not quite gender equality, is it?
Allan Bain
Helsinki, Finland
The burial of Richard III
While I agree with much of Polly Toynbee’s article (Britain mourns a monster, 3 April), I must take issue with her reference to Richard III as “a monster” and as “a child-killing, wife-slaughtering tyrant”. As a Yorkshireman and a member of the Richard III Society, I may be a shade biased, but his reputation was severely traduced by Tudor propaganda. Given the standards of the age, Richard was a relatively civilised king and the jury is still out on many of his alleged crimes.
Interestingly, if you do believe in royal inheritance, it can be argued that Richard III was the last true English king and that all our subsequent monarchs over the last 500 years have been usurpers.
Mike Gibson
Swadlincote, UK
• Thank you for Polly Toynbee’s bull’s-eye critique of the monarchy. The Queen is not defender of the faith but defender of the status quo. The spider’s web entanglement of the monarchy and the establishment beggars all belief.
James Blyth
Ayr, UK
• Polly Toynbee’s wonderful piece about the (re)burial of Richard III had me laughing and laughing and grinning like an idiot for the rest of the weekend. By itself, well worth the annual subscription.
Mike Kearney
La Mouche, France
Writers are not all vain
I was appalled to read in Julian Baggini’s article that writers suffer from vanity as a character trait (27 March). According to my dictionary, we thereby are “elated with self-admiration; greedy of applause; frivolous; ostentatious; showy; unproductive; worthless and useless” and, according to him, our book launches are evidence of ego massage. Baggini seems not to acknowledge the fact that self-confidence is needed to embark on any profession, particularly the arts, where work is done on spec and there is no guarantee of any recognition ever.
I am one of several thousand published writers belonging to Author’s Guild, of whom only around 600 make their living solely from writing – the rest of us have day jobs too. We write because we love writing and regard the publication of our work as validation of the years spent honing our craft.
But publishing has changed over the last 20 years; now we no longer are able to write and let the publisher sell the product, but it’s up to us to also undertake marketing what we have sold – through those book launches so maligned by Baggini, blogs, Facebook chat, Twitter, library events and book signings.
Baggini should learn that we writers pursue our calling because we are driven to do it and we host publicity events because we would like to earn money from years of work, which is a far cry from vanity.
Sandra Cuza
Urbana, Illinois, US
Infelicities of style
It sets my teeth on edge, as it does for Jeremy Butterfield (10 April), to encounter an erratum like “a criteria”. Such befuddlement must be a result of this recent trend to eliminate foreign plurals from English, anglicising them. Where are these doofuses who are monkeying around with the past – is it done by fiat by some twentysomethings at Microsoft and Google?
Anglo-Saxon already has fuss enough with its -s’s. I’ve run across larvas, funguses, hippopotamuses, platypuses, terrariums, phylums, septums, appendixes, larynxes, coccyxes, phalanxes, protozoas, faunas and floras. But where will it all end – locuses, emboluses, animuses, ovums, bacteriums, corpuses?
R M Fransson
Englewood, Colorado, US
• Thanks to Jeremy Butterfield for taking up arms against the many lazy, jargonistic, redundant and euphemistic words and phrases that are infiltrating our language, particularly from the United States.
May I add a few that have been misappropriated from mathematics? “Wiggins was one of a number of riders to hit the deck in last Sunday’s Tour of Flanders …” (10 April). But how many is “a number”: one, 10, 50? Just say “one of the riders”.
Similarly, “a fraction of” tells us nothing. Any two quantities are each a fraction of the other – the larger will be a fraction greater than one.
In the same vein, to say that one quantity is one or more “orders of magnitude” greater than another is uninformative and potentially misleading. Both 100 and 999 are the same order of magnitude (expressed as powers of 10); 1,000 is a higher order of magnitude.
Now if only we can persuade the Guardian to drop the pretentious final -me from program.
Jeremy Gilling
Sydney, Australia
• While I take on board Jeremy Butterfield’s somewhat sententious diatribe on linguistic misdemeanours, I feel, irregardless, that at this point in time I am obliged, in all honesty, to take issue with his ultimate conclusions. Language is fluidly dynamic, and today’s Greengrocers’s apostrophe may well represent an apocalyptic first step, going forward, to tomorrow’s Ulysses.
This, I fear, is a prevailing issue about which, in the fullness of time, we can but agree to differ on.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia
Okinawa and the US base
Justin McCurry’s article Okinawa governor blocks new US base (27 March), with its provocative photograph, fails to acknowledge the decade or more over which Okinawans have been protesting against the damage that the new base in its present location will do to the marine environment and, especially to dugongs. The depth of local concern alone can explain why Takeshi Onaga was elected governor. That concern ought to have been fully acknowledged, not denigrated by visual misrepresentation combined with an inadequate final paragraph.
Philip Stigger
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Briefly
• Learning to play is not just for children (10 April). Correct, but why “colouring-in”? It is a limited activity because it involves following someone else’s blueprint. The only choice is that of colour.
Getting together to draw or make things in clay would give more opportunities to try new approaches, take risks and to be imaginative – some of the classic elements of play.
Chris Stevenson
Sydney, Australia
• “How much do we get from our genes?” asks Julian Baggini (10 April). “70%. The heritability of IQ, on average is 90%. The heritability of IQ at Harvard University, reflecting the fact that nurture has an impact.”
But the majority of those students will be the intelligently endowed children of graduates.
Edward Black
Sydney, Australia
• The “group travel programme designed for introverts” (27 March). Surely this is an oxymoron?
Chris Kennedy
Stella, Ontario, Canada
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