What I can't get over is that what I'm doing now -sitting with baby, feeding baby, dressing baby, changing baby, cooking, laundry, general domestic drudgery- used to be almost every woman's full-time job. Maybe if she wass unmarried she'd get to teach, but otherwise a woman basically just got to have babies and raise the babies and hope that her babies got old enough to have babies. The repetitiveness of this astonishes me.
And then, of course, I question my own astonishment. If I had been raised with the expectation of making babies my work, would I find female history less startlingly boring? Or did my foremothers, too, get bored? Is my own boredom a luxury, one more excrescence of the ease of modern life?
The problem with the country of the past is that all its patriots are dead.
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