You've come a long way baby......

I wonder why they ever thought that was a good slogan?

You've come a long way, but we're still gonna call you baby.

There have been superficial changes over the years, certainly women have greater access to more fields, better access to maternity leave, and have cracked some of the glass ceilings.

However, there is still a pink ghetto. Women are still more likely to have lower paying jobs.

We are more likely to live our senior years in poverty and we are still more likely to die at the hands of our partners.

Rape is still underreported and when it is reported is still often met with the same blame the victim attitude it always was.

I see young girls dressing beyond their years, dumbing themselves down, refusing to insist that their partners wear condoms and I wonder what the hell is going on?

Across the country from 1916 to 1951 women won the right to vote. There are most assuredly women alive today who remember being able to become part of the process.

Unfortunately, that is what we did become....part of the process.

There was a brief surge of anger, of railing against the status quo, of fighting for those that could not fight for themselves.

What happened?

There is a news story about women in Zimbabwe not having access to sanitary products, when advised of this the parliament "fell about laughing" well before we get too smug lets not forget that it was only a few years ago that some members of our parliament fell about laughing over the results of a study on domestic abuse.

Have great strides been made to curb abuse?

Of course laws have been changed, ways of dealing with offenders has changed somewhat, real change remains sadly out of sight.

Things that would enable women to leave abusive situations like decent welfare rates, publicly funded day care centres, affordable housing, access to good legal counsel. Why haven't these things been changed?

Too much of our liberation has been smoke and mirrors.

We have made strides in entering the workforce but the economy responded by making it so that one income was not now enough to provide for a family.

We fought for the right to be accepted as ok just as we were and yet the diet industry is a multi billion dollar a year reminder that we can never be too thin.

We fought for sexual and reproductive freedom.

Yes we are less likely to be called sluts but the word has not disappeared, in fact in much of modern culture women are referred to just as a matter of course as sluts and bitches.

Yes we did have a period of time where we were getting close to being able to have control of our bodies but that tenuous hold is getting thinner by the day.

We did not only fight for ourselves, we fought for our daughters, our sons, our brothers, our fathers.

We hoped that an end to patriarchy would help them break free of their bonds as well.

Patriarchy has proven to be hard to kill. We should have been more prepared, we should have realized that while men would be happy to share the workload they might not be so happy to give up the priviledge.

Now the hard part of the fight begins, now when so many believe it is over.

Yes we won the superficial, but we are far from reaching the goal. We are far from a society where women feel safe, we are far from a society where mothers on welfare have enough to care properly for their children, we are far from a society where an elderly woman doesn't have to worry about becoming homeless for her senior years and we are far from a society where men in general are willing to give up the power that they are afforded through patriarchy.