Study & paid work
Do you have the qualifications you need to start or change a career? Could you do with a short course in extra computer skills or belly dancing? As for work, should you go full-time or part-time? Go for a career or take anything that pays well? How do you apply for it? How do you get paid as much as a man for the same job without using a revolver? What if you get sacked? What if the boss keeps making creepy remarks? How do you move jobs or retrain?
If you work hard but nobody pays you, and there's banana in your hair, you may find you're a homemaker for a while with a child or two (or more), or maybe doing part-time work, or schemozzly full-on everything. Chapter 34, 'Making a Home', has some... stuff... but I can't remember what because, like most women, I'm trying to do too much at the same time. In fact, if you wouldn't mind, can you please just finish this paragraph yourse...
Making a home
You don't have to be as lusciously cardie-clad as Nigella Lawson, or as obsessed about matching your wall paint colour to the exact shade of the eggs laid by your rare chickens as Martha Stewart, to care about and enjoy making a home.
Nor is it compulsory. If dusting the skirting boards and pottering about putting things to rights gladdens your heart, lovely. If the very thought of it makes you want to chew on teaspoons and kick the front door off its hinges to get away, well, it's good to know your own mind. Problems arise, of course, when you consider it ghastly drudgery and you have to do it anyway.
This chapter is for those of us who work full- or part-time but still keep an interest in homey things, or those of us who'd like to know more. There's handy info on cooking, sewing, organising, gardening, home maintenance, cleaning, traditional crafts and skills, and how to divide up the household chores: if necessary, with a chainsaw.
A fair go for women: are we there yet?
Although more than 98 per cent of the Women's Stuff Survey respondents said they believed in equal rights for women, less than 44 per cent said they regarded themselves as feminists. Which is a bit like saying you're not a professional musician but you play the guitar for money. Or you run the Catholic Church and wear a purple frock and carry a smoking handbag, but you'd rather not be called the Pope.
'I'm a feminist' is not a signal for everyone to start muttering about involuntary penis removal, get shouty and wave pitchforks if they see a man in the distance. But the fight for equality isn't over – in some ways we seem to be 'going backwards'. This chapter explains why, and the easy and non-pitchforky ways to support the idea of equality and fight discrimination against women, whatever you call yourself.