Unit 6 reading

1. Look at the article headline. What do you think the article is about? Explain your answer.

RISE, MEN, AND OVERTHROW THE QUEEN OF HEARTH

2. Read the subtitle of the same article below. See if your guess was right.

Men will never be proper fathers until women stop telling them how to do it

Do you agree to this statement? Why or why not? Give your reasons.

3. You are going to read an article by S. Conran from the Sunday Times on the problem of relationships in a modern family. Look through the article. Choose the best suitable heading from the list (A-F) to each part (0-4) of the article. There is one extra heading which you don't need to use.

A	Domestic goddess
В	Advantages of being a woman
С	Bossy mothers - bad fathers
D	The queen of the hearth
E	Exhausting home-making
F	Family roles

Part 1 the maternal mistique

0. Women are preventing men from becoming good fathers. They may complain that men don't do enough with their children but the truth is that mothers often don't allow fathers to have much input. They'll see a father fumbling as he tries to make the formula for the baby's bottle. Instead of letting him get on with it, they get bossy and possessive, and say: "Give the bottle to me; I can do it quicker myself."

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1. When it comes to raising their children, women want things done in their way only: it's what I call "the maternal mystique". When I was a girl we practically ignored my father. Sometimes we had to put up with him being there, as he sat in his armchair. His role was that of "the breadwinner". I suspect that quite a lot of fathers feel like that today. Yet "breadwinner" is a silly, old-fashioned concept. One in three women now earns more than the man she lives with. One in five families is one-parent family headed by a woman. One in five women is single.

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2. We have to get rid of the maternal mystique because it makes it difficult for a father to have a relationship with his children. The maternal mystique is proprietorial and part of the territory ruled by "the queen of the hearth". In 1975, when I wrote about minimising house-work, a lot of women were very angry with me. They said I was taking their job away. I think I was only taking away their sense of self-importance. Yet, 25 years later, the virtues of women as queens of the hearth are still being extolled by the likes of Nigella Lawson in Britain and Martha Stewart in America.

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3. Nigella has written a book called How to be a Domestic Goddess and she appears on television for her series Nigella Bites. I watched one programme where basically what she was demonstrating was how to cook I bacon salad but with a fancy Italian name. Nice work if you can get it. I admire anybody who can make money out of cookery or house-work. But Nigella will have depressed an awful lot of women. They will think: "Why can't I do that?" And the answer is that most women haven't got Nigella's advantages: her perfect looks, her famous parents, her education, her contacts throughout the media.

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4. Martha Stewart believes that not only should you bake your own bread but also that you should have cinnamon rolls as well. It reminds me of how in the 1960s we used to rash home from work and dive into little black dresses to give three-course dinner parties. We had started to prepare three days beforehand, and then we stayed up all night to do the dishes. Afterwards we were absolutely exhausted. I suppose it is called "home-making", but I'm not sure that this sort of carrying on really has to do with family life at all.

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