ABSTRACT
Single status in a culture in which marriage is encouraged is not the only form of marginality that women can expect to experience. Although women in Britain actually outnumber men in the population, the sense of being as equally as important as men in the organisation and deliberations of the state is not part of women's experience. Somewhere in the presentation of male reality and male perspectives as the totality of human experience, women have ceased to exist in a serious and visible way. Women's acceptance is also ironic because the work women undertake at home, the domestic servicing of men and children, the care-taking, and the emotional management of family life at whose centre is the mother, and whose labour and fortitude historically have served to keep families together through often trying and difficult times, represent the kinds of skills and self-sacrifice and resilience which, if they were men's skills and men's work, would be enormously regarded and rewarded.
