Kathy Lette thinks marriage can still be slave labour, while Jenni Murray wants affordable childcare. The list of demands for women is long – so what's top of your list?

Kathy Lette



Kathy Lette. Photograph: FilmMagic

It seems to me that a woman who calls herself a "post- feminist" has kept her Wonderbra and burned her brains. Women in the west still don't have equal pay – in Britain we're getting 75p in the pound, and we get concussion hitting our heads on the glass ceiling, plus we're expected to clean it while we're up there. Wouldn't it be wonderful if our daughters could live in a world where it's men who angst over how they're going to juggle kids and career? I don't want my daughter's wedding vows to read, "To Love, Hoover and Obey". The enlistment of labour on a subsistence basis is now forbidden in Britain, except in one state – the holy state of matrimony.

But if it's bad enough for us, what of our less advantaged sisters in the developing world? In the developing world, women are fed last and least. One woman dies every minute in childbirth. I hope that during my own daughter's lifetime, women in the developing world have access to education, nutrition and contraception. Copulation equals population. With no contraception, girls are little more than a life-support system to their ovaries. By playing ovarian roulette, they become runners up in the human race. An unplanned pregnancy means joining a giant Missing Persons Bureau. And who is missing? The girl with potential – the girl she was BC (Before Childbirth).

On International Women's Day, it's good to remember that women are each other's human Wonderbras – uplifting, supportive and making each other look bigger and better.

Kathy Lette, novelist, is an ambassador for Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance

Jenni Murray



Jenni Murray. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

When the Women's Liberation Movement formulated its list of seven demands in the early 1970s, I was a very young woman full of hope that I would be able to have a career and a family and that there would be 24-hour free childcare as the "sisters" said there must be. There wasn't. We had to juggle our way through it; a nanny when they were babies and then Him Indoors giving up his work to take care of the boys as a full-time father.

And now, as the cost of childcare rockets – rising above the rate of inflation – "having it all" gets even harder. So my wish for this generation of hopeful young women is affordable, quality care for their kids. (Yes, I've become more pragmatic with age. It should be free, but I know it won't be!)

Jenni Murray is a journalist and regular presenter of Radio 4's Woman's Hour