(A letter to The HERALD, Glasgow, - November 1992)
Dame Barbara Cartland's obviously well considered suggestion, that women should not do work that men can do, has interesting implications - not all of them welcome ones.
Only a very few of us would relish the prospect of exclusively male nurses, chorus boys, the return of castrati to the operatic stage. The use of male transvestites in modelling for the rag trade is also of limited minority appeal.
But perhaps the greatest loss would arise from an exclusive reliance upon male authors and ideologues; such a restriction would have deprived us of Dame Barbara's mature and insightful literary output over the years.