The annual International Women's Day celebrations got off to a bright-and-breezy early start today, with many women merely carrying on with their normal daily routines.
In New York, housewife Barbara Oppression got busy with some ironing, before waking her kids up, then washing, dressing and feeding them, and driving them to school. Then she returned home and darned some of her husband's socks.
Over in Pittsburgh, Agnes Slavery did her laundry, then hung it out to dry. Her husband watched. Then she chopped some logs for firewood.
Olive Hardlife, in Boston, dealt with her 18-month-old twins' breakfast, and that of her unemployed husband, before washing the dishes, and scrubbing her eyeballs out on the kitchen floor. There was just enough time to hang a picture frame before the twins started screaming.
Becky Puppet, who lives on a farm in Idaho, milked her cows, before doing the family's 'laundry' in a babbling brook a mile from the farmhouse. Then she collected the hens' eggs. When she'd finished, she got on her father's tractor, and ploughed 10 acres of land, in preparation for some heavier planting work next week.
England was no different. Heather Workhouse was out at the crack of dawn to go to her local supermarket to stock-up on food supplies. When she got home, she cut the grass, then baked a cake. When she'd finished, she cooked her husband's lunch, and then washed-up after the brute.
Colleen Grindstone, of London, gave her house a spring clean, mended a puncture on her son's bike - as her husband 'supervised' - then went to her part-time job selling matches on Oxford Street. She'll be home at midnight.
Russia was one of the first countries to celebrate International Woman's Day, and Olga Gulag, in Tomsk, did what she does every other day - reported for work, and completed her 14-hour shift 700 meters underground at the Kuznetsk Basin coal mine. Her shift over, she pedalled her bicycle the six miles home to cook her husband some delicious cabbage soup.
And finally, African women are probably the most devoted women in the world. Angolan lady, Alice Underdog, whose husband has three other wives, walked her huge 400-pound frame 14 miles to a watering hole, with two large buckets on the ends of a pole, so that her man could wash his feet and between his toes. Then, she killed a buffalo by slitting its throat, and, letting the blood fall into a cauldron, prepared a love potion which she put aside for use later on tonight.
Then she cooked the buffalo and served it to her husband and his friends, who ate it.
