Wow, I wish someone will give me a mandated hour off work to go home and cook! Cause I love to cook for my family.
So let me get this: you are fighting to remove a benefit/perk designed for the women? And you are wondering why those who benefit from this are fighting you? Really? Well, how dare they to not want to be liberated by you!
Why don't you take it further-in the name of equality try to fight the maternity leave altogether? Two weeks should be more than enough, right?
Sorry, but any social program that makes a provision for women to leave work one hour work in order to cook entrenches the notion that cooking is women's work. It makes it that much harder for women to have a choice in the issue. Men can simply say, "No, you get the hour off, you cook."
I support your right to cook for your husband and children day in and day out, if that is your choice. It is not the choice of all women, however, and it may not be the choice of all men
not to cook. The measure can thus not be construed as a step towards equality. In order to give ALL women (and men) the choice, the state needs to give the hour (or half-hour) off to both and to allow them to decide who cooks and when. Gender-based allowances are simply another form of discrimination no matter how altruistic or sympathetic they seem.
Your use of childbirth as an analogy for domestic cooking is both telling and troubling. Women doing the cooking is a social construct; it is something societies have come up with over time and it can be changed. Bearing children is, at this point of history, a biological fact. To make an argument for social constructs based on biological factors is to attempt to write in stone (or, more accurately, to write on the body) what is actually a social construction - one that not all women find "liberating."
Having said that maternity is a biological fact, the care of children is not. It is quite possible to find men who are better caregivers than women. Thus, in more progressive countries, the state mandates some leave for women to deal with the biological issues of childbirth, and then allows women and men to decide between themselves (or women and women, men and men) who will take that part of the leave related to caring for the baby. Again, if a woman wants both forms of leave, she can take them. More importantly, if she does not (and if the male does), she is not forced into it by those women whose preference it is.
There are, in fact, two strands of feminist thought that have emerged historically: sexual difference and sexuality equality. Your argument resembles the former but not in its most nuanced form. It is the version of feminism one finds more often in Europe, and which has a long history there. In sexual difference feminism, women argue for rights based on their biological difference from men. In the US, sexual equality feminism predominates: women fight for rights based on their similarity to men.
Although sexual equality feminists can learn from a well-articulated sexual difference argument, in my opinion the latter is a risky proposition. It is all too easy for the argument "women are different but equal" to mean that women are not actually equal to men at all. We have seen this happen with the disingenuous attempts of religiously conservative institutions to respond to feminism, for example. Their argument that women are equal but different traps some women in socially constructed roles they may not otherwise espouse.
.... but please don't jump into Lethe on my behalf.
I think you just having that kind of the Friday and grumping silly about your hubby or smth. 
she could've sang an Elton John song for sh!ts and it still wouldn't have come close to what she was able to accomplish in this interview. 
