Women who seek to commandeer their husband's cash after they split may make a quick profit, but they do nothing for their sex.

SOMETIMES you wonder why we bothered. Maybe we should have just sat at home like Victorian misses or Jane Austen heroines, fluttered our eyelashes and waited for a rich man to marry us. Then we could have put up with him for two years and come out with a £5m divorce settlement.

Beats working for a living.

And it's still going on. There are two landmark divorce hearings going on at the moment. In one, Melisssa Miller married a very rich man. She didn't help him make that fortune. He already had it. They had no children. After less than three years he left her. Rat.

So yes, of course, she deserved a share of his money after being abandoned. He'd had, after all, three years of her life and company and she'd put her plans on hold, given up work while trying for a baby.

But £5m? For less than three years?

Mrs Miller is 33. Not exactly a crumbling old crone unable to fight her way back into the job market.

That sort of pay for that sort of effort smacks of high class prostitution. It also smacks of money grabbing, greed and revenge. It has no basis in reality. It says nothing for dignity and independence and equality - and must have all the early feminists revolving in their dungarees.

Meanwhile, Julia McFarlane is also contesting her divorce settlement. She and her ex husband, he an accountant, she a solicitor, were together for 20 years, starting with not very much and ending up with three children and a great deal more money than you and I will probably ever have. Throughout the marriage, whether she was working or at home with their children, they were clearly equal partners.

She now wants a fair share of the proceeds and even though the sums are enough to make your eyes water - she's asking for £250,000 a year - there seems an element of fairness, justice and reason in her arguments. I hope she gets it.

But if Melissa Miller gets her £5m, I won't be cheering. It will be easy money for her, but it will do nothing for other women except to widen a gulf of suspicion and distrust between men and women and set back the cause of equality by a generation or more. So much for independence.

Melissa Miller should be able to cope with two years out of the job market and be able to get her life back on track again.

And if she can't, then it's hard to see why her feebleness should be rewarded to the tune of £5m.

MAXIM, the British lads' magazine, has just launched its first edition in India, aimed at all those twenty something young men working in call centres. It's the usual mix of scantily dressed girls, fast cars, gizmos, gadgets and things you never knew about women.

And it only goes to show that Indian lads are just as daft and empty headed as their British counterparts.

Should we all be teenage mums?

MAYBE we're doing things the wrong way round. A new mail order kit can predict a woman's fertility for years ahead. It's being aimed at women who are putting off having babies until their late thirties, or even forties.

It gets tricky after 35 - as all those fertility clinics know too well.

Meanwhile, clueless little 16-year-olds with more sex drive than sense seem to get pregnant with no problem at all.

So maybe it's time we stopped trying to fight nature and all had our babies in our late teens. If we can take a year or so off to travel the world, why not a year off to have a baby? And as the Government seems determined to take our babies off our hands almost as soon as they're born, we can then get on with our education and careers.

Teenage mothers will have more health and energy to cope. And grandparents will still be young enough to help. There also won't be the new problems that beset older mothers - coping with the menopause, teenage children and ageing parents, all at the same time. Fun, fun, fun.

If we had our children young, then by the time we hit 40, they would have long left the nest and we could embark on a life of self-indulgent pleasure, rather than sleepless nights and nappies.

Not long after I had my first son, when I was 32, an old school friend who had married at 16 became a grandmother at 34 and went back to college.

I'm still not sure which of us did things the right way round.

THE Government's new idea of a regular health MOT seems vaguely interesting, sensible even. But it turns out not to be a full battery of medical tests. Not even an appointment with a doctor - but an online questionnaire.

And about as useful, I guess, as those I get every day offering to extend a part of my anatomy I haven't even got.