“I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it might be Latin, but I didn’t know any Latin. Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next”
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Instilling anxiety about a woman’s suitability as a mother has long functioned as a means of regulating her behaviour, channelling it into stereotypes of the appropriately “feminine”, the compliant. This preys upon her wish to provide the best possible care for the flesh of her flesh, to which her every subsequent need is to be subordinated if she hopes to avoid censure, the overwhelming vulnerability and dependency of the infant distracting from the social control imposed upon her. An article in The Independent on Sunday (9th October) by Katy Guest, We drink. We smoke. We’re not perfect. We’re…Slummy Mummies seemed to offer some hope that the finger of blame pointed with such monotonous regularity by moralists eager to exploit the inexperienced mother’s greater willingness to conform (construed as her “mellowing”) might just be pushed aside. A brave challenged to the pristine, Madonna-like image was issued by Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother, published following the success of her blog. Guest wrote: “‘It shows the extent to which women are frustrated and angered by the immense pressure,’ says Ms. Calman. ‘Not only to be endlessly nurturing but also to be thin, beautiful and sexy and have a fabulous-looking house that you can transform in a makeover that takes a matter of two hours’”.
Even that bastion of “sullen misogyny” (a description by Sarah Sands, first woman editor of The Sunday Telegraph) the Daily Mail, applauded the iconoclasm in a piece by Lowri Turner (13th October), Hooray for Slummy Mummies: “She’s the mother whose children arrive at school wearing odd socks and with their swimming kit still sitting on the kitchen table. Her home totters uncertainly between shabby chic and just plain shabby.
She is still wondering if she’ll ever get into her pre-pregnancy jeans, though the odds are against it now. When she gets back from the school run, she thinks about doing some yoga, but she puts the telly on instead. She is the Slummy Mummy and goodness me, what a relief she is.
After what seems like an age when the Yummy Mummy – that Little Miss Perfect with the flat stomach and the terrifyingly glossy lifestyle (…) – has reigned supreme, the arrival of the infinitely more realistic Slummy Mummy is worthy of a round of applause”.
Turner continues: “There’s a bit of Slummy Mummy in all of us. How many mothers have taken one look at the breakfast table, strewn with debris, and fantasised about getting back into bed and pulling the duvet back over the top of them?
How many will admit to speed reading their children’s homework, or planning to take them on an educational trip to the museum, seeing the rain tipping down and sticking them in front of a Disney video instead?
Slummy Mummy is not like Chavvy Mummy. Se doesn’t go of to Faliraki, leaving the offspring with a £10 note and the phone number of the local babysitter.
Slummy Mummy does not shirk her maternal responsibilities, although she is liable to take a few short cuts for the sake of her own sanity.
Homemade muffins or shop bought? Shop bought every time. Because what Slummy Mummy has is a realistic appraisal of her own abilities.
She doesn’t try to punch above her weight in child and homecare terms. She is human and fallible and, most importantly, likeable”.
The refreshing conclusion: “Whereas the cult of Yummy Mummy made us all feel guilty if we failed to replicate the perfect life we were encouraged to feel was possible, Slummy Mummy makes us all feel better about ourselves. She represents an acceptance that no one can be that perfect all the time”.
The criticisms surely struck a chord as the paper (23rd October) sounded out another writer on the subject, Polly Williams, whose The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy, The truth about modern motherhood, is about to be published. She permits herself a wry smile over the gulf between celebrity and ordinary motherhood: “In our own, rather less glamorous workplaces, the ‘Let’s pretend we’re not mums’ conspiracy thrives like MRSA in a hospital bathroom. As our maternity leave draws to an end and we squeeze back into work clothes (with the glum realisation that despite all that yoga we’ve ended up with our mother’s figure after all), we put on a new identity, too, or rather the old one, which, like the pencil skirt, no longer quite fits. And so we go back to the office, skinny latte in hand, giving it 110 per cent (just in case our maternity cover was more efficient, and we don’t want childless colleagues getting twitchy), and, yes of course, Boss, foreign trips and evening industry dos are totally fine.
We can cope. Or we could if we had wives at home. But no, hang on a minute, we are the wives! And there is no one at home but a nanny who’s missing her boyfriend in Poland, a bewildered baby and grumpy children with nits fighting over the DVD player. So we rush home, worrying about that report we didn’t quite manage to finish, drink too much wine in order to unwind, accept another invitation to a party we’ll be too tired to enjoy, and collapse into bed, before being woken two hours later by the baby. And still, somehow, we manage to emerge at the office the next day, hair washed, heels on, BlackBerry at the ready, as if nothing’s happened.
Lest we forget, having a baby is like being turned inside out, physically and emotionally. Or being trampled on by the Gruffalo. Labour feels like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be allowed in the 21st century. The aftermath – the joy of your warm, sweet-smelling baby, the inexplicable traumas of breast-feeding and pram assembly – is overwhelming. Then there’s the soul-destroying attrition of sleeplessness. A recent survey found that British working mothers are surviving on a mere five hours of sleep a night. New mothers often get far less.
While no one wants a return to the days when mothers hid in blowsy florals, only danced at weddings and threw their career away with the baby’s bath water, one can’t help but wonder if we’ve set current standards too high. There will always be high-achieving women who juggle work, family and a fizzing social life gracefully, and don’t turn to Green & Black’s chocolate for comfort. But for the rest of us, the mothers who can’t slip back into size ten jeans four months (oh, let’s be honest, a year) after giving birth; for those of us who would rather not be sent on weekend work trips, well, not until the baby can sit up on its own; for those of us (…) who need time to grow up and adjust to our new role and the new self that was delivered with our baby, a little bit of compassion is required. The pressure on women – and some is self-inflicted – to emerge immediately from motherhood unchanged, slim and socially ‘on it’, sucks self-esteem dry, because they are standards by which most women will find themselves wanting”.
Whereas I would not pretend that the wrench away from the chubby little face and endearing, ready grin can be difficult for some (personally, I found the experience of single parenthood stultifying and could not wait to flee back to full-time mental occupation and interaction with fellow adults, indeed I was driven to do so by financial necessity, unprotected by maternity leave) it is all too easy for the “chain them to the kitchen sink” brigade to seize upon such sentiments. Yvonne Roberts (Observer, 2nd October) in Official: babies do best with mother, reopened the debate on whether motherhood should automatically disqualify women from remunerated employment (changing nappies, expressing milk or preparing a bottled substitute with meticulous sterilisation, adjusting to the loss of autonomy and being cooped up alone as well as the emotional drain of being responsible for constant care should not be excluded from the category of work): “The study on children from birth to three [by Dr Penelope Leach] will reignite the controversy over the best way to bring up young children. It found babies and toddlers fared worst when they were given group nursery care. Those cared for by friends or grandparents or other relatives did a little better while those looked after by nannies or childminders were rated second only to those cared for by mothers”.
As she correctly remarked: “Although the report will be leapt on by those who believe that mothers should stay at home after childbirth, others point out that it is often the quality of care outside the home which is at issue”.
Rather than playing on women’s feelings of guilt, it would be preferable for Britain to catch up with the rest of Europe by finally addressing the scandal of the chronic shortage of facilities to enable mothers to resume careers: “The UK has over 450,000 children under three in nursery are and the study reinforces the demand for a vastly increased investment in training and salaries.
‘In terms of the happiness and wellbeing of our children, we are at a crossroads,’ Leach warned. ‘Are we going to achieve the highest quality care from the most appropriate person for the child? Or are we to settle for what government thinks it can afford? At present…the government is trying to do five times as much on only twice the money – and the danger is that children and their parents will suffer as a result’”.
In its front page headline of 3rd October, Children Do Best if Mother is There, the Daily Mail’s Sarah Harris provided a more detailed account of the research conducted by Dr. Penelope Leach, president of the National Childminding Association and Oxford University Professors Kathy Sylva and Alan Stein, who studied 1,200 children and their families from North London and Oxfordshire in 1998. Mothers were interviewed when their babies were three months old, then again when they were ten, 18, 36 and 51 months: “Young children develop better if they are looked after by their mothers at home, a major study has concluded.
They are more socially and emotionally advanced than youngsters cared for by nannies, childminders or grandparents.
Babies and toddlers fared even worse when they were given group nursery care”.
About half the mothers taking part looked after their children full-time. A third returned to work before their babies were seven months old and eight per cent went back at under three months. The children were tested on their ability to complete a series of tasks and the level of eye contact maintained with adults was monitored: “Those cared for by their mothers performed best, thanks to the benefits of one-to-one interaction”. They were followed in order by those minded by nannies, child-minders, grandparents and at the bottom those entrusted to class nursery care. The conclusion: “Youngsters who were not cared for by their mother either tended to show higher levels of aggression or were inclined to become more withdrawn, compliant and sad”.
The journalist (hardly surprisingly) gloats over how this negates Labour policy: “At least £14 billion has been spent on nurseries and childcare over the last five years to encourage women back to work.
The ending of tax breaks for married couples forced many mothers out of the home while Chancellor Gordon Brown’s system of working tax credits effectively penalises those who concentrate on their children.
The Government has also introduced maternity and paternity rights, specifically designed to increase the number of mothers entering the labour market, and created more than 1.2 million registered childcare places.
Fifty-five per cent of women with children under five now have full-time or part-time work.
In the early 1980s, fewer than a third had jobs”.
However, Harris did have the decency to introduce a qualification: “Dr. Leach insisted that her findings should not be interpreted as a demand that mothers stay at home.
Instead, she said they underlined the need for ‘developmentally appropriate high-quality childcare’”.
In the absence of options (most families are too strapped for cash to afford a nanny, let alone the luxury of a stay-at-home mother), many relied on their retired parents for assistance: “Dr. Leach said: ‘Mothers often wanted their own mother as the carer because they say ‘she’s family, she loves the baby’. But love doesn’t necessarily produce the best child.
That takes planning and thinking about the child’.
Not all babies and toddlers did best at home, however.
Children of mothers suffering depression, for example, fared better with childminders and nurseries”.
On 4th October, the Daily Mail printed an interview with Dr Leach by Helen Weathers, What I really think about working mothers: “Childcare expert Penelope Leach looks weary and becomes rather cross when people accuse her of being unsympathetic to working mothers and overly child-centred.
‘People often misinterpret what I’m saying,’ she says tetchily. ‘Sometimes I get a little bit irritated by people who say ‘she’s so child-friendly and anti-working mother she makes me feel guilty’. But which working mother wouldn’t feel a million times more guilty than she already does after reading Leach’s latest research published this week?”
Weathers did not balk at spitting out the subtext: “Surely this must be the loudest clarion call to date for working mothers to down tools at once and become stay-at-home mums, regardless of whether they can afford to? And let us not forget that 55 per cent of women with children under five now work”.
This is fully in keeping with the tabloid’s relentless anti-single mothers crusade (the diatribes vilifying teenage mothers the fiercest sub-genre thereof). Weathers’ prescription would lead to more poverty in old age (women being denied a decent pension in part because of enforced spells off the labour market necessitated by the lack of state childcare provision alluded to above), and ultimately greater benefits dependency. In a nutshell, it oozes hypocrisy.
In this respect Leach is more honest: “‘People have accused me of being anti-working mothers, but that is just not true,’ says Dr. Leach. ‘These days it isn’t a choice between having an ‘at home mummy’ or a ‘working mummy’. Most people have a bit of each and childcare is the backbone of many people’s lives, which is why it is so important to get it right.
‘The idea of having your mother at home until you go to school is still the kind of gold standard for childcare, but in whose terms was it ever a gold standard? Certainly not the women. Who brought that to an end? The women did – women who had children in the 1970s and got lonely, isolated and depressed staying at home (…)
The important thing is not whether women work or not, but that they have the choice and that employers recognise the need for a work/life balance for both parents. If we get it right for the children, then we get it right for all of us in the long term. I think it’s terribly sad when a woman feels she can’t even admit to having a baby in case it’s a black mark against her career’”.
Weathers notes that Leach did not abstain from work altogether during her own children’s infancy: “When their daughter Melissa was born two years after their marriage, Dr. Leach returned to work as a part-time lecturer and after their son Matthew was born three years after that, worked four days a week until he was two years old.
She gave up her job and went freelance after her son developed viral meningitis and almost died and then her trusted childminder of five years left to pursue another career”.
In the end, Leach went freelance: “‘It makes me mad when people say, even today, that in an ideal world mothers would be at home full-time. The ideal is for both parents to have a choice that can flux and change as the children grow’”.
Leach is also aware of the impact of cultural context: “She [Leach] is reluctant to make comparative judgements between her experience and that of women today, except to say that there’s far more stress on parents now than in the Seventies. ‘Women are starting families much older and having much fewer children so there are fewer aunts and cousins around. Many women I talk to have never held a child before their own,’ she says.
‘Even if you are 32 and a confident managing director, you may have no idea how to breast-feed. Babies have become a drama in the middle of your adult life, as opposed to being a long phase and part and parcel of being a grown-up.
‘Parents are under enormous stress. If they are working long hours they don’t have the time to enjoy their children and there are very real issues about safety which we, as parents, didn’t have to address. Children are now virtually in a state of house arrest. There’s no way one could say ‘let them go outside and play on the pavement with their friends.
‘It’s not so much that a stranger might snatch them, but that they might be knocked down by a car.
‘We get bees in our bonnets about how much television children watch or how fat they are getting, but we don’t look at the basics. If a child is not allowed out on their own after school as they wait for their parents to come home from work because it is now too dangerous, then what is the alternative?
‘Society needs to be far more child-friendly, for if they are happy then we are all happy. As for the rest of it, I have always felt that if you have children, it is so important you have a duty to give it your best’”.
Zoë Williams, in The Guardian (4th October, A stick to beat women) adopts a disarmingly light-hearted approach: “Here are some things that have never been explained to me. First, does it matter if children develop late? Does it necessarily mean they won’t develop eventually? (I was very late in learning to read. I blame my mother, of course. She was too busy doing prototype ball-busting). Second, why, in all these studies, is it always mother versus all other carers? Why not one-on-one care versus group care? Surely that’s the key difference between maternal and non-maternal toddler-tending, given that not all mothers are equally good at being mothers. Mainly, though, I want to know: what is the purpose of a study like this? Who does it help? Have you ever seen a study of the mental health of adults who work, set against those who don’t? Or a paper on the incidence of cancer among people with jobs, compared with the jobless? Of course not – because it doesn’t matter, ultimately, whether work depresses you or makes you ill. It is a given that you have to work, so academic inquiry into its effects is deemed void unless, of course, you are female, in which case you still have to work, but are also responsible for all the negative consequences that proceed from that”.
She defends Leach’s original findings: “The twist – that women must try harder, must in some ways defy the exigencies of the work-to-survive society – was added later, by people discussing the research. Likewise, Leach’s study, which may stem from a desire to see government policy reversed, will be used as a stick to beat women who are already in a no-win situation”.
In The Observer (9th October) Cristina Odone follows suit in injecting a note of irony: “When Penelope Leach introduced the findings of the latest research into childcare last week, she sounded not so much like Dr. Spock as Philip Larkin. A study of 1,200 families found that they fuck you up, your mum and dad, by rushing off to work as soon as maternity/paternity leave allows, often leaving you in a crèche where you have to elbow a fellow toddler out of the way to have access to a potty or a biscuit or, worse, parking you with a 23-year-old Moldovan with rudimentary English and an advanced social life”.
She reminds readers of the complexity and diversity characteristic of real life’s messiness: “But averages take us only so far. They obscure the exceptions which make up real life. Not all mothers are created equally maternal, just as not all crèches are feeders for borstal. For some mothers, going out to work is torture, but for others, staying at home is a recipe for miserable, mind-numbing baby blues”.
We ought to be open to learning from the example of other countries: “(…) but what if we had the kind of high-quality care enjoyed in the Scandinavian countries? Crime stats show that you are seven times more likely to be attacked on a London street than in a Stockholm alleyway. Might that social cohesion have something to do with the fact that Swedish children typically attend excellent, state-run crèches, while the overwhelming majority of British children don’t get a chance to?
The one-dimensional spectrum of parent versus carer also ignores other influences: too much television, video games, overcrowding, poverty, a violent neighbourhood. All these can overwhelm even the best carers (parents or not)”.
In her reader’s letter to the Daily Mail (6th October), Lorell Atkins voices her exasperation: “I’m sick of people telling mothers how they should feel about bringing up their children. My daughter, now three, has been going to nursery since she was six months old and probably contradicts all the ‘expert opinion’ I’ve read over the past two years.
She’s sociable, outgoing and confident. I take her to restaurants, where many people comment on her good table manners. We go to church regularly, where she’s happy to sit with the others during the service. Her speech is well developed, and she has en excellent memory (…)
It’s wrong to add to working mothers’ burdens by implying that we’re doing our children a disservice (…)
‘Research’ such as the recent study, which suggested that young children fare best at home with their mum rather than being in childcare, merely adds to the stress some working mothers experience and makes them feel inadequate”.
Given the likelihood of being called upon to help out, it is probably just as well that contemporary Grannies are not the stoop-backed, arthritic, dried up crones of earlier clichés, according to The Independent, (12th October, unattributed): “Grandmothers feel 20 years younger than their age and do not believe they are old until they are at least 80, a survey reveals. Research into modern lifestyles for the over-60s found many pensioners were living in a golden age of freedom, health and wealth compared with their grandparents. Yours magazine commissioned the research and found grandmothers were more likely to travel, learn languages and make love, than do knitting”.
Steve Doughty, in his Why 45pc of working mums rely on granny (Daily Mail, 12th October) reiterates the point concerning reliance on private support networks when parents are confronted with the exorbitant price of a fundamental service: “Nearly half of working mothers depend on grandparents for childcare, according to a study yesterday.
Only 37 per cent of families said they paid for childminders or nurseries.
The research – based on a survey of 19,000 children – suggests mothers returning to work are rejecting the formal childcare ministers have been urging them to take up”.
Granny is the answer to the dilemma for two groups: “The first group preferred to see their children raised by their own, trusted parents, rather than cared for by strangers.
The second group comprised mothers who simply could not afford nurseries or childminders”.
Doughty draws on an investigation by Shirley Dex of London University’s Institute of Education. Her report looked at how children born in 2000 and 2001 were cared for at the age of nine and ten months: “Some 45 per cent of working mothers were found to turn to their own parents for help with childcare. Next most popular were nurseries and childminders at 37 per cent.
Third in line were husbands and boyfriends, with 31 per cent of mothers using a male partner for childcare while they were at work.
Recent studies have suggested grandparents save their children £1 billion a year in babysitting and childcare costs”.
No sooner had the topic gone off the boil than a new set of recommendations vied for attention. Once again the Daily Mail, (7th November) has taken the lead in dispensing advice with Tahira Yaqoob’s Helicopter mothers, giving publicity to the views of Helen E. Johnson, author of parenting guide Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money: “She does her grown-up children’s laundry, buys birthday presents for their friends and even phones up their bosses demanding to know why they have been sacked.
Meet the ‘helicopter mother’, a new breed of obsessional parent who refuses to let her children take responsibility for their lives.
But instead of helping them, she is more likely to be turning them into lazy adults full of self-doubt, warn experts”.
Johnson’s definition possesses striking similarities with the ideal of the über-caring, permanently at the beck and call mother extolled by Weathers: “‘A helicopter mother is one who hovers over every state in her child’s development, from in utero through to the college years and beyond.
‘These children have never done anything on their own. If a child never learns to be resilient, she or he will have very little confidence in their ability to handle things.
‘This is a result of totally inappropriate parental involvement, and it’s a sad phenomenon. It is a disturbing fact that many parents have not done their critical job of preparing their child for the responsibilities of adult life”.
If her ambitions are to be confined to raising the progeny, her energies subsumed exclusively into guaranteeing their wellbeing, is it surprising that she might be slightly over-zealous? The phenomenon of Kippers (Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings) is a product of several wider trends: “The Office of National Statistics has also revealed that more than half of all men and 37 per cent of women aged between 20 and 24 live with their parents after university, an increase of 50 per cent in a decade.
The so-called ‘boomerang generation’ has been driven back to the family home because of soaring property prices and student debts.
With the average price of a house now more than £155,000, many in their twenties cannot afford to get a foot on the property ladder and instead of paying rent, they choose to stay with their parents”.
Indubitably, improvements to maternity leave entitlements would go some way towards deferring the problem. In The Independent (1st March), Colin Brown broached the issue in Extra maternity leave ‘will cripple small businesses’: “Tony Blair has brushed aside the protests of business leaders who have warned that government plans to extend maternity leave from six to nine months would ‘cripple’ small businesses.
The proposals are aimed at wooing women voters back to Labour and would allow mothers for the first time to share some of their parental leave with the fathers”.
The Daily Mail later picked up on the theme (5th October) in Becky Barrow’s Maternity leaves firms in trouble: “Parents taking time off work after having a baby pose a serious problem for a quarter of British companies, research revealed yesterday.
Small businesses with fewer than 20 employees struggle most while larger firms are better positioned to cope with staff changes.
The research, commissioned by Axa insurance, reveals the threat that the Government’s new parental policies represent to business leaders.
Firms now have to cover for parents taking time off or risk legal action if they do not follow the letter of the law.
This is a major problem for the 95 per cent of Britain’s four million small businesses which employ less than five people.
They have to cover the cost of hiring and training the mother’s replacement and keeping her job open for a year”.
According to Barrow: “Few businesses dare to talk about the problems that Britain’s increasingly generous maternity and paternity leave presents to them for fear of being accused of sexism.
Some simply refuse to employ women under the age of 45”.
However, this protest paled into insignificance by comparison with the outcry against proposals to grant fathers time to devote to their parenting duties, as demonstrated by the Daily Mail’s response (10th October) in James Chapman and Becky Barrow’s Six Months’ Paternity Leave for Fathers: “Ministers hope the move will break the ‘macho’ culture of men working through their children’s early lives.
But the plans, expected to be unveiled this week by Trade Secretary Alan Johnson, have angered business groups.
They warned yesterday that the new rights for working fathers would be disruptive, particularly for small firms, and expensive to organize.
Bosses complain that Labour has rushed through massive changes in parental leave over the last few years – leaving businesses struggling to cope with the fast pace of change. Up to 400,000 men a year will qualify for the extended paternity leave from 2007. Currently, they can take only two weeks off after having a child. About 60 per cent of eligible men take up the offer.
They are paid £106 a week by the Government, though around half of firms continue to give them a full salary during the fortnight.
Under the new proposals, they are expected to be entitled to a fortnight’s paid leave followed by a further five-and-a-half months unpaid, taken before the child’s first birthday.
They will, however, be allowed to take time off only if their partner has gone back to work.
Essentially, the reforms mean parents will be able to decide themselves how to divide up parental leave for the first time.
Ministers say this will allow couples to ‘mix and match’ childcare in the first six months, with the mother taking the first three months off and the father the next three, for instance”.
The objections were identical to those previously deployed against recruiting women: “They [employers] also say that Britain’s four million small businesses – 95 per cent of which have fewer than five employees – will be badly hit by having to grant months off work to men as well as women.
Many firms also fear they will have to pay male staff full salaries while they are off as a competitive measure – or see staff move to rival firms with more attractive childcare packages”.
Speaking on behalf of his organisation, David Frost, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce betrayed its lack of enthusiasm: “Last year, 80 per cent of its members said that they opposed extending paid maternity leave.
The Government said last year that it plans to allow women to be paid 12 months off work after having a baby by 2009. From April 2007, women will be entitled to statutory maternity pay for 39 weeks [i.e. a derisory £106 as opposed to full salary], an increase of 13 weeks”.
Steve Doughty and Becky Barrow, in Paid Leave for New Fathers (Daily Mail, 20th October) expressed their dismay: “A sweeping package of publicly-funded paternity leave will pay men to stay at home in families where mothers go back to work.
But when the mother chooses to bring up her baby full-time, fathers will get nothing”.
In case any lingering doubts haunted readers’ minds, they spelled out that feminism is a dirty word: “The scheme enraged business leaders, who face bills of hundreds of millions of pounds to replace staff they will lose for months. Taxpayers are also to be burdened with new costs that will run into billions. Other critics accused the Government of social engineering and pushing mothers back into work in the name of feminist equality”.
Seething with outrage, they did not conceal that only marriage enjoys validity as a form of partnership in their eyes: “In the new system, the man who claims additional paternity leave will not even need to be the real father of the baby. Husbands and ‘partners’ of mothers will qualify whether or not they are the biological father”. Removing disincentives to hiring female employees by levelling the playing field and encouraging men to show an interest beyond the initial squirt of semen are to be frowned upon. That male prestige and authority can no longer be derived from the breadwinner role no doubt causes them to hold up their hands in horror.
To make matters worse, those grimly determined to acknowledge the disproportionate, gender-justified burden on women have the sheer effrontery to make allowances for other demands on her time: “The new law will also include new rights for ‘carers’ – those workers who look after sick or elderly adults will be able to ask their boss for ‘flexible’ conditions in the same way that is now available to parents returning to work.
But ministers have yet to define what ‘carer’ may mean and who may benefit from the new law”.
Jill Kirby of the “Tory-leaning” (a masterpiece of understatement) Centre for Policy Studies is also quoted, claimed that this boiled down to a simple shirking of responsibility: “‘The point of this is to shift the burden of supporting families on to employers.
‘When the Government should be reforming the tax and benefit system to help families, it is washing its hands of the problem and making employers bear the burden.
‘They are trying to change the way men behave by telling fathers to stay at home. Mothers at home are being told to go to work – fathers are being told that taking paternity leave is a good thing”’.
Sociologist Patricia Morgan, author of a number of studies on the decline of the traditional family likewise waxed lyrical: “‘The influence of Patricia Hewett is behind this.
‘She is interested in pushing women out to work and promoting them while men are held back and encouraged to stay at home.
‘They are trying to bring about a sex-change society. The Government hopes daddies will become mummies – a Pampers generation of men’”.
In The Observer (23rd October) Cristina Odone tackled the matter in Fathering is as instinctive as mothering – and this country is recognising it: “US companies like to have work on tap – and this extends to their staff who have families. An American couple who have a baby may take up to three months’ unpaid leave – but the take up rate, at less than 1 per cent, is worse than Britain’s own dismal 3 per cent. And women constitute most of that 1 per cent: paternity leave is such and alien concept that it is not even on the statute books.
The consequences of this work-life unbalance are dire – as any perusal of American crime rates, family break-ups, and educational failures reveals”.
She argues: “What happens when families don’t come first is ugly. The converse is, instead, quantifiably good. When father is involved (read: can spend time) with his child, that child will do better at exams at 16 and be less likely to have a criminal record at 21. By the time she reaches her 30s, she will be happier and better adjusted if daddy was available to her in those formative years”.
The legislation does not merit the hysteria it has generated: “As Jack O’Sullivan of Fathers Direct points out, there’s ‘no need for business to get its knickers in a twist: we’re talking about a benefit that will affect 30-36,000 men at most’. But the message sent out by the legislation is clear: fathers are an important social asset”.
Indeed: “In a way, the shift in social policy reflects what is happening on the ground already: fathers, according to equal opportunities research, are already doing one third of parental child care of the under-fives.
For those who still cling to the traditionalist view of parenting as a feminine preserve, the following study will prove enlightening: when mums and dads were tested for their reaction (in terms of sweat, heart rate and temperature) to their baby’s crying, the machines registered that daddy’s heart races, his skin generates heat and his hands sweat just as much as mummy’s. Fathering is as instinctive as mothering. Happily, we live in a country that is coming to terms with this”.
Jan Ravens in The Independent on Sunday (23rd October) took a slightly different angle in Paternity leave? Good idea, but can we have just a bit at a time?: “It will certainly even things up in the world of work. Now men too will have that ‘Sorry? And you are?’ treatment that women returners have had to go through when their mothering responsibilities are discharged. But a good idea to give couples more choice over how they divide up paid work and childcare. Yes?”
A glint of mischief permeates her suggestions on splitting the leave: “When your offspring requests endless games of football and cricket; when it is time to train him to ride a bike; and when it’s time to go tenpin bowling, paintballing or one of those ghastly deafening places where they all fire lasers at each other, then you can tell your darling co-parent it’s his turn, and that you are off to indulge in some late-onset binge drinking or to run up soft furnishings – whatever.
If a woman is going to breastfeed for the first six months, say, then she has to be around anyway. No, don’t talk to me about expressing, because I’ll have no truck with that. Enough painful and unattractive things have happened to the mother’s body without sticking your breast into something that looks as if it were invented by James Dyson. So Mum’s in the milky-den stage, where the nearest you get to a funky accessory is a congealed muslin square; and where you imagine your partner leaves you every morning for some golden land full of glittering chatter and glamorous assignments (…)
At this point, most women don’t really want the guy to take paternity leave; they want him to take husbandry leave. Women can look after the babies (genetics, programming, etc.), but we do then need someone to look after us – to cook the dinner, buy us some carrot cake, stroke our heads (no, don’t go near my tits), and generally do the kind of pampering that doesn’t involve infant sanitary products.
I am not some person from a Tory think-tank on family policy. I don’t think that men who want to spend time with their babies are a bunch of wussy Jessies. I know lots of men who take to fatherhood very naturally. Great that they can be with their new offspring. But gentlemen, beware (…) any guys contemplating full-time childcare as an image-enhancing exercise, think again. Trackie bottoms and hair encrusted with Hipp Organic spinach purée isn’t a look that’s going to go down well with the chicks ”.
In The rise of the house husband, Becky Barrow (Daily Mail, 13th October) highlights the growth in the number of full-time fathers: “Nearly 200,000 men look after the house while their partner goes out to work, official figures revealed yesterday.
The rise of the house husband has turned traditional family life upside down with fewer women staying at home than ever before.
Only 2.1 million women of working age now choose domestic life – down 600,000 on 1993 when figures were first collected.
The number is expected to dip below two million in the next few years.
The figures also show that record numbers of men are opting out of jobs.
Seventeen per cent of men who are of working age but claim no benefits do not work.
In 1971 that figure stood at only 5 per cent.
The number of women not working in 1971 was 40 per cent but has fallen to 26.5 per cent now. The Office for National Statistics, which compiled the figures, said the 3.2 million out-of-work men were not classified as unemployed because they were not looking for a job or claiming benefits.
Instead most of them said they were looking after the children or studying.
In the survey, 189,000 men declared they were ‘looking after family/home’ but in 1993 there were only 109,000 saying the same thing”.
The male retreat to the home is due in part to early retirement (“Nearly 430,000 men are giving up their jobs before the official state pension age of 65”), as well as the changing nature of employment opportunities on offer (“The number of manufacturing jobs continues to fall.
The figure fell 99,000 over the last twelve months to stand at just over three million”).
The picture of cosy domesticity is misleading, however: “House husbands are put under such strain that they are almost twice as likely to have a heart attack as men who work, according to research presented to the American Heart Association.
Over a decade the scientists studied 3,600 men and women to find what effect different jobs had on health.
They discovered that men who said they had been house husbands for most of their adult life were 82 per cent more likely to die in that ten-year period than counterparts who went out to work.
The link between men staying at home and poor health held true even when other factors such as age, blood pressure and cholesterol levels were considered”. The cultural disparagement of “unmanly” or “emasculated” men who reject the traditional privilege of mingling with the boys in office or factory apparently exacts a heavy toll.
Guy Walters, in Diary of a useless househusband (Daily Mail, 13th October), records his journey from smugness to an insight into the frustrations of running after toddlers:
“Until last week, I had always thought I would make a perfect househusband. After all, I was well qualified: I cook a sensational dinner every evening, do more than my fair share of cleaning, and I even know where the washing-machine is.
In the mornings, I help to get William, our two-year-old son, off to playgroup, and feed breakfast to his six-month-old sister, Alice. I change their nappies without being asked, and come bathtime I am standing by with a towel, ready to get William into his pyjamas and read him a story, which more often than not – being a writer – I have written.
Over a delicious three-course dinner I then tell my other half Annabel how much I enjoy domesticity, and that if she were to earn one pound a year more than me, I would happily give up writing wartime thrillers to enjoy an idyllic existence of spending quality time with my children. Our days would be spent going on picnics, touring fascinating museums, and visiting their little friends while I nattered with their attractive mothers over a few slices of home-made quiche.
When I tell Annabel all this, she raises an eyebrow, rolls back her eyes, and shakes her head. I then gently inform her that she and her friends make a meal of being housewives, and if only they employed male efficiency and ruthlessness to the challenge, then they would be in a fit state to open the door for us at 7.30 in the evening, a vodka Martini in hand, adorned in the latest line from Agent Provocateur”.
He keeps a Bridget Jones’s Diary-style of how he stood in for his wife when she was ill. By Wednesday he laments: “I wish I was back at work, any work. I would trade this in for a job disposing of clinical waste. Why is this so difficult? Why am I so bad at it? Unlike my father and most men of his generation, I’m a hands-on dad. I also like and love my children and I don’t see them as an encumbrance or joshingly refer to them as ‘the brats’, which I find offensive. So why am I finding this the hardest thing I’ve ever done?
My brain is occupied by timetables, working out whether Alice’s food will be ready in time – it wasn’t – for me to then cook William’s food, all the time wondering whether William’s nappy needs to be changed now or after supper (now, inevitably). Fall into bed feeling a little dizzy, but not sure whether that’s the wine, or the aching exhaustion that settled on me all day”.
Come Friday, his chirpiness has vanished: “I was shocked at the amount of work our wives put in each day.
It’s wearing, not because it’s particularly intellectually taxing, but because it’s so boring. You can have a busy day at work, and feel revved up for a big night out. But this is different. This is death by a thousand whines, a thousand spilled drinks, a thousand leaky nappies. Just a few years ago I spent my time chasing girls around London. Now I’m scrubbing a kitchen in Wiltshire.
What’s gone wrong? Do women think like this? Is this why they’re bitter? I feel emasculated and boring. What can I say to my friends on the phone? It feels strange to feel like this, because I always thought I was pretty New Man about these things. Perhaps I’m not.
Maybe I really am just another old sexist who thinks a woman’s job is in the home, or at least it’s certainly not my job to be there. Have I been living a lie all these years? Shouldn’t I just have married a thick woman with no ambition? Isn’t that what alpha males do? So what am I? A beta male? A gamma?” Well, Guy, I hate to disillusion you, but even a “thick” woman is unlikely to discover a transcendental sense of purpose in wiping spatters of baby mulch from the wallpaper. Women want a fairer deal in bringing up the precious little darlings precisely because of the complete lack of intellectual stimulation entailed by satisfying their every demand. The wondrous absorption in the bundle of joy is hormone-induced and of extremely limited duration, like any novelty soon wearing off. We crave fresh challenges every bit as much as you do.
In the Daily Mail (16th September), Tim Shipman penned the headline on a report by Rebecca O’Neill (Fiscal Policy and the Family) deploring what he perceives as an assault by the Government in Labour’s Tax on the Family: “Families are being encouraged to break up by Labour’s tax and benefits policies, according to a hard-hitting report.
The think-tank Civitas said parents can receive £4,000 more in handouts if they separate or get divorced.
Overall, the ‘perverse’ system penalizes hard working families and concentrates benefits on the jobless, lone parents and low-earners.
One result was to increase child poverty by encouraging men or women to bring up children in circumstances that were most likely to lead to hardship”.
Hard-headed economic calculations would torpedo romance and commitment every time: “After all their taxes, tax credits, benefits and allowances have been factored in, a couple with one child who work full time on the minimum wage would get £366 a year in State handouts over and above their income.
If they separated or divorced, the parent who cared for the child, probably the mother, would receive a gain in subsidies of £4,355. She would still receive all the major benefits associated with bringing up a child – getting even more for being a single parent.
The other parent would lose child benefits, but tax credits and income support would still give him £28 more than his gross wage.
Between them, the two parents would have handouts worth £4,383, £4,017 more than when they were together.
The report says: ‘Lone parenthood is discouraged by the French and German regimes but the UK tax credit system favours children who live with a lone parent. Lone parents automatically qualify for income support because they are not expected to work until their youngest is 16’”. I am sure that some of his stable mates might find it difficult to conceal their delight that not only will some uppity women be removed from competing with men over scarce resources (jobs), but their resulting long-term subsistence on social security will furnish a convenient target for the wrath that keeps their bank balances healthy.
His choice of words harks back to Tory scapegoating of single mothers for all the sins of social degeneration familiar from the dark decade of the 1980s: “The report says 30 teenage girls in every thousand have children in the UK, compared to 13 in Germany and nine in France.
It lists the benefits available to young single mothers – income support, housing benefit, child benefit, child tax credit, credit and working tax credit, as well as free school meals and a chance to jump the housing queue”. Bring back the workhouse! Throw the little sluts on to the streets along with their snot-nosed, undeserving brats! Lock them up in homes for their shameful, feckless promiscuity, like we did in the ’50s!
The Conservative response brings us full circle: “Tory spokesman Teresa May said: ‘This is yet more evidence that Government policies are actually encouraging the breakdown of families.
‘Everyone recognises that stable homes are the best place to bring up children. The effects on society are extremely damaging. Ministers must urgently realise that the real victims are the children who see their home lives devastated’”.
Ever keen to swerve Tory accusations of being soft on parasites, The Independent on Sunday’s Marie Woolf focuses on the latest Labour scheme in Blunkett to crack down on single mothers (23rd October): “Single mothers on benefits are to be made to actively seek a job as soon as their youngest child reaches 11, in a government clampdown on unemployment in lone parent households.
The best way to help their children is ‘by bringing a wage home,’ ministers will say. The drive to get more lone parents of secondary school children into jobs is to be launched by David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in a Green Paper on ‘Welfare to Work’.
Single mothers on benefits with children in secondary school must engage in ‘work-related activities’, including drawing up job-finding plans, and attending regular interviews with employment advisers, and taking training courses. The proposals are designed to cut child poverty and help the Government meet its target of raising from 56 to 70 per cent the proportion of lone parents in paid work.
But the move will infuriate some single mothers’ groups and lead to accusations that they are trying to force mothers to leave the home. Currently parents with children must attend work-focused interviews when their youngest child is aged 14”. It strikes me that we are again being presented with measures tailored to appease the opposition rather than to alleviate the misery of the poorest. It is simply untrue that any wage is better than no wage (by the same token it is also untrue that children over 11 require less nurturing, their need for emotional input increasing as their elementary physical dependency is reduced – and it is worthwhile recalling another battle cry of the right about failing standards of discipline and gangs of teenage thugs roaming the streets, if single mothers do not arrive home until late in the evening, where will the firm hand come from once the testosterone kicks in? – rendering the cut-off point arbitrary). Training courses are all very well, but if no tangible prospect of a decent job with a decent pay packet can realistically be guaranteed then they represent little more than yet another time-consuming punishment meted out for the crime of not belonging to the middle-class, the kind of interference that the latter, more fortunate segment of the population would deem intolerable if subjected to it.
A degree of scepticism therefore remains in order: “Lone parents who cooperate with the work-seeking programme will receive a financial incentive, expected to be in the form of enhanced benefits or tax credits. They will also have greater access to babysitting with the Government’s plans for school-based childcare before and after school.
Children in lone-parent households are three times more likely to live in poverty than children brought up by couples. But the plan to get the parents of older children to find jobs would lift around 300,000 more children out of poverty, the Government believes.
Kate Green, director of One Parent Families, welcomed the aim to help more lone parents find work, but warned that a two-tier benefit system could emerge, penalising single parents who did not find work.
‘There seems to be a suggestion that you would be required to do these activities and there would be more money…but if you did not, you would be on current rates of benefit, below the poverty line,’ she said.
‘This is not about the age of the youngest child. It’s about the barriers lone parents have, such as very low skills levels and no qualifications’”.
What does marriage have to commend itself to the independent woman of today? Not a lot in the bedroom department, it would seem if James Mills’ summary of paper by a team at University College London, drawing on data in the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles from 2000, The wives who feel let down in the bedroom (Daily Mail, 29th September) is anything to go by: “Marriage is far from a bed of roses for women, a study has found.
They are more likely than single girls to face problems in their sex lives.
More than half complain of difficulties, ranging from a lack of interest in being intimate with their husbands to pain whenever they are.
Married men, however, fare much better.
According to the study, men have less trouble in their love lives once they are married.
The study, which looked at 11,000 British adults, found both men and women complained of a range of sexual problems.
Some were the architects of their own misfortune. Men who drank too much alcohol, for example, found themselves disappointed – and disappointing – in the bedroom.
Four in ten men who consumed more than the recommended amount reported problems with their sexual performance”.
Men and women between the ages of 16 and 44 were polled: “Fifty-five per cent of married women said they had encountered difficulties in the past year, compared to 32 per cent of married men.
Sex for single women may be less troubled, but 50 per cent still encountered problems of some sort. The figure for single men was 39 per cent.
The sex lives of mothers with young children were also more likely to suffer, with 60 per cent reporting problems”.
Linda Kelsey, in The truth about married sex (Daily Mail, 6th October) took the opportunity to disparage academics in search of empirical evidence to substantiate their hypotheses: “All is not well, it would seem, between the marital sheets. Married women are facing more sexual problems than single girls, with problems ranging from a lack of interest in sex to a failure to reach orgasm. What a surprise!
One does have to wonder why tens of thousands of pounds are spent on a daily basis asking ‘ordinary people’ questions to which we already know the answers. But in this case the research may have done women a favour.
While single women will discuss with impunity the most intimate details of their sexual encounters, married women – out of a mix of embarrassment and commendable loyalty – tend to keep mum, especially once they’ve become mums themselves”.
This did not deter her from corroborating their conclusions: “I decided to test the findings about married women’s sex lives with an investigation of my own. A cursory survey of my friends, conducted in non-laboratory conditions, mostly over cups of tea or while out walking the dogs, revealed the following: a couple who haven’t made love for three years; a wife who can’t actually remember when she last had sex (she thinks it was August but can’t swear by it); a woman who is having mind-blowing, earth-moving sex – but not with her husband; a mother who lives in terror of the children walking in mid-coitus; a wife who has sex more often than she would like (once a month); and a couple who do it as often as he takes Viagra – on average, once a week”.
One reply reminded me of Susan Maushart’s concept of wifework: “‘Sex puts him in a good mood. If he misses out for a few days, he’s grumpy with the children, foul-tempered with his secretary and aggressive to his colleagues. For at least 24 hours after sex, he’s a lamb. I honestly think I should be put on the payroll’”.
Kelsey goes on to display a flair for stating the obvious herself: “For married women today it’s difficult to square our expectations of sexual fulfilment with the realities of long-term relationships.
We grew up in an era when orgasms were regarded as a right, in which sexual experimentation was the norm and it was easy to move from a relationship where the sexual chemistry was no longer working to one where the sparks flew 24/7.
By the time you’re 45 or 50 (…) it’s perfectly possible to have been married for a god 20 or 25 years. Your children may be grown up; you could even be a grandparent.
You look in the mirror and, despite the encroaching wrinkles (which surgery can sort out if they really trouble you that much), you see a woman still in her prime. Perhaps one who needs to lose a few pounds, or just as likely still fits into the same dress size you wore at 20.
But that’s not really the point. More important than how you look is how you feel. And inside you still feel like a woman with sexual needs, or at least a woman who wants to feel she’s still sexually attractive.
Do we have to accept that sex in marriage will eventually go off the boil?”
Adding a little spice is the woman’s work: “Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, but it does breed laziness.
Have you checked your nightwear? For every woman who goes to bed in a peek-a-boo baby doll Agent Provocateur number, or even some cute Boden pyjamas, I can name a dozen whose sleeping garb would give the most ardent of husbands second thoughts”.
To her credit, however, Kelsey does not let the man in her life entirely off the hook (though she takes it for granted that squeezing the Fairy Liquid bottle is so unusual that it can function as an aphrodisiac): “What men need to realise is that for most women seduction doesn’t start with him making a grab at you under the duvet.
It may need to start over supper, with him offering to do the washing-up. It may need to continue with a glass or two of wine on the sofa once the children are in bed (but not too many glasses, because overindulgence in alcohol, as the survey reported, is a prime cause of problems with sexual performance). You may even need to talk to one another – but if it’s only going to be about problems at work or why the children are driving you nuts, you can forget about getting in the mood for love”.
The patter of tiny feet is an effective passion-killer in more ways than one: “Once children come along, changes are inevitable. You may get your pre-baby body back quickly enough, but it’s a myth to think that the moment you are back to your svelte self, your sex life will pick up where it left off.
Tiredness, interruptions (babies crying, toddlers with nightmares, teens who fancy a chat when they come home at midnight) and the busyness of our daily lives all conspire to put sex at the bottom of our to-do list. Rather than being a priority, it becomes a chore”.
The title of Robin Yapp’s story The brainy women who stay married (Daily Mail, 5th March) suggested that staying together is a sign of intelligence. Yapp’s effort summarises an article in The Economist concerning a study by Dr. Tak Wing Chan based on data from the General Household Survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics, which looks at around 9,000 households each year: “Highly educated women are far less likely to divorce than those who are working class (…)
The finding is a reversal of the situation in the 1960s and 1970s when women who went to university were more likely than others to see their marriages fail.
It may reflect the fact that in the past, far fewer women then men studied for a degree and many of those who did felt driven to make a show of independence. Now the numbers of men and women attending university are roughly the same”. The currently larger female undergraduate intake should not be attributed to a slippage in educational standards (letting in women who would formerly not have made the grade), but to the then prevalent expectation that women would be more content and fulfilled as housewives, provided for by their spouses (supplementing the income with part-time earnings, “pin money”). Wages had not yet been as savagely curtailed as they are at present.
Brute economic necessity had not yet dictated that we should all, woman and man alike, toil unceasingly (although, obviously, this statement is informed by a middle-class perspective): “(…) women with degrees who married in the late 1960s had a 32 per cent higher chance than average of seeing their marriage end over the next decade.
But university-educated women who married between 1985 and 1989 were 27 per cent less likely to divorce in the subsequent ten years than women in the general population.
Official figures show that overall there were 153,490 divorces in 2003 – which was a rise of nearly 6,000 on 2002, the biggest increase in a single year since 1985. For every 100 weddings, there were 57 divorces”. Whereas in the 1960s it might well have been the case that acquiring a capacity for independent thought did made the suffocating restrictions of marriage less easy for women to bear, perhaps nowadays marriages are less likely to fall apart because women are not entering them until they are much older and have not only accumulated sexual experience, but may have also cohabited first, allowing them to make a better selection of life partner.
Dr Chan takes a more prosaic view: “Dr Chan says the increase in women’s earnings may have reduced the likelihood of them divorcing as men are more likely to need them financially”.
Marriage counsellor Carol Martin-Sperry maintained that middle-class couples are more willing to forgive adultery than was the case in the past. Yapp disagrees: “But family law experts say an alternative reason for the findings may be that wealthy men are now more wary of committing adultery in the first place because of the equal division of marital property in divorce cases”.
Back home, our politicians are as reluctant as ever to embrace social change, as Stuart Nicolson’s Embarrassing setback for Executive as MSPs reject quickie divorces (Scottish Daily Mail, 3rd November) reveals: “New plans for ‘quickie’ divorces in Scotland were rejected by MSPs yesterday.
They claimed the proposals undermined and devalued marriage.
Instead, they demanded that ministers look again at plans drastically to cut the cooling-off periods required between separation and divorce.
The Scottish Executive had proposed cutting the minimum wait from two years to one where both parties consented to the divorce; and from five years to two in cases where one side contested the action”.
The Tories favoured prolonging the agony: “The MSPs backed alternative Conservative plans, which would cut the cooling-off periods, but not as far as ministers want.
Under the proposal from Tory justice spokesman Margaret Mitchell, the minimum wait would be 18 months and three years for uncontested and contested divorces respectively”.
Betraying the sad persistence of the throwback chain up the swings and roundabouts on Sunday mentality: “Nationalist MSP Brian Adam also hit out at the plans. He said: ‘Divorce should be the last possible option, rather than something we should be smoothing the passage to’.
His SNP colleague Bruce McFee said the proposals sent out a message that marriage could be easily disposed of. ‘To reduce from two years to one year does devalue marriage’, he added.
Labour MSP Mary Mulligan added: ‘We all realise marriage is a serious commitment. We have to question whether allowing people to remove themselves from marriages in such a short period of time upholds that commitment or undermines it’”.
The original plans were more sensitive to those suffering the anguish of a break up: “Deputy Justice Minister Hugh Henry had argued that imposing longer time limits would deny people the opportunity to move on from failed marriages.
He said: ‘Either you accept the principle of divorce or not. Once you accept there’s a reason for divorce, then we’ve got to ask ourselves is there any value in keeping people married when it is clear that that marriage no longer has any purpose’.
He added: ‘Yes, I support marriage. The Executive supports marriage. We believe people should be supported to make a go of it and work through their difficulties. But where all of that has failed, we have to make a decision about letting people go reasonably amicably’”.
Meanwhile, south of the border, Clare Dyer’s Unmarried couples need more legal rights, says law lord (The Guardian, 9th November) focused on Lady Hale’s F.A. Mann lecture, The Mating Game – Coupling and Uncoupling in the Modern World, which advocated a departure from the do-nothing philosophy of the past for various reasons: “The first was the vulnerability of a partner caring for children. A cohabite, unlike, for instance, a wife, was not entitled to financial support if the relationship broke down, nor a share of property held in the partner’s name.
The second objection concerned the ‘common law myth’ – cohabiting couples falsely believing they had the same rights as married couples. ‘There are rather too many people ordering their lives on the mistaken assumption that they have rights that they do not have,’ she said.
The third objection was the European convention on human rights, which guarantees respect for family life and bans unjustified discrimination in the enjoyment of this right.
The number of cohabiting couples has been rising steadily over the past 20 years and is predicted to move from 2 million today to over 3.8 million over the next 25 years. The British Social Attitudes Survey in 2000 found that 56% of the population – and 59% of those cohabiting – believed that people who lived together for some time without being married had the same legal rights as married couples.
Lady Hale said she agreed with a ‘tiered approach’ to rights which would not give cohabiting couples the same rights as married couples, but would enable them to draw up contracts spelling out what would happen if they split up. They would also have a right to claim some ‘marriage-like’ redress, such as financial support”. I would prefer an end to discrimination against the unmarried (both straight and gay) by abolishing the distinction between marriage and cohabitation outright. Only then is there a chance that the stigma stubbornly clinging to “illegitimate” children can finally be eradicated.
Amanda Platell, in Bridget Jones R.I.P. (Daily Mail 13th October), examines the single life: “A decade ago, none of us thought we would end up single. Being alone was a choice, a temporary state until we were ready to make the commitment to marriage and babies – both of which we believed we could put off as long as we wanted.
But a cruel trick was being played on our generation. No one told us how hard it would be to have babies after 40, nor how hard it would be to find our Mr. Darcy.
The cold reality, as revealed in hard facts by the Office for National Statistics recently, is that women now in their 20s are three times more likely to be alone by their 40s. Only 40 per cent of them will be married, and millions will face middle-age – or middle-youth as we prefer to call it – without a partner or children.
So suddenly Singledom isn’t so funny any more. The chill wind of loneliness blows through our lives in a way it never did back in the Nineties”.
She drives what she considers the final nail into Bridget’s coffin thus: “And in an age where binge-drinking has become one of the biggest social problems among young women, we tend to hide, not joke, about the number of units we consume. Even Chardonnay isn’t particularly cool any more”.
Helen Fielding’s brilliant creation has firmly ensconced herself in the journalistic consciousness. In the Daily Mail (30th September), Steve Doughty entitles his take on the same report, How we’re turning into a nation of Bridget Joneses: “Millions of women now in their twenties face lives of loneliness as they enter middle age, they were told yesterday.
One in three will not be in a marriage or have a male partner by the time they hit their mid-forties, a Government forecast said. One in five will never have married.
And many will face middle and old age with neither partner nor children and family to support them”. (Funnily enough, I have been labouring under the misapprehension that even Grannies can no longer look forward to any respite from dabbing away the dribbles from either their grandchildren or their dementia-struck other halves).
He sallies forth to champion the sacrament as opposed to the no-strings-attached convenient: “They showed that the chances for women living out their lives as singletons are rising fast thanks to the decline of marriage and the growing popularity of cohabitation.
Unlike marriages, cohabitations tend to last for only short periods. The ONS analysis shows that one in five women approaching their 50th birthday in the early 2030s will have known only short-term informal relationships.
It is said that 20 per cent of women aged between 45 and 50 in 2031 will never have married and will have no partner. Another 11 per cent will have divorced and will have no new male partner.
At present, only 7 per cent of women aged 45 to 50 are classed as unmarried and without partners. Overall, only 22 per cent now live on their own in their late forties.
Among all women over 16, more than four out of ten will have no partner. A quarter will never have married, and nearly one in five will be divorced and have no new partner”.
Jill Kirby of the Centre for Policy Studies is again trundled out: “‘Women are accepting other forms of relationship which, with the best will in the world, are not lasting. We know cohabitations do not last very long. This means there will be a generation of women who risk losing the companionship of family and the financial security marriage used to provide.
‘The solution to this lies with women themselves. But a lot of the onus lies with the Government, which has contributed heavily to this trend by removing support for marriage from the tax and benefit system’”.
Doughty cites the predictions with gloom: “According to the forecasts, by 2031 only 40 per cent of adult women will be married – while nearly as many, 39 per cent, will never have married. At present, more than half are married and fewer than a quarter have never married”.
Before succumbing to the blandishment of a band of gold, however, it is worth perusing Terri Judd’s contribution on the Unilever Family Report 2005, which canvassed 1,142 people aged 25 to 44, Men living alone are lonelier and unhappier than women, study says (The Independent, 27th October): “Men are lonelier living on their own than women and less likely to appreciate the freedom and lack of compromise it brings (…) [as Susan Maushart so eloquently catalogues]
The number of people choosing to live alone has almost doubled in the past 30 years with the shift most significant among men. The total of males under 65 living alone has tripled since 1971.
A study published today reveals that 96 per cent believed living alone had become a rite of passage though the majority did not expect it to be a long-term situation (…) Sixty-four per cent of women thought it was good to have their own place before settling down and so did 48 per cent of men.
The reality is that many have been forced into the situation, usually after separating from a partner or becoming widowed. Particularly among older males they are no longer willing to live with parents and their friends are likely to be settled with their own families.
More than one third of households are now single occupancy, compared with barely one fifth 30 years ago while the percentage of the population living solo had more than doubled from 6 to 13 per cent.
The result is a cultural shift that not only fuels claims of a ‘non-family’ society but potentially throws up problems in later life with pensioners not having a live-in carer”. (The latter more likely to be of the feminine gender, I would note in passing).
The tide is turning against marriage: “In a definite move away from the original nuclear family, more couples are opting to stay in separate properties with a third saying it helped their relationship and a quarter wanting to remain that way indefinitely. Some people have simply decided that they prefer the independence of living alone.
The phenomenon stretches across all social stratas [sic], from the most affluent to the poorest, though the increased cost of living makes it a tough option for lower income groups”.
Robin Yapp’s companion article, Why women love living on their own (Daily Mail, 27th October) cannot resist the mention of Bridget: “Living alone was once considered a rather sad situation for a female to find herself in.
But for many women, it is now seen as an empowering rite of passage that helps them enjoy life to the full.
Instead it is men who are more likely to find that being home alone leads to them feeling lonely and cut off from friends (…)
Contrary to the Bridget Jones stereotype, it is women who feel they really thrive on the freedom of the solitary life.
Less than half (48 per cent) of women living on their own said that they sometimes feel lonely, compared to 55 per cent of men living alone”.
Men can no longer count on an uncomplaining pseudo-servant to do the ironing or cook the dinner: “The numbers living alone in Britain has soared in recent years as the divorce rate has risen, increasing numbers of women have put their career before a family and young people wait longer before marrying.
Single-person households now account for 29 per cent of all UK homes compared to 18 per cent in 1971.
By 2021 it is expected to have risen to 35 per cent – overtaking two-people homes as the most common living arrangement.
Philip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, said the reason women fared much better living alone was simple.
‘Women are much better able to look after themselves,’ he said. ‘They are better adults than men in that sense.
‘Living alone you have got to organise your washing, shopping and cleaning routine as easily as you organise your email file’”.
Bridget’s divine dizziness is not to everyone’s taste, as Gareth Sibson (28 and author of Single White Failure) illustrates in his Save me from the Bridget Clones (Daily Mail, 27th October): “Perhaps I shouldn’t have snooped, but I couldn’t help myself (…) while my date got ready in the other room, I found myself glancing at an open notebook on the coffee table.
What I saw scrawled across the page in a rather childish and summed up everything about the emotional insecurity of single women today. There, in blue ink, she’d repeatedly written her first name and my surname. This was a woman who had talked non-stop about her career and her independent life from the minute we met.
When it came down to it, of course, she was just as desperate and needy as the rest of them, so I’m afraid to say that was our third and final date”.
He disparages the Bridget Clones: “For a start, they are boring company. Not only are they obsessed about themselves and the way they look, all they want to – or indeed can – talk about is work.
I also found them far too upfront about sex. What sort of man wants to be propositioned on a first date? I certainly don’t. It’s terribly off-putting.
It’s not that I want to play the field. Far from it. I’d like nothing more than to find a wonderful woman to settle down with. But my cut-off point at the moment remains just three dates. Because that’s all I can take. These women aren’t as sexy, strong and independent as they like to think they are.
They are unsavoury and positively rapacious ladies with a penchant for boasting about bra size within moments of meeting. They also have a frightening tendency to flit from incessant chatter about their ‘independent lives’ and ‘high-flying careers’ to talk about marriage.
Scratch a little deeper and they are all fanatical about finding Mr. Right behind their officious career-woman façade”. Maybe, Mr Sibson, these women have been a teensy-weensy bit influenced by the welter of magazines disfiguring the shelves at every newsagents insisting that they purchase a boob-job to maintain their market value until Mr Right strays across their path. Or maybe you are still in the thrall of the ancient virgin/whore dichotomy and feel intimidated by their forwardness.
He hisses: “I’ve dated dozens of women and every one has pitched herself as an ambitious go-getter, confident, outgoing, self-assured and sex mad, but in reality she was rarely any of the above”. Again, he blithely ignores the pressures from the wider culture whereby women must constantly be “up for it”, good for a laugh and not setting snares for the gent about town in finest Armani plumage.
Joan Smith (The Independent, A nation still sniggering in the bike shed; I neglected to record the exact date) articulates the unease even a feminist can feel in a situation where the last vestiges of the old prudery/saucy seaside postcard pubescent naughtiness persist: “In the Seventies, like many women of my generation, I mined Cosmopolitan and Our Bodies, Ourselves for information about multiple orgasms, oral sex and other previously taboo subjects. I welcomed the new openness about sex, following on from decades in which public sexual discourse consisted of exposés of randy vicars and juicy divorce reports in the News of the World. I loathed the old morality and assumed that as we grew more relaxed about sex, we would also become more grown-up about it. What I hadn’t allowed for was the rise of a popular culture completely obsessed with sex, to the point where it sometimes seems as though the entire country has become one huge bike shed, populated by sniggering adolescents.
Even if you don’t buy the red-tops, you cannot escape the sensational headlines. Sex has gone from being a private act between consenting adults to a species of performance with a potential audience of millions. No one is forced to buy the Daily Star or watch Big Brother in the hope of catching a glimpse of live sex, but the appetite for such tawdry rubbish appears undiminished. Popular culture extends a perpetual invitation to voyeurism, reducing readers to the status of infants, gawping at the discovery that adults have sex with each other”.
His tender sensibilities are offended by confrontation with carnality (surely the ultimate objective of the encounter, even if put off “respectably” until later): “Those who aren’t obsessed with marriage want to jump into bed at the first opportunity. Call me old-fashioned, but I hate the way women seem to think that it’s attractive to be so frank – and even crude – about sex. There is, in fact, nothing more unappealing”. Oh dear, oh dear, women are still supposed to pose as demure, delicate little blossoms, languishing on the chintz upholstery by the telephone until the male takes the initiative.
He denies hankering after a doormat: “I’m all for having a modern relationship with a career woman, but not one that is so modern that I’m left feeling totally emasculated.
I’d like to be with someone intelligent, who is my equal, but not someone who makes ridiculous demands of me or feels a need to constantly put me in my place”. So, to win Mr S’s heart you have to be prepared to let him have his wicked way with you a few times while he makes up his mind whether he wants to go down on bended knee (though he is more likely to propose that you move in, since wedding bells do not ring in his ears except in his nightmares), although you must smile sweetly (don’t show your teeth, as that would be construed as predatory intent) and never, ever let slip a word about your promotion or straighten his tie for him as such implied criticism would suffice as grounds for being dumped.
His critical outpourings have not been depleted yet: “They are so wrapped up in their tiny little worlds they can’t compromise or take things slowly. These women live incredibly busy lives. They want to find Mr Right, but they haven’t got time to take it slowly or give any consideration to the other person.
One of my early observations was that women seem to look at dating as a business plan. Of course, we all understand the impact of the biological clock, and I too have a desire to find someone I can settle down with. I don’t know a man who doesn’t.
But let’s be frank here: it’s totally unattractive, and a little bit scary, to start talking about such things on a first date (…)
Dating should be a more organic process. Just relax a little. I’m all for trying to establish formality and commitment after a month or so, when we’ve had a chance to get to know each other a little.
But after just one date, for all you know, I could be anything, a psychopath, a liar or even married to someone else.
And offering no-strings sex and one-night stands simply isn’t a turn-on. Women seem to think all men care about is sex, but that’s not the case, or certainly not for me”. So we are supposed to rise above the media messages we are bombarded with from every quarter, ignore the paucity of available slots in our timetable (as well as of eligible males who were not snapped up long ago) and forget about the feeling of being in control of our lives bought at the cost of our foremothers having tubes forced up their nostrils in prison cells and the yellowed complexions of munitions workers.
Maybe the “vulgarity” that causes Mr Sibson such buttock-clenching embarrassment is linked to being “treated” to clumsy male advances. Roger Dobson and Jonathan Thompson put together the following on research by psychologists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Central Lancashire who gave 40 “verbal signals of generic quality” a whirl on 205 people, ‘Excuse me, beautiful, do you have space in your handbag for my Merc keys?’ (The Independent on Sunday, 6th November): “Having sweated over the origins of the universe and split the atom, academics have finally tackled the question that has perplexed mankind since the dawn of time: what are the best chat-up lines?
For millions of males forced to do a swift about turn in nightclubs, the advice is simple. The way to a woman’s heart is to dazzle her with a bit of culture and suggest that you’re a fine specimen of a man.
Think long term, even if that is not your intention”. Deception ever was the seducer’s trustiest weapon…
Lack of originality and obviously contrived phrases not go down well with the ladies: “Dr Christopher Bale, who led the research, explained the findings. ‘The highest rated lines were those reflecting the man’s ability to take control of the situation, his wealth, education or culture, and spontaneous wit. A direct request for sex received a low score, but it was not the lease effective gambit’.
So what are the words of wonder that researchers believe will secure a night of passion? Apparently: ‘It’s hot today isn’t it? It’s the best weather when you’re training for the marathon’.
Another winner, they assure us, is to steer conversation towards your favourite music, so you can drop the line: ‘The Moonlight Sonata or, to give it its true name, Sonata quasi una fantasia. A fittingly beautiful piece for a beautiful lady’.
By now, you may be wondering what the worst lines were. ‘You’re the star that completes the constellation of my existence’ is unlikely to make her swoon”.
All we really want is access to his spending power, apparently, but to rub our noses in it is a turn-off: “The scientists maintain that while it might be good to hint at having the means to support a potential partner, showing off was not appreciated. ‘I was just wondering if you had space in your handbag for my Merc keys’ was the ultimate flop”.
The Daily Mail’s spin on the news by Rebecca Camber, added a further quote from Bale: “‘We found that more sophisticated and complicated chat-up lines worked better than the cheesy one-liners.
‘But the highest rated one was effective because it advertised physical fitness’”. We do not object to our favours being solicited, but woe betide the overly cocky and glib. At least we do not clothe our efforts to ascertain his designs in smarminess.
Matthew Hickley vented his spleen on the purging of certain terms for the unattached (a pretext for denouncing legislation on granting legal recognition to gay partnerships) in Abolished, bachelor boys and spinsters (Daily Mail, 29th July): “For hundreds of years, adult Britons who have never married have been legally recognised as bachelors and spinsters.
Now the Government is to sweep away those centuries of tradition by abolishing the terms – in a move attacked by family campaigners as ‘a silly piece of political correctness’.
From December, official records such as marriage and the new civil partnership certificates, will describe the status of never-married men and women simply as single.
Officials say single can be applied both to heterosexual and gay people, whereas the words bachelor and spinster are ‘not clear enough’.
The change has been prompted by the civil partnerships or ‘gay marriages’, which are due to come into law shortly before Christmas and will be equal in status to civil marriages”.
Hickley’s disapproval stems from a negation of equality: “The abolition of the terms spinster and bachelor was announced by Len Cook, the Registrar-General for England and Wales.
A spokesman for his office said: ‘Instead of using the words bachelor or spinster, the word single will be used to mean a couple have never been through a marriage or civil partnership.
‘The proposal is to make things consistent so civil marriages and civil partnerships are registered in the same way’”.
He goes on: “The Church of England will be allowed to use the words bachelor and spinster when publishing marriage banns.
But the clergy will have to use the term single when filling in a marriage certificate, and the Church is likely to come under pressure to switch completely to the new terminology. Hugh McKinney, of the National Family Campaign, said: ‘This change isn’t constructive, or modern, or progressive. It certainly isn’t necessary. It is merely a silly piece of political correctness.
We will rob the English language of two terms which everyone understands and which have served us well for hundreds of years, replacing them with something blander and duller’.
The term bachelor has described unmarried adult men for more than 600 years.
Its first recorded use was by Chaucer in the 1380s. It possibly has its origins in the French phrase bas chevalier – a young knight.
Spinster originally described women who spun, but in the 17th century it became the legal term denoting those who had never married”. Personally, I do not agree with making concessions to the church.
John Walsh’s column in The Independent [I sloppily failed to jot down the date] pinpoints the very different cluster of connotations attaching themselves to the two labels: “How extraordinary they’ve been allowed to hang around in popular (if quasi-legal) documents for so long. For they’re terribly unfair, are they not? They both mean ‘unmarried’ but one is loaded with positive energies and the other is weighed down with dismal negatives.
A bachelor used to mean ‘a young knight who follows the banner of another because he’s too young to display his own’. How charming that is; I think we can all picture this gilded youth, apple-cheeked, fair-skinned, slender, impetuous in battle, desperate to prove himself to the ladies and acquire his own banner?
The word also means a chap who’s got a first degree at university, and also ‘a young, unmated bull seal’, so a composite picture builds up. We now have in our heads a 21-year-old knight with golden locks, a shiny breastplate and a BA (Hons) in History, who is also a wonder of nature slithering along the seashore, virginal but hugely potent, desperate to mate. Quite an appealing thought, if you take the smell of fish out of the equation.
‘Spinster’, on the other hand, doesn’t do anyone any favours. It means an unmarried woman, but more specifically an ‘old maid’, and derives from woman-who-is-only-good-for-the-spinning-house – a place where, in less enlightened times, elderly virgins were sent to be least trouble to the community. Pinched of face and wizened of hymen, they could sit there for ever, spinning yarns both literal and figurative and dreaming of the gorgeous young knight (with a faint resemblance to a bull seal) whom they once met but failed to get off with”.
Nor was this perceived act of linguistic vandalism an isolated incident, as Tahira Yaqoob’s The city where it’s rude to call a woman a lady (Daily Mail, 20th October) makes plain: “Ladies and senior citizens, prepare to face the wrath of the politically correct brigade.
These forms of address, according to town hall officials, are offensive”.
Elected representatives on Hull City Council received an e-mail from their Corporate Equalities Unit, inspired by the TUC and Unison manual, Unity in Diversity: “It listed a series of terms that were best left unsaid and offered alternatives.
Terms which have been banned include traditional endearments such as pet, duck, luvvie, flower, love, darling and dear.
And beware anyone tempted to call a colleague sweetheart or planning to go out to lunch with the lasses.
Instead, women in Hull can only be referred to as women”.
The Independent’s, Jemima Lewis harbours no such misplaced nostalgia in I’m sorry, darling, but ladies should be banned (21st October): “If this is political correctness, I’m all for it. Councillors at Hull City are in a huff after being told not to use the word ‘lady’ (…)
According to the Liberal Democrat councillor Carl Minns, this is – brace yourself – ‘political correctness gone mad. I was brought up to refer to them as ladies – that is good manners – but will this now be a disciplinary matter?’
Councillor Minns’s confusions is, perhaps, a problem of class as well as gender. Those words that the lower middle classes tend to think are polite – toilet, pardon, serviette – are often reviled by the upper middle classes, and vice versa. Thus, while one lot considers ‘lady’ to be a respectful and genteel form of address, the other regards it as pretentious and inaccurate. A lady, as my grandmother drummed into me from childhood, is a woman with a title. Anyone else who calls herself a lady is a social climber.
Feminists, too, dislike the connotations of ‘lady’ – though for rather better reasons. Woman is a straightforward word, a description of gender only lightly dusted with overtones of maturity and earthiness. Lady, on the other hand, is saturated with daintiness: it suggests coy glances and batting eyelashes, pencil skirts, pinnies, manicures, tiny feet, dinner on the table and not a hair out of place. It means never burping, snorting with laughter or buying a round”. Indeed, it is the verbal equivalent of the tightly-laced corset.
She perceptively indicates how something, which in one person’s usage might not be patronising can operate as a potent put-down in another’s: “(…) terms of endearment such as pet and darling can – in the wrong hands – be powerfully annoying. I once had a colleague – no, dammit, an employee – who, as an older and mildly chauvinist man, disliked the fact that I was his boss. Most of the time we rubbed along fine; I do believe we quite liked each other. But if I ever queried a piece of his work he would retaliate by calling me darling. ‘No, darling,’ he would sigh, his tone both sympathetic and weary, as though he were addressing a backward child. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ It was untrue, unfair – and above all, unchivalrous”.
“It is a curious fact that the same people who rail against political correctness often pride themselves on their gentility in other respects. They would never dream of causing offence by farting or dying; instead, they break wind and pass away. They eat with their mouths closed, give up their seats on the train and open doors for women. Yet as soon as they hear certain buzzwords (women, race, equal opportunities) their manners desert them.
Godfrey Bloom – the Yorkshire businessman and UKIP member who got into trouble for saying that ‘no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age’ – is typical of the breed. When he was accused of sexism, he protested that, on the contrary, he loved women and was the soul of chivalry. I dare say he is scrupulous about standing when a ‘lady’ enters the room, and perhaps even escorting her into the next room by guiding her elbow. But unless manners change with the times – to allow, for example, for the agonies that women suffer over combining motherhood and work – they soon become redundant”.
Claire Rayner in Call me a batty old cripple, but this PC language is ghastly (Daily Mail, 21st October) put up a spirited defence of the traditionalist line: “Are the streets of Hull really so clean, the parks so pristine and the housing so well-maintained that the council can afford to employ an office of pen-pushers to dream up this kind of nonsense?
Apart from the expense of the exercise, what is equally aggravating is the abuse of power. The Hull equality experts have taken to issuing warnings against the ‘continuing use of inappropriate language by council officers and staff’.
Who on earth do they think they are, deciding what is ‘appropriate’? Who appointed them the ultimate arbiters of linguistic good taste?
In recent years, I have grown heartily sick of this eagerness to enforce these bureaucratic euphemisms on the beautiful, lucid honesty of the English language.
Thanks to the influence of ideologues like those in Hull, we are all expected to retreat into a kind of empty verbiage, which in theory is designed to prevent offence being given, but in practice promotes only a climate of anxiety and grievance”.
She deplores what she regards as the enforced impoverishment of the language with self-deprecating humour: “In a world free of bureaucratic euphemisms, what they should say is that I am a ‘batty, deaf old cripple’. That is a far more honest summary of my position.
But would I take offence? Not a bit of it. I’d welcome it as a breath of honesty amid the fetid jargon that so pollutes modern discourse.
Using soft phraseology to describe my various disabilities does not comfort me; it only makes me angry. The fact is that I am a bit deaf, I am stuck in a wheelchair and, at 74, I am hardly a spring chicken.
They are genuine difficulties that I have to cope with. I would far rather people were open about it rather than trying to wish them away with tortuous verbal distortions”.
Keeping up is for her like tiptoeing through a minefield: “And the ideologues keep moving the goalposts. What was once the height of good manners is now arbitrarily called ‘unacceptable’.
It used to be polite for a man to call a member of the opposite sex a ‘lady’. Now, anyone doing so is suddenly labelled sexist”. Language is in a constant state of evolution and over the last few decades scholars have stressed the power of the vocabulary we avail ourselves of to shape our understanding of the world around us. It is a pity indeed that every word denoting female of the species should have accumulated derogatory overtones in our sexist environment, yet if “woman” is the sole neutral means of expression left then so be it. We could attempt to reclaim “lady”, recuperate it along the lines of “queer” or “whore”, but, as Richard Dyer makes clear in his excellent In a word (included in the collection The Matter of Images, Second Edition, Routledge, London, 2002, pp6-10) this entirely laudable undertaking is not as straightforward as we might hope. He lucidly explains the laudable impulse behind the linguistic clean-up thus: “Struggling over words is one of the most immediate, day-to-day forms of what may be broadly characterised as left cultural politics [hence the Daily Mail’s instinctive loathing]. They are at one end of the continuum that includes attention to presentation across the board, the now widely granted centrality of identity as a basis for activity, ideologically inflected reviewing of the arts and the increased stress on the role of consciousness and culture in our general understanding of why and how things are as they are and how to change them. The term ‘cultural politics’ to cover all that is itself inadequate. In some ways, the venerable socialist reference to ‘the struggle for hearts and minds’ is better, because more concrete and inclusive, but it had its own drawback. It tended to imply that there is ‘real politics’ and a correct way, to which socialists had to persuade people (their hearts and minds) to assent, whereas ‘cultural politics’ sees all aspects of the heart and mind as themselves political and all politics as emotional and ideological. ‘Culture’ is not just the vehicle whereby you win people over to something else that is not culture – culture is politics, politics is culture” (p6).
However: “The histories of political word change seem always to be this fraught. In part this has to do with having to have a word at all. White people, heterosexuals, the able-bodied, do not generally go around worrying over what to call themselves and have themselves called. Having a word for oneself and one’s group, making a politics out of what that word should be, draws attention to and also reproduces one’s marginality, confirms one’s place outside of power and thus outside the mechanisms of change. Having a word also contains and fixes identity. It is significant to most aspects of who I am that I am gay but all the same it is only part of who I am; yet the label, and the very real need to make a song and dance about it, is liable to suggest that it is all that I am, that it explains everything about me. It has the effect of suggesting that sexuality is fixed, that it consists of clear, unchanging categories, which is untrue both for individuals and for the historical constructions of sexuality. Similarly, ‘disabled’ lumps together all forms of departure from the physical norm, as if these all form one common experience which determines what needs to be known by and about disabled people. We will always feel frustrated by having to have words to express our social identity, even while that social identity means that we do indeed have to have words for it.
The frustration means that we will almost certainly get fed up with the words that we use and see the negative associations creep back in. This has also to do, however, with the fact that words do not necessarily change reality. The Sun now uses the word ‘ay’, but with just the same hatred as it would have used ‘queer’ or ‘pervert’. No amount of changing the terms to describe African-Americans will change attitudes, as long as material conditions keep African-Americans overwhelmingly in the jobs, housing and conditions fit for ‘niggers’. As long as the material reality of a social group remains one of oppression, the word used to describe it will sooner or later become contaminated by the hatred and self-hatred that are an inescapable aspect of oppression” (pp8-9).
Links for further reading:
Bill on Paternity leave
Responses to the Bill from:
The Federation of Small Businesses
The GMB
The TUC
The DTI
The Scottish Executive
The Families, Children and Childcare Study
The Unilever Study
The F-Word Blog on Marriage
Rebecca O’Neill’s Study
Conjugal Abstinence
Lady Hale’s Lecture
