What Women Want

Evidence from British Social Attitudes

Geoff Dench

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138540453
• eBook ISBN: 9781351299428
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last few decades, families in many highly developed nations (such as Great Britain) have been held together by grandparents. Yet as single motherhood spreads into this generation, extended families without men or work are becoming more common. The proportion of single mothers with daughters who are also state-dependent single mothers is growing. The British underclass has arrived. Women who can see this happening around them, and understand its roots, are the ones most able to revive traditional values, but policymakers are looking the other way. This fuels alienation from mainstream political parties.

What Women Want argues that sociology and social policy in Britain have failed to recognize how women's orientation to paid work and a career remains different from men's. Most women now have paid jobs, but the happiest are those working only part time, with plenty of time to enjoy motherhood and being a homemaker. A revised sexual division of labor has emerged; and the author argues that denial of this in Britain may be contributing to the breakdown of family life.

A working male partner is a major factor in making women happy. The least content are single mothers dependent on state welfare who know that the state expects them to repay its support by becoming full-time workers when their children reach a certain age. Many single mothers may be victims of policies prioritizing work for women. Single motherhood has grown alongside male male breadwinners. This is a new edition of a book previously distributed only in the United Kingdom.

CHAPTER 1

A WOMAN’S WORK

Destiny through paid work

It is one of the ruling clichés of modern Britain that women’s lives – and those of their families – have been transformed by their increased participation in the labour market; and triumphalist commentaries like in the Economist a few weeks ago tell us that the process will be continuing for quite a while.¹ But what does this all mean? Is it what women themselves actually want? And insofar as it has already happened, why has it done so, and what are the implications? Underlying this bland cliché there is a boiling cauldron of unresolved issues and differing opinions about what is desirable. It is perhaps the danger of becoming engulfed in these which makes use of the safe cliché so popular. However, I feel that it is high time that we explored and aired some of the questions that are bubbling away below the surface. Our collective failure to do so is one of the main factors feeding the political alienation which is currently poisoning British public life.

For there are serious misunderstandings circulating at the moment, about women and work, which need to be cleared up. Harriet Harman’s Women and Work Commission continues to ratchet up the pressure to remove all possible obstacles to full equality for women in the labour market. But much of what is assumed by policymakers is already very out of date, and fails to address important concerns. This is why I want to explore these issues. It is also one of the reasons why I am using British Social Attitudes data to do so. In our rather technocratic era, BSA findings are what come closest to an accepted voice of ordinary Britons.² You and I may know something very well; but until it has been picked over and clarified and disseminated by British Social Attitudes then our political leaders are able to claim that nobody has told them. These issues have been examined by BSA; but rather less has been done to publicise the findings than is desirable. That is why I feel the need to act.

Careers for women

I want to start by sketching out, very briefly, what I feel are some key issues here. First of all it perhaps needs to be spelt out that when we refer to increased participation of women in the labour market what we are actually talking about is the development of careers for women. It is misleading to assume that women in the past did not have any job market experience. Most did, of course. It was one of the felt privileges of being a middle class woman that one did not need to. It was the others who worked. So when I hear people saying that ‘women’ in Britain now work, it reminds me of the opening passage in Toby Young’s ‘How to lose friends and alienate people’, where his boss, the editor of a society magazine, on hearing that a plane has just crashed, asks “Anyone on board?”

For what is meant by ‘working’ in this context is that women now have a chance to do more interesting work, and pursue proper careers alongside men. Therefore high status women can join in. And this is indeed a recent development, which could not have happened until certain other developments (for example in the reliable regulation of reproduction) had themselves taken place.

But just as important here as the pill has I think been the cultural evolution of the idea that we are all made by our work. Following the Second World War, British governments found that they needed to adopt new models of social cohesion to replace the broken structures which were crumbling with the empire. A popular notion was that in a properly open society every citizen should have the chance to contribute to the common wellbeing through doing what they were best at, and then be individually rewarded by society for that. ‘Everyone’ most definitely included women, who were regarded by progressive thinkers such as Eleanor Rathbone as having been too long confined to domesticity, on the margins of society, by male domination of the centre.³ So in the years following the 1948 Education Act, girls with lively minds were encouraged to turn their backs on the private realm of family and local community life, and to aspire to a real job alongside male fellow-citizens.

These processes played a significant role in nurturing the libertarian values which exploded onto the scene in the 1960s, and have driven subsequent changes in British society. The 1960s were the period when young women started to enter higher education in large numbers, when their expectations of work began routinely to encompass serious careers, and when employers had to start adjusting.⁴ The vanguard generation which pioneered this change have since been dubbed the baby boomers. They will be discussed at various points in the coming argument; but what stands out as particularly important about them is their boundless faith in the capacity of the public realm, that is political and economic institutions, to be moved by values that women respect and to provide suitably moral solutions for social problems. With the rise of the baby boomers, the public realm became able to take on the functions of – and so take over – the private. This made it imperative for women to become part of it, and arguably moved the focus of their concerns as women out of the private domain. This leads into the second introductory point that I want to make, which I think is far more substantial.

Career versus community

Most accounts of women’s increasing attachment to public realm institutions and values fail to draw any attention to what it is that they may be leaving behind. The recent piece in The Economist is not alone in regarding motherhood simply as a problem for them. It is as if women had existed previously in some sort of social void, from which paid work and full individual citizenship had finally rescued them. But, of course, as we all know at another level, this was not the case. The traditional lifestyle of middle class women (those who have been most affected by the rise of careers) revolved around family and community life within a private realm which for most people – men and women alike – was the undisputed hub of social life. Within this domain women did much (unpaid) work. But at the same time they had a lot of autonomy, and also exercised a good deal of power, especially as wives and mothers. To abandon this would not be a simple and self-evident gain.

Marriage was a central feature of this lifestyle. This was not only by virtue of creating a wide network of kinship ties, entailing reciprocal supports, but also through sustaining a sexual division of labour in which men and women were interdependent, and which gave both of them a place in the community.⁵ But interdependence implies difference; and so marriage was one of the first aspects of traditional British society to be deemed detrimental to women by postwar modernisers. Geoffrey Gorer, writing in 1955, gives an appreciative analysis of the complementary aspects of the husband/wife relationship which was at the hub of conventional British community life.⁶ But when he updated his study just a few years later he had to note that complementarity was rapidly being replaced by a new, egalitarian mode in which companionship provided the bond.⁷ And by the 1980s, when baby boomers had moved into influential positions throughout British public life, this view had become publicly dominant.

The transition of women’s energy and concern into the public realm has generally been represented as a benefit for all – with rights and independence for women, and their civilising influence in business and politics for the rest of us. Few influential voices can be heard lamenting the decline of the private domain, and loss of the autonomy which disappears with it. Instead we have seen the emergence of new conventions which treat even family-based activities of women as being performed for society as a whole (in order to qualify them for this or that state benefit). This leads us to some confusing places. Some years ago for example, when grappling with the problem of how to ensure that mothers might continue to enjoy the high status that they had possessed formerly, when they had been at the heart of a vibrant private realm, Arnold Toynbee came up with the highly problematic formula that the state should pay them (at a suitably high rate) for their social contribution:

Insofar as, and for as long as, she serves society as a mother, I feel sure that a woman ought to be given the high status and big salary that the key profession of motherhood deserves. Her status ought to be at least as high as, say, a professor’s or a magistrate’s or a pilot’s, and her salary ought to be of a corresponding size. (Arnold Toynbee, 1989, p. 118)

The idea that women do or should become mothers, and care for kin, in order to serve wider society (and be paid by it) is possibly one of the most muddling social policy notions to have arisen in Britain in modern times. But once the priority of the public realm has been asserted, this sort of thing follows.

Monitoring progress

Meanwhile, most actual public concern about women in recent decades has been about how they are faring within the labour market. Thus, during the 1970s, anxiety that women were encountering unfair obstacles in the job market led to extensive equal employment opportunity legislation. Then an influential study carried out in 1980 highlighted the continuing problems related to working which arose from women’s attachment to their roles as wives and mothers.⁸ So in the early 1980s attention was given to the domestic arrangements which still seemed to be limiting women’s chances of behaving as free citizens. The hunt for New Man, who could help to unlock the door, was on.

All this helped to stimulate the emergence in 1983 of a new national opinion survey – British Social Attitudes – devoted to documenting and analysing people’s changing lives in modern Britain.⁹ The great interest aroused by BSA’s early findings relating to women and work enabled the survey to secure the funding to establish itself as an annual event. So during its first decade, it carried many questions about working women and their families, reflecting the debates (and domestic battles) that were taking place nationally at the time.

By the middle of the 1990s, BSA had accumulated a wide range of other interests too, and was contracted to a number of government departments (Health, Transport, Environment etc) to run regular batches of questions for them. So there has been rather less about working women since then. However, by the 2008 survey a full generation of material had been amassed, making it possible to start carrying out a reasonably long-term assessment of change. There is more than enough collected now to permit more extensive and considered analysis of the implications of the idea of the female career – 60 years on from the 1948 Education Act – including some treatment of the central question of how far this is (still) what women want. British Social Attitudes is the perfect place to explore this question, as it has been so closely involved with the subject for so many years, and contains such a variety of other materials against which it can be analysed.

Analysing BSA data

In truth there is far too much data assembled now for any quick or easy analysis to be made. So what I have done here inevitably constitutes only a first skim, to get a taste of what is there. Because of this, I have given priority to documenting basic questions about ‘who thinks or does what’. Fancier interpretations of why, and in what circumstances, have been postponed. And there are still limits to what can be done anyway.

Firstly, it was not until 2001 that BSA schedules began regularly to contain questions enabling the identification of the respondents who are parents – as I have recently reported.^10...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Summary
• Ch. 1 A woman’s work
• Ch. 2 The value of a male partner
• Ch. 3 Wider family ties - and grandparents
• Ch. 4 Representing women
• Notes to chapters
• References