In the second of Dr Case’s articles about the day care disaster he asks if the reason for mothers working is really about economics. You can see Part 1 here.
ON THE BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1992, child psychologist Penelope Leach remarked that post-industrial society ‘has no easy or obvious place for any of our caring relationships’. Only those competing to sell their labour in the free market appeared to her to be valued as citizens.
Many have come to the same conclusion. Economist Paul Collier observes that capitalism is helping families no more than Socialist kibbutzim or Stalinist Marxism. The comparison brings into focus the stealthy brutality of the market. As if blind to the source of their own and their children’s struggles, mothers seek help from state and employer, not recognising that such help will make resistance to the work imposition harder, depriving them of control over their lives and those of their children. They must silently acquiesce in a set of dysfunctional norms because these norms appear to be shared by everyone else. What better illustration of the totalitarian tendencies of modern ‘liberal’ economies?
The conformity forced upon mothers by the impossibility of life without wage-earning and the cancellation of the option to care which comes with it should provoke outrage. When pleading for special treatment as employees, working mothers resemble those victims of a housebreak who, rather than insisting on their lawful right to the return of the stolen goods, welcome the opportunity to negotiate for monetary compensation. When a mother accepts a work/life balance which allows her only two hours per working day with her small child, as evidence shows many must, she has accepted a very poor deal from her employer who now effectively owns the child and dictates the terms of the compensation. If we were speaking only of the family silver the theft would be a legal matter; it becomes a question of morals when we speak of the nurture of children and the happiness of mothers. From this perspective, the mother has been coerced into compromising both her obligation to the child she brought into the world and the natural right of the child to be loved and raised by its parents.
It might be hoped that government would help to protect mother and child from the economic pressure nullifying maternal obligation and infant right. That it would recognise the mother/child bond as the foundation of the social superstructure and defend a mother’s freedom to care. On the contrary. By means of around £9billion a year in nursery care subsidy, government instead relieves the employer of financial responsibility for the child he has forced from its mother. The employer thereby gains both the mother’s labour (largely on his own terms) and relief from the duty of providing for the child whose separation from the mother is the condition of her availability for work. Like the landlord whose repair bills are subsidised by the state, the employer benefits more in the end from the subsidy to wages and the saving on childcare. Government, for its part, banks on a healthy return in tax and NI receipts plus a reduction in the welfare bill and a boost to innovation, efficiency and national productivity.
The result is that mothers who may complain of stress and high childcare costs are still reluctant to forgo a wage, however small; employers may plead that profitability is threatened by the additional cost of maternity pay (or other employment terms favourable to mothers) even while they are excused nursery costs, and wages fall as mothers swell the workforce while governments who argue that childcare subsidies for working mothers cost less than the tax breaks which would enable some tens of thousands of them to care at home for a few years never admit that the calculation is guesswork.
The way we make and spend money expresses our values, yet we often make financial decisions as if in an ethical vacuum and pretend to mind our treatment of others when in fact doing nothing good for them. When it was put to Margaret Thatcher in a Commons question in 1989 that mothers should be encouraged to stay at home for the better ‘care, happiness and fostering of our children’ she replied, ‘that is for the mothers themselves to decide’. (Forgetting her failure in 1985 to introduce an option of household taxation or transferable tax alongside her independent taxation reform.) Her deference to a mother’s right to choose was immediately followed by the counter-statement that ‘we need many more mothers at work’.
Equal opportunities for women was uppermost in Prime Minister John Major’s mind too when in 1991 he spoke at the launch of Opportunity 2000, an initiative to encourage employers ‘to remove the barriers that make it harder for women to realise their full potential’. This, he said, was necessitated by a ‘social revolution’ in the role of women already under way. Major presented this revolution as a spontaneous cultural event independent of government or economics, let alone of sustained radical feminist lobbying. He said that it was ‘right socially’, and asserted that business needed to obtain a better return on the state’s investment in women’s education thereby conflating the morally with the economically desirable.
Both prime ministers held the position that women were free to behave as they wished, but that the choice upon which employers could capitalise was the better kind. Neither acknowledged the changes in taxation, benefits and the housing economy that had squeezed the real income of single-earner families and driven the social revolution. Nor did Blair and Brown, for whom the preferred method for delivering freedom and equality continued to be to remove constraints to maternal work, never to absolve mothers from the need to act economically, even for a few years of their potentially long working lifespan. Childcare credits and working tax credits were all designed to lure mothers back to work. They formalised the nationalisation of childcare, creating a new frontier of the welfare state. That a mother might realise her ‘full potential’ through bringing up her own children was never entertained. Instead, virtuous-sounding rhetoric validated the subjugation of motherhood to the market.
But we do not protect a woman’s right to work by depriving her of the freedom to nurture her children. To call this attitude motivated thinking downplays its inherent corruption. It is nothing less than the assertion of a will to enslave mothers for a purpose not their own; its life blood is a warped and self-serving fantasy of freedom, equality and discrimination, and we have seen it in action this century.
In the final part of the series, Dr Case considers the thinking that dresses up apparent economic pragmatism and ‘anti-discrimination’ as kindness.
