According to a Cambridge University report published last week, “The shine has
come off Supermum” and most people now believe that a woman who works harms
family life - ergo, that a woman’s place is in the home. This conclusion is
based on an analysis of three decades’ worth of social attitude surveys by
Jacqueline Scott, a Cambridge professor of empirical sociology.
“While British attitudes are more egalitarian than in the 1980s, there are
signs that support for gender equality may have hit a high point some time
during the 1990s,” says Scott. “When it comes to the clash between work and
family life, doubts about whether a woman should be doing both are starting
to creep in.”
She added: “The idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking
cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealisable.”
This is all a bit like saying that the shine has come off unicorns because
most people haven’t actually ever sat down with one and had a little cuddle.
Who or what is this Supermum facing extinction? Can something that never
existed outside of people’s imaginations really be endangered? Of course
not. So-called Supermums - the handful (literally) of mothers who work in
the City of London and earn gigantic salaries - aren’t up until 3am baking
cookies. They have servants. That’s what enables them to be Supermums. You
might as well call every aristocratic parent going back 300 years a Supermum
- ooh, look, she’s wearing couture and hosting a ball, even though she has
children and 200 deer; I wonder how she does it. I mean, really.
Back in the real world - the world that most working mothers inhabit - there’s
nothing prodigious or heroic about juggling the office and childcare: it’s
just what people do, whether they work in the biscuit factory or the High
Court. There’s nothing “super” or unusual about this: it’s not as if women
walk around thinking: “Wow, I’m juggling.” We just muddle through as best we
can. Which would be fine, and would make us all reasonably happy, if we
weren’t peddled a ton of crap about how inadequate we are every single day.
We work too hard, which makes us heartless. We work too little, which makes us
chattels. We’re too fat. We’re dangerously thin. We’re exercise addicts. We
can’t find time for the gym. We’re too old. We’re too young. We have crepey
skin. We have Botox. We can cook, which makes us throw-backs. We can’t cook,
which makes us a disgrace. We’re too trendy. We’re too dowdy. We have
cellulite. Or have we had lipo? It’s a wonder women don’t commit mass
suicide, frankly. It’s also perplexing that they don’t wake up, look around
and flick two fingers up at the whole misogynistic dementedness of the
situation. You can blame the outside world - media pressure and so on - up
to a point, but then, surely, you have to use your brain, take control and
live your life - and never mind if your thighs have cellulite and you love
your children but you actually like going to work.
There are two points here: the first is that 75% of mothers work. They work
because they have to. You can think that harms the family, or think it does
the family good, but it's irrelevant. Most of us don’t have any choice: if
we stopped working, our place wouldn’t be in the home but in the trailer, or
in the cardboard box on the pavement, and our children wouldn’t have any
clothes to wear or food to eat.
Many of them would also have mothers whose brains had atrophied and who were,
in many cases, almost gaga from the sheer repetitive boredom of domestic
life. Beinga stay-at-home mother is not just about bedtime stories and
baking. It is also about putting endless loads of washing on, cooking,
cleaning, taking the buggy onto the bloody bus in the pouring rain, dealing
with tantrums in the supermarket, going to the boring park with the lurking
yobs, changing dirty nappies, cooking again, cleaning again and trying to
look as if you are a person who wouldn’t trade in sex with Brad Pitt for the
chance to sleep for 12 solid hours, just once.
Secondly, why blame working mothers for harming family life? What about
working fathers? What about all those kids with no male role models on a
street corner near you, with their lovely hoods up? Do we call that an
excellent result? It’s a bummer, of course, that anyone has to work, we
could all do with lying in meadows all day long, composing poetry and being
fed grapes, but since work is a fact of life it would make more sense to try
to come up with solutions than to apportion blame. It seems ridiculous –
risible – to blame working mothers for what some people perceive as the
collapse of society. Mothers, no matter what hours they work, tend not to
abandon their kids; they also tend to try to do right by them. Compare and
contrast.
Where the sentiments expressed in the report are right is in the growing
realisa-tion (well done!) that you can’t have it all. You can’t grow wings,
either, or chat to dodos. You can’t work long hours and expect to hang out
with your children a lot, or help them with homework as much as you’d like
to. You can’t guarantee that they won’t resent your absence. And, unless you
are very lucky, you won’t find a dream job that involves working part-time
at home - unless your idea of a dream job is stuffing envelopes for the
minimum wage.
What you can do, though, is be both a mother and a functioning professional -
and to me, that hard-won combination is admirable and glorious. Yes, your
children may one day resent having had a succession of not-very-good au
pairs and not much mother-and-daughter baking time. But I wonder how fondly
they’d look back at a childhood with no treats and no holidays and economy
mince every day and a mother tearing her hair out with despair.
And, although I believe entirely in a woman’s right to choose without being
judged, I have observed that stay-at-home mothers come a bit of a cropper 10
or 20 years down the line, when the children have grown up. What then for
the woman still in her prime? She comforts herself with the fact that she
was in her rightful place, presumably, right next to the stove and within
striking distance of the washer-dryer. Thanks but, um, no thanks.
+ Writing in The Times Higher Education Supplement, Dr Ken Smith, a
criminologist at Bucks New University (no, me neither) launches a crusade
for common spelling mistakes, aka “variant spellings”, to be accepted into
everyday usage. “Either we go on beating ourselves and our students over
this problem, or we give everyone a break and accept these spellings,” he
says. So it’s fine to write “truely” for “truly”, “speach” for “speech”,
“thier” for “their”, “opertunity” for “opportunity”.
Smith’s proposal has been greeted enthusiastically by the Spelling Society,
which has campaigned for a more phonetic approach since 1908. I find this
unbelievable. It’s a terrible shame that students have had such bad
educations that they can’t spell “their”, but I would suggest that students
with the spelling skills of toddlers should go back to school, not claim
degrees for papers in text-speak. Why are they at university in the first
place? Who let them in? And why don’t they know about spellchecks?
All of this reinforces the feeling that there are far too many universities
and that their preponderance debases the whole idea of academic
qualifications. They are part of the “all shall have prizes” mindset that
afflicts education. Quite a lot of people are just thick. Why not find them
nonacademic things to be good at instead of insisting that their silly
little degrees in ridiculous subjects are meaningful? Why not - crazy idea -
start off by teaching them to spell?
