History is always a battleground. We see it through a contemporary prism, and cannot go back to double-check the facts. Clearly some people will disagree with the interpretation of female history to be found in my Prospect cover story from April—but I wish they did not feel obliged to caricature what I said in the process.
Pat Thane does this several times in her otherwise interesting comments. I did not deny that women often went into teaching because nothing else was available. On the contrary, I discussed in detail the historic absence of alternative careers for educated women, and how rapidly modern women have availed themselves of other opportunities. I also said that, in the past, factors other than coercion were strongly evident in many women's attitude to teaching, notably an idealistic commitment to the awakening and development of their pupils, whether expressed in religious or Enlightenment terms. One has to take what people say seriously, as reflecting what they and their societies see as important, and as legitimate reasons for action. I stand by my argument that the values espoused by these women are far less evident today.
It is also important to look at what people do, and not just what they say, which is why I also stand by my comments on the decline in voluntarism. Thane asks where I got the figure of four minutes a day as the average time now spent on voluntary activity. It was from the UK Time Use Survey (2000), a study for which people kept detailed diaries of what they were doing, as they went along. This is a far more reliable source of data than asking people to report on what they did over a period of past and imperfectly remembered time. I hope that (as Jean Seaton suggests in her letter) I am being too pessimistic about the future. Perhaps pensioners—already almost a fifth of the population—will fill the gaps. There are certainly plenty waiting for them.
Thane also suggests that my discussion of children as insurance policies involves regret for an "idealised" past. No: it describes the past as it was, and it was often awful. Many old people were indeed left without children to depend on, and nothing on offer but destitution or the workhouse. That is why we have the welfare state, and a good thing too. But one result, to repeat myself again, is that there is now less incentive to have children. Historically, although childbearing could not guarantee comfort in sickness and old age, it improved the odds enormously. That link has been broken.
While Thane and I are clearly discussing the same subject, Rosemary Crompton is mostly concerned to use my article as a springboard for attacking "neoliberalism," a concept which she nowhere defines. She seems to believe that it is better to have no jobs at all than "bad" part-time ones, perhaps because "part-time work… is the kiss of death as far as upward career mobility is concerned." She is also clearly a fan of Scandinavian policies—but does she realise that employed women in these countries are in fact far more concentrated in female-dominated occupations than in Britain (or indeed than the OECD average), with predictable effects on the average male-female pay gap?
Crompton devotes considerable space to issues of child mortality and poverty, which were not my topics. (It is worth noting, however, that far and away the biggest influence on child poverty levels is the incidence of one-parent families. If these increase, you can, like our government, spend vast amounts of money running to stand still on child poverty measures.) I am, however, surprised that she takes issue with a statement I thought so obvious, and generally accepted, as barely to be worth making: namely that childbearing is a rational career choice for academically unsuccessful girls, especially when state benefits are available.
Of course benefits are not the only factor affecting teenage pregnancy rates: just about everything in life is multi-causal. But in Sweden, as here, it is not the academic stars who are having babies in their teens. The negative relationship between education and childbearing holds, whether one concentrates on Britain—as I did—or looks further afield. Countries that provide large maternity benefits have usually managed to raise their overall birthrate, but it remains the case that highly educated young women with lucrative career possibilities tend to have fewer children. In other words, financial incentives do not just apply to frequent-flier programmes. They affect family life as well—which was one of the main thrusts of my article.
Anastasia de Waal takes me to task for not offering solutions, but there are not always solutions to every dilemma. The change in women's opportunities has brought us huge benefits, but we cannot simply wave away the downside. Mike Dixon and Julia Margo of the IPPR argue for more—and presumably tax-financed—childcare, parental leave, and "employment support" for the less skilled, which will wipe out the "fertility penalty" this group pays. This certainly fits with our society's implicit assumption that we should all be in paid employment, but I cannot for the life of me see why it will have any major impact on fertility rates among the most skilled—who are the ones not having babies. Rosemary Crompton's "solution" is to completely re-engineer society. Are the dire consequences of 20th-century utopian fantasies not recent enough to deter us from another such attempt?
Let me end where my original essay began—with the question of whether or not there has been a genuine rupture with the past. I believe there has, and that it involves the emergence of women whose individual careers define their lives as much or more than does their biology. I do not (as Pat Thane argues) ignore the huge differences that existed between rich and poor women in the past, or the fact that—as I indeed explicitly noted—many wives and widows had to supplement family income through paid labour. Nonetheless, in the past, all women's lives were dominated and structured by being women; they were primarily wives and mothers, aspiring to and defined by those roles. And for the first time in human history, that is no longer the universal female fate.
