Rosemary Crompton rightly points to flaws in Alison Wolf's analysis of the problems of modern working women. And we agree that Wolf got her history wrong.
Wolf compares a present when highly educated women have wide opportunities in the workplace with a past when they did not. She sees losses as well as gains. Loss of "millenia" of "sisterhood… during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did men," and loss of a "specifically female public service ethos" as educated women have abandoned a central commitment to the family, voluntary action and a sense of vocation, for high-flying careers with built-in disincentives to motherhood, creating a serious decline in the birth rate.
History can help us to understand some of the messes we are in, but only if we get it right. Wolf's largely invented "past"—that vague territory where things were always better—does not help. To suggest that the gentlewomen who "could rejoice in assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, daytime lectures, urban walks and pleasure gardens" (to quote, as Wolf does, Amanda Vickery on the 18th century) on one hand, and the peasant women working in the fields while their mothers minded their children on the other, "shared lives centred on explicitly female concerns" is romantic nonsense which sheds no light on the past or the present. These women's lives were as remote from one another as those of their contemporary elite men and navvies.
It is true that since the 1980s the number of graduates, male but particularly female, has exploded, and that many more women graduates both take on careers after graduating and return to work sooner after giving birth. It is also true, as Wolf describes, that before the war it was almost impossible for a married middle-class woman to work in a paid career, and that since the war the range of occupations open to married women graduates has gradually expanded.
But Wolf misunderstands the processes of change. This is clear from the findings of the largest available survey of the life histories of British women graduates through much of the 20th century. Amy Erickson, Kate Perry and I looked at the lives of a sample of over 700 women who attended Girton College, Cambridge, between the 1920s and 1990. In the 1920s, 62 per cent of Girtonians entered teaching as their first occupation. By the 1960s, this had fallen to 33 per cent, by the 1970s to 20 per cent, and in 2001, only 1 per cent of Oxford and Cambridge graduates entered teaching. I agree with Wolf that this is not good news for British schools. She explains the change in terms of a decline in women's idealism, encouraged, she implies, by feminism, which valorised competition in the male workplace over past commitment to vocation. She adds that "if the able woman of 70 or 100 years ago entered classrooms and hospital wards merely because nothing else was available, they would have brought little commitment."
On both counts, our Girton evidence shows otherwise. Time and again, women who entered teaching between the 1920s and 1960s said that they did so only because nothing else was available; or because they had to work to support a widowed mother and help siblings through college; or because they were discouraged from seeking another career. As late as the 1960s, the Cambridge University Appointments Board is reported as offering clever women careers only in teaching or secretarial work, and discouraging the adventurous from such daring choices as working for the BBC or studying for doctorates. Women wanting to return to paid work in the 1950s and 1960s after childrearing, whatever their previous occupation, found teaching the only career open to a middle-aged woman.
This often-expressed reluctance to teach better explains the flight of clever women (and men) from teaching, as wider career options became available, than does a supposed decline in female idealism and vocational commitment. After all, as Wolf points out, over the same period much larger numbers of women graduates have entered medicine, social work and other "caring" occupations. This does not suggest an overall decline in the commitment of very many women to helping others.
Most of these reluctant teachers were not uncommitted or incompetent. Faced with no other option, they made the best of it for themselves and their pupils. Many clearly became fine, inspirational teachers, encouraging their pupils to seek more ambitious careers than had been open to them. Perhaps the aspirations of younger women owe more to these women than to the "feminists" invoked by Wolf.
It is also true that many fewer middle-class, working-age women are involved in voluntary action than in the days when such women were effectively barred from the paid labour force or entered it with great difficulty. But many more women (and men) now volunteer after retirement, now that more people are fit and active to later ages than at any time in history. Girton graduates currently at work express the ambition to do just this when they retire. And Wolf ignores the emergence during the 20th century of new, vigorous forms of voluntary action, often overseas, such as VSO, or the continuing importance of such large-scale, indispensable, voluntary activities as the magistracy or the Samaritans.
It is hard to know what to make of Wolf's unattributed comment that "the average amount of time that today's British citizen, male or female, devotes to volunteer activities is four minutes a day." If it is true, I very much doubt that the average was higher 100 years ago. More helpfully, the home office citizenship survey reported that in 2003 more than 26m people in England and Wales contributed 1.9bn hours of voluntary work, equivalent, they calculate, to the work of 1m full-time workers. Even if religious commitment is in decline—and evidence from our Girton surveys suggests this is far from certain—voluntary action definitely is not.
Organisations staffed by untrained voluntary workers 80 or 50 years ago are now run by trained professionals, and are generally the more effective for it. Untrained amateurs were not always competent. It was the ambition of many of the women pioneers of Victorian philanthropy, whom Wolf rightly praises, that social workers should be trained and paid, for their work to command the respect it deserved. Similarly, Emily Davies founded Girton in the 1870s in order to give women the same education and career opportunities as men.
The Girton evidence suggests not that there has been some dramatic change in the ideals of women, driven by feminism and the materialism of modern society, but that they have always wanted to do as Emily Davies hoped and use their skills and talents alongside men. Only recently has this become possible. But past generations of women could not foresee the dilemma of today's fortysomething career woman juggling the needs of work and family. Wolf rightly points to the disincentives to bear children faced by educated women (although this has hardly been "ignored). But again, she contrasts this phenomenon with an idealised "past," when "adults had no tax-financed welfare state to depend on... children paid." Now we get benefits "whether or not we contribute a future productive member to the economy." In fact, in 18th-century England, as many as one third of people had no surviving children when they reached 60. The past was not a better place to live. The tax-financed Poor Law was the only means of survival for a very high proportion of older people. Rich older people paid female servants to care for them, as they still do.
Maintaining a "balance" between working long hours to support children and bringing them up as well as possible has for centuries been a problem for poor women. There were as many lone mothers in the 1880s as in the 1980s—the former mostly widows. Now, for the first time, educated professional women face similar problems. Perhaps, far from the "sisterhood" of common concerns declining, women have more in common now than ever.
One big difference is the availability of safe contraception, which enables career women to delay motherhood. Another is that professional and businesspeople now work long, stressful hours, once the experience just of the working class. This change crept over us unforeseen, at just the time that women's work opportunities were expanding. As recently as the 1960s, a PEP report on "Women and Top Jobs" confidently predicted that new technology would reduce working hours, making it easier for women to combine work and family. If only. Increased divorce rates since the 1970s have added to the pressures, by leaving more lone women to care for children.
It is hard to be clear about the full effect of pressurised work lives of graduate women on birth rates. Nationally, it has turned upwards a little in the past two years. But however seriously we regard the low birth rate of educated career women, Wolf is surely too pessimistic in describing this as the "intransigent" outcome of the occupational advancement of women. As BP's John Browne recently pointed out in a lecture to the Young Foundation on the need to abolish fixed retirement ages, many employers not so long ago refused to employ women or ethnic minorities—now they do. Shortage, or anticipated shortage, of skilled labour is leading some of them—KPMG is one example—to abolish retirement ages and to introduce flexible working for mothers and even fathers.
The effects of change are not always predictable. Perhaps we will come to grasp the opportunity presented by the lengthening of active life and rethink the place of work over the life course, allowing parents to work shorter hours under less pressure and give their children the care they need, making up for it by working later in life. The evidence is strong that older workers are just as competent, and often more reliable, than younger ones. Demographic change brings opportunities as well as problems.
