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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday October 19 2003 01.10 BST
Motherhood is under scrutiny, and the pendulum swings back towards the Fifties family, complete with breadwinner father, Oxo-advert mum and children raised on Beatrix Potter and home-made soup. Half a century after women longed for a career and a life outside the home, we are in a Tupperware timewarp.
One survey claims that only one per cent of women want to work full-time when their children are small, and two thirds would prefer to give up even a part-time job. Another report, by the National Family and Parenting Institute, says that mothers complain of 'being pushed towards work'.
Once, non-working mothers were supposedly ostracised at parties by men who implied they would rather be entertained by the Ancient Mariner than by chutney-making bores. Subtly, the emphasis has shifted. The new school-gate power-brokers tend to be full-time mothers, Churchills in classroom politics and Stella McCartneys when costumes are needed for the Christmas play. Briefcases, a demented air and bags of kettle chips for the school fete provoke pity rather than envy among those who have renounced the workplace. Traditional mothers have two new patron saints. The first is Betsy Duncan Smith.
A few days ago, BDS was just a target in a row over how many Christmas cards you have to autograph on a husband's behalf to qualify for a £15,000 salary. Now she is practically the Madonna of the Pinks. A friend from the school run writes of how Betsy's ancient station wagon is crammed with bicycles so that her children can get some healthy exercise after lessons. If that does not inspire guilt in mothers whose offspring get PlayStation II and takeaway pizza, Betsy's friend has another challenge.
Why, she asks, should people think answering the phone in an office counts as work, but dismiss the contribution of someone who takes a call while cooking pasta for 10? Though I am all for multi-tasking, I would rather talk business with a worker behind a desk than someone who is plucking a grouse while extracting Polly Pocket accessories from a washing-machine filter. Still, the point is reasonable. Mrs Duncan Smith, and non-earning mothers in general, have been patronised too much and heeded too little.
Hence the emergence of their second patron saint. Patricia Hewitt, an evangelist of working mothers, is not a natural in this role. The Trade and Industry Secretary is perceived, unfairly, by some-right-wingers as Wackford Squeers in pearls. Headlines quoting her view that the Government had failed mothers who stay home caused perplexity, not least in Miss Hewitt's office.
Did she really say that? While conceding that non-earners feel under-valued, she claimed afterwards that she had merely repeated her mantra of the past decade: choice matters and, while most women want to work, they also need more time. Anyone hoping that her wish to 'value' non-employed mothers might translate into the cash-in-hand Tory prescription of making personal allowances transferable will be disappointed.
She thinks, justifiably, that the Government has already made progress through tax credits and by offering some (tokenistic) paternity leave, plus six months' maternity leave, paid at a minimum of £100 a week, and six months' unpaid. 'Obviously, in the future we'll have to look at whether we can make that paid as well,' she told me last week. Women should not get their hopes up. A year's salaried time off to have a baby sounds like a wish, not a priority.
In other ways, Miss Hewitt has shifted radically. She now acknowledges that that the Government's emphasis on work was overdone, and she is right. Maybe the Chancellor, a new father, will increasingly concede that point as he experiences the desperation of all parents not to sacrifice childhood to ambition or financial need.
But errors of the past may already have contributed to demographic meltdown. As Miss Hewitt mentioned, in passing, the population is in decline. With a UK average of 1.63 children being born per woman, the lowest on record, the real question is why motherhood itself is so undesirable. Although the number of women back at their jobs within a year of having a baby has risen from 24 to 67 per cent in 20 years, many seem unhappy. Others find the compromise too hard and never return.
We still have sparse childcare and the longest hours in Europe. Michael Portillo, out-Betsying Mrs Duncan Smith, has been demonstrating on television what it's like to be a woman bringing up four children while working in Asda and as a classroom assistant. Affluent women spared such juggling are also ambivalent. They recognise that paid employment is more fun than ironing. They think they have a better relationship with their children than they had with their own mothers, the floury icons of the Fifties and Sixties.
And yet there is a pang of loss. Women who think, as a tenet of faith, that work is synonymous with freedom and progress cannot mourn on their own behalf, so that qualm is twisted into guilt that they are harming their children. It isn't true. Last summer's Bristol University study showed that children in paid childcare fared as well, or better, than those looked after at home by their mothers.
But child-rearing is suddenly fraught with irrational fears, fed by politicians and family fundamentalists. Once children were a prop of the economy, as factory workers or inheritors of a trade. Later they were a lifestyle choice. Under the new mythology, they are burdens, costly to raise, lethal to careers, always at risk and poised on an artificial cusp between yob and victim. Parenthood is becoming less appealing just as children become more vital. As the population ages and births dwindle, they are an economic necessity again.
This is tricky for governments. Mr Blair can hardly embark on a coercive have-a-baby drive, even if he wished to. Nor can Ministers imply that women may be more valuable as breeders than workers. Miss Hewitt's view, that deferring having children for too long has created a 'baby gap' between the families women want and the ones they get, marks the limit of official theorising.
But there are practical remedies. Birth rates are plummeting, from Italy to Bangladesh, because women feel oppressed by motherhood. Denmark, one of the few countries to raise its birthrate significantly, spends 2.37 per cent of GDP on early childhood care and education, against 0.4 per cent in the UK, and treats mothers and fathers equally. Here, by contrast, women still get only 72 per cent of men's pay. Taking time out to have a child affects mothers' wages and pensions for the whole of an expanding working life. Miss Hewitt is determined to stamp out that discrimination, by legislation or through culture shift, and she will have to.
The economy needs mothers rather badly, and the Government must treat them better. Hence the conciliatory mood music for those who stay home with their children and the promise of more flexibility for those who don't. There has been progress, but when promises exceed action, it would be folly for the debate about mothers to degenerate into a bogus tribal war between quiche-bakers and deal-brokers. Both hold more power than they realise.
