Godless in Eden. Fay Weldon
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change comes in the countryside, it’s seldom for the better. And the village store has closed. Okay so you never went in it – if you did they always said, pointedly, ‘Haven’t seen you for a long time’ – so it got embarrassing; but you like it to be there. Say no to the country cottage; it isn’t what it was!
The countryside’s good for the children.
Yes. But you wouldn’t think it to listen to them. They don’t sound all that appreciative. They look at TV a lot. They miss McDonald’s and the corner shop. There’s a strange-looking man lurking in the playing fields, and you see drugs behind every hedge. There’s nothing for the kids to do. Mother turns into a taxi-service, unpaid. They’ve got to see their friends, learn to ride, remedial speech, whatever. Mother’s gloomy and bored. Father’s commuting, now the home-office idea has collapsed, and becomes part of the divorce statistics. He met someone cheerful on the train. Someone who, like him, longs for a loft apartment in Islington – and if both country houses were sold and each took their half, and mother kept the children – well, they are her life – why then the move back to the city could just about be managed. For him. What’s good for the children is not necessarily good for the marriage.
But who’s listening? ‘We’re moving out,’ friends say, thrilled to the gills. ‘It will be different for us.’ And so it may be, and so I hope it will be. Humankind cannot live by reason alone, nor should they try to. And it is the spring, after all. And the mud’s drying out. And the early sun catches the hill-tops, and the wheat field’s sprouting green and strong, and lambs bounce in the fields, and what’s so good about here anyway?
The entrance to the Garden of Eden may no longer be barred by a flaying sword, but Mother has to get back to the baby. No way she can enter.
Not employers, certainly. Mothers demand equal wages but have their minds on things other than their employer’s interests. Sick babies, for example, toddlers with chickenpox, sudden calls to the school, childcare. Mothers can’t be asked to stay late, won’t do overtime, use the phone a lot, won’t relocate, demand maternity leave. And they don’t look so good in the front office either.
ERRATUM: sweatshop employers rather like mothers. Desperation means mothers will put up with anything. No-one else will do the job, anyway.
Fathers, on the other hand are much like anyone else. Sometimes they take an afternoon off for the Christmas play, or for a session with Relate, and insist on having their holidays in August, but otherwise who notices?
ERRATUM: lone fathers of course count as mothers. Same problem. Who needs ’em?
You can’t blame employers. They’re not philanthropists. The rational aim of the individual employer is to make a profit out of the worker’s time and labour. If the employer is a company it must put the profit of the shareholder before the interests of the worker (let alone the customer). If the employer is the State – a shrinking section of the new economy – managers and accountants take the place of the old-fashioned boss. Their object is to save money, not make money. Which puts the employee in exactly the same situation: the pressure is on for longer hours and lower wages.
The working class can kiss my arse,
I’ve got the charge-hand’s job at last.
– as they used to sing in the old Marxist days. Thank you, Mr Blair.
Not that anyone admits to being working class any more. Who wants the Union to fight for their rights? It’s an indignity. Except we all go on working and earning, especially mothers, harder and longer than ever. Forget lone mothers, one average pay-packet is scarcely enough to keep even a family with a father in Pot Noodles, petrol for the car and Nikes for the kids. So out she goes to work, which is fine in one way because being with small children alone in a house can drive you crackers, but not in another because cramming stiff unwilling arms into coat sleeves on a winter’s morning in order to be at the nursery by eight and work by nine is no fun. When you and the child are half asleep.
It’s no use the self-righteous (usually the childless, who can afford to be minimalist) telling you you’re being ‘greedy’ or ‘materialistic’: you should magically do without the extra money. You have to have a new car because the old one breaks down on the way to work, and where’s the public transport? And you have to have a microwave because there’s no time for ‘proper’ cooking. It’s a vicious circle. Since the introduction of the poll tax no-one has been able to live cheaply.
Mothers, who wants ’em? Stay at home (if you’re lucky) and be told you’re boring and unaspirational. Go out to work and be told you’re breeding delinquents.
Mothers, who wants ’em? Not the State. Mothers are a drain on the national purse. They’re either lone or divorced and on benefit or claiming low income family supplement, or kicking up a fuss because their child didn’t get to the school of its choice, or failing to teach it its times-tables before it gets to school or irresponsibly going out to work so it ends up delinquent.
Mothers, who wants ’em? Not even children. The crèche, the nursery, the school, the after-hours homework club takes the place of home. As the traditional family turns into a unit with two breadwinners and no parent, children learn to do without mothers very fast. (Even grandmother’s out at work.) The teacher, the peer group, television and youth culture become more important in their lives, are a greater cultural influence. Watch the four-year-olds dancing to the Spice Girls. And that can be even if you don’t go out to work.
What’s to be done? This is not a happy situation for mothers. Everyone wants to be needed. Feminism has been the only movement in recent times to turn its attention to matters of social justice, personal dignity and the quality of our lives. Let the New Feminists attend to these rather than the gap between male and female wages. Let them stop congratulating themselves on how happy they are to wear lipstick and what a good thing Mrs Thatcher was, and extend their remit. Let them start by diving the world into four separate categories, not two, and looking at what is really going on. Men, Women, Mothers, Fathers, not just Male and Female. Let them bring about a society in which there is parity of parenting. So ‘the problem of the working father’ is as much talked about as ‘the problem of the working mother’. Younger men, trained by earlier feminists to have full and loving relationships with their children, will co-operate. Apart from a few emotional dinosaurs. We might all even end up working less hard, having fuller lives, and happier relationships with our children.
As for Mrs Thatcher, it was she, remember, who in repealing the Shops Act took away the right of the shop assistant to have a chair.
As written for Harpers Bazaar, New York, to celebrate the New Year, 1998, and a New Age, in which New Eve rules in the Garden of Eden, and New Adam feels weaker for the loss of a rib.
Back in the seventies the feminists argued that the personal should become the political. So it did. The word sexism was coined, men (in this scheme of the universe) could no longer operate by dividing and ruling; a woman might be a victim by virtue of her gender, but she no longer cried into her pillow alone. Her woes, politicised, became the stuff of legislation and social disapproval.
Time and the process rolled inexorably