Women are still doing jobs men don't want
By George Pitcher
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Sexism has returned – but not in the way the martinets of new feminism say it has, argues George Pitcher.
Today is International Women's Day. I know, your heart sinks, doesn't it? But this isn't one of those faddish lobbying festivals, like Bruce Forsyth's Artificial Hip-joint Day or the Andrew Rawnsley Stop Bullying Week. IWD has been going since 1911 and has its roots in the Suffragette movement, so today seems as good a day as any to review the progress of feminism.
I'm not, admittedly, first into the ring on this one. Heavyweight women's-issue wrestlers have been weighing in on the subject for weeks. In the red (in tooth and claw) corner, we have the likes of Charlotte Raven and Natasha Walter, whose new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, serves as the current seminal tract, if she'll pardon that expression, of how former visionary sisterhoods have been let down by the ladette culture, Wags and pole-dancers.
Meanwhile, in the blue (stocking) corner, we have Fiona Millar, "Mrs" Alastair Campbell as she isn't known, who writes in that Spare Rib of contemporary journalism, Radio Times, that men like hers are hopeless around the house, simple domestic vacuums who can't do the Hoovering. So women like her have to do all the domestic chores as well as holding down top-line executive jobs, like telling Cherie Blair what to wear and slagging off private schools.
There is some truth in all of this. Nearly a hundred years after truly fearless fighters for gender freedom, such as Millicent Fawcett and Emily Pankhurst, won universal suffrage and 40 years after Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, women are in a disappointing place. A majority of schoolgirls in a recent study said that the form of prostitution known as "glamour modelling" is a serious career choice. There are just four female CEOs of FTSE companies today and Katie "Jordan" Price sells more books than Martin Amis.
Admittedly, that last point is good news for a women's movement trying to counter oppressive and misogynistic male attitudes, but where the Walters and Millars have a point is that, in short, women are still doing the jobs that men don't want to do. Partly, that has its primal cause in biology: women bear the children and, unable to offer any role- reversal in that regard, men stand back or pretend to be hunter-gatherers while the women go on to feed the children, choose their schools and listen to their boring stories. I mean, empathise with their development, obviously. Beyond families, this tendency is reflected in the wider world
of work.
Alpha males do the competitive, dragon-slaying and lucrative stuff, while women do what needs to be done. There has been a spike recently in the numbers of men going into primary school teaching, which is nice, until you realise that they've all lost their jobs being masters of the universe in the City and have just noticed that children go to school.
Then there's nursing, still overwhelmingly dominated by women. I may have expressed the odd view against euthanasia here in the past, but guess who will have to do the killing as and when a predominantly male Parliament legalises "assisted dying". Yes, that's right. Jobs for the boys also means getting the girls to do the ones we don't like.
But the prophetesses of doom seem to miss one major point. And it's the economic one. Firstly, it's no good for moaning, middle-class minnies like Ms Millar to complain that they are shackled to domesticity, while loveable but useless Campbell potters about, hoping to be played by Neil Morrissey in the movie. I have it on good authority, as they say, that the Millar-Campbells have been as well served by domestic staff as the rest of us.
During the boom years, we subcontracted domesticity. Now the markets have turned, couples are jostling for position over who does the chores. And there may be the teensiest bit of control-freakery: I don't do the house either, but let's pretend it's just Alastair that's hopeless, shall we?
Secondly, one of the supposed triumphs of Seventies feminism was liberating women into the world of work. Never mind if most young women were going into second-line servicing, such as public relations, rather than the mainstream economy. They were getting out of the home. But that meant dual incomes for bigger mortgages, which in turn hugely inflated pushed property prices. So we're now in a place where both partners have to work just to service their mortgages, especially in London, whether they want to or not. Some liberation.
I have to be careful here, but if a martinet of the new feminism tells me it's Cheryl Cole or Jordan, or even Fiona Millar with her Hoover, who have betrayed the sisterhood, I have to tell her she's talking rubbish. It's the economy, stupid.
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