💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › solidarity-federation-political-parenting.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:59:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Political Parenting
Author: Solidarity Federation
Date: Autumn 1998
Language: en
Topics: parenting, family, Direct Action Magazine
Source: Retrieved on June 20, 2005 from https://web.archive.org/web/20050620082329/http://www.directa.force9.co.uk/archive/da8-features.htm
Notes: Published in Direct Action #8 — Autumn 1998.

Solidarity Federation

Political Parenting

A woman’s right to choose? New Labour plays happy families...The nuclear

family is in decline. Social change is rapid throughout the ‘developed’

world. The signs are clear; rising divorce rates, falling birth rates,

more women entering the workplace, more lone parents, gay couples living

open lives, and so on. While many people have good reason for huge sighs

of relief at the passing of the nuclear family, New Labour is planning

the next move...

The post-war ideal of the family in which the father goes out to work

while the dependent mother stays at home to mind the children no longer

matches social reality.

In America, this social change has led to a right wing backlash, with

the steady growth of a highly-organised pro-family movement which is

socially conservative, overtly anti-feminist and anti-homosexual. To get

their reactionary message over, this pro-family movement has focused in

on the growing number of fatherless families, claiming that they are the

cause of much of society’s woes, from rising crime to lower educational

aspirations, to increasing incidents of child abuse. They see the

‘solution’ in a host of regressive legislation, including stricter

divorce laws and savage welfare cuts. They even advocate laws to make

sperm banks and fertility services strictly only available to

heterosexual married couples. Mothers attempting to raise children

without the presence of a man are the cause of the downfall of

civilisation as the conservative right knows it.

In Britain, the pro-family lobby remains in its infancy compared to the

US. The strongest indication of its influence occurred in the early

1990’s, when an ideological onslaught by the Tories was launched against

lone parents. This reached a peak in 1993, with Tory ministers lining up

to castigate lone parent mothers as welfare scroungers, the cause of

moral decline, rising crime and Britain’s growing “dependency culture.”

The ‘popular’ press supported these attacks, with numerous articles

attacking lone mothers — the headlines “Single Parents Cripple Lives”,

in the Telegraph, and “Wedded to Welfare” and “Do They Want to Marry a

Man or the State”, in the Express, are typical examples.

Unfortunately for the Tories, these attacks did not go down too well

with voters in general and women in particular. As the election

approached, with their support among women plunging alarmingly, the

Tories panicked and began to stress their commitment to lone parents and

working mothers. However, this dramatic policy shift came too late, only

serving to portray the Tories as confused on the issue of the family.

new saviours

New Labour sought to cash in on the Tory’s lone parent fiasco,

portraying the Tories as a sexist, backward-looking and male-dominated

party, while portraying themselves as the party of women’s equality and

cultural diversity. Central to this theme was the idea that work

empowered women, so it must be encouraged by the Labour Party, through

the introduction of greater state provision of child care. Great play

was also made of the fact that they had acted to ensure a greater number

of women MPs entered Parliament. These new women MPs were going to end

the culture of confrontation that had characterised the male-dominated

British political scene for so long. New Labour would govern based on

‘women’s’ values of care and co-operation.

Behind all this gloss, New Labour’s commitment to the two-parent family

was little different to that of the Tories. They too saw lone parent

families, not as a different yet equally valid way of raising children,

but as a problem to be solved. A pre-election document produced by

Labour on parenting is full of the same bigoted stereotypes that had

typified the Tory attacks on lone parents. The section entitled

“Children living with lone parents” demonstrated its contempt with such

‘positive’ sections as “Parenting Problem Areas”, “Children in Public

Care” and “Children with ‘Attention-Deficit’ Disorders”.

the new reality

One real difference between New Labour and the old Tories’ approach, was

that they recognised that lone mothers could not be driven into

marriage. They accepted that lone-parent families were a social reality,

and they have now brought forward policies designed to mitigate the

‘problems’ that lone parenting supposedly created.

The centrepiece of New Labour’s new policy is the idea of forcing

lone-parents, particularly women, into paid employment. This has a

number of attractions. Firstly, it will save money by cutting welfare

payments. Secondly, the plan is that lone-parent women and their

children can be weaned off their current ‘dependency’ on welfare. The

main mechanism to be used is the stick of cutting benefit and

introducing a harsher welfare regime for lone parents. If there is a

carrot involved, it is in encouraging lone parents into work by

providing tax breaks and more childcare.

Accompanying the general economic blackmail of single parents, Labour

plans to introduce some form of direct state control over ‘wayward’

children and ‘bad’ parents. The notion of ‘problem families’ is to be

taken seriously, and these families are to be forced into line. As yet,

they appear unsure of just how state intervention can be made to work in

this area. Watch this space.

new families?

Labour’s approach to lone parenting forms part of its wider approach to

women and the family, which is based on vague words about equality

within the household and women’s right to paid employment. Labour argues

that, in order for the family to survive, it must become a democratic

institution, with women having an equal say and the opportunity to

pursue a career. This differs clearly with the American New Right, that

argues for the woman’s place in the home as a child raiser (and by

implication, against any other role for women).

However, the fact that Labour’s attitude is couched in feminist language

should not lull women into a false sense of security. Labour’s thinking

is completely in tune with free market orthodoxy, and modern capitalism

has no intention of driving women back into the home. On the contrary, a

modern service-based economy requires increasing numbers of women to

join the workforce. But capitalism’s requirement for more women workers

has little to do with women’s rights and everything to do with the

greater exploitation of women.

new slavery

Just how in tune the Labour’s approach is with market capitalism can be

gauged from the pages of ‘The Economist’. In a recent in-depth special

survey on working women, the magazine stressed its feminist commitment

by welcoming the growing number of women workers and rallying against

workplace inequality. In distancing themselves from new right thinking,

the authors made it clear that, even if the increased number of women

workers is undermining the ‘traditional family’, this is no reason to

“drive women back to the stove”. They also proposed avoiding the problem

of falling birth rates leading to a future shortage of (cheap) labour,

by increasing state support for working mothers and liberalising

immigration laws.

The Economist’s free market feminists went on to point out that “women

workers have been a godsend to the booming US economy...they usually

cost less to employ, are more prepared to be flexible and less inclined

to kick up a fuss if working conditions are poor...with far fewer of

them in unions.” Part of the survey had a section entitled “Our Flexible

Friends”, which dispels any illusions about the free market attitude to

women.

new patriarchy

While the dangers of the pro-family movement in America are reviled by

many in Britain, there is little discussion of the dangers and

implications of Labour’s policies on the family and the role of women.

This is understandable, given the Labour smooth talk about empowering

women and women’s equality. Hardly a word is mentioned of how, having

‘empowered’ women into the workplace, they intend to tackle the greater

exploitation and inequality women face when they get there. Nor do we

hear much from Labour about the social inequality women suffer, which

means many have to accept low paid temporary work in the growing service

sector. Such structural sexism can only worsen as more women are forced

into the (still) male-dominated world of paid work. Meanwhile, unpaid

work in the home is still done by women — despite talk of ‘new men’.

Research repeatedly shows that the burden of raising children and

running the household remains overwhelmingly the task of women.

The current reality is that the only way women can gain even the very

limited economic independence gained from paid employment is by finding

ways of combining housework with paid work. Little wonder then that the

only way this can be achieved is by accepting ‘flexible’ hours and

part-time working.

Patriarchy and capitalism combining to exploit women is hardly new. What

is new is that this is being dressed in the language of feminism. No one

should be fooled by this ploy. Labour’s policy towards the family

differs from the Tories only in that Labour is tailoring the family to

meet capitalist needs for an increase in the number of women workers. In

this respect, as in many others, Labour is in tune with modern

capitalist thinking. Though we may find the ranting of the American new

right obnoxious, in the long term it may be Labour’s ideas that prove to

be the more dangerous