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“Is raising a child a job for society or for mothers?” asks David Goodhart in this provocative book. He writes that the “four horsemen of liberal modernity” are the UK’s social care crisis, the decline of family stability, mental health problems among young people and the falling birth rate. He claims that domestic devaluation has made everyone worse off.
At first I was afraid of it The treatment dilemma was a plea to return to the 1950s hidden under a thin veneer of cod feminism. It’s partly a lament for the days when children were cared for at home, people married more and mothers had time to volunteer. But Goodhart (who had four children with the successful Lucy Kellaway, a former FT columnist) argues that society has taken women for granted for too long, taking their caring nature for granted. He rages at the injustice that women still earn less than men in low-skilled jobs. He wants to cancel the nursing debt, give nursing work more status, extend paternity and maternity leave, and encourage grandparents to live nearby.
Goodhart is best known for classifying post-Brexit Britain into two tribes. His book A road somewhere (2017) contrasted “Anywheres”, mobile and educated, with “Somewheres”, more rooted and socially conservative. The Care dilemmaHis plea for valuing domesticity is based on this concern that society has disenfranchised “somewhere” and debased the practical abilities and emotional intelligence he extols. Head, Hand, Heart: The fight for human dignity and status in the 21st century (2020). That book argued that our meritocracy relies too heavily on IQ rather than emotional intelligence.
The treatment dilemma tries to repeat the trick by pitting “care egalitarians” against “care balancers.” Egalitarians, Goodhart argues, believe that men and women are “essentially identical” and that family structure is irrelevant to life chances. Balancers “take equality but are more concerned about the consequences of an unstable family life. . . and want to reform rather than eliminate the division of labor between the sexes”. Most voters, he suggests, are balancers, but politicians don’t hear their voices.
The cartoon showed something that bothers me – our tendency to talk about mothers almost exclusively as factors of production. I agree that it seems perverse to include stay-at-home parents in the “economically inactive” numbers that ministers are currently worried about.
However, I’m not sure how many people actually think of men and women as completely interchangeable. “Young women should definitely be encouraged to pursue STEM work,” she writes. “However, that does not necessarily mean that a 50:50 balance is either possible or even desirable.” No – but most people don’t demand 50:50 – they just demand that girls have a chance. And few women would say that their husbands are “replaceable” in housework.
But one question the book raises is whether gender equality is now sufficiently entrenched for the “balancers” to be heard and for men to take a greater role. Goodhart hopes so, especially if families can get much more financial support, which he advocates.
The book contains detailed analyzes of the failures of both childcare and social care. On childcare, Goodhart says the UK has the tightest nurse-to-baby relationships in formal care settings in the rich world. In the UK, the ratio for children under 2 is 1:3; In France, the situation is 1:5. He strongly appeals to the government giving money to parents instead of subsidizing formal arrangements.
In his opinion, social care has the potential to be more of a preventive service with a high status. He rightly objects to the “perpetuation of so many lines of demarcation between professional and non-professional personnel” that prioritize formal qualifications over practical skills.
There are some funny anecdotes. She describes how her father, Philip Goodhart, beat Margaret Thatcher to Parliament in Beckenham after a predominantly female selection panel grilled him – but not her – about how to juggle an MP role with children.
The tone can be arrogant. The book is restrained in its arguments about what are “feminine qualities” – more anxious, careful and “masculine” – and what women miss out on if they don’t have children. I agree with Goodhart’s view that the conversation about motherhood has been too dominated by professional women (like me). But when she disapprovingly quoted Joeli Brearley, founder of the mothering charity Pregnant Then Screwed, saying that “maternity leave can be desperately, painfully lonely”, I found myself thinking, but it’s true – and Brearley helped a lot of women by saying that.
Ultimately, the message of this book is that caring can provide more meaning to many of us than work ever could. It is all the more worth saying because it is not fashionable.
The Dilemma of Care: Adequate Caring in the Age of Gender Equality Author: David Goodhart Forum €25, 256 pages
Camilla Cavendish is a researcher at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government, Harvard University and author of “Extra Time: Ten Lessons for Living Longer Better”
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