Suzanne Franks has written a maddening book. Most of it is well-researched, well-presented and thought-provoking. It is the sort of book any of us would want to write and which most of us enjoy reading. It presents a clear picture of the changes-social and economic, educational and domestic, professional and personal-which have taken place in the lives of women in Britain over the past 30 years. She also, unusually, records expectations about the future which people held in the recent past and considers the extent to which they have been fulfilled.
I have two minor reservations and one big one. The first minor one is Franks's assumption that what has happened to women in Britain has happened to women in other countries, too. The second is her failure to recognise the important part that the second world war played in the lives of many ordinary women, and hence in the developments which followed. The war showed women that they could gain personal fulfilment in ways other than through traditional gender roles. Rosie the Riveter was not just a catchy title for a movie; she was a real person, and there were millions like her. I knew a woman who had left secondary modern school at 14, but who found herself training aircrew (all men) in how to use the newly invented radar. The effect on her view of herself and her capabilities lasted for the rest of her life. Although she, like other women, left work and had a family, she always knew that she was capable of more, and that there was more to life than the home. These women, confident in their abilities to function outside the home, were the first to grasp the job opportunities which the postwar economic boom offered in the 1950s and 1960s. They may have waited longer, until their children were older, compared to mothers today, but there was no question in their minds that they would go back to work. To claim, as Franks does, that the need to consume ever more goods and services was their prime motivation is to do them a disservice. Moreover, she ignores the importance of the aspiration for home ownership-itself a peculiarly British phenomenon-in encouraging wives to take paid work.
However, what made me want to throw the book across the room was the section about the future of work. Here Franks has fallen into the trap of assuming that changes which reflect the economic cycle are permanent and structural. In contrast to the later chapters of the book, where she has gone to great pains to ensure that events which took place in the latter part of 1998 are included, the earlier chapters about employment are firmly rooted in 1996. The remarkable recovery in the British labour market which has taken place since then is ignored. This is a pity, because these developments challenge some of her conclusions. Thus her central point, that more women than men are now in paid employment in Britain, was only true in one quarter of 1996, has ceased to be true since then, and anyway was only true then by ignoring the self-employed.
But, if we set that on one side, the book remains well worth reading. It is rare to see so much material and so many ideas, brought together in one place in such an accessible way. She has read and absorbed some challenging sources, including technical articles in US economics journals. She has interviewed a wide variety of people. These include Henry Neuberger, who pioneered the development in Britain of national accounts which give estimates of the value of unpaid work. Henry died suddenly in December. This book serves as a reminder of his contribution to British public life.
Franks reminds us that no matter how much domestic life has changed for women, it has changed relatively little for men. There has been a small shift among younger men towards greater sharing of household tasks, but among couples with children this is negligible. With a trivial number of exceptions, women, irrespective of age, class or income, take prime responsibility for child rearing and take management responsibility for running the household. (Franks provides some circumstantial evidence to suggest that the rot may set in during maternity leave, and that the responsibilities accepted during a short period of being at home full-time are never shed once paid work is resumed.) The only difference is that women with more money pay other people to do some of the cleaning, laundry or housework rather than do it themselves.
However, she also shows that although women in the 1990s earn more than they did in the 1960s, when separate pay rates for men and women were the norm even when they were doing the same job, men still earn a third more-on average-than women. Moreover, in spite of the high profile breakthroughs made by a small minority of women in the professions and the media, most women still work in traditional women's jobs: retailing, catering, cleaning and caring; the market extensions of what they have always done at home. Most men continue to be defined by their jobs, and expect to be so. Fatherhood is incidental. Women's definitions of themselves are more complex. They are unlikely to say: "I am a check-out operator." They are more likely to say: "I have three children, an elderly mother who lives round the corner, and I work part-time at Tesco."
One reason for recommending this book is that Franks confronts the challenge which the feminists of 30 years ago ducked: the well-being of children. She shows that, increasingly, children resent being marginalised by their busy parents (particularly their mothers), and are unwilling to repeat the same lifestyle pattern themselves. She recognises that we have not managed to reconcile the fulfilment of parents with genuine choices for children. For younger children, high quality childcare may well be the answer (although, as Sweden shows, it is expensive, and beyond the means of most parents without state subsidy). But what are the outcomes for children with other forms of childcare? More important, how do we ensure the support and development of older children who can feed themselves by raiding the fridge, but who need time to discuss their hopes and fears? She confronts the contradictions in government policy towards the family-pushing lone parents into the labour market while also seeking a reconciliation between work and family life. She also argues that as long as these are treated as women's issues they will not be treated seriously.
Comparisons with other countries in Europe would have been helpful. For example, the issue of hours of work seems to be peculiarly British. The pattern in most of Europe is that men work about 40-45 hours a week and women work about 25-30 hours. Five or (increasingly) six weeks holiday is the norm, and people expect to take their holidays. The implementation of the European Working Time Directive in October 1998 is unlikely to show much immediate effect, but it is likely, over time, to influence attitudes towards hours of work in the same way that the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 began to change our views about what constitutes acceptable behaviour. It makes it unlikely that her prophecy, that half the workforce will be working 60 hours a week in the 21st century, will be fulfilled. Franks argues that the incentive structures of capitalism drive people inexorably towards longer hours of work. But in almost all capitalist countries (Britain and the US are exceptions) annual hours have been falling steadily for a century and there is no evidence that the trend is being reversed.
Franks has swallowed the myth that there has been an explosion in part-time work at the expense of full-time. But the growth in part-time work came in the 1970s. In 1981, 21 per cent of the British work force worked part-time. By 1998 about a quarter did. This represents growth, but hardly a huge expansion. She also fails to mention that the growth, from a very low base, in part-time working among men is driven by the expansion in the number of students who work their way through A-levels, college and university. About 1m people in full-time education also have part-time jobs.
Since the autumn of 1996, the number of jobs has grown by 700,000, most of which are full-time. In the most recent quarter for which figures are available, full-time jobs grew by 72,000 and part-time jobs by only 10,000. One effect of this strong employment growth in the last few years, which Franks ignores, is that it has transformed the prospects of young men with few educational qualifications. There are still some unemployment black spots in places such as Merseyside and Tyneside, but in much of Britain young men with criminal records, with no qualifications and with a patchy employment record, are being recruited by employers who are sufficiently desperate to fill their vacancies to give anyone a try, with few questions asked. These are not career jobs. Indeed, many of them, in retailing, pubs and fast food outlets, are the kind of jobs which traditionally have been done by women. However, to young men who live at home and who therefore have no housing costs, they represent the opportunity to earn hard cash. Moreover, except for the army and the mines, jobs available to young unskilled men have never been secure. The current "easy come easy go" approach on the part of both employers and employees is reminiscent of the 1960s. This may just be a symptom of the peak of the boom, and I would hesitate to draw long-term conclusions, but the labour market at the opening of 1999 is not always the grim world described by Franks.
We do not need her world of workless men and exploited part-time women to recognise that the dreams of the women's liberation movement of 30 years ago have not been fulfilled. To some extent, as Catherine Hakim famously recognised, this may be because the aspirations of most women have never been the same as the agenda set by committed middle-class feminists. But, as Franks shows us, men and their contributions to family life have not changed, and neither have the expectations employers and colleagues have of people who look on their work as a career rather than a job. Women are rightly challenging the desirability of doing nothing but work, whether paid or unpaid. The message for the new millennium is not so much get a job, as get a life.
Having none of it: women, men and the future of work
Suzanne Franks
Granta 1999, ?12.99
