The miserable regiment of women

"Professions for women!" If not quite the last cry on Emily Davison's lips as she went down under the King's horse in 1913, this was certainly one of the main objectives of early feminists. They argued that the vote alone would never set women free-only work, with its redefinition of female status through increased access to power, privilege and not least pecunia, would serve.

That day has dawned. In the last 25 years, women's participation in the labour force has grown from less than a third to more than a half: 55 per cent of women now work full-time, and over 70 per cent of women are in paid employment of some kind. After the year 2000 a majority of British workers will be female. With women rising to senior posts in medicine and the law, where half of all students are now female, with women in business and in banking, in the Cabinet, in No. 10, there is nothing, it seems, that women can no longer do. Along with other quantifiable facts such as the fall in the male sperm count, this is conventionally taken to mean the triumph of feminism: we have seen the future and it wears a skirt.

Yet the working women of today do not feel like the inheritors of the earth, to others or to themselves. A marked malaise surrounds many women in employment-especially those in the professions, who should in theory be riding high, at last romping up to join the males at the top of the heap. Women who should be glorying in a grand-sounding job at Arthur Andersen or the Deutsche Bank, or stylishly shrugging off some notable coup in government, industry, or the media, tend to respond to questions and congratulations with a wary, sometimes wild air of harassment, as if to say, "God, isn't it enough to do the bloody job? Have I got to talk about it as well?"



And they are not only harassed-sometimes, apparently, to the edge of endurance. Around many women working today there lurks a sense of unbelief, an air of "Is this all?" or "They never told me it would be like this." The new complexity of the 1990s is proving depressingly resistant to the powerful old slogans that still resurface regularly in every women's magazine and all-female discussion group in the land. Nineteen-seventies feminism with Superwoman and her "have-it-all"-a-go-go, followed by 1980s careerism with its women's training schemes, women's management courses and "Reach for the top!" all seemed to promise something more, something better, something else.

Nor can this be dismissed as the embittered whinge of first-generation feminists. Younger women may never have it as good as the 1970s sisterhood did, bursting upon an astonished world which was to prove surprisingly receptive to their complaints, cresting the 1980s economic upsurge as the cry went out to employ more women, and give them better roles. It has been left to their younger sisters to try to live the formula of "having it all," and these are the women most acutely aware of something wrong.

Wrong, but hard to pin down. If unhappiness is the gap between expectation and reality, then the assumptions of a whole generation of women have proved wide of the mark in ways resistant to ready analysis. The unease they feel is something almost never met with in a man, no matter how badly his world of work may be treating him at the time. Like the suffragettes when their bitter fight was won and the world wagged on almost exactly as before, a generation of today's women has emerged feeling obscurely betrayed.

And this feeling is only deepened by the awareness that all the old enemies of female promise (mothers, teachers, careers advisers, the pram in the hall, medicine, the law-and especially men, as father, lovers, husbands, bosses) will no longer serve as God-given villains of the piece. To a greater or lesser degree, all these old enemies have now begun to swing women's way, some of them to an extent inconceivable 20 years ago. And although problems remain, these can no longer be made to carry the can for all the female frustration that continues to flow.

The discontent of individual women may in part be traced to a wider unease. Western society, and western women themselves, are deeply divided in their attitude to "women and work," an historical conundrum unsolved in over 2,000 years. We still tend to view the working woman as a modern anomaly responsible for all too many of today's social aches and pains. From unemployment to the fall in male wages (women taking men's jobs drives down the value of male work at the lower end of the skill spectrum) to truanting, juvenile crime and children watching video nasties, it seems that so far as any kind of employment goes, a woman's place is always in the wrong.

Yet against this must be set the evangelism of the last decade for "the female resource." From the Institute of Directors to the TUC, from the Industrial Society to Opportunity 2000, tub-thumping enthusiasts and assorted worthies have endeavoured to convince us that women in the workforce are "a good thing," and that any increase in the numbers of women employed, through more part-time jobs or better nurseries, should mean hats in the air all round.

Well, up to a point. For a variety of reasons ranging from their lack of qualifications to the need to structure their lives around children, women have always borne more than their share of casual, part-time and marginal labour. Is it too cynical to link this new-found exaltation of the female with the economy's ongoing need for an endlessly expanding and contracting pool of cheap labour; a pattern that women are generally readier to accept than men?

The hypomania of contemporary terminology disguises what is often a grim reality. Virtually every one of the statistician's "economically active" females is promoted to a "career girl," no one simply "does a job." The armies of squat-bodied females seen struggling on to buses with piles of shopping at the end of every working day, find themselves disenfranchised by the terms of this discourse.

When the magazine Working Woman was launched in the UK with a cover shot of a high-flying woman, one of the first readers' letters began, "I am a psychiatric orderly in Port Talbot. Where do I come in?" Yet it is the high-flying professional who is most expressive of today's discomforts and discontents. Undoubtedly their expectations are higher than those of the check-out "girl" at Sainsbury's, as indeed is their capacity to vocalise their complaints. And it is they who feel most keenly the gulf between rhetoric and reality in their working lives, the contrast between their hopes of something better and their experience of something worse.

Why should this be? One source of the new discontent stems from a very old discontent which never went away. No matter how hard modern women work, they are still, beyond doubt or argument, victims of unequal pay. In the latest Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) statistics, the average female manual worker earns 72 per cent of a male wage, while her non-manual sisters, including accountants, lawyers, medics and even company directors, weigh in even lower, at 68 per cent. This applies at all levels. In a case brought before an industrial tribunal earlier this year, financier Helen Bamber was being paid ?43,000 a year on the basis of generating ?173,100 worth of business to her firm, as against a male colleague of similar age and experience who was receiving ?60,000 on a basis of generating ?170, 990. The man was also getting a higher annual bonus (?15,000 against Ms Bamber's ?3,250), longer holidays, and a company car.

Today's professional women cut their teeth on Cosmopolitan and Anita Roddick, on working mothers in Downing Street and the White House. So many of them believe that the founding mothers of feminism dealt with all that boring old trouble-making stuff about pay ages ago. The acknowledgement that this raw and primary injustice with its inescapable implication of female inferiority (their inferiority) is still alive and drawing blood (their blood) is often too painful to contemplate. When it is, the sense of being undervalued cuts deep. "Even if you're getting ?100,000 a year," says a woman director, "it can really get to you that Bloggs is getting more just because he's got a dick."

And what about the men themselves? Despite all the hype, the new women have as yet failed to find anything more than somewhat new-ish men. "While women have moved into the workforce and substantially increased their paid labour time," writes Patricia Hewitt in her book About Time, "men have not moved back into the home or increased the time they spend in unpaid domestic work at the same rate." In all social circumstances women still undertake a far greater share of the domestic labour or its management than do their men. The woman will also be the backstop if the system fails-she will be expected (and expect) to cancel her work commitments for a family crisis more readily than her partner will.

Things are changing, but often rather slowly for the women who are up against it now. In all surveys, men are found to over-report what they do. Men are also intensely selective in the chores they undertake, naturally preferring the pleasurable, point-scoring or sheer glory activities such as playing football with the kids, or barbecuing for 100 guests. Even New Man, that interesting modern hybrid, has yet to learn the 10,000-year-old female art of internalising every detail of house-and-child-care until he, like most women in full-time work, can do it in his sleep.

Male support of labouring females, pace the earnest Islingtonians seen coaxing their offspring down slides in parks or into the swimming baths, usually proves to be much less than meets the eye. A national opinion poll commissioned by the charity "Care for the Family" found that most of the 2,000 men surveyed didn't care much at all: they prefer watching television, or participating in sport, hobbies or gardening, to spending time with their children. More than half the fathers surveyed spent less than five minutes a day on a child, and 15 per cent spent no time at all. When the child is a girl, the time drops still further: fathers are far more likely to spend time with a son. At the end of the day, then, the dissatisfaction of the women they live with may not be with the company "men in suits," nor with inadequate pay, legislation or government action, but with the man of the house, the man in their bed.

But once again, it's not enough to round up the usual suspects. Until recently a man's work was often where he went to get away from his family, an equivalent, for Everyman, of the old-style gentleman's club. In another quirk of post-modernist fate, just as men genuinely began thinking of having a fuller life and spending more time with the family, work has become not an escape hatch but an ever-deepening hole, something men have had to dig into ever more grimly if they wanted to work at all.

in this situation, nothing is more calculated to encourage the "mine's longer than yours" competitive male phallacy of the working day. Despite a decade of vigorous experimentation with 1970s innovations such as job-sharing, the world of employment still clings to its patriarchal assumption that real work equals 48 hours for 48 weeks for 48 years. And despite some progress in union negotiations towards a shorter working week, British men still work the longest hours in Europe: a recent EOC survey found that half of all men worked over 44 hours a week, and a quarter over 50. Recent rhetoric of the "feminisation of management," of "new structures for a new world" breeze through the topless towers of business and industry without making any serious impact. Employment patterns remain not only mal-adapted to women but inherently hostile to family and "real" life as well.

Our over-strained woman, then, may well feel that however inadequate her home back-up is, she is getting all that can be expected out of her over-strained man. To all these difficulties, the women who want to work and have a mother's life must add another problem that neither right nor left can solve-despite passionate engagement from both sides. Whether conservatism tried too hard to persuade us that if God had meant women to work He would not have given them wombs, or whether feminism oversold the ease with which work and motherhood could be enjoyed together, there can be little doubt that the effort of combining "proper" jobs with motherhood is so huge, and at times even cruel, that many women dare not stop the carousel to ask themselves what they are doing and why. And why ask, in any case, when there is no responsibility to be apportioned, nor remedy to be found? Both as labourers and producers of primary labour, women carry a double burden imposed by no process nor policy nor cabal of malignant males, but by that great leveller Mother Nature herself.

Childbirth is undoubtedly the double-headed labrys of any Great Mother Goddess fantasy: at once the ultimate proof of achievement and the potential killer constantly threatening to deliver the final blow. The women's network thrums with tales of modern heroism like latter-day Bateman vignettes: "The woman who was still dictating to her secretary on the delivery table," "The woman who had fax, phone and Footsie 100 facilities installed next to the crib." New Woman, in short, labours at her desk until the final pang, and is back there again, sitting on her stitches, 24 hours or even less after the birth. Nineteen-nineties sisters don't miss a beat. Little wonder they're exhausted.

For they are. The sister-vine regularly trembles with talk of this one who went to sleep and simply never woke up, of that one who went on holiday and couldn't get back because she couldn't remember who she was. At many a dinner party, behind the bright quips and determined smiles there will be sudden glimpses of a fatigue that lies too deep even for tears. Some of these women are heading for the burn-out that threatens those who are first in a given field. And they are the first generation of women to try to go the whole nine yards, to do marriage and motherhood and work and play, to scrum down with the big boys-there, where the real men and money are to be found, where the going gets rough, where the wild things are.

Despite progress, there are still potholes on the smooth path of women's progress towards equity and parity in the world of work. Last year, the proportion of women managers in top organisations fell back from its already modest 10.2 per cent to 9.5 per cent. This year, too, the numbers of women being made partners in their law firms also fell by 5 per cent. Did they fall-or were they pushed? Individual experiences fill out the statistics in almost every business, trade or industry. One woman company secretary was sacked when her employers, a family firm of Northern non-conformists, discovered that she was not married to the man she was living with. The company found to have unfairly sacked Dr Lydia Pollard (for having a baby) declared itself "surprised and disappointed" by the verdict. "Origin UK employs 262 people, of whom 44 are women," a spokeswoman said. "It operates an equal opportunities policy." The humour of this is too near home for many women to enjoy. Superwoman, it turns out, made a lot of enemies. Now, instead of her simple triumphalism, women in work hear the constant refrain, "You can't have it all." An important source of this is the tabloid press, whose low-grade nagging hostility to successful and independent women is expressed in a constant drip-drip of features such as the notorious "Executive Tarts" sequence.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge the deep and often intractable difficulties that working women with families face, the never-permanently-soluble conflict between the duties at home and responsibilities at work, at least within the 15-year need-span of the average child. However much being at home with children may indeed be work, and hard labour at that, there remains a bedrock conviction in many souls that the "natural" or true state of womanhood is "not working," at least not for money, and not outside the home. Adults are not the only ones to feel this way. As Nora Ephron, author of Heartburn and Sleepless in Seattle, remarked: if your children could have you happy and successful in Hollywood or suicidal in the next room, they'd take the next room.

Feminists have been as reluctant to confront this as they have been to accept anything that could be used to beat women down-the female role in child abuse is another untouchable that comes to mind. But their silence may be hurting other women more than any honesty could. Somewhere along the line we have lost sight of what "having it all" means for women, a confusion that the Early Mothers never fell into themselves. "Of course you can have a marvellous career, a wonderful husband, three lovely children and a life as well," Shirley Conran is said to have enthused, "just not all at the same time." Today's formula of delaying childbirth to make "having it all" easier often seems to achieve the opposite, with the demands of the lovely kids and the fabulous career swelling simultaneously to fortissimo just as the social life hits its inexorable stride, the elderly parents begin to fail, and the wonderful husband starts eyeballing 23-year-olds as he kicks off into the mother of all mid-life crises. How have we arrived at a situation which makes such punishing demands on the brightest and best of our young professional women and gives them so little in the way of aid and support in return? Is it surprising that many a once clear and confident 20-year-old has turned into a 30 or 40 something whose internal refrain is "Jam tomorrow, never jam today!"

looking back on the 1970s generation of women who first demanded to "have it all" and then sketched out what it "all" could be (the love of a good man, children and a family life, work they adored, friendship, fun, the occasional trip to a film and a guilt-free existence to boot), their brave-new-world hope and shining faith are both staggering and touching. It's a huge agenda and, for some of us at least, should perhaps have come like Bertrand Russell's version of the Ten Commandments with the instruction, "Only three to be attempted." Has it been left to the new generation of post-feminist women to try to live this early vision in all its glory, only to find that, like so many utopias throughout history, it was all dreamed up by those who had no experience of what they were talking about, so it was all a fantasy?

Not all, I think. Enough women have dreamed the impossible dream and awoke to find themselves what they had dreamed (Margaret Hilda Roberts, Elizabeth Butler Sloss) to give hope and comfort to the rest. Women can and will win equal pay. Working hours of both men and women are likely to become easier in the future. It will become accepted that most children are born to couples, and that we must have more parity in parenting if we are to have children born at all. And men will, sooner or later (most likely later), accept that domestic labour entails not only a bit of hoovering and the odd dash round Sainsbury's, but cleaning the loos as well. They will also do it sooner if women will accept that theirs (or more likely their mothers') is not the only domestic standard, and that a bed can be made up without hospital corners and everything nicely tweaked.

Beyond the level of all the old feminist arguments and conventional explanations, a radical overhaul of the "having it all" formula is long overdue. Let us dispense with the argument of whether this was a crucial philosophical error of early feminist theory, or whether it represents a subtle but effective piece of media anti-feminism designed to defeat women's emancipation by overselling how straightforward "having it all" could be. Either way, there are too many women who are dancing like Grimm heroines to music which compels them never to slow down.

In the US, at least, there is welcome evidence of a counter-trend among women at the very top of the pile. According to a recent issue of Fortune magazine, women in business are suffering a mid-life crisis. But a survey of 300 women executives found this had virtually nothing to do with either children or the glass ceiling. Having fought so hard for men's jobs, these women have discovered (what most men knew already) that it is no fun working all hours for a big corporation, at least not when you're out of your 20s. They are now setting up their own small businesses, going back to college, switching from accountancy to carpentry, or travelling the world. The Fortune article found that even when women are primary breadwinners they are less hung up about it than men, and have been raised to expect a multi-dimensional career to include some combination of family, community and outside interests.

Perhaps here in Britain we are starting to follow the American example. The recent spate of departures and dismissals of high-flying women (Janet Street-Porter, Carmen Callil, Marcelle D'Argy Smith, Eve Newbold and Rosalind Gilmore) may be partly attributable to conventional prejudices, but perhaps some of them have just decided to "have it all" in a more unusual, eclectic way.

Other women, too, need to remember what it was that got them up on their feet and on to the dance floor in the first place. They need the space, time and encouragement to think clearly and decide honestly what "having it all" means for them-to realise that they no longer have to tick off every single item on the universal want-list in order to justify their existence, but simply need to choose what they do, in the order they do it, to stay sane, and to survive. Only those who have lived the St Vitus's dance of perpetual motion between home and work, family, friends and kids, know how little justice the vapid women's magazine phrase "juggling your life" does to the pain and the drain involved. When women, their families and their employers accept the simple truth that "having it all" was never intended to mean "doing it all," and all at the same time, and without adequate back-up or fair pay, then and only then will women be free in the way that feminism wants them to be.

Until the new world dawns, women will continue to gravitate to women-friendly employers, to be readier than men to strike out into self-employment, to limit child-bearing or to avoid it altogether, to seek institutional care for their elderly, and to break down under it all from time to time. Looking to the future, today's generation of women, once it has got its children off its hands, will be so formidably well-organised, so strongly motivated and so tempered in the fire of the struggle that future politicians should be quaking in their shoes. n