It is often said that men are becoming redundant. Women can get by without them, true enough; they always could, and often had to, and so can men without women, come to that. But where's the fun? When it comes to children, women have always had to manage as best they could, with or without men's help. It is very nice when a woman has a partner who will help out; but if there is no man around a woman will do it. She has to. There they are, the little howling dependent things, and you do what you can. Nature insists. This is less true the other way round; yet if women are not there, men will-because they have to-look after children. But there usually is a woman around, both because there are more women than men (or used to be) and because nature cuts in more savagely with women than with men. Men do bond, but less than women. It is more natural for men to drift off, driven by the selfish gene.
My own childhood is a case in point. My father left home when I was five and I was brought up in a women-only household. I went to a girls' school and seldom met any men. This went for lots of my friends too. The children of such homes usually consort with children in a similar situation. We mutually vetted one another, in the hope that others would understand our predicament: we were "not as others were." This was New Zealand in the 1930s, when mine was an unusual situation. By tradition most men worked; women stayed at home and envied them. But my mother was alone and supported us.
I was in touch with my father, though, and would visit and stay with him. He was a competent, good and charming doctor. We would often go out with him on his rounds. He lived in a rural area and didn't like to leave us behind. He was a remarkable man and I admired him.
He was always full of ideas. He once put on a production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt for the local people in a tiny little former gold-town. There was a group of energetic people in New Zealand at the time, bent on bringing drama to the outback. My father was always great fun. He was never a good provider or a useful and reliable member of "a family," but he was important to the community.
At the time men didn't see "parenting" as having much to do with them. In some ways, this was women's fault. Women of my mother's generation would say to men who stepped into the nursery and picked up the baby: "Oh, don't drop it!" Wilful driving out of the father meant that women's lives were more circumscribed than they are now.
Women ran the nursery and kitchen and men went out into the world and brought back news of what was going on. As a division of labour it was not all that bad for many women-perhaps even for most women. Women liked men to be providers-and still do, even if the state has to take over the role of those individual men who are absent. In myth, men were the effective ones but in practice women did everything-as they do in most societies. I don't think it has ever been different and I have given up insisting that women complain about it: it seems endemic to the female nature to do everything, and in men's nature to be idle and decorative. Show me a man having a bad time and I will show you a woman having a worse time. So let us get on with it. But women are changing their notion of what they require of men; which is why some say that there is a crisis in men's roles.
Women have always hoped to be able to do more for themselves. But while men controlled women's fertility, a woman's life was out of her hands. With the pill, the structure of society changed. Women gained control of their fertility; more were able to work and support themselves. Men fought back at first; through the 1960s and 1970s they were truly horrible to women and amazingly insulting to them. Women were not yet accustomed to speaking in public or being in charge; they were in the habit of presenting themselves as foolish creatures-and often were.
But then women got fed up with it; feminism arrived. Women began to be horrible to men in their turn. Gender, it turned out, was a two-way street. Women began to speak well of themselves and badly of men; they lost their capacity for adoration; and suddenly everything changed-attitudes, social structure and a technology fitted to female labour. Since the invention of the typewriter there had always been something bitsy and boring outside the home that women could do. So now women no longer needed men for support as much as they used to.
There are demographic factors, too. There are now more men than women. If men want sexual partners they are in a client situation, as women often used to be-especially after wars. Men who survived had a large pool of women to choose from. Women had to compete to please men; now men have to compete to please women.
All this has led to a turnaround in relations between men and women. A gender switch has occurred, which was not quite what women wanted. Women are now as nasty to men, and as rejecting of them, as men were to women. We have seen a switch from patriarchy to a form of matriarchy; from Father God and wicked witches to Mother Nature and abusing fathers. We have therapy-the whole healing-by-talking business which is anti-rational and traditionally female and has divisive effects on families and society inasmuch as it is part of the trend to put the blame on others. Then there is a new belief about who we are. We have New Labour, a touchy-feely form of politics, caring and sharing. In our former religions there was a sense of sin: you were born imperfect, striving to be good. Now there is a sense that we are all born perfect-bright, beautiful, intelligent-and if we are not, somebody is to blame. Our spouse. Our teacher. Someone.
We now need 10m extra houses because 28 per cent (rising to 30 per cent) of households consist of one person only-which seems to me not what people were designed for, nor what makes them happy. Feminism is only one element of this, but it may have triggered a whole lot of other things. What is cause and what is effect? What is the disease and what is the symptom? Perhaps we are still too close to be able to say.
Whatever the links may be, our lives have been changed as a result of the feminisation of our culture. Women are affected as well as men-perhaps even more so. Many now prefer not to have children, which they may regret when they get to their 60s and 70s. But who at 30 ever thinks that they will get there, or if they do, that they will regret their decision? Some women will come to feel it terribly; many won't, or will deny it. Today you see lots of women without children. They would not dream of having them; they are having far too nice a time. They look at women who do have children, who are having a terrible time, who don't have enough disposable income, and they feel sorry for them. The childless have good sex lives-but having children pulls marriages, partnerships, apart.
I used to think wilful childlessness was shocking. I used to have all kinds of virtuous feelings about having babies-that only by having them did you ever learn to be unselfish or discover who you were. Nowadays I could not think of one good reason for discovering who you were. Better to be blind.
More women are relying on their careers for satisfaction in life. This may be a mistake. Careers are very interesting until you are 30 or 35; then they begin to fall because other, younger people can do more or better than you. You have done it all before, anyway. The point of the race is that all but one get left behind. What happens to the others? At the age of 50 most men still have the family, the history, the relations, the golden wedding party to come. Women who remain single don't have that. They have their friends. But friendships go, just like marriages do.
I have many friends like this. They get to a certain age and sometimes they are very successful and sometimes they are not. And then they wish they had not had that abortion; they wish they had married this man, that man; they wish they had not been so picky. But you also meet married women of the same age who say: "Oh, I wish I had never had that son. What a terrible waste of orange juice!" or "I have been married to this terrible man all my life. I wish I were you and unencumbered." I think a lot of this is temperamental. We want what we don't have. But I should think that by the time a woman gets to 50 or 60 it is better to have had children than not.
It is impossible to say how things will turn out. It may lead to a new role for men, or for those who can adapt to what women want. There was a revolution-a feminist revolution. Society has been turned upside down and, as happens after any revolution, you lose a generation. We have become self-centred while we mill around one another, inventing new social structures and trying to create new ways of living and being.
The generation of women which comes after us may well look at those without children, these barren twigs on the tree of life, this stunted growth, and cry: "Not for us! Let me have six children and you, husband, go out to work or, indeed, you look after the children and I am going out to work." These people might manage to marry in new ways-as young people are beginning to-with gentler men marrying confident women who are good at earning, while men look after the babies and are perfectly happy. This is already happening. If you go to the school gate you see men waiting and gossiping; if you go to the shops you see men with babies.
If my father were living in Britain now he would be like my son Daniel, who is making and producing films and is also a good family man. But then he is married to a woman who will allow him to be a father. Dan is a born impresario, but he is also dedicated to his children. Today's society allows men to be involved in parenting. Because my son lives in a different culture, he is a reasonable provider and an involved father. Women want this now, and so do men. This is, I hope, the way society will settle down after so much turmoil and strife.
