When ever people ask what is Prospect's political line, I usually say something about a realistic, small-"L" liberalism. If I'm feeling more expansive I might mention a special interest in the conflicts and contradictions of progress—liberalism's dark side. My "Too Diverse?" essay of two years ago on the tension in modern societies between diversity and solidarity named one of liberalism's "progressive dilemmas." Alison Wolf's cover piece identifies another: the unintended consequences of female emancipation. Wolf is herself a professor at an elite university, so is hardly suggesting that the great advances in equality of the past 100 years should be rolled back. What she is proposing is an unsentimental evaluation of the losses to society when women, especially educated ones, choose work over family. One of the reasons the female labour market story has appeared so unambiguously positive over recent decades is the buried assumption that women were not really doing anything of value when they were working mainly in the home. Wolf quotes the American economist Shirley Burggraf, who has noted the strange alliance on this issue between feminists and market economists: the former see domestic labour as performed under patriarchal duress, the latter do not consider labour in the home at all because it is not paid and so does not contribute to GDP.
Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as to the raising of the next generation, and yet our society steers educated women away from childbearing. So much is well known. What has been less noticed is the loss to the public services (and to volunteering) of the most talented women, who are now busy competing with men in the private sector. Moreover, for the past 200 years industrial societies have drawn on a specifically female service ethic, often underpinned by religious belief, which now seems increasingly outdated. We badly need to find a substitute for the next 200.
