The Care Dilemma (eBook)

Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality

David Goodhart (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
304 Seiten
Forum (Verlag)
978-1-80075-362-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Family life has changed dramatically over the past 60 years. Greater choice and autonomy, especially for women, and a more equal domestic sphere have brought great gains for human freedom. However, argues David Goodhart, there have been losses and unintended consequences too -  in family instability, children's declining mental health, and the ever-rising demands on the welfare state and social care system. Sharply falling birthrates also present major challenges. For many people, especially in the bottom half of the income spectrum, the costs are now too high. The Care Dilemma argues that we need a new policy settlement that supports gender equality while also recognising the importance of stable families and community life, and that sees having children as a public as well as private good.

David Goodhart is Head of Demography at the think tank Policy Exchange. He is a former Director of Demos, and former Editor of Prospect magazine, which he founded in 1995. David is a prominent figure in public debate in the UK, a well-known broadcaster, author, commentator and journalist, and a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Care Dilemma is the third in a trilogy of books examining where contemporary Western societies are out of kilter - following the Sunday Times-bestselling The Road to Somewhere and Head Hand Heart.

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1

The Road Home

Freedom is a great horse to ride, but you have to know your destination.

Matthew Arnold

The domestic realm – the family, the household, our private lives – has undergone dramatic change in the past 60 years. That change has often pitched sex equality and care for the dependent young and old against one another. This book explores ways to reduce that tension not by pushing back against equality but by raising the status and value of the traditionally female realms of care.

To help think about the issue dispassionately, consider it an investment problem: how can we invest enough in the things we say we want (having and caring for children, and the best possible care for chronically ill and disabled people and the growing army of the elderly) while maximising the choices and opportunities open to men and especially women – including, in some cases, the right not to care?

This book touches on many big, often personal themes: the family, parenting, declining fertility, the epidemic of mental fragility, childcare, care of older people, the social care system. What links these themes is that they are all connected to an undervaluing of the domestic realm, and the aptitudes for care and attention associated with it.

Women’s autonomy and financial independence has been the biggest step forward in human freedom in high income countries since 1945. This advance is of course welcome, but along with other more general advances in individual freedom it has had unintended consequences for family life.

There is no ‘golden age’ of family life to return to, but few people welcome the fact that by their early teens nearly half of children in the UK no longer live with both of their biological parents. Moreover, many women, and men, continue to derive great meaning and satisfaction from the domestic realm. They regret the fact that recent family policy has been focused on making it as easy as possible for both parents to spend more time at work.

This is an area of public policy with one of the biggest mismatches between the priorities of the political class and public opinion. As I finished writing this book, the last UK government (with full support from the new one) was unrolling a big expansion of state support for childcare outside the home for children as young as nine months, at a cost of around £4 billion a year – a policy that will be especially valuable to families with two parents working full-time. But two parents working full-time while raising preschool children is the preference of less than 10% of the British public.1

This tendency to undervalue the domestic realm is, to borrow the terminology of my last two books, an ‘Anywhere’ bias. In , my 2017 book on populism, I described an emerging divide in the world view of two ‘ideal types’: highly educated (and often mobile) people who see the world from anywhere, and more rooted (and usually less well-educated) people who see the world from somewhere.

‘Anywheres’ tend to be comfortable with change, autonomy and openness. They find meaning and identity in educational and professional success. Though a minority, Anywheres have dominated British society since the 1990s. ‘Somewheres’, by contrast, have identities shaped more by geographical location and social group. They have been discomforted by many aspects of the Anywhere world view and their resistance has contributed to disruptions in our recent politics, notably Brexit.

In a second book, (2020), I described how the Anywhere focus on one form of human aptitude, analytical intelligence, has made the mainly non-graduate Somewheres, who often earn a living with their practical abilities or emotional intelligence, feel like second-class citizens. My claim is that the merit in meritocracy is too narrowly defined around cognitive contribution. There are other ways to live a successful life than academic higher education followed by professional work in the knowledge economy.

is the third book in my Anywhere–Somewhere trilogy. It can be read completely independently of the first two books but, like those earlier ones, it dwells on aspects of modern Britain that tend to be occluded by the public realm and career-orientated Anywhere world view.

To answer the implicit question in the subtitle about how we can care enough in the age of sex equality, I will explore four consequences of our reduced investment in nurture, in both the private and public realm. These are:

1. Less family stability and the consequent rising cost of the social state

2. The mental fragility epidemic among young people

3. The rapidly falling birth rate

4. The recruitment crisis in many face-to-face care jobs.

The first two themes – the less stable family and the mental fragility epidemic – feature strongly in the first five chapters, which focus on the family revolution and the fallout from it, while the other two themes, the falling birth rate and the recruitment crisis in care jobs, are covered in the two middle chapters. The final three chapters draw the threads together and offer some directions of travel.

I have also drawn inspiration from two quotations that have helped to frame my thinking, from, as it happens, two American women academics at different ends of the political spectrum. The first concerns the care versus sex equality tension and is expressed, in the cold language of economics, by conservative academic Amy Wax: ‘Care is today undersupplied because more than most activities it generates “positive externalities” – that is, positive benefits for society – that do not flow to the caregiver. This creates a mismatch between effort and reward that used to be solved by restricting women’s opportunities to do anything else. Having relaxed those restrictions, we do not have an alternative solution, and are today living with the consequences.’2

The second is from Anne-Marie Slaughter, former adviser to Hillary Clinton, who wants us to think about equality in a less public realm-focused way: ‘My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did… Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men, but as we attain that power we must not automatically accept the traditional man’s view, actually the view of a minority of men, about what matters.’3

I am aware that as a man I have limited direct experience of some of the things I am writing about. When it came to caring for my own four children when they were younger, or for my elderly parents before they died, I played a subordinate role to, respectively, my ex-wife and my female siblings. But these are issues that are central to the future of our society, and men are entitled to views about a better balance between the domestic and public spheres just as much as women are.

While writing this book I had an exchange with a well-known academic who premised her comments about an earlier draft of this introduction by saying: ‘There is a really loud dog whistle that women should go back to hearth and home.’ As a man I am bound to attract such comments. And writing about these themes partly from the outside does, indeed, require me to take careful note of what women, of many different opinions, write and say about them. But to be clear, I do not think women should be returned to ‘hearth and home’. I don’t want anybody to go back anywhere. This is a forward-looking book. And it will be obvious to readers who are familiar with their work that I have been influenced by the unorthodox British feminists Louise Perry and Mary Harrington.

This is not an argument between today and the 1950s. It is an argument between a minority of people like my academic critic, whom I call the , and their main counterparts, the . Egalitarians believe that men and women are not only equal but fully interchangeable. They believe that family structure is largely irrelevant to people’s life chances, the falling birth rate doesn’t matter, and that the gender division of labour is an anachronism.

Balancers, on the other hand, embrace equality but worry more about the consequences – for women, men and especially children – of unstable family life, regret the diminished domestic sphere and the shrinking family, and want to reform rather than abolish the gender division of labour.

The future that might flow from the logic of our current arrangements is one of maximum individual freedom and minimum obligation to others. Reproduction, if it happens at all, will largely be left to technology, with sex differences dwindling. People will lead increasingly autonomous, screen-based lives, largely unencumbered by emotional connection.

There is a different future that re-embraces the strenuous joys of multiple-child families, better values face-to-face care work in the public economy, rewards nurturing work in the home and allows men and women to balance more fairly their respective contributions in both the private and public realms in a spirit of mutual obligation.

No, I replied to my academic acquaintance, I do not advocate a return to a pre-1960s world. However, I do want society to attach greater value to ‘hearth and home’. This is not a dog whistle – the opinion data tells me that most women and men want this too.

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Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 24.10.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
• Schlagworte: birth rate • Care • Childcare • Divorce • Domestic • Family • family breakdown • Feminism • marriage • Single Parents • two-parent family
• ISBN-10: 1-80075-362-4 / 1800753624
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80075-362-4 / 9781800753624