Survey: male provider role unchanged in 35 years

The male provider role is still going strong in Australia. Bettina Arndt has discussed some research data which shows that the amount of paid work undertaken by women has barely changed since the mid-1970s.

It's true that female workforce participation rates have risen since the 1960s from 33% to 58%. But that includes women working only a few hours a week and those unemployed but looking for work. But when it comes to full-time work there has been no significant change:

One of the most stubborn characteristics of the Australian workforce is women's rejection of full-time work. The Australian National University economist Bob Gregory sums up the data: ''Despite the rapid increase in education levels, despite large changes in social attitudes towards married women working in the labour market, despite large increases in labour market rewards and despite increased labour market involvement, the proportion of women 15 to 59 employed full time is much the same as it was 35 years ago.''

Nor have women's part-time work hours increased much:

women's weekly part-time working hours show very little overall rise - barely an hour over 30 years.

The conclusion drawn by Arndt is that husbands are being unfairly castigated for not doing a larger proportion of unpaid work when women have not increased their proportion of paid work.

The response from the female readers is interesting. Some agree that the paid and unpaid work balances out:

In my own household my husband earns 95% of the income (working very long hours) and does 5% of the unpaid housework/child care. I earn 5% of the income and happily do 95% of the unpaid housework/child care.

But then one woman had this ungrateful thought toward her own husband:

Yes Bettina, my husband plays on his iPad on the long commute. Likewise his long lunch is a "work-related activity". Do you really think this tripe helps men? You may like to consider that reading your articles makes many women feel very stabby towards them.

Another took the PC line that there are no natural preferences at work but that it's all due to socialisation:

you do not discuss why women are 'rejecting' full-time work. (No, it's not because as a female I am 'biologically hardwired' to be a snuggly nurturer all my life.) You do not go into any of the cultural or social background which could lead to such a rejection.

But most of the comments, from men and women, agree with Arndt - and that's in a newspaper with a largely lefty readership:

Reader 1: At last, someone tells the truth of what I see around me and what my own experience is. Why would I have kids and spend all week working and commuting?

Reader 2: Arndt's comments are absolutely true. Many academics and journalists are determined to trot out the party line on women and work, ignoring the clear evidence to the contrary. For example, did the media ever pick up on the obvious fact that ABC childcare went broke because contrary to the rhetoric, there is not an enormous unmet need for childcare in Australia, other than in affluent inner urban areas? Childcare centres in the suburbs and the urban fringe, where the majority of kids live, have plenty of spaces, because most of the children's mothers are not working or working in ways that still allow them to care for their children. You never hear this story because it doesn't match the approved story we are meant to be telling.

Reader 3: I generally agree with your article. Put simply, any women I know of about my age (mid 30's) in a relationship with children either do not work, or at least do not work full time. Nor do they seem to be ever intending to work full time again.

My conclusion? Women can be hypercareerist in their 20s and that can be demoralising to their male peers. The men ask themselves why they should bother trying to keep up when society doesn't want them as providers anyway. But the female hypercareerism doesn't last in the large majority of cases.

I've seen that happen many times. I've seen strongly feminist women who have sworn over and over that they weren't maternal types suddenly get jack of it all, pressure their boyfriends into marriage, have a child and quit their jobs.

So one conclusion is that men shouldn't accept that the male provider role is redundant. It's not by a long way.

But there's one more conclusion to draw. Even on the right there is often an assumption that women's greatest aim in life is to be a full-time careerist. Therefore, if you support the traditional family you might be criticised for trying to impose a masculine bias on women or trying to support a policy that women will rise up against collectively.

But the reality seems to be that even after decades of the state and the political class trying to impress a careerist world view on women, that most women aren't buying into it - that they really do want to focus on their families and that they don't see full-time careerism as the path to self-actualisation.

So I don't think traditionalists have much to lose in supporting the traditional family. We can afford to be a bit flexible when it comes to female workforce participation; all that we really need to do as a minimum is to continue to uphold the male provider role in society.

Responding to Greer's rage

Germaine Greer has published an essay, On Rage, in which she blames white men for the domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.

The essay is yet another example of an ethnic double standard. Greer is a radical liberal in her attitude to white Australian society, but a traditionalist when it comes to Aborigines.

For instance, Greer complains that the effect of white society on Aborigines has been to set men and women against each other and to undermine the traditional male role, thereby marginalising Aboriginal men within the family. This, she argues, has fostered the rage of Aboriginal men which then leads to domestic violence.

Greer quotes an Aboriginal woman who laments that,

Our communities are like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other. (p.56)

Greer also voices disapproval of the effects of government welfare in increasing the autonomy of Aboriginal women to the detriment of the male role within the family:

The fact that government welfare payments are often made to women ... means that more and more women can live independently of men, and are doing so.

... When hunter-gatherer societies begin to break down, it is invariably the gatherers, the women, who combine to hold them together, but in doing so they further marginalise their menfolk, including their own sons. (pp.75,76)

To give you some idea of how Greer treats the Aboriginal family and the male role within it, here is part of her discussion of the issue:

According to anthropologists RM and CH Berndt, traditionally "the most cherished possessions of men were women, children and their sacred heritage," in that order ... The Aboriginal man's wife was not simply a woman he met by chance and fancied, but a kinswoman ... it is the level of avoidance which signifies just how fundamental, how absolutely shattering this loss and humiliation must be. (pp.56,57)

It's curious to find a Western feminist writing in this vein. After all, Greer led a movement to achieve in her own society the very things she is so dismayed occurred in Aboriginal society.

Take the complaint that Aboriginal societies have been left "like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other".

This view of society, in which men and women are set against each other, is built into the feminist theory championed by Greer. In feminist patriarchy theory, men are believed to have organised a power structure in society in order to protect an unearned privilege gained at the expense of oppressed women.

In this world view, the traditional male role within the family is a source of oppression to be overthrown; men are motivated by a desire to assert power over women; women must therefore compete with men for money, power and status.

Millions of Western girls have been brought up to follow this world view, almost like a religion.

The more radical feminists even go so far as to assume that men, by having organised society to oppress women, must be assumed to hate women. Greer herself, in her influential book The Female Eunuch, goes to great lengths to describe male hatred of women.

Nor has Greer overcome this negative view of men. As I'll describe a little later, Greer is all too ready to vilify white men in her essay on rage - the same essay in which she laments the setting apart of Aboriginal men and women.

It's a similar story when it comes to the issue of autonomy. Greer is terribly concerned that Aboriginal men have been emasculated and marginalised by the decline in their provider role (and in their leadership role); this may have made Aboriginal women more independent, but to the overall loss of cohesiveness of Aboriginal communities.

Yet it is exactly a radical individual autonomy which has been most keenly sought by Western feminists, regardless of the larger consequences to society.

There is another aspect to Greer's ethnic double standard. Greer is a traditionalist in wanting Aborigines to survive as a people, as an ethny. For example, when she discusses the problem of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, she is concerned not with issues of patriarchy or gender equity, but with the survival of Aborigines as a race:

What is now undeniable is that violence towards women and children across the same spectrum has reached the level of race suicide. (p.91)

When Greer writes about Aborigines, traditional attachments are held to matter. She tells us that Aborigines have lost "what makes any human life worth living". What does she include in this category? Well, she holds that Aborigines have lost "all the important things" including "their families, their social networks, their culture, their religion, their languages and their self-esteem". Furthermore, Aborigines, instead of living in their own tribes, have been forced to amalgamate and live in "polyglot assemblages" (pp.30, 31).

So for Greer it is a terrible fate for Aborigines to live in "polyglot assemblages" as this destroys "what makes any human life worth living". Yet isn't "polyglot assemblage" just another term for "diversity". Is Greer willing to apply her principle to Westerners, just as she does for Aborigines?

I suspect not, as Greer vilifies whites frequently throughout her essay. She claims that Judy Atkinson "puts it as delicately as she can" when she writes of "marauding white males" (p.58); she uses terms like "Australian racists"; she claims that the rape of Aboriginal children by white men "prevailed on a massive scale across the continent, wherever the white man penetrated, in the words of Strehlow's superior, "all the time"" (pp.49-51); she writes too that "From the beginning of white contact in the 1780s ... the white man has considered Aboriginal women his for the taking" (pp. 39-40).

At the end of the essay, the derogatory treatment of whites hits a low point: she uses the term "Whitey" in an openly hostile way:

People now talk of establishing an annual sorry day, as if it would do Whitey good to remind himself how magnanimous he was on 13 February 2008. More useful would be an annual angry day, when Whitey would get reminded of just what he has done for Australia. (pp.97-98)

Little concern here for the "self-esteem" of her own race, despite having previously described it as one of the qualities "that makes any human life worth living".

What is happening here with Germaine Greer? The key thing is that Greer cares about Aboriginal society. She identifies with it and wants it to survive as a distinct entity. Therefore she does not apply liberal concepts to it. She takes instead a traditionalist view.

It's important to understand this, so I'll rephrase it. Here we have a leading figure of left-liberalism, who has expressed on many occasions her alienation from her own tradition and her concern for Aboriginal society. It is no coincidence that she pushes liberalism on her own tradition but refrains from doing so when it comes to Aboriginal society. She wishes to conserve Aboriginal society and therefore takes a conservative, rather than a liberal, stance toward it.

So the question then is why she cares for the survival of Aboriginal society but not her own. I can only speculate as to the reasons why.

Perhaps it has to do with a certain understanding of equality widespread on the left. If you assume that our status as humans depends on our autonomy (our power to enact our will), then an imbalance of power means that some people are human at the expense of others. Therefore, you have to either accept that some people aren't fully human (not a palatable option) or else claim that the inequality in the balance of power is the result of an unjust, unnatural, "racist" organisation of society. The group doing the oppression then loses its legitimacy - its moral status.

As whites were the dominant group for a period of time, it's easy for the left to regard them as the illegitimate, oppressive party - and to prefer to identify instead with a non-dominant minority.

Greer has, in fact, throughout her life identified with an ethnic minority. As a young woman she chose to believe that she was Jewish, despite little evidence of Jewish ancestry. More recently she has sought an Aboriginal identity; in one essay (Whitefella Jump Up, 2003) she wrote of Australians declaring themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation".

In her essay on rage she also emphasises the powerlessness of Aborigines ("utterly powerless"), whereas white society is represented by "racist authorities". It fits the framework of a majority organised illegitimately around the oppression of a powerless minority.

The framework itself deserves to be criticised: it assumes that human equality is contingent and is to be measured by an autonomous power to enact our will; it makes any majority tradition illegitimate; and it falsely assumes that a majority tradition is organised primarily as an act of oppressive dominance over others.

The framework also distorts Greer's understanding of the real situation. She seems to believe that whites are so powerful that their existence can be assumed to be perfectly secure, whereas Aborigines are so powerless they are on the brink.

If anything, the position of Aborigines is advancing, whilst that of whites is declining. Aborigines are becoming more numerous; there is an increasing amount of land set aside permanently for their own use; they are free to celebrate their own existence and there are considerable government funds at their disposable to organise themselves as a community.

In contrast, whites have declining birth rates; are being relegated to minority status throughout the West by immigration; and do not have the same freedom to celebrate their own existence.

That Greer doesn't see this suggests to me that she is still working through the theory I described above. The distance of this theory from reality, and the double standard it encourages in Greer's own writing, are reasons for younger Australians to question the politics of an older generation of left-liberals.

Rebecca West: A house of one's own

I've read a few more chapters of the biography of Rebecca West. If you recall she was a British feminist and socialist writer, who, at the end of my first instalment, had agreed to become the mistress of H.G. Wells.

In short, she then fell pregnant and decided to keep the baby, a son named Anthony. Wells was unfaithful to her (if you can be unfaithful to a mistress), but the relationship continued for many years. She became well-known as a reviewer and wrote several novels. There was a messy break up with Wells, followed by affairs with a newspaper magnate, Max Beaverbrook, and several Americans, including Charlie Chaplin. She had a nervous breakdown and consulted a psychiatrist. At age 38 she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews.

I can't in a short post like this attempt a universal critique of this stage of her life. All I aim to do is to pluck out a few themes that are of interest to me as a conservative.

The first theme is straightforward. It is striking just how privileged Rebecca West was as a writer. There is an idea at large that women artists were held down by a male dominated society and lacked a room of their own to create their art. This view doesn't hold true in the case of Rebecca West.

She began as a radical writer who wrote scathingly of male authors such as Wells and Ford Madox Ford. These male writers responded sympathetically to her and used their connections to promote her work. When Rebecca West became pregnant, Wells set her up in a house, with a nurse, two servants and a housekeeper.

She was paid handsomely for her literary work; receiving at one time, for instance, a guaranteed payment of $10,000 from Cosmopolitan magazine. In the 1920s and 30s, she travelled the world, taking frequent trips to New York and holidays in tourist resorts in Italy and France.

She lived better then as a writer and single mother than would most upper middle-class couples of today.

The second theme concerns her love life. There is an obvious disparity between Rebecca West's political beliefs as a feminist and socialist and what she instinctively was drawn to in her relationships with men.

She was a socialist and yet she was romantically attracted to wealthy, powerful men. First there was H.G. Wells and then later the newspaper magnate Max Beaverbrook. When she jumped ship (so to speak) she justified the move on the basis that Beaverbrook was the more masculine, unreconstructed kind of man. She wrote a novel in which the character based on Wells is described negatively as a "more recent, more edited kind of man". The Wells character is rejected as being too intellectual and sensitive compared to the more direct and unfiltered masculinity of Beaverbrook.

Nor was Rebecca, in her own love life, content with the feminist goal of independence. She could have lived independently as a single mother with a good income. We are told in the biography, though, that "Rebecca yearned for male companionship and marriage". She seems to have sought out a strong, protective type of man; the biography says of her marriage that:

... Rebecca revered Henry. He was a man who would take on any burden for her sake - a strong man, physically active ... Rebecca could do things for herself, but oh what a pleasure to have Henry do them for her, especially with such loving grace.

She praised her husband too for his emotional support, for being "So sensible when it's needed, and so insensible when that's needed."

In the early 1930s, Rebecca met the French writer Anais Nin. Both women expressed a preference for strong men:

Neither Rebecca nor Anais liked what they termed weak men. Rebecca was especially harsh on what she called pansies.

So whereas feminism leans toward female independence and non-traditional gender roles, Rebecca West in her personal life needed a relationship with a man and was attracted to strong, protective, "unedited", masculine men. Rather than the personal being the political, there was a major, unexplained disparity between the two in Rebecca's life.

The third theme is more difficult to explain. I'll have to introduce it in the broadest of terms. There have been three important "conversations" in European culture. One is the materialistic, naturalistic, scientific one. Another is the formal religious one, marked by a Christian concern for individual salvation through the avoidance of sin. The third conversation is also spiritual, but not tied formally to religion or theology or to salvation or sin; it is a conversation on what impressed the European mind as being of spiritual meaning or worth in life.

We are used now to the materialistic conversation dominating what we discuss and in what terms. The Christian conversation is still there, but cordoned off to a minority of the population. The third conversation is now almost entirely lost to us, even though it was once as prominent as the other two.

What is also striking is that there is so little crossover now between the conversations. It was once not unusual for an individual to hold all three realities together: a man could be a believing Christian, conversant in theology; he could at the same time recognise the reality of the material world, and be educated in the scientific processes describing this world; and still again take part in a conversation about the role of character or moral virtue in the spiritual life of man.

And here's the thing. When I read books about the radicals of the early twentieth century, I recognise immediately what I dislike about their politics. At the same time, though, it's hard not to notice that even the radicals of the time were usually more embedded in all three of the European conversations than an ordinary, conventional man of today. In this sense, they were still more cultured, in spite of their political radicalism.

Rebecca West is no exception. Yes, she did have her materialistic side, sometimes taken too far. She wrote, for instance, a book outlining a theory of art which appears to reduce art to a kind of scientific experiment on the human mind:

She has to work terribly hard at showing how Pavlov's experiments with dogs resemble the artist's experiments with humanity, since each, she believes, carries on a methodical inquiry into the mind that has advanced knowledge.

One reviewer, Edward Garnett, criticised her "materialistic confusions" and even H.G. Wells, more technocratic in his thinking than most, thought the book "ought to have music by Stravinsky":

And religion? We learn that:

Rebecca occasionally attended Catholic services, finding in ritual "a picture of spiritual facts which human language still finds it difficult to express adequately". She admired the spiritual discipline the church inculcated in its members.

We learn too that Rebecca found:

her own touchstone in St Augustine, the great Church father whom she had been reading since her teens ... Rebecca employed Augustine's belief in original sin as a symbol of the neuroses that made a mockery of free will ...

Finally, as you would expect of a well-educated, cultured woman of the time, Rebecca also participated in the third great conversation, the one turning on what was found to be of spiritual worth in life. She described herself at one point as being "interpenetrated with interests of the soul and the intellect". She admired other women for their beauty, grace and nobility. She praised D.H. Lawrence for being,

intent on revealing the spirituality of human beings even as the England of his day was "swamped in naturalism".

I'm not claiming that Rebecca West was especially adept at holding the three conversations in balance. It does seem clear, though, that she was able to participate in each, to a degree that would be rare for an intellectual of our own times. And I admire her for it. She still had something that we have lost.

The family is not a technology

If a mother is to spend time with her new born child she needs to be materially provided for. How does a society arrange this? Traditionally, the husband worked to provide for his family. Now it is assumed that the mother should be provided for by a centralised system of maternity benefits.

Why the change? Up to now, I've focused my answer on liberal autonomy theory. This theory holds that autonomy is the overriding good, that paid work is the key to autonomy and that women should therefore gain maternity leave through their labour force participation.

Does this really explain why we are shifting to a system of centralised, bureaucratic maternity leave? The strength of this analysis is that it is how maternity leave is argued for in the documents. If you read the reports on maternity leave, it is usually argued for on the grounds of female autonomy and labour force participation.

However, there's probably more to it. There was an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun yesterday which reported that certain mothers' groups want all women, including those at home, to be paid maternity leave by the Government:

MOTHERS' groups and women's organisations have called for paid maternity leave for all women, even those not in paid employment at the time of pregnancy.

The Women's Action Alliance, speaking yesterday at the Productivity Commission's inquiry into paid maternity and parental leave, said maternity leave should be inclusive and funded by government.

Lisa Brick, national secretary of the WAA, said current maternity leave schemes excluded many women, including mothers at home, casual and contracted workers, unemployed and recently employed women, and those who were self-employed.

She said some models for maternity leave were too tied to the workplace and meant women often felt compelled to return before they were ready.

"We often wonder why there is this focus on getting mothers back to work when the youth employment rate is still around 15 per cent," Ms Brick said ...

The WAA said maternity leave could be initially funded by combining the baby bonus and Family Tax Benefit B, which spread over the course of a year would work out to around $318 per fortnight.

Ms Brick said an early return to work hampered women's ability to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months -- a view backed by the Australian Breastfeeding Association, who spoke at the inquiry later in the day.

ABA president Margaret Grove said government-funded maternity leave for all women, not just those in paid work, would help the duration of breastfeeding.

"We would like six months' paid maternity leave, government-paid, for all women. It would be for everybody, as the baby bonus is currently for everybody," she said.

So even those organisations which don't tie motherhood to the workplace immediately assume that mothers should be provided for through a centralised, bureaucratic scheme run by the state. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the traditional means of supporting mothers, the one that has been around for millennia, is not even argued against - it simply doesn't seem to register as an option in people's minds. During the entire maternity leave debate in this country I'm not aware of a single public figure who has suggested that husbands might work to support their wives.

What might explain this? The American traditionalist Jim Kalb recently published an interesting document in which he explains the origins of a modern technological mindset. Kalb argues that the view of reason adopted by the West is too limited:

The modern understanding of reason is radically defective, because it takes a fragment of reason, scientific reason, and treats it as the whole.

The Western view of reason, scientism, is based on a sceptical view of what can be known, with the purpose of knowledge being limited to what in practice gives power to achieve an end:

On the scientistic view, we can know only the things that modern natural science knows: things that can be observed and measured by any trained observer who follows the appropriate procedures, and things that are connected to observations by a theory that makes predictions and so can be tested, and is as simple, mathematical, and consistent with other accepted theories as possible. Since those are the only things we know, those are the only things we can treat as real.

Anything beyond that is not knowledge at all. It’s opinion or feeling or taste or prejudice. It doesn’t relate to anything real. Knowledge of the good and beautiful is not knowledge. Contemplation is not knowledge. Knowledge is experimental and oriented toward control ...

The result of this scientistic view of reason is a technologically-ordered world, in which the methods of the modern natural sciences are applied to political, social and moral affairs. The aim is to supply the satisfaction of wants according to a clear, efficient, universal system administered by experts.

You can see how the traditional, family-based method of providing for a mother fails to fit into such an outlook. It is not an application of science or technology to a social question to generate an identifiable and testable "policy", but a decentralised, non-expert method of provision based on qualities difficult to measure, standardise or control, such as instincts and emotions.

The strength of Kalb's analysis is that explains why the traditional practice, as significant as it is, fails to register in terms of public debate. People don't feel comfortable defending it in policy terms because even the pro-family people think something else is expected when discussing social issues.

It's another case of conservatives being too compliant with the settings of a liberal society. If we agree to those settings we will always lose. The terms of policy debate might be rendered technocratic by the modern Western understanding of reason, but that doesn't mean that conservatives should fall in line and limit debate to what appears acceptably technocratic.

We distinguish ourselves best when we state: the family is not a technology. It is an intensely human institution, in its nature not reducible to technocratic control. We should allow the natural, interconnected forms of family relationships to flourish, and be willing to defend them even in the setting of a technologically-ordered world.

The state vs the male provider

In Britain and in Sweden the state is undermining the efforts of men to be providers for their families.

In Britain a typical couple on a low or middle income would be $148 a week better off if they split up and lived separately. This takes into account the costs of running separate households:

Three out of four ordinary families would be better off living apart than sharing a home under Labour's benefits system.

Tax credits and benefits are increasingly skewed towards single mothers, a study has shown.

A typical couple on a low or middle income would be £69 a week better off if they lived apart. For some families, such as those with one child and a wife who stays at home, the premium would be almost £100 a week [$214].

In Sweden, there has long been a system of paid parental leave. It is, as you would expect, mostly taken up by mothers rather than fathers. Mothers choosing to stay home with their babies is considered to be an oppressive gender inequality in Sweden, so a "gender equality bonus" is being introduced in which families will be paid up to $526 a month extra if the parental leave is split evenly between fathers and mothers.

The Moderate Party of PM Fredrik Reinfeldt wants to push the concept further, and pay out additional equality bonuses to men who choose to work part time or who stay home with sick children.

The Moderate Party proposals have met some resistance, from a leading newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:

Svenska Dagbladet compares the move to unnecessary 'social engineering' and admonishes the Moderates for undue meddling in decisions about how families divide their household responsibilities.

"Citizens are fully capable of deciding what's best for them on their own," it writes ...

In addition, the paper openly questions whether Swedish taxpayers would tolerate the measure.

"Citizens already pay inappropriately high taxes with impressive levels of tolerance because they expect basic services tailored to their needs, and not to be lectured by some 'gender equality police' who disapprove of their family's make up."

In Sweden, a man who sets out to be a good provider will find his efforts undercut by:

1) Having to pay an exorbitant share of his wages in tax.
2) His wife being supported to stay home by a paid maternity scheme rather than by his own wage.
3) Losing "equality bonuses" through his decision to go out to work.

And this is all in aid of an ideological belief that gender equality means men and women playing exactly the same role in the family.

I've written previously on the ideological basis for Swedish views on gender: The case against Sweden.

To read the views of a Swedish woman on these policies see Feminine rebellions: the Viking Princess.

What kind of marriage makes women happiest?

Modernist assumptions about marriage continue to unravel. Last week a major research project came to some "surprising" findings, namely that women are happier in traditional, gender-based marriages rather than the "egalitarian" (non-gendered) partnerships which they have been encouraged to embrace.

The starting point for the research project was the idea that what counts for women is the emotional quality of a marriage. It has been assumed that men will do more "emotional work" within a modernist "companionate" form of marriage, one in which the husband and wife share similar work and family responsibilities; in which husbands do not have distinctive paternal authority; and in which traditional concepts of masculinity are absent. (pp.1322-23).

The project's authors were aware, though, of research showing that traditional women were happier in their marriages than their modernist counterparts (p.1323). They therefore wanted to test a theory that what was missing in the modernist marriage was not so much traditional gender differentiation, but the institutional support for marriage available to more traditional women (such as from churches) and a focus on equity (a perception of justice in marital arrangements, even where roles differ) rather than equality (the same division of household roles).

The researchers did, in fact, find that institutional support and a focus on equity rather than equality improved the level of female satisfaction in marriage. However, these factors weren't enough to overcome the disadvantages of modernist "egalitarian" marriages. A traditional, gendered form of family life still produced the highest levels of female happiness within marriage.

Here are some of the results of the research project in the authors' own words:

Model 1 indicates that wives who hold egalitarian gender attitudes, who work parttime, and who take a larger share of the family breadwinning responsibilities are less happy. (p.1331)

Women who share high levels of church attendance and normative commitment with their husbands are happier than their peers. (p.1331)

... one reason that the companionate model has not gathered much institutional empirical support is that marital egalitarianism is also associated with lower levels of institutional commitment to marriage and with higher standards of equality, both of which seem to diminish women's chances of marital happiness. Nevertheless, even after controlling for institutional and equity factors, we still find no positive evidence for the companionate theory of marriage.

Indeed, Models 3 and 4 provide some support for the gender model of marriage insofar as women who earn a greater-than-average percentage of couple income ... and whose husbands take up a greater share of household labor report greater unhappiness. In other words ... women who live in marriages characterized by less gendered patterns of earning and housework are less happy in their marriages. (p.1331-32)

Contrary to expectations of the companionate theory, Model 1 of Table 4 indicates that women's gender role liberalism and women's labor force participation are associated with lower levels of women's happiness with the affection and understanding they receive from their husbands. (p.1332)

This last finding is especially noteworthy. The researchers did find strong evidence that female happiness in a marriage depends on the "emotion work" undertaken by husbands. However, contrary to expectations it was men in traditional marriages who did more such work and whose wives reported greater satisfaction with such work:

Men who are married to more traditional-minded women and to homemakers ... are more likely to devote themselves to spending quality time with their wives.

Table 5 is also significant because it provides additional evidence for the gender model of marriage and against the companionate model of marriage. Models 1 through 3 indicate that no measure of egalitarianism in practice or belief is associated with higher levels of men spending quality time with their wives. Indeed, in keeping with the gender model of marriage, wives' gender egalitarianism and work outside of the home leads to less positive emotion work on the part of husbands ...

Thus, consistent with the gender model of marriage, it would appear that women who are in marriages that are characterized by more traditional gender beliefs and practices are happier with the emotion work they receive and do receive more such emotion work from their husbands. (p.1337-38)

So take a bow traditional men! It seems that you combine longer hours at work, longer hours with your children and longer hours of quality time with your wives.

Finally, it's worth quoting a few of the researcher's conclusions. They remark, for instance, that:

adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also - surprisingly enough - to expressive patterns of marriage ...

We also find evidence for the institutional model of marriage, which stresses the importance of social and normative support for marriage. Wives who share high levels of church attendance are more likely to report happiness with their husband's emotion work in marriage ...

In conclusion, our results suggest that the road to successful "new families" is more circuitous and difficult than originally thought. While it is true that changes in men's behaviour are required for this transformation, it also appears that contemporary couples could benefit from a heightened appreication of the role that shared religious commitments and normative commitments to marriage play in supporting women's marital quality and the expressive dimension of marital life.

Our results also suggest that more traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender play a positive role in the quality and expressive character of many women's marriages ... (pp. 1341-42)

This still leaves the question of why traditional marriages are happier on average than modernist ones, but I'll raise this for discussion in a later post.

The end of the wave?

Years ago I was browsing through a second hand bookshop and I found a pile of American magazines from the late 1940s. The lead column in one of these magazines was written by a female editor. The editor asked the question of whether feminism had really been worth it: worth the disruption to relationships, to family life and to motherhood. She answered no.

I wish now that I had bought the magazine for future reference. The article seems to mark a significant shift in attitude; it was, after all, at exactly this time that the very long phase of first wave feminism finally came to an end.

I wonder too if we have now reached a similar turning point. It's possible that the shorter, but more intense, wave of feminism which began in the early 1970s and peaked in Australia in 1994 is now really starting to turn.

Older feminists seem to have become disillusioned with the disruption caused by feminism to their own personal lives; instead of a stridently orthodox feminism it's now increasingly common for political women to reassert the traditional in relationships, or even to express regret at some of the effects of feminism on society.

I'll give two recent examples. Jill Singer is the resident left-wing columnist for the Melbourne Herald Sun (possibly in her mid 30s, though I'm not sure). In her recent article on masculinity (Latham Shot Down 02/20/06), there's a clear shift away from the usual feminist support for role reversal and raising empathetic men. Nor is there talk of traditional provider-type men being dinosaurs or oppressors. Instead we get this:

While there's a growing number of women fortunate to have supportive stay-at-home husbands, the majority probably still prefer their man to be a traditional bread-winner.

Just as men hanker for women who are more gorgeous but less clever than themselves, women will generally keep seeking men who can provide for their family in material terms.

I hear many women complain they feel dudded in their relationships, that gender equality means women's workload is made unbearable by both work and home duties.

Their husbands apparently benefit from their wife's income but don't put in more at home themselves.

We're not just talking about caring for children, but old-fashioned domestic duties that men used to do such as household repairs. Sure, there are lots of good handymen out there, but they're not married to anyone I know.

It's pretty sad hearing a bunch of educated, well-paid, busy working mothers fantasising about their husbands repairing a door hinge.

Women might melt at the sight of men who are good with children and doggies, but what really brings us undone is an old-style bloke who knows one end of a spanner from the other and black from red in a balance sheet.

... Snags are for nagging, not shagging.

What women really want, sugggests the very left-wing Jill Singer, is an "old-fashioned bloke" rather than a feminist new man.

Then there's the recent contribution of feminist novelist Fay Weldon. Now 75, she too has broken with the feminist orthodoxy of the past. Instead of promoting gender role reversal as a "liberation" for women, she now worries that,

many women are failing to accept that, hormonally and physiologically, they are programmed to experience life differently from men.

I think we need to make the most of being women as women, not aspirational men. The assumptions we all make now as to what comprises a good relationship are upside down. The differences between men and females are what we should be celebrating.

Fay Weldon even appears to feel some guilt for her own earlier feminism. A near death experience convinced her of the existence of an after life, but she wrote that "It is not all sweetness and light over there, at least it won't be for me." A journalist for the Melbourne Age sought clarification on this and asked her if she had a sense that she was being held responsible for doing something bad. She answered,

Yes. Because contempory culture is (partly) my fault. If you help shift the balance in gender, you feel a vague responsibility. Because at the time people shook their fists at you and walked out on you because you were doing that and they may have been right.

I'm not suggesting that feminism will go away entirely. There will still exist feminist academics and a layer of femocrats in government employment (just as there was in the 1950s).

But hopefully some space will open up for family formation, just as it did in the post-War period. If this does occur, the challenge then for conservatives will be to weaken the influence of the underlying liberalism which keeps generating fresh waves of feminism (when the personal costs have been forgotten).

The survey upsetting head-banging feminists

A British survey of 3000 young women has found a major disenchantment with the idea of female careerism.

The most revealing finding? Only 13% of young British women wish to be in full-time work when they turn 40.

Why have young women turned against full-time careers? The reason seems to be that they have observed their own mothers run themselves ragged trying to mix together a full-time career and motherhood. The daughters don't want to live that way and, sensibly enough, prefer the idea of part-time work or full-time homemaking.

Other interesting results of the finding were that:

Only 31% of women say they find their job fulfilling

75% want to get married before having a baby

If given the options of being a homemaker, a lady of leisure or a career woman, only 23% would prefer to be a career woman.

The editor of the New Woman magazine commented on these findings by saying that,

The New Man experiment embarked on with such enthusiasm by their mothers, simply hasn't worked. Young women think their mothers just ended up with two full-time jobs - work and home - while nagging their man to do more housework.

Young women today are more than happy to sort out the home as long as he provides the lifestyle they want...

The truth is, young women saw the blueprint their mothers and society had created for them and thought 'We can do better' ... They've watched their mothers exhaust themselves and want a better work/life balance. If this means that a young woman wants to restore her partner as the main breadwinner so she can achieve an easier life, so be it, why not.

And the feminist response? The women's editor for the left-wing New Statesman wrote:

Reading the newspapers ... can sometimes be especially demoralising ... sometimes it's the very smallest stories ... that really get you down. So, for instance, the widely reported magazine survey of 3,000 women (average age:28) ... made me bang my head against my desk while gouging my thigh with a compass.

That compass would have been worn blunt if the Guardian editor had happened to read a follow-up piece on the survey published in the Daily Mail. Interviews with young women confirmed the kind of attitudes revealed in the survey. Here are some of the thoughts held by the young women:

Felicity Callaghan: "[Mum] was always trying to juggle everything ... She must have been permanently exhausted ... I vowed I'd never try to cram so much into my life ... If all feminism afforded my generation was the prospect of working ourselves to the bone and being expected to be mothers at the same time - well, Women's Lib was a waste of time. I intend to be at home with my children when they are young ... I have no intention of being the main breadwinner ... My mother's generation seemed to be competing with men, but I couldn't care less. What was it all for? I don't feel like I have to prove myself by having a career, I just want to be happy and relaxed."

Barbara Garcia: "My earliest memory is of my mother rushing out of the house carrying a briefcase ... I remember always straining to keep my eyes open and to stay awake so I could see her when she came home from work ... I used to envy my friends who had stay-at-home mums ... I remember once going home to a schoolfriend's house and almost weeping with envy when I sat down to tea around the table with her two brothers, mother and father - all talking and laughing ... The constant pressure and stress to make both sides of her life work made [Mum] look old before her time. She was skinny and short-tempered ... I don't want to miss a minute of my children's early years. I want to be a proper mother and to have a husband who can support me. Stuff feminism."

Sarah-Jane Sherwood: "Like most of my generation, I think personal happiness is more important than a successful career. I want to feel fulfilled, not be tied to some boring desk job from dawn until dusk ... I work hard at the moment to fund my lifestyle, but I'd far rather be supported by a man when I have children, so I can have the time to enjoy them. I have no intention of working nine to five."

The lesson for young men in all this? Don't be put off by feminist triumphalism when you're in your late teens and early twenties. Work yourself into a good situation career-wise and financially and you'll eventually find yourself in a very strong position to marry well. The male provider role has not been made redundant, in spite of all the feminist efforts to make it so: women still want to be financially supported, especially when they have young children. Hardly any women envisage a life of full-time paid work. They want to marry a man who can take care of them by earning a good income.

(P.S. This survey is similar in its findings to an even larger one undertaken in 2003, in which over 90% of the 5000 British teenage girls surveyed wanted to be provided for by their future partners.)

Boy Danny

It's nearing Father's Day, so The Age devoted its Saturday magazine to the issue of men and masculinity.

Some of the men interviewed did a good job of responding to the set questions. Danny Katz, a humourist, was the notable exception.

For instance, the first question asked was "What do you consider men's greatest strength?" Peter FitzSimons, a sports journalist, answered "Our resilience. The ability to take the hits, get up, keep going." Peter Kundall, who presents a TV gardening show, answered "Probably their single-mindedness. That they can put their mind to something in a very concentrated way."

And Danny Katz? He replied "I'm not a big fan of men and I struggled to think of anything ... we're funny with our kids, we're goofy."

Poet Jaya Savage was asked "Do you feel you have to be the provider?" He answered, "Yes, I would like to be. In many ways I am a traditionalist at heart. I like the idea of providing ... Maybe it comes back to my childhood and single mother. I would like to have been able to help my mother in some way."

Peter Kundall, when asked "Are men expected to be too emotional now?", replied "One thing I've noticed in the past is that many women want men to behave in a more emotional way, but when they do, the women don't like them so much."

Peter FitzSimons responded to the question "How much a part of your identity is work?" with the answer, "First and foremost I identify as a husband and father ... I heavily identify with "I am a FitzSimons." What am I? I am of the FitzSimons family of Peats Ridge. I don't know why that is so strong in me ... but it is."

And Danny Katz? He told the reporter, "I'm the fanatical cleaner of the house, the primary cook. I'm the one dressing the kids in the morning, making the breakfasts."

When he was asked, "What would you change if you were in charge of shaping the way men are?," he said,

You mean, anything, like I'm a godlike figure? Well, obviously something went terribly wrong the first time round. So I'd want to extract some of that testosterone and make us a little gentler ... If I could change a behavioural thing I think all men should experience raising their child more. I'd make them spend the first year at home ... It softened me and made me care about her [his daughter] and children in general and the human race...

Notice how the other men are more strongly "natured" than Danny Katz; they are more strongly connected to their masculine identity in particular, and to traditional forms of identity in general.

Where does this leave Danny Katz? Should we admire him as a gentle, feminine soul who has relinquished an aggressive masculinity?

I advise reading on before drawing such a conclusion. First, it's difficult to admire a man whose effeminacy is so well-honed that he admits of his "nesting" habits that,

I plump cushions as soon as people stand up from the couch. I'm like Terence Conran, moving vases and jugs to get that exact angle. If I even have a tradesman coming around, I'll clean the house and create a little bit of "mood".

This does not make for heterosexual romance. He tells us,

I have no sense of romance whatsoever ... I'm not an intimate person. I wish I could be like that for her [his wife], and yet I can be like that with my kids. I don't know why.

Nor does it contribute to an adult male personality:

I get spiteful, bitter, more angry than upset and I always behave in very childish ways. I think I'm at about the same emotional level as a nine-year-old. Instead of getting upset, I just sort of sulk and put my head down and shuffle around and send off this horrible vibe and make the whole house unpleasant.

I wouldn't accuse Danny Katz of lacking intelligence or wit. It does seem, though, that Danny Katz's negative view of men has left him unusually immature and effeminate. Even at the age of 42, he has failed to connect to that part of his masculine nature which might have led him to reach a more substantial adult self.

Male poverty

The Saturday Age had the following statistics in its "Numbercrunch" column:

Proportion of separated fathers in Australia who had a taxable income of less than $15,000: 40 per cent; less than $32,000: 68 per cent.

These are remarkable figures. They show that divorce is heavily concentrated among the poorest of men, who are earning well below the average wage of $49,000. More than two thirds of divorces in Australia are suffered by men who aren't earning a "living wage" sufficient to maintain a family.

In some ways, this should be of some comfort to those men who have stubbornly kept to their "provider instinct" and who are toiling away to earn a decent wage. Such men are much less vulnerable to divorce than those who lack a good job.

The statistics also show one way to dramatically lower the rate of family breakdown. If there were a focus on encouraging low-earning men into a higher income bracket, then it's reasonably likely that the rate of separation and divorce would fall.