Last Friday, the universities Minister David Willetts commented that women’s progress in the workplace has prevented working class men from attaining well-paid jobs, saying that “Feminism trumped egalitarianism”. Mary Evans critically unpacks these comments and says that not only are they ignorant and prejudiced, but they also show the deep suspicion of Conservatives to progressive movements.
It is good to see that David Willetts, as Minister for Universities, has read widely in fiction about the theme of men and women competing for jobs. A particular figment of the literary imagination that he has obviously taken to heart is that of the furious Annie in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night, in which this working class woman launches a (potentially lethal) attack on female dons in Oxford. As Annie says :
Don’t you know what you’re doing? I’ve heard you sit around snivelling about unemployment but it’s you, it’s women like you who take the work away from the men and break their hearts and lives.
The spectre of a male Minister taking on the angry narrative of a woman with whom he would probably be the first to claim that he has nothing in common has various interesting aspects, not the least of which are the themes of misogyny, envy and class hatred that unite them. More fascinating is the way in which a upper middle class white male shares the wild and ill-informed perceptions of a woman made frantic by poverty. So various questions arise about the origin of Willett’s recent remarks that have seen him blame feminism for escalating unemployment rates amongst working class men, reaching for a familiar explanation: it is all the fault of women.
That explanation has clearly a lasting appeal for the Conservative Party, and Willetts might do well to note that even if women have taken all the best jobs, this has not occurred in politics, where the front bench of the present government remains solidly male. Nor has the Conservative Party managed to get its head around the idea that people live collectively, that to isolate the ‘bright’ working class men is an insult of considerable offensiveness to many people. Stand up the ‘bright’ working class men; jolly good for us upper class people to see that a few of you down there have some brains. Equally notable in this context is the implicit Darwinism in Willetts’s remarks: somehow all middle class women are able to benefit from higher education, but only ‘bright’ working class men.
The ‘classism’ and the social blindness in Willetts’ remarks are particularly remarkable. In his speech, he implicitly assumes two things: that all those women who went to university obtained employment in the professions and those ‘good’ jobs that Willetts and his ilk expect as the birthright of their class and gender. The second is that Ministerial rank entitles a person to comment on a complex subject without even a glance at the evidence.
Extensive evidence about women and the labour market suggests that for many female graduates paid work is not high flying work in the professions but less well rewarded employment where a considerable number of women never reach the level of income at which they would have to pay back their student loans. Willetts should consult the lorry load of statistics which demonstrates that the birth of children limits the employment of women far more than that of men, that discrimination against women still exists in the labour market and that women are paid significantly less than men. Not forgetting the studies that show the ways that social class inhibits educational achievement long before a child gets anywhere near a university.
We might blame the mothers and fathers of the present Cabinet for their collective inability to instil into their children the recognition that there is another world outside their prosperous bubble, but it is unlikely that these parents, attached to the various forms of competition beloved of the British upper middle class, had any experience of lives where other families needed more than one income for the household to survive. The increase in all kinds of living costs (of which the price of housing is particularly significant) has made it essential (and not, as in Willetts’s world, optional) for mothers and fathers to be at work.
Those women who, in Willetts’s own words, ‘would otherwise have been housewives’ are not trying to maintain paid work, child care and domestic life because they have voluntarily signed up for the UK version of how to work very hard, all the time. They are doing it because the UK has limited public child care facilities, disgracefully low income levels for many of the jobs necessary for the care and support of most of us and deeply embedded class cultures that help to retain the privileges of the most wealthy.
Willetts’s speech has been denounced, rightly, by the people whom he would probably regard as the usual suspects. But loaded with ignorance and prejudice as the speech is, it is also a very revealing insight into the workings of the Tory mind. The statement that ‘feminism has trumped egalitarianism’ shows the deep suspicion of Conservatives to progressive movements; the implicit assumption that feminism does not contribute to the egalitarian is either a misunderstanding of both words or an indication of that world view which suggests that ‘you’ (being everyone except the privileged) cannot have everything.
It also demonstrates, with almost terrifying clarity, the hatred of the agency of women, the dread of the possibility of changes in gender relations and the assumption that ‘bright’ working class men will be seamlessly absorbed into the habits and the assumptions of the middle class. The psychic wounds inflicted by Margaret Thatcher on the potestas of male Tories seem to have gone as deep as the wounds of impoverishment on Annie, who shares, with David Willetts an apparent terror of the implications of the education of women.
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People unthinkingly refer to the so called ‘liberation’ movements of multiculturalism,
egalitarianism and feminism as ‘progressive’. I would like to argue that these movements
from promising beginnings in scholarly texts and exposes have declined into various
manifestations of regression and decadence.
We are seeing a general alienation, or estrangement between ethnic and gender groups
and a pervasive mistrust of all established ‘ so that a generalized lack of objectivity,
a degraded sense of what is real is rooting itself destructively.
Men and women were decidedly not created to be rivals or competitors with one another, nor were they created to obsessively seek power over others.
Men and women are different and complementary and it is this difference and complementarity that fosters social and personal harmony and wellbeing. By seeking rivalry and encouraging it women increasingly resemble men and lose their distinctive feminine contribution to the wellbeing of the whole of society.
The improvement of women’s material circumstances has been matched by a deterioration of family life, short-lived marriages in which women usually take the initiative to divorce, single-parent ‘families’, children growing up fatherless,
and men and women introducing their otherwise spouses as ‘partners’ as though
the relationship were a business with a limited liability!
The last 30 years since Thatcher, I call the Regression, and ‘Progressives’ I call
Regressives, since this period constituted a loss of the social and political integrity of the New Deal and has declined into a society and civilization that is ruthlessly
selfish and living on borrowed time.
As Oliver James pointed out in his various books on the gender ‘war’, the pursuit
of selfishness has ruined the beauty and loveliness of our created (not invented)
sexuality!
Forgive me for asking but what is “Working Class?” Aren’t we all in danger of joining the non-working – both male and female? What is the place in our society of those who are not in employment – through redundancy – with no chance of re-deployment and not in a position to start their own businesses? If everyone is expected to work until they are in their late 60s who will be the volunteers to keep charities working? Perhaps everyone should be expected to take a sabbatical year to get experience of working in the 3rd sector, with minimal income. Sounds a bit like National Service without the army training, I know, but Conservatives, with their second homes and ample income, have no comprehension of the problems of men and women who need to share child-care and each do a part-time job to keep afloat.The local authorities are being squeezed so much that even the state provision for affordable child care is rarely available. All these issues need sorting with economists, psychologists and philosophers working together. They should not be left solely to politicians and journalists, which is what seems to be happening now. All that does is lead to misery and pessimism. Older people have said they were happiest in the most difficult of times because everyone pulled together. Interestingly, Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour is debating the point as I write this.
I agree with Evans remarks that yet again women are being made a scapegoat for government blunders. I did not have anything on a player but fought to get my uni fees paid to study a subject useful to all- teaching. I went to a state dchool and my mum had to work to pay our mortgage as my dad’s govetnment
scientist job did not cover bthe escalating cost of living. I want equality with my working class male colleagues against a silver spoon in mouth bunch of out of touch toffs.
I agree with Evans on Willetts’ too theoretical view. In other words, women haven’t been working more and more as part of a theoretical battle for their sex; they’ve been working because, increasingly, only the very highest earners can support a spouse and family. Much more than Willetts allows for, women work for pragmatic not theoretical reasons. After all, unless you’ve got a dream job, working doesn’t feel particularly liberating at 8 on a Monday morning.
I’m a lifelong Labour supporter and I don’t agree with Willetts, but his thoughtful speech on this subject from 2006 is worth reading. In it, he makes his case with hard numbers, of which he is correctly skeptical; he chooses his words carefully; and he appears to show genuine concern for those less fortunate than he has been. You can read its (badly formatted) text on the Website Prof Evans links to.
I might be a long-time Leftie and a believer in sexual equality, but I’ve also spent most of my life working for the Medical Research Council; I like to think I can spot poor scholarship when I see it. Unlike Willetts, in her blogpost above, Prof Evans confuses correlation with causation and resorts to speculation about the motives of those with whom she disagrees. Imagine how she would react if a male academic responded to a reported comment by a female minister in a Labour government by accusing Labour women of being scared of working-class men and being so traumatized by Tony Blair’s leadership that their femininity had been undermined.
When I read the introduction to this piece, I wondered about its phrase “critically unpacks”. Now that I have read it, it seems this means “neglects original sources and resorts to psychobabble and sexist slurs”.
-Comment edited to remove reference to libel – British Politics and Policy at LSE Editor
Not all Tories support what David Willetts said. http://feminismfortories.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/david-willetts-sexism-and-common-sense/
This is a great article, and cuts to the heart of the Tory mindset. The comments by Daivd Willetts – the university minister for crying out loud – are astonishingly narrow minded. He (perhaps pretends to) identify a social inequality and sees it as problematic, but then in one fell swoop directs policy response in precisely the wrong direction. Instead of questioning & interrogating the neo-liberal forms of social and economic “organisation” that makes such inequalities, not only possible, but probable, or even inevitable, he assumes whatever small progressive policy decisions taken in the past to mitigate inequalities are to blame for reproducing inequality…but this time for “working class men”. A Tory making eyes at the working classes is utterly preposterous and laughable. One could argue that inequalities are a consequence of barely regulated capitalist society (neo-liberalism). Attaching blame to women’s rights, is the most wrong headed response it’s possible to imagine. It’s a classic rhetorical gesture and is similar to the right wing focus on immigration. Instead of seeing these things as consequences, Willetts et al see progressive politics as cause of rising unemployment and continuing inequalities.
On various comment pages – in the Guardian and The Telegraph – many have tried to argue that he’s actually being rather progressive in seeking to “help out working class men” Whilst it’s plain to see that a lack of support for working class people is a major factor, “blame” is directed in the wrong direction. One could possible make a case for progressive thinking if there was any hint of a single policy initiative – historically or contemporarily – that Willetts or any other Tory would enact in order to address this educational deficit. But there are none, zero. I mean, why bother when you can just transfer blame onto whichever ‘Other’ happens to fit the bill this week. This pathetic article by Willetts is dog whilstle politics at its worst: “Don’t look at our policies, just blame feminism/immigrants” and as such is a classic right wing gesture.
The brilliant writer Gary Younge puts it well: “Nobody ever asks: “when did you first realise you were straight?” or “how do you balance fatherhood and work?” One day, hopefully, they might. But in the meantime some identities will be subject to relentless examination, while others coast by with eternal presumption. Those who ask the questions of others without interrogating themselves are effectively saying: this is our world, you’re just living in it.” Well quite.