Nothing has divided women like the issue of whether mothers should or should not work outside the home, but why must we mothers be pitted against each other? Because we have bought the myth - much to our misfortune - that work and family are by nature incompatible. According to this widely held falsehood, there are two kinds of women in the 1990s: the self-sacrificing earth-mothers, who dedicate their all to rearing ideal, well-adjusted families; and the intimidating superwomen whose energy, ingenuity and management skills enable them to behave like men, working long hours in the office while retaining the ability to transform at will into nurturing 1950s mothers during carefully scheduled sessions of quality time.
The reality is that few women feel comfortable with either myth and most of us try to muddle through. We struggle to reconcile the values we believe in at home with the game we have to play at work - and most of us fail sooner or later. When we do fail, as we must, we feel guilty and blame ourselves, when we should be blaming the system. It's in a time of skill shortages, such as the present economic boom, that workers have the clout to seek family-friendly work. Now that companies are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and keep staff, we may be on the threshold of a widespread shift towards recognising the needs of working parents.
The greatest threat to the psychological health of our children is not the working mother; it is the assumption that work and family must conflict and that the female worker who is not willing to sacrifice her children's needs does not belong in the workplace. There are many women - and fathers too, no doubt - who fantasise about how, if they were bosses, they would reorganise their working life to make it family-friendly. Jayne Buxton, author of Ending The Mother War: Starting The Work- place Revolution insists that a fundamental restructuring of the workplace is a real, practical goal which we must dare to achieve if the current generation of children is to be psychologically healthy. This is the book that we mothers who muddle through would have written if only we'd had the time. Buxton, a part-time business consultant in her mid-30s with two children, blames two sets of myths for our inability to blend family life with work - "Myths from the Superwoman's briefcase" and "Myths from the Earth-mother's Kitchen". Superwomen operate under four destructive myths: "the guilt thing", "the myth of managed mother", "the myth of the new father" and - the most pernicious and damaging myth of all - "the day-care dream". The assumption that "the guilt thing" is a prerequisite to being a working mother may be the greatest stumbling block of all to healthy family life, Buxton argues. If we assume that "guilt" is our lot, we start rationalising it away - convincing ourselves that it's satisfactory to subcontract our mothering to childcare workers for long hours, sometimes seven days a week. When we stop listening to our hearts and live in denial of our "guilty" feelings, we may detach from our instincts to the degree that we forget what it's like to be a genuine, interacting family.
Buxton believes that media images of highflying working mothers "fail to question whether, in fact, something important might be missing in homes that are structured to accommodate two parents who are focused on work and away from the home for most of the week".
Women who refuse to live this way are seen as being too cowardly or disorganised to walk the mothering/career highwire. "Managed mothering" is the idea that by being super-organised, by hiring mother surrogates, by ruthlessly delegating and by scheduling "quality time" with the children, a working mother can "have it all".
It doesn't work: you can't schedule quality time. Children need you when they need you.
"The myth of the new man" implies that if a working mother has managed to find and marry a man willing to take her place in the home, she can get ahead in a demanding career without cost to her children. This may work in rare cases, but it's no overall social solution to the family/work crisis.
The most insidious and potentially damaging myth of all in Buxton's view is the "day-care dream", the propaganda put about in Britain by the liberal/New Labour "conspiracy" of feminists, academics and politicians that affordable quality daycare is the answer to all our problems. Women don't want to put their children in creches 10 hours a day and would much prefer tax breaks for flexible, paid childcare, Buxton says. She also deconstructs the myth that if offered daycare, 90 per cent of women would choose to work. The European experience is that when daycare is provided free of charge to all children, a large proportion of women still choose either to stay home, or to work part-time. Daycare advocates "misrepresent the facts" about the harm which children may suffer when forced to spend most of their waking hours in an institutional setting, says Buxton. "Almost every ploy imaginable is used to persuade us that daycare is not only not harmful to children, but is positively, and without qualification, good for them . . . Evidence of the negative effects of daycare are regularly dismissed or ignored; and terminology is manipulated so that part-time nursery education becomes synonymous with full-time day-care, with all the benefits of the former being attributed to the latter."
Just as the key to utopia does not lie in daycare, it's not to be found in returning all mothers to the home either, Buxton argues. The Myth Of The Earth-mother, The Perfect Family And The End Of Crime pretends that every woman is not an earth-mother at heart. But we are complex creatures. Why should women strive academically through life, go to university, strike out on careers if what women really want to do is throw it all away to nurture children to the exclusion of anything else?
The anti-working mother lobby believes that the full-time mother by her very presence inoculates her children against behaviour problems (who ever attributes the delinquency of a boy to the fact that his mother is full-time in the home?). Whereas, the working mother threatens her husband's self-esteem, takes a job that by rights should go to a man and sends children out on to the streets to commit crimes. This pernicious myth is simply "preposterous", Buxton believes. "Full-time motherhood is no magic wand conjuring up happy, intelligent children, satisfied husbands and cities free of theft and violence . . . Our children's future happiness will depend far more on their ability to balance their professional achievements with rich personal and family lives than on startling academic success attained through the constant attention of a stay-at-home parent."
Buxton's clarion call is that we can achieve this balance of the professional and the personal if we try. "Asked to envision a work world in which individuals can achieve genuine balance between work and the rest of their lives, most people's imaginations venture far beyond the boundaries represented by today's typical family-friendly firm," Buxton writes. "Their images of stage-four firms, in which the culture and work processes are fully aligned with individuals' needs to balance work and life, have little to do with lactation rooms for breast-feeding mothers, or helplines providing childcare advice to parents. The basis of most people's visions is time: radically different ways of thinking about it, using it and organising it."
Working parents need more time with their children, and more control over that time. Employers who resist changing the traditional working day, should start to look at hidden costs such as absenteeism and low productivity, Buxton urges.
"The choice is plain and simple, a future in which individuals can add value to the organisations while maintaining healthy, happy and balanced personal lives, or a future characterised by wasted talent and opportunity, declining mental and family health and stress-related law suits run riot."
Companies may balk at the challenge, but Buxton asserts that the changes associated with flexible working - which could mean as little as letting a worker home at 3 p.m. to collect children from school, or giving a worker a mid-week day off to be with young children - are nothing compared to what companies have already had to implement in association with new technologies. Add to this the new thinking in management theory, which is that long working hours do not necessarily equate with superior performance; workers are talent who should be measured by their performance, not "face time" at a desk; and managers are people who provide team leadership in a lateral way, rather than through an intimidating hierarchical system. Buxton gives several good examples of companies which have changed their culture to implement flexible working and she argues that there's no reason why the role of chief executive can't be a part-time job. But she admits that the revolution will have to begin not with companies but with individuals having the courage to exploit their own personal power to change their own circumstances at work. It's the highly educated and skilled, probably middle-class parent who has the best chance of that.
Relying on the altruism of employers has never been realistic, so what's in it for them? Buxton argues that companies who help parents blend family life with work, enjoy higher productivity and creativity. The greatest benefit, of course, is that if we only dared to stop viewing work as a time-clocked treadmill and to start seeing it as an integral part of rich, multi-faceted lives, we can create a society which genuinely puts children first, rather than assuming that children must pay the price of our society's economic success.
Ending The Mother War: Starting The Workplace Revolution by Jayne Buxton is published by Macmillan. Price £14.99 in the UK.
