Last week's column looked at Prime Minister John Howard's conservative agenda for women. Research shows that under the Liberal-National Coalition government, women are not being driven back into the home, as is often claimed. Participation rates for women in the work force are higher now than for many years.
The double burden which women have faced since they entered the paid labour force is however increasing. Women still do the bulk of unpaid work (including caring for others) in the home, as well as full-time, or more and more often part-time work. So if Howard's back-to-the-'50s agenda is not to get women back into full-time domestic servitude, what is it aimed at?
Women workers have always been useful for capitalist employers. From the time of the Industrial Revolution when women and children were favoured for their small agile hands and low cost (mostly at half the wage rate of men), women have been a source of very flexible labour. Because there has not been the same expectation that women are "breadwinners", when less labour is needed women have been absorbed more readily into the ranks of those not even looking for work.
When capital's labour needs are greater, the "labour reserve" can be activated, as during World War II when women joined the ranks of the employed in record numbers as they bid farewell to the male workers heading off to war. With the war over, women were pushed out of the paid work force and back into the family home.
With the rapid expansion of the economy during the 1950s and '60s, the capitalists needed to expand the paid work force. More and more women were drawn out of the "reserve army of labour" to produce surplus value for the capitalists.
The women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and '70s raised women's expectations. The strength of the movement forced legislation in the '70s and early '80s which gave some formal rights for women's participation in the paid work force, including anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation.
Governments were also forced to make concessions and provide services, such as public child care, for the work that women had traditionally done in the home, just as happened during World War II.
Today, women provide employers with a flexible component of the paid work force. Willingness to work part-time is one factor. While many women say that they would prefer full-time hours, a large proportion (usually with children) will accept fewer hours than male workers, and their bosses are praised for offering "family friendly" working conditions.
The economics of such a flexible work force, though, are in favour of the employers, and I suspect that many women would jump at the chance for more hours if low cost, high quality child care was more accessible.
The social services — health care, child care and care of the elderly to mention a few — that had been fought for to alleviate the domestic burden on women, are being eroded by the Coalition government in order to enable more of the revenues it collects through taxation to be spent in the employers', rather than employees', interests.
But to get to its conservative ideal, there is quite a lot of ground, a lot of expectations to overcome, thanks to the women's liberation movement. To reduce opposition to its social spending cutbacks, the Howard government must lower women's expectations of what should be provided by the government.
Free, quality health care, child care, a livable wage for those who are raising the next generation, especially those on their own, and a comfortable, government-funded retirement at the end of our working lives are a right, but we are being told that they are an unaffordable privilege.
Howard's pro-nuclear family, pro-heterosexual, church-sanctified motherhood ideal is an attempt to convince women that they are the best providers of care for the young, the elderly and the sick and that the family unit is the best environment within which these social responsibilities can be provided. It is, of course, no coincidence that this is lowest cost alternative for the government and its corporate masters.
BY MARGARET ALLUM