Women who earn more than $90,000 a year are the "most eager" of all Australian women to have children, and the least likely to expect to be childless, according to a study just released by the federal government and the Curtin University of Technology.
"These women can buy the services they need to deal with having children, whereas the less affluent women can't", the report's co-author David Charnock told the Melbourne Age on March 12. Charnock is one of a large number of academics being bankrolled by the federal government to point out the bleeding obvious.
Australia's "fertility crisis" (the fertility rate is an average of 1.5 children born per woman, an all-time low and way below the level to needed maintain Australia's population) has spawned a research industry that is endlessly picking and prodding at women's "expectations" in an effort to work out how to get them to have more kids.
The logical solution to the fertility crisis, based on my reading of the Curtin University study, is to guarantee an income of at least $90,000 per year to every woman in the country. According to the evidence, there'd be the mother of all baby booms!
Only two major problems with this solution though: no-one would come up with the money (certainly not government or big business) and there would be no poor women to get to do the housework, childcare, aged care and so on — unless of course we excluded refugees and immigrants from the scheme and shipped in a few million extra nannies and maids in from impoverished or war-torn countries.
Prime Minister John Howard's favourite sociologist, British fertility guru Catherine Hakim, says that women can be divided into three groups according to their "expectations": work-centred, home-centred and "adaptive" (which means a bit of both). Her theory is that policies to increase fertility should give up on work-centred women (because their fertility rate is so low and "hard to shift") and focus on the fertile "home-centred" group and those in the "adaptive" group who are willing to work only part-time.
Hakim's shallow observation that women who work full-time find it more difficult to care for two or more children apparently strikes Howard and his cheer squad (anti-feminist journalist Bettina Arndt and sex discrimination commissioner Pru Goward among them) as somehow profound. It also provides a handy theoretical justification for the taxation, childcare, maternity leave and other policies that provide "incentives" for women to stay at home and mind the kids.
The fact that Hakim, Howard, Arndt and Goward must pay lip service to women's "right to work" is testimony to the gains that the movement for women's liberation made in the 20th Century. What Hakim's work enables them to do, though, is to corral women who work full-time into a special minority.
Hakim says that only around 10% of women are "work-centred" (and she proudly states that she falls into this group) and therefore they are not the issue. Presumably, they can fulfil their "expectation" of remaining childless, or they can earn big money and hire a nanny.
The real issue, then, is the remaining breeding stock — the 90% of women who are "home-centred" or can "adapt" to being home-centred.
We cannot allow the debate to be framed in these terms. If women are to move forward in their struggle for full human status, we have to challenge the very foundations of the current debate. Former ALP adviser Anne Summers has begun to address the Hakim agenda, but only on the tired and defeated social-democratic basis that women should be allowed to make "choices" about "work and family life".
The reality is that while women remain economically disadvantaged and stuck with sole or primary responsibility for child rearing and housework there are no real "choices" available to most women, and the "choices" available to rich women depend on the subjection of poor, predominantly migrant women.
The only way forward for feminists is to re-enter the original battleground of the struggle for full equality with men and liberation for all.
BY KAREN FLETCHER
From Green Left Weekly, March 19, 2003.
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