Mr Prior and the mothers
Mary Kenny
When I gave birth to my first child, I was a staff writer for the London Evening Stan dard, and I took five months off work to have the baby. During that time, without question or murmur and without any, for mality whatsoever, my employers paid my salary in full, which must have cost them something in the region of £2,500. In addi tion to that, I qualified for State benefits deriving from National Insurance contributions. I thought everyone was so kind to give me all this money, but I have been told that this is just the Irish shoneen in my blood: Pathetically grateful to the English landlord If he turns out to be anything less than a tyrant. Good heavens, (I have been admonished) Mr Alan Hall of NOW! • magazine would spend that sum on a few meals out; half of Fleet Street and half the , camera crews in Lime Grove pick up that sort of money for a few weeks out-of-town expenses, and in Grays Inn Road and elsewhere in the newspaper industry, perfect ghosts are awarded such sums bi-monthly While not existing at all. Right-wing people would say maternity leave is a perk that women get, just like men get more office cars or entertaining expenses. Left-wing People would say it is a right: part of a woman's right to work. Among career women, it is taken as a m. atter of course that one returns to fulltune employment after a decent interval of Maternity leave. It never occured to me, at that time, not to do so. Maternal feelings do not spring up overnight; but they grow on YOU. As time went by I knew that I would s,00n have to leave full-time employment because I just missed being with the baby too much. And so I did undoubtedly helped by the idea that 1 had a profession I could practise at home. This is in fact a common pattern among' women at work in the western democracies. Although half of all married women in Britain have jobs (many part-time), the majority of women with children under five are not in' full-time employment. And it is clear both from the employment profile of working mothers and from day-to-day conversation with mothers themselves, that the majority of women do not want to be in hill-time employment when they have ):oung babies. However, it is, I think, signif!cant that this pattern does not emerge nmediately after the birth of the first baby. Very many women just like me return to their places of work imagining that life will return to normal once the baby is settled and substitute care adequately arranged-It takes some time for the penny to drop: life is never going to return to 'normal' again. The natural order of things is that mothers want to be with their young babies, and young babies want to be with their mothers. If the State is put in the position of being the authority on these matters, should it encourage the mother to be with her baby, or encourage her not to he with her baby? If it is put in a position of niaking regulations about these things, it is hard to see how it can remain neutral.
It is because of this pattern of women at work the dropout rate after the children are born, with the pattern gradually reversing itself as the children grow up (though most mothers continue to have family responsibilities all through their lives) -that the Government has come up with its new maternity proposals. It is suggesting that small employers (firms under 20 people) .should not be obliged to keep a job open for a woman while she is on maternity leave. It is not just the fact that the employer will be paying maternity leave to the absent woman worker which burdens the small firm, it is also the statistical likelihood that the mother will eventually stop work anyhow. The Government has a fair point when it says that the present maternity benefit law doesn't operate very well, because it falsely lures women back into the job market who have no real intention of staying there while their children are young. On the other hand, it would be a sadthing if the Tories were to drive a wedge between small firms and women workers. Women flourish better in small firms and offices; women respond better to a personal scale of work relationships; women are likely to be both happier and more successful in small companies. 'My advice to any woman wanting to get on in the City,' says a woman banker, 'is start with a small firm. Your learning curve is greater, your potential for responsibility greater. Women are given opportunities in small offices that they don't get in bigger ones.' And in cases where mothers have absolutely no alternative but to work, the small employer, the manager who knows each of his employers individually, is likely to be a much more flexible boss. The great thing about working in a small firm,' an unmarried mother in Belfast told me, 'is that if the child is sick, or if you're terribly tired and overcome with family problems, the boss is much more likely to react as one human being to another. He knows that work is basically give and take, and if he shows consideration for you as a person, you'll do anything you can to help him. It's not like that in a big firm, where it's all clocking on and off and you're just a number anyway.' While women generally find it more satisfactory to work for these small companies, many small employers know that women employees when 'shown consideration' are generally more conscientious than men.
It is a very difficult area to administer fairly. If one were actually going to be serious about maternity leave, one would pay mothers salaries while they stayed at home with their young children, a plan that the paediatrician Dr Penelope Leach proposes in her recent study of mothers and children, Who Cares? (Penguin, 1979). But such an East-European structure of family policy presupposes that the responsibility for the children is fundamentally belonging to the State, an idea not native to the British. It also supposes that most women exist in order to be productive workers, which doesn't dovetail either with the aspirations of most women or with the microchip future, when the whole drift of economic planning will be to get people out of technology and into human skills and leisure.
On the other hand, reneging on any maternity benefits will appear to be doing something which is taboo in every culture: attacking motherhood. HANDS OFF MUM! proclaimed the Daily Star, in a primeval response to the proposal, which was put across as though the Tory Government was about to steal the bread out of the mouths of starving mothers. 'Mothers,' pleaded Edna O'Brien on Robin Day's new TV chat show, 'mothers are the lifeblood of the country.' Thunderous applause while Edna composed her beautiful face into a particularly mournful characterisation of Mother Courage. No, Mr Prior, you'll never win this one. Bad magic.
'Maternity leave is a racket,' one Tory employer said to me. 'You girls just take the money and run, don't you?' But in a society where everyone has his own little racket the company car, the expense account, the ghost worker, the tax dodge, the black economy, the quango job, the freeloading hospitality, the extra directorship should women be expected to be any different? Should mothers?
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