Blame women - it's easier than thinking

This climate of mistrust is equally cruel for nursery staff, of course; no matter how caring or hard-working they are, they have no easy way of proving it to fearful parents. Either way, the whole effect of the controversy - given an extra twist by the recent publication of a study which suggests that close and loving early parental care is essential to the development of a baby’s brain - has simply been to add to the crippling burden of stress already carried by many working mothers.

For in the mounting war of words and headlines over how we live our family lives, it’s women whose behaviour most often comes under scrutiny, and which is usually found wanting.

We are the ones, after all, who supposedly insisted on changing everything. We are the ones who refuse to live the same lives as our mothers. We are the ones who, over the last generation, have broken into the labour market in unprecedented millions, and demanded the right to compete on equal terms with men. We are the ones who - horror of horrors - dared to dream of "having it all"; that is, of having that combination of marriage, children and a life outside the home that most men still take for granted.

As punishment for our cheek - and leaving aside hints of responsibility for everything from endemic child neglect to yob culture - we women have been accused by various sections of the media, in the last couple of weeks alone, of reducing the prestige of the medical profession by taking up too many jobs in it, of seeking out old boyfriends on Friends Reunited and thereby inflating the divorce rate, of selling our men short by having less sex with them than our mothers did in the 1950s, of making our children obese by failing to cook them healthy family meals, and - worst of all - of being increasingly chubby ourselves. Apparently the average female waist size has increased by six inches in 50 years, owing to our appalling greed and laziness, and - to judge by the accompanying 1950s photographs of Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren - our growing unwillingness to wear corsets.

We are living, in other words, through a serious psychological backlash against the social changes of the last generation; and women are being invited to take most of the blame.

The difficulty with this mood of reaction, though, as with many "backlash" phenomena, it that it seems doomed to sow widespread feelings of fear and self-loathing - and to provoke plenty of recrimination among women about the different choices they make - without actually recommending any real course of action. If we had anything resembling a full consensus that gender equality is a good thing, we could simply get on with the task of compensating for the inevitable impact of motherhood on women’s working lives in all sorts of imaginative ways. But in practice, we still seem stuck in an endless, debilitating, backward-looking debate about whether the whole idea of equality between men and women is somehow unnatural and expensive, and ought to be replaced by a stoical acceptance that women will always face tougher choices than men, because nature decrees it so.

But here’s the final rub: even if we accept the idea of tougher choices for women, for the vast majority those choices no longer exist in any case. Whoever was initially responsible for it, the fact is that the rush of women into the labour market has suited British business and politicians at least as well as - and often better than - it has suited women themselves.

The rise of the dual-income household has been one of our main engines of economic growth and increased consumption for more than a generation now. For the last half-decade, Tony Blair’s government has also been pressurising single mothers into work, and their children into daycare, in order to keep them off benefit and out of poverty.

And although it suits newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph to imply that all mothers could return to the home if only they were less materialistic and less grasping, in fact they must know that our entire economy would collapse if too many women actually acted on that advice. An entire food industry now depends on both mum and dad being too tired and time-poor, after a day at work, to prepare a family meal from fresh ingredients; whole swathes of the global car industry depend on the modern family’s need to run two cars, in order to sustain the rush from work to nursery to school to supermarket and home. And without the second incomes that have helped to inflate house prices, the whole British property market, and the complex structure of credit that rests on it, would not only collapse, but implode.

If modern family life, in other words, is locked into a pattern that implies high levels of stress, little time for sex and emotional intimacy, and the chronic neglect of little babies, then we are all implicated in the social and economic structures that make it so. To heap the blame for the ensuing social damage onto individual women and their personal decisions is at best ungallant, and at worst disingenuous, manipulative and cruel.

If women have any sense, of course, they will rebel against the big lie that it’s all their own fault. They will join the "slow" movement for the kind of world in which there’s time to live and love, as well as to work. They will campaign against a ridiculous long-hours work-culture that might have been designed to undermine family life, and marginalise all those with caring responsibilities. They will talk to each other about the problems they share, rather than verbally beating one another up; they will make common cause with men who actually like women, rather than colluding with the kind of men who seize every opportunity to blame and belittle us.

But do 21st-century working mothers have time for any of that sensible stuff? Of course not. For most of them, it’s just the long triple shift of work, housework and childcare, followed by the pang of guilt that they’re too tired to have sex with the husband. And then, if they’re lucky, a brief slump in front of the telly, with a newspaper designed to tell them, in a superficially female-friendly way, why none of what they have done will ever be good enough; and why, at the exhausted end of the day, they still have no-one to blame but themselves.