What is being lost . . .

I can remember the time of the first great incursion of married women into the workforce in the mid to late 1960s.  And it was a great time to be alive.  Suddenly women found themselves in possession of something more than pin money and with all sorts of possibilities seemingly opening up to them.

Move forward some fifty years and we find a situation where the presence of married women in the workplace has become more or less the norm.  Yet the outcome is somewhat less sunny than one might optimistically have expected back in the ‘60s.

Looking around me nowadays, I see a situation where married women no longer work by choice, but out of pure necessity, especially if they ever want to own a home.  And if they have children, you are more likely see them stretched out on the crucifix of creche, job, commuting and home rather than living the dream.

The same applies to husbands, too.

Once upon a time the core of family life was to do with rearing children.  Now that function has no longer a central role but has been banished instead to the interstices of social life.  The idea of fulltime nurturing is now old hat; instead we have the compensatory overkill of ‘quality time’ and TV and spoiling—the bread-and-butter work of day-to-day care being hived off to creches and the suchlike.  And rarely is it not a matter of choice; there is simply no other option.

All a far cry of the seemingly sunny uplands of the future as viewed from the 1960s.  But then the experience of the ‘60s was really a sort of ‘loss leader’ for the realities of these later times.  There is no possibility of fulltime hands-on mothering now—even for those women who would really want to do it—beyond one wins the lottery or marries a millionaire.

Indeed, the tendency is clearly in the opposite direction.  Rather than create the possibility of a mother-friendly society, the demands are instead for more state-supplied or subsidised childcare, seldom anything else.

Indeed, it is possible to extrapolate forward in time and see the end result of a society where children are born and immediately delivered to the state, on an almost fire-and-forget basis, with only the most perfunctory of emotional connection being maintained, rather along the lines of traditional English upper-class practice.

The world is collapsing around us, and not primarily due to climate change, but because of the pernicious effects of the various ideologies and -isms that have over the past decades sought to undermine education and common sense and inherited tradition.  One consequence of which is the delivery of ever-increasing generations of obese and stultified brats—look around you, you can see them everywhere!—whose laziness and stupidity (which is rarely their own native fault) is forever being disguised by the invention of ever-new pseudo-scientific labels.

It has always struck me as strange that one should, almost without argument, abandon the things that have been proven to work for the benefit of human society down the ages, especially the idea of a nurturing motherhood, which is also an especial target of feminist hatred.

By all means increase and make more cost-effective the availability of childcare.  But at the same time, for those who wish to go another route, one should consider also the provision of a proper wage for full-time mothers, who after all perform the most valuable work of all.

As a targeted intervention, it would seem to me to make more sense and to be more effective, both socially and cost-wise, than the various plans being discussed nowadays for generalised ‘helicopter money’ and ‘basic-income’ schemes.