Abbott's scheme

I've written in recent posts about the trend in modern societies to dissolve the social functions held by individual men and women and to have these functions carried out instead by a class of state administrators.

There's an excellent example of this in the Australian papers today. The leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, has a  paid maternity scheme which would pay women their full wage for six months. A woman earning $150,000 a year would therefore receive $75,000 for each child she had.

The scheme has met resistance from within the Liberal Party for being too expensive, but Abbott is sticking with it:

This is a question of wage justice. When a woman takes leave because she's having a baby she should be paid at her wage just as if a bloke takes leave to go on holidays should be paid at his wage.
 

Feminist Eva Cox thinks this finally marks the arrival of a radical feminist policy on paid maternity leave, as it justifies paid maternity not as a health or welfare issue but as a workplace entitlement.

The more radical basis for arguing for parental leave is to set up it up as an ongoing workplace entitlement. Feminists have long argued for parenting time to be recognised as a legitimate employee entitlement, like holiday pay, sick pay and long service leave.
 

There will be readers of this blog who will benefit financially from Abbott's scheme and no doubt the money will be welcome. However, in spite of this I think we should be opposed to it.

What the scheme does is to reduce further the role of being a husband. It was once the case that a woman relied on her husband's efforts to earn a living in order to be supported whilst having her children. Under Abbott's scheme a woman will be supported by a combination of her own career position and a government mandated leave scheme.

So the first problem with the scheme is that it contributes to the narrowing role of the individual in society to that of worker and consumer.

Second, it means that the question of how long a woman might be able to spend at home with her child will no longer be decided at the family level but at the bureaucratic one. Abbott thinks six months at home is the right length, but down the track government officials might opt for either a shorter or longer period of time. Isn't that a blow to the status and function of the family as an institution?

Third, the longer term effect of the scheme will be to give governments power to enforce a sex neutral version of the family. The reason for this is that if you believe that individuals are made through their career, then it will seem unjust for women to spend more time at home with a child than men do. That's why in Europe there has been a push to make it compulsory for men to take a portion of the leave. In other words, if you want the money you'll have to accept a sex neutral concept of parenting in which the traditional motherhood role is shared equally between men and women.

The argument for men taking up the scheme is already being made in Australia, for instance, by Jessica Irvine:

Reforms such as Labor's paid parental leave scheme, paid at the minimum wage, and Abbott's more generous scheme to pay mothers their own salary for six months offer vital support for women in a stressful phase in their life. It is social recompense for the private investments women make to give life to the future workforce.

But Abbott should join Warren Buffett in encouraging fathers to take up his parental scheme too. Because if women are to truly "lean in" in the workforce, men must learn to "lean in" at home too.
 

The scheme pushes further toward the idea of individuals being interchangeable units in society. The connection between a female nature and motherhood, and a male nature and fatherhood is diminished.

Fourth, the place of stable marriage as a foundation of parenthood is further reduced. It no longer matters as much whether a woman is married, or even in a relationship, as her ability to mother a child is now connected to her position at work rather than to her place within a family.

It is true that a personal relationship between a man and a woman is still left in existence and feminists of the past once argued that this would be a more pure foundation for relationships between the sexes. The problem is, though, that getting rid of the "social office" aspect of being a husband and wife also decreases the level of stable commitment to such relationships. It becomes harder for individuals to justify the formalising of relationships and to find meaning and satisfaction in fulfilling a marital role even at times when the personal relationship itself is under strain.

It should be noted that Tony Abbott is at the more right-wing end of the mainstream political spectrum. The fact that even he simply assumes that part of the traditional male role should be taken over by the administrative state demonstrates just how strong such attitudes are within the political class. It does not even register with him that something might be lost in the process. The influence of economism within right-liberalism probably doesn't help, as it encourages the idea that activity in the market via a career is the measure of success and self-realisation.

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New model vs old model

Alicia Geddes is an Australian woman who looked forward to motherhood ("The Sum of Us" Melbourne's Child, June 2012):

I dreamt about being home with my baby full-time ... when the two red lines appeared on the pregnancy test we were ecstatic.

But there was a major hitch. Her husband wasn't able to afford the mortgage repayments on his salary. She was going to have to go back to work not just part-time but full-time:

My dreams of full-time motherhood were shattered.

She wasn't alone in her situation:

I asked my mothers' group how they met financial demands. Some were lucky enough to have plenty of money, while others had saved up before becoming pregnant to take a year off work. None said they planned to stay at home full-time after their child turned one. Would they if they were able to financially? Surprisingly, most said yes.

Things didn't go well when the time came to leave her young child for paid work:

As I doted over my newborn son, the end of paid parental leave loomed and the prospect of missing many firsts - first crawl, first step, first word - was heart-rending. How would I be able to concentrate on work when I would be missing my son so much?

Jealousy brewed towards more affluent friends ... I found myself resenting my husband, my parents and anyone else I thought could have saved me from returning to work but didn't. I became teary, angry and anxious. I hated myself for these feelings and stopped enjoying my son.

She did eventually find a solution. She and her husband moved back in with her parents, which allowed them to rent their house and meet their mortgage repayments. She is, for the time being, happy to be able to spend time with her son.

Alicia Geddes's story illustrates the problems with the new liberal model of family life. This new model of family life is based on the following logic:

i) The highest good is to be an independent, autonomous, self-determining individual.

ii) Therefore individuals cannot be defined in terms of family; our predetermined sex must be made not to matter; and women must be made independent of men.

iii) Therefore women are oppressed in the role of motherhood and liberated in the role of careerist. A career gives women an identity outside of family; it makes her financially independent of men; and it is an androgynous role in which our sex doesn't matter.

iv) Therefore women's lives should be organised around careers and not family. If women do stay at home after having children, they should be supported to do so by the state or by their employers rather than by their families; it should be for a limited time only; and as an ultimate aim men should take just as much of the paid leave as women.

The new model assumes that motherhood is at the heart of women's oppression. Paid parental leave was established not so much to allow women to be mothers but to organise women's lives around the workplace rather than the family.

In Australia, for instance, the argument for paid parental leave was set out by Elizabeth Kath back in 2003. She held that the oppression of women:

derives from their traditional reproductive role and that the introduction of paid maternity leave should be introduced as a means to transform this traditional role.

... Feminists have long recognised that the traditional view of women's role in society is an oppressive one. Shulasmith Firestone's declaration that "the heart of women's oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles" expresses a commonly held view amongst women's liberationist advocates.

Alicia Geddes did not find the motherhood role oppressive but fulfilling. But in the new model of family life, there is no family support for her to stay at home to look after her children. There is only the paid parental leave provided by the employer or state. And this is only intended to allow her to be at home for a limited time before she returns to her "proper" role of careerist.

If women do want to have a real choice to be full-time at home, then they need to turn toward a more traditional model in which there is family support for them to do so. This would mean, amongst other things:

a) Arguing for a living wage for men, i.e. a wage on which a family can be supported.

b) Not being triumphalist about the decline of men in education and employment. After all, the men who are declining in these spheres are no longer going to be able to support a family on their wage.

c) Not supporting an open borders policy, which excludes some men from the professions (as overseas students are able to buy their way into courses and then dominate the professions) and which tends to drive down the wages of unskilled men.

d) Encouraging men to commit to careers, as good for their future families, rather than discouraging them from doing so by suggesting that a high male wage is oppressive to women.

e) Rejecting the idea that an individualistic, self-determining lifestyle is an overriding good; instead, permitting people to accept that we are social creatures and naturally interdependent.

In Australia, too, we need to address the issue of housing costs. Our economy has been geared, in part, to speculative investment in housing. Although there were some winners from this, there's a point beyond which prices can't rise any further and in the meantime many families do find it harder to meet mortgage repayments.

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The Julia attitude

Barack Obama ran a "Life of Julia" campaign recently which attracted a lot of criticism. Julia is a (fictional) white American woman who goes through life being supported by government welfare policies rather than through a family. She does have one child at age 31, but apart from that Julia lives her life as an individual supported by the state.

It's not surprising that left-liberals would feel comfortable promoting such a life, given that their ideal is an autonomous individual whose life conditions are to be made equal by a state bureaucracy. But there was less support for such a vision of life on the right. Andrew Bolt wrote:

Beyond parody. Barack Obama’s latest ad boasts how a single woman can be married to the government for life.

And from James Taranto:

The most shocking bit of the Obama story is that Julia apparently never marries. She simply “decides” to have a baby, and Obama uses other people’s money to help her take care of it.

...In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy" to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.

It's interesting that the American left should be ramping up the idea of replacing family support with state welfare at exactly the moment such a model is failing in Europe. There are European countries now facing a serious debt crisis because of excessive government spending (even in Australia the average worker is now paying $5000 a year in taxes to support welfare spending).

It's interesting too that left-liberalism has continued moving left to the point that Barack Obama's advert is now more radical than the views expressed by feminist Germaine Greer back in 1991. Greer wrote back then that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and she complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".

There is no such sense of lament about a woman being supported by the state rather than by a family in the Obama adverts.

I should point out that you can find the "Julia" attitude in various places. For instance, yesterday I was reading an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun about superannuation. The gist of the article was that women are facing a bleak financial future because when they opt out of the workforce to have children they lose a few years of superannuation contributions.

The assumption is that women are not part of a family and have to support themselves. The thought never even occurs to the writer of the article that the husband's super fund will help support the family - instead, the assumption is that men's super is used for men and women's for women, therefore if women have less they are missing out:

"Countless Australian mothers are paying the ultimate sacrifice for their commitment to family, with many neglecting their financial futures in favour of other responsibilities around the home," Suncorp Life head of superannuation Vicki Doyle says...."

What do those with the Julia attitude then propose? They believe that women should get free superannuation payments:

We have argued for some time that paid parental leave should include a superannuation component and that a super 'baby bonus' or a return to work super bonus after a career break could go some way to addressing the issue.

And here we come to a serious flaw in this whole attitudinal shift. On the one hand, a society needs to keep its men motivated to work. But the Julia approach undermines this motivation, by seeking to make women financially independent of their husbands.

Let me put this another way to try to clarify it. A society needs its men to believe firmly that they are necessary to a family as providers. If that belief breaks down then that society will inevitably decline. But Western society is taking the attitude that women should be autonomous of men and rely instead on government welfare for support.

So the West is relying on individuals to hold two contradictory beliefs or values. We are supposed to believe of women that they exist as individuals without family support, but of men that they should continue to work to support women.

There are already some in the men's movement who believe that the situation should be equalised by no longer expecting men to be providers, i.e. by matching a "Julia" attitude with a corresponding "Julian" attitude.

Traditionalists would remove the contradiction the other way - by not thinking of women as autonomous Julias reliant on state welfare, but rather as wives and mothers supported within a family.

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