Most women are only one man away from a welfare cheque. Gloria Steinem’s famous warning may sound now like a tinny echo from history, a throwback to distant days when wives rarely worked or, if they did, earned peanuts. Her call for women to recognise their own vulnerability, and understand that true security comes not from marriage but from knowing you can earn a living was an essential battle cry back in the early days of the women’s movement.
These days, work is just what we do. Female employment is at a record high, stay-at-home parents an increasingly exotic minority and, while there’s no “right” time to go back to work after having a baby – however long or short a career break you take, most of us agonise over whether we judged it wrong – the assumption is that sooner or later virtually everyone gets there. So why should it feel so uncomfortable when the state moves to set this emerging consensus in cold, unforgiving stone?
For that is what is happening, with surprisingly little public debate. Ruth Deech, the crossbench peer and lawyer, is bringing a private member’s bill through parliament arguing that maintenance for divorcees be limited to three years (although payments for children would continue until the end of university). After that, the assumption is they’ll jolly well get a job and fend for themselves, unless they can prove particular hardship. Keeping former spouses on the hook financially for a marriage that may have ended 15 years ago is, she argues, hopelessly behind the times.
On the face of it, the idea that marriage shouldn’t be a lifelong meal ticket sounds fair. But Deech goes further, arguing that current arrangements aren’t just hurting the one picking up the tab, but also actively holding the lower earner back. “The assumption throughout the legal system that once a woman is married she is somehow disabled and incapable ever of managing on her own” is, she argues, what is stopping women being treated seriously at work. Really? It couldn’t be the other way round, with motherhood – if not marriage – rendering even the toughest of us vulnerable to not being taken seriously?
Deech’s bill may have little chance of becoming law. But it’s worth examining because it reflects a broader debate about non-working parents. From next month, changes to the benefit system will see the widowed parent’s allowance, paid to those bereaved with young children, capped. It was never a fortune – a taxable benefit of up to £487.71 a month – but it was paid until children grew up and gave traumatised families breathing space, easing the pressure on the surviving parent to earn. From April, however, it will be paid for just 18 months and then withdrawn in what ministers euphemistically call a move to help the widowed “readjust”.
If that doesn’t seem long to grieve, stabilise the children, reorganise home life and throw oneself back into work, it’s more grace than some of those rendered unexpectedly single may get. Also from April, unemployed lone parents – mostly women – and others on universal credit must be actively seeking work from when their youngest child is three (and attending work-focused interviews once the youngest is one). We have leapt within two decades from a tacit acceptance that single parents probably wouldn’t work, via New Labour’s expectation that in return for help with childcare they should start job-hunting once the children were in secondary school, to the apparent assumption that a year’s maternity leave is more than many can afford so single mothers can’t be mollycoddled. Tough luck if you find the logistics impossible, with only one person to do the nursery drop-offs. Which leaves Deech’s three-year transition phase for divorcees looking remarkably in step with the times.
It’s true that things have moved on from the days when a woman without a man was seen as a helpless charity case, and not just because the courts are increasingly dealing with cases of high-earning wives expected to pay maintenance to former stay-at-home fathers.
Many women will have squirmed uncomfortably on reading lurid accounts of high-profile divorce cases involving millionaires’ wives seeking to be kept in the style to which they have grown accustomed. Who are these women, indignantly demanding fur coat allowances that outstrip what most of us earn in a year, turning their noses up at the wrong sort of houses in Belgravia, pleading helplessness at the very idea of a job? Have they never heard of sisters doing it for themselves?
But these are the glitzy exceptions to a more painful workaday rule, with divorce courts increasingly assuming that by the time children are seven or so, a stay-at-home parent should be working.
Women my age lecture our daughters never to rely on a man for money; whatever choices these girls make, they can’t say they weren’t warned. But as the supreme court judge Lord Wilson argued, a 60-year-old wife who may not have worked for nearly four decades – and never expected to have to do so again – may not be able to waltz into a job if her husband leaves her. Sometimes the deals done inside a marriage, the tangled expectations of an entirely different era, can’t be unravelled easily.
As for the welfare state, the days when it could afford to stand in for every missing spouse are gone. Public willingness to support other people’s children (and it is the children the state is really protecting, via their mothers) is shrinking even faster than the tax base.
But until every single parent’s chance of getting hired or promoted is equal to a childless person’s, and a woman’s working opportunities are genuinely the same as a man’s, it seems pragmatic to err on the side of caution and flexibility. Steinem was right that money is the only real stepping stone to female security. Beware anyone claiming to empower women by taking it away.