What you write can come back to haunt you. The Compleat Woman was written in a
furor scribendi, when I was 38 with four children under the age of 7. The
goals of women's liberation had been won in the 1970s - equal pay, no
discrimination, maternity leave. We had a woman PM - not that she showed any
interest in promoting women - and we could now allegedly have it all. But
how, and who could tell the tale? I read through the 1985 Who's Who, in
search of women who combined career and family - and had stayed married for
25 years. Hah! Most women who infiltrated its testosterone-filled pages were
unmarried civil servants, or childless headmistresses. Pillars of society,
but not what I sought. (I wanted mothers of three-plus, since the real test
begins once the children outnumber their parents.) Having scraped together
20, I met them and wrote the book, at nights and weekends, neglecting my
children, finishing as dawn broke on my 40th birthday in May 1986. The first
readers were the agent Pat Kavanagh, and Carmen Callil, the publisher, two
successful childless career women, who regarded my subjects as an alien
species. “These women are impossible!” Carmen scrawled in a margin.
Impossible Women was the original title.
They were an odd lot: laden with academic achievement and mostly born to
privilege, with exceptions such as Mavis Nicholson and Margaret Forster, who
sprang from working-class backgrounds when education was a key to social
mobility.
Several were authors and as Drusilla Beyfus said: “We are cheats.” Why?
“Because our work is flexible. It is inflexibility that is death to anyone
with a family.” True: you can fit in writing anywhere, any hour. The career
women of the 1980s, forging towards the glass ceiling in a corporate world,
couldn't work from home. For them, the only solution (such as mine) was a
live-in nanny. My 20 women tended to scramble along with au pairs, grannies,
ad-hoc help. Theirs was a totally different era: Elizabeth Anscombe, the
Cambridge philosopher, had seven children, but no car and could not drive.
A first-time mother tells me that she found the book (available on Amazon for
just 1p) useful and I express surprise. Surely things have changed vastly
since 1987? It's no longer remarkable to do what men have always done -
succeeding at work, despite parenthood. What has changed is women's
expectations of access to work, and the family demographic. The 20 CWs in my
book had altogether 90 children, but most of them would never be so
reproductive. “These women may prove to be the last of their kind,” I wrote.
Last year I revisited half a dozen of them (another half dozen had died) to
ask what they felt had changed for their descendants, now well into
adulthood.
It would take another book to detail the varying and complex outcomes.
Some of the 90 children have made names for themselves: as writers, academics,
film directors, journalists, TV producers, scientists, artists. Some have
married (and remarried), become parents (or not), divorced, emigrated,
suffered illness and accidents. Having it all (as a life-plan) is a chimera.
Two of my women had divorced, after 25 years' marriage; and eight are now
widows. Madame Life's a piece in bloom/Death goes dogging everywhere/She's
the tenant of the room/He's the ruffian on the stair - W.E.Henley. Women's
habitual mantra of “getting on with it” is instilled from birth: children
leave and men usually die first.
All women develop resilience.
A-higher-than-average number of children does not guarantee an exponential
number of grandchildren. I went to see Sheila Kitzinger - my
natural-childbirth guru in 1976 - to find out about her five daughters, two
of whom are university professors. Only one daughter has followed her into
maternity. The others, three of them lesbians, are childless. Beulah Bewley,
the distinguished epidemiologist, also had five children, but of the four
who survive (the eldest was a Down's child, who died at 42), only one - a
consultant obstetrician with a female civil partner, also a doctor - has a
child. “Perhaps we preached the gospel of contraception too successfully!”
the Bewleys told me.
Grandchildren are objects of fascination. “This house is a kind of vortex for
our seven grandchildren,” said Shirley Hughes, a children's author and
illustrator, who was widowed last year. Margaret Forster's house is besieged
daily by three grandchildren and she was proud to become one of the Useful
Grannies at the school gates while her two daughters (one divorced) and
daughter-in-law pursue careers in journalism, TV and the theatre. “Nothing
has really changed,” as Margaret said, “about child care.”
Trixie Gardner, an Australian-born life peer, and a former dentist, now
widowed, had three daughters. “In my life, whenever a good thing happens, a
bad thing happens,” she said. “When I got the peerage, my eldest daughter
got MS, at 21. I would have done without the peerage if I could have saved
her.” From her wheelchair, Sarah (a divorcée) carried on her work in
Whitehall, and became deputy mayor of Kensington.
“With me as a role model, Sarah said she didn't look on anything as
unachievable. But health was the thing that hit her. To be a divorced,
childless disabled person at home all day would be demoralising - so she
finds her job very rewarding.”
The Gardners' middle daughter, Rachel, a GP married to a consultant
neurologist, fits in her working hours around four children, including the
eldest boy with Down's syndrome. The youngest daughter, Joanna, used to work
long hours with an American-based City law firm. Having stood as a Tory
against David Miliband in South Shields in 2001, she married, had her first
baby and found, at 40, that “life changed completely”.
“Women have burdened themselves with many extra things,” Baroness Gardner
said, “but they have not lost the chores they always had. On the whole I
think our daughters' lives are harder, more of a juggling act than ever.
When they were small, we had a big house and garden in Bayswater. No dentist
couple like us could afford that house today. It was bought by a sheikh, and
is now worth many millions.”
I saw Mary Warnock in the House of Lords too. Her five children, all in
interesting professions, had not proved “a good marrying lot”. Two marriages
failed. The eldest has a long-term partner and is “a wonderful aunt”. Two
daughters have one daughter apiece. One son has two children; the other son
and his wife have adopted three.
Baroness Warnock, philosopher, defines anxiety as the unchanging factor of
motherhood. “Anxieties about children don't change and I don't think they
ever will. Nor do the domestic demands. I don't see that any element has
progressed in such a way that women have been relieved of any
responsibilities. Men are supposed to do more and they do; but the question
is: who is more conscious of the responsibility? I always lived in terror of
the telephone, of being told that a child was sick, or had disappeared. I
don't think that's changed.”
Shirley Hughes's daughter, Clara Vulliamy, has two children and, as a portrait
painter, mirrors her mother's life. “Freelance work gives no pension, but at
least you can knock off when someone is ill,” said Shirley. “Young couples
today are seriously overworked: it's such an effort to pay a mortgage on a
family house. We all had huge houses, broke as we were.” On the other hand,
she notes, women no longer feel guilt about working, and men do chores. “My
molecular biologist son Tom does all the ironing, and his boys get a clean
shirt every day!”
Jill Parker, widow of Sir Peter Parker, with 11 grandchildren, thinks her
three sons and one daughter are better parents than she was. “I didn't give
my kids enough time,” she said. “None of my children would just
turn off the light and say good night to their children; they stayed with
them till they were asleep. They don't say, ‘here's supper' as I did, but
ask, ‘what would you like?'” Is their life any easier? “Well, they've got
more machines. We started without even a washing machine and got blisters
wringing out the bloody nappies. I loved my work, but I had to be at surgery
at 8.30am and I would fling some porridge down them and shove them out with
shoelaces untied. My Lucy and the others see the virtue of getting up
earlier.”
Sheila Kitzinger at 79 is still writing and working on the rights of mothers
in childbirth. Far from yearning for more grandchildren, “I just want my
daughters to be creative and to put a lot into life. We argue and discuss
the major issues, especially feminism, supposedly outmoded, but we still
consider ourselves feminists. Uwe [her husband] is the amused onlooker.”
There were several refrains in these conversations. One is that a stable
50-year marriage is a cohesive force. Unforeseen disruptions and pitfalls in
children's lives - and they had all faced some emotionally shattering blows
- are cushioned by the longevity of a cocooning family unit. “We all get on
so well,” they would say, “and get together, that's the main thing.” And
when mother becomes a widow, what gets her through bereavement is her
supportive children.
As for having it all - perish the phrase. I would never write that book today,
knowing that women who appear to have everything sewn-up still have moments
- or years - of guilt and self-reproach, of feeling stretched and torn in
too many directions. Hence the high-powered women who give up on the career.
My interest in this subject has dwindled to the point where I go along with
Margaret Drabble (mother of three): “If I get into a railway carriage with a
child in it, I get straight out.”
The real change is in the media. Male editors used to recoil at women
mentioning birth, nappies or nannies. When The Compleat Woman came out, I
was writing interviews in The Sunday Times, alongside 11 political
columnists (male) in the News Review. Then the paper was redesigned and our
views were invited. “There is nothing in this paper of any interest to
families, or mothers with small children underfoot,” I said. Andrew Neil,
the Editor, retorted: “What about the Funday Times [the comics supplement]?”
Since then I am hoist with my own petard, because the Sunday Times News
Review, and every other paper, is awash with columns by women - and men -
writing of mummyhood, daddyhood, sleepless nights, school hols, school runs,
exams. Bringing Up Baby is the predominant theme of feature pages today,
while domesticity, cookery and home-makeovers fill television screens. For
the single and child-free (who now make up the majority) it must surely
contribute to Grumpy Old Person syndrome. If any young woman should wonder
today how to have it all, there's plenty of advice. But if she asked me, I'd
tell her, you really don't have to.
Nothing quite turns out as we imagine
I came to regret my book's provocative title, chosen because I found a
marvellous 18th-century painting for the cover, showing a woman wielding a
fishing rod (as in The Compleat Angler) while her huge family played on the
riverbank and her husband sat sketching. But “compleat” sounded smug, which
my women were not. “I don't want to be envied,” said Mavis Nicholson. Others
said: “Don't make it look easy! It's not.” I now recognise that a sense of
fulfilment does not necessarily come from combining have-it-all goals, but
from qualities within oneself. Hundreds of dynamic, life-enhancing
acquaintances and friends have never married or had children. Most women end
up alone anyway, and how they cope is what really distinguishes them. The
most liberated woman is the singleton: independent and free of anxieties
about menfolk and offspring. Children are hostages to fortune: the larger
the family, the more hostages for fortune to play with. We embark on
marriage and motherhood in confidence and optimism; nothing quite turns out
as we imagine.
