For the past four years, I’ve been running a very small business: a 15-acre farm on which we rear pigs, grow vegetables and fruit, as well as produce 350 eggs a day from our chickens. This year, we’re going into small-time flower production.

Because it’s the sort of work that needs someone to turn up, regular as clockwork, every day, we employ two people – including an attractive woman in her thirties called Sarah, who feeds the pigs, collects the eggs, and makes sure the water systems are turned on in the polytunnels.

Our finances are fragile in the extreme. Eggs sell for just 85p a half dozen; recent rises in grain prices have doubled the cost of pig feed. At the end of most months, we’re worried about how we’re going to pay the bills. Somehow, we keep going – but I have to acknowledge that I live in dread of what should be happy news. If Sarah were to get pregnant, I honestly don’t know what we’d do.

It’s 36 years now since I co-founded Spare Rib. As a femi-nist, I’ve believed that women should have the right to work, if that is what they want. I’ve also always believed that employers should stand by their female staff when they have children, that maternity leave and maternity pay should be just as much of a given as our right to a pension.

But when the British MEP Godfrey Bloom blustered that “no self-respecting small businessman . . . would ever employ a lady of childbearing age,” I found myself in a dilemma. If Sarah became pregnant, I would be legally obliged to keep paying her for a full year after she’d given birth – which the business could ill afford. Now, on top of this, the government has announced that parents of children up to the age of 16 (as opposed to only up to six) will have the right to ask employers for flexible working arrangements.

Selfishly, I immediately thought of my own life. My pigs certainly aren’t going to thrive on flexi-feeding schemes. And neither is my business. Little wonder, then, that plenty of angry voices were last week demanding that women should get back to the kitchen.

How has it come to this? When I gave birth to my daughter Daisy, 25 years ago this summer, I was lucky enough to be able to spend the first 18 months of her life at home, working as a free-lance. But today, less than one in eight mothers stay at home and look after their children themselves. The rest juggle with unreliable (and often horribly expensive) childcare, race home from the office to collect the kids by 6pm and become anxious when they need to ask for time off to take them to the dentist.

For many, the financial demands of modern life have left them with no choice but to work, but there’s no doubt that many would at least prefer to work part-time during their children’s early years. And now, as if all that were not bad enough, we have small business leaders saying they no longer want to employ women anyway, because they can’t afford the expense involved if their female employees fulfil their natural destiny and have children.

How on earth, after 35 years of fighting for our rights to work and to be mothers, did we reach such a sorry state of affairs? Having children is, after all, the country’s most essential job – yet, from every direction, women are being slapped and punched by red tape and angry employers. Sometimes, it seems that the fem-inist culture – for which I’ve spent so much of my life fighting – is turning out to be not a dream come true but a nightmare in which women are both losing and suffering.

My stepdaughter recently told me about a mother of a boy in her son’s class who is so overworked that the child sometimes turns up to school in his pyjamas, with his day clothes crammed into a bag to which is attached a note saying: “Please help him get dressed – I don’t have the time.”

Last week, David Cameron emphasised the vital importance of families – as the bedrock on which societies are built. I believe he is right and that the social breakdown we are witnessing starts from the moment our children are born into a world which is hostile to mothers. But I’m also painfully aware it is equally hostile to the managers of small businesses.

Why should they be the ones who have to pick up the pieces when mothers take long maternity leaves or insist on flexible working practices that leave everyone else with more to do? It makes the childless resentful, and it makes employers angry.

At least one thing seems clear to me now: the femi-nist mantra of the 1980s – that a woman “can have it all” – has turned out to be a lie. We can’t. If we want to make work our priority, then we’re going to have sacrifice time with our children. Or we’re going to have to settle for a much smaller household income.

Whichever way you look at it, it’s a hideous choice – and grossly unfair. Unless the government decides that child-rearing is a job as worthwhile as any other – and looks for more complex and subtle solutions to this problem – women will continue to be faced with agonising decisions.

Times recommends

• Ask me about sex, not pay
• Culture clubbing
• Honor Blackman: Words from the wise