Maternity leave: Rosie Boycott opines in the Observer August 24, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Media and Journalism, Social Policy, Society.trackback
An interview with Rose Boycott in today’s Observer tells us all we need to know about aspects of populism. And no surprise that a founder member of Spare Rib in the early 70s has made a smooth, if not quite seamless, journey to ‘food tsar’ for Boris Johnson’s London administration. All well and good, much as one might expect indeed. And for how she attempts to square these circles you can read the article.
But one thing that really annoyed me about it was the follow on from an article she had written in the Daily Mail (natch) last month where she argued under the headline “Feminist finds herself silently agreeing that family rights could be harming women’s careers” that:
Speaking on the eve of a keynote speech on family policy, Nicola Brewer, the new chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, has made the startling claim that Britain’s generous maternity benefits may actually be harming women’s role in the workplace.
Ms Brewer says new legislation, which will son enable women to take 12 months’ paid maternity leave, has made many employers think twice before offering them jobs or promotion.
Boycott continued that:
while parental rights are a wonderful thing in theory – beloved by governments eager to court the ‘family-friendly’ vote – they are also an immense burden on the small businesses who are expected to pick up the tab, especially at a time when the economic downturn means many are struggling simply to keep afloat.
Here, I speak from anxious experience.
As regular Mail readers might recall, 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 producing 350 eggs a day from our 600 chickens.
This year we’re going into small-time flower production.
It’s hard work – and it’s the sort of work that demands someone turning up regular as clockwork, every day, to feed the animals and collect the eggs.
We employ two people on a full-time basis and two others part-time.
One of the two employees is female, an incredibly attractive young woman in her 30s called Sarah.
Many an early morning (and late evening) Sarah’s there on the farm – feeding the pigs, collecting the eggs, making sure the water systems are turned on in the polytunnels if needed.
Our finances are fragile in the extreme.
Eggs sell for just 85p a half-dozen, while recent grain prices have doubled the cost of feeding our pigs.
At the end of most months, we’re worried about how we’re going to pay the bills.
But, month by month, by hook or by crook, we keep going.
There is, however, one thought which fills me with dread: if Sarah were to get pregnant, I honestly don’t know what we’d do.
And here, lest we think her views might be – to use a word she drops in earlier in her piece – antediluvian.
Let me be clear: I have always believed that women should have the right to work and that they shouldn’t be condemned to a life of home and hearth if that isn’t what they want.
I’ve also always believed that employers should stand behind their female staff when they decide to have children, that maternity leave and maternity pay should be just as much of a given as our right to a pension and a bus pass when we get to the end of our working lives.
But the fact is that the pendulum has now swung so far in women’s favour that for the majority of the 3.8 million small businesses in Britain, paying maternity leave can make the difference between staying in business and calling in the liquidators.
Okay… so perhaps not antediluvian, but certainly for Boycott (”leading feminist in the 1970s, wrote a revealing memoir in the 1980s and edited a glossy magazine and a New Labour-leaning newspaper in the 1990s” to quote the Observer) pretty bloody self-serving.
For in the Observer piece we learn that the piece in the Maid is built on shaky foundations. As the Observer interviewer notes:
The subtext here seems to be that young women are inevitably going to get knocked up, especially if attractive. If you’re a hard-pressed steward of the land, you employ them at your peril. When I visited, Sarah, happily, had so far avoided getting pregnant. But Boycott claimed her employee hadn’t minded being publicly warned about the damaging possibilities of her childbearing decisions – ‘She’s lovely.’
Well, that too seems a bit self-serving (and what’s with the ’she’s lovely’… patronising, non?).
But that’s okay, because Boycott rolls out the tried and tested defence that:
….she has been misunderstood. She insists that what she was actually saying is that women are facing pressures caused by inequality. ‘What message are we sending out that a man’s got entitlement to two weeks’ paternity leave and a woman’s got 52?’
Odd then that the words ‘men’ and ‘fathers’ or even ‘paternity’ figure not at all in the piece…although she’s keen to throw the latter term into the mix in the Observer piece:
But wouldn’t longer paternity leave just exacerbate the problems for small businesses? ‘We are going to need better tax breaks for small businesses. I don’t think there’s enough help. But I don’t know how we do the next step of feminism. I think when we started out we assumed women would have choices. Being a parent has been downgraded. If I could go back I would have started fighting much sooner for tax relief for childcare.’
But lest that seem just like typical confusion, note the last line in the following (broadly correct) analysis:
It does seem odd, though, that Boycott, who founded the pioneering feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1972, at the age of 21, appears to be prioritising the needs of business over the rights of women to choose how much time to take off paid work. And it seems – how shall we say? – rather unfair of her to have argued for reproductive rights when she was of the age to reproduce, and for small business now that’s become her new baby. (In fact, she may have been unnecessarily fearful. She seems surprised when I tell her that employers can recover 92 per cent of the 26 weeks’ statutory maternity pay.)
So, let’s get this straight. Her cri-de-coeur about the parlous state of societal structures, and her business in particular, and the dangers of the ‘lovely’ Sarah specifically are based on a complete lack of knowledge of the actuality of statutory maternity pay and the financial support for business. And for this she gets paid to write articles in the news media.
Nice work if you can get it.
Cheltenham Ladies College and University of Kent educated Rosie B…….. Class trumps everything in the end, one finds…..
It sure does. I always think about it as class position. Look at the majority of people and trace their trajectory… particularly in political terms. It’s also, I think, a flip (in every sense of the word) side of a certain brand of ‘liberalism’.
Exactly. Mirrors the way a certain strain of liberalism in a way acted as a placeholder for a ‘left’ here from the late 60s through to the bieth of the tiger and the Spring tide.
I hate to be picky, but there is a quote at the bottom of the article where she says she never went to university.
according to this she read Maths at Kent – doesn’t say she finished, mind.
sorry, this was meant to be: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/review/panel/1937145.stm
‘this’ was a link to the BBC Newsnight site which the spam filter appears not to like
Brenda Power in the Sunday Times (Aug 24):
‘It might be entirely relevant for, say, the owner of a small business to wonder about a working mother’s childcare arrangements or to be curious as to whether she plans to have any more children. He’s not being sexist if he’s not inclined to ask the same questions of a male employee, he’s just being realistic. Women are the ones most likely to take time out to tend to a sick child or go to a parent teacher meeting or conceive and give a birth to a baby.’
I’ve been naively wondering when the parental leave disparity will be evened out by extending parental leave – it takes two ‘feminist’ columnists to make it dawn on me that the disparity is far more likely to disappear through the agency of businesses complaining that maternity leave, such as it is, harms their competitiveness.
crocodile, that’s my fear. When O’Brien and Boycott are reading off the same sheet there’s trouble afoot.
Will sort that out sonofstan.
Brenda Power, WBS
Oh, and Rosie B. believes it should be compulsory for young people with ASBOs slapped on them to work on allotments for nothing. Maybe she should get them to work on her ‘ickle farm for nothing…. Saves maternity leave and having to cough up for the “lovely” Sarah.
Shame how once trendy feminist Rosie co-founder of Spare Rib has gone all right-wing petit-bourgeois. Obviously equal opportunites and sex discrimination have also been ditched by the wayside by Rosie.
I don’t give a monkey’s that she went to Cheltenham Ladies’. I do give a monkey’s that ever since Spare Rib she’s given no signs of being anything other than a talentless has-been with a lot of good connections. Honestly, she’s right up there with the Rolling Stones and Peter Hain for living off past glories and she’s spent thirty years being awarded jobs for which she’s displayed no very obvious aptitude. And now she’s turned into Fay Weldon.
By the way, what does “natch” actually mean? I used to come across the word about twenty-five years ago when reading the music press (if you can be said to “read” something quite so obviously subliterate) and I’ve always associated it with pretending to have a Cockney accent when you haven’t.
Short for “naturally”, isn’t it?
Spare Rib always had a conservative element to it anyway, at least on issues of sexuality, so I’m not really surprised to see such reactionary positions espoused by one of its founders. Although I suspect Rosie’s sharp turn to the right over the past decade (didn’t she join the Lib Dems a few years back?) is probably an embarrassing step too far for her former colleagues.
Ooops… Sorry. My mistake crocodile. Worse again though. Revenge of those the petit-bourgeois, as harpymarx notes.
That’s a great idea harpymarx. Problem is she’d probably think so too
Natch, as Wednesday says, is ‘naturally’. I use it ironically. I never thought of it as English, more American if anything.
Oi, what precisely was subliterate about the music press 25 years ago, ejh? Sure, it was pretentious to a fault (although it had toned that down by 88 or so). But subliterate? To be honest I always thought that for all the obvious faults it was actually quite well written and even the pretension was quite educative – at least to a degree…
it was actually quite well written
This is what I don’t think. They might have all pretended they’d read Barthes and Bourdieu, but that wasn’t the main problem. Their most glaring stylistic drawback was that precious few of them could write a sentence that communicated its meaning clearly.
Which is strange, really, when you consider that rock ‘n’ roll, at root, is all about putting across a simple message in a simple way.
I use the past tense, by the way, but I have no reason to think that this has changed.
I agree with you on that Wednesday re Spare Rib having a conservative element when it came to sexuality. It was also moralistic and had that lecturing style. Spare Rib got worse on those issues from the mid-80s onwards mainly due to adhering to the scriptures of radical feminism. It was an utter shame as Spare Rib coulda/shoulda been so much much more. Though saying that, I always thought it was good on international issues.
But lack of direct communication isn’t synonymous with sub-literate.
Re Spare Rib, doesn’t it come back to class position as well?
‘This is what I don’t think. They might have all pretended they’d read Barthes and Bourdieu, but that wasn’t the main problem.’
None of the writers for Smash Hits ever came across like that!
Heh. I wouldn’t know. Actually didn’t Miranda Sawyer write for them? What an arse she is.
But lack of direct communication isn’t synonymous with sub-literate.
No, but I was being needlessly abusive (as indeed I am above). I think the problem is people who think it’s better to write a sentence that goes at 100 mph and piles in as much as possible rather than one which actually says “this is what I think and why”. That may seem a rather Spartan approach to the writing of prose but it’s not such a bad place to start, if only on the grounds that you ought to be able to do that before you start trying to write like the last chapter of Ulysses.
I get what you’re saying ejh, but I think in the context of music that’s a big ask. It’s a bit like sports writing. It has to be more than the base material because the base material is in some respects very simple and straightforward (neither of which is a criticism of either sport or music). And consequently we see the propensity to add candyfloss and then more candyfloss and then even more candyfloss in terms of text. To be honest, and I’ve said this before, I’m always amazed when I read any writing about music over 1000 words which is halfway decent. That’s why I love Christgau’s work because it’s so short and succint. So I guess I half agree with you, but…
D&C… Smash Hits eh? Well, I think some fairly good writers cut their teeth on it. But yeah, not so much with the Barthes… (unless it was an interview with Scritti Pollitti)
Yeah, but I don’t think it had so much to do with the base material*, as with having writers who didn’t understand that what you’re trying to communicate is meaning, not how breathlessly you can write. The same faults attended pieces of any length, not just the longer ones.
* to tell the truth, to a large degree, the fact that it’s rock ‘n’ roll contributes mightily to the problem: it’s a medium which is about showing off, about being loud, about being young, about being provocative, and about making a name for yourself. It therefore tends to produce a journalism which reproduces those characteristics.
What ejh calls ‘the problem’ I found most stimulating. Of course much pioneering rock journalism was self-advertising, pretentious and often wilfully obscure – but a lot of it was different and exciting and there was a sense that it belonged to our generation. Precociousness is like that: it can annoy, and is partly designed to. It can also excite and innovate and sweep away the cobwebs. Of course I hurled the occasional flight of fancy by Morley or Penman or Savage across the room, but they made me think.
Compare a late 70s NME to what passes for music criticism now, demanding nothing of its readers, seeking to introduce them to nothing new, not in music, not in language, not in ideas.
Yeah, but there’s nothing “precocious” about writing badly. Only about writing well.
Prodigies are annoying, but even more annoying are people who think they are prodigies when they are not.
WbS: “Re Spare Rib, doesn’t it come back to class position as well?”
Yeah, it does. And to be honest, that’s a further limitation of radical feminism is doesn’t have an analysis of class except that it sees women’s oppression in terms of this monolithic unchanging entity called patriarchy.
Is “patriarchy” necessarily “monolithic” and “unchanging”?
Nope, ejh, I don’t believe it is and that’s not my analysis of patriarchy in relation to capitalism and class society. I am putting forward a radical feminist understanding of patriarchy as much of their analysis revolves around it being unchanging and they don’t see it in terms of class and capitalism.
I’m with crocodile on this. And I do think that even rose tinted glasses aren’t completely wrong in looking back at the 1980s writing which at least tried to push the envelope in terms of suggesting that ideas mattered, something that as time has gone on simply has blinked out completely. I gave up on the NME about six years ago tired of pedestrian writing about pedestrian bands. They couldn’t even do an Everett True or Simon Price (Jesus, Romo? although in fairness it was merely a precursor to the completely unlamented electroclash scene) on it… And I wasn’t much of a fan of either of them back in the day, but at least they tried.
Rose-tinted or not, WBS, I’d go back to the mid-70s as the real golden age of British rock journalism, where it seemed every week some new genius was being revealed to us by Nick Kent, Giovanni Dadomo, Savage and others. They weren’t always right, but at least their excitement shone from the page.
I only caught the tail end of that, but I think you’re right. And while there were flashes of brilliance afterwards the nature of the magazines changed sharply, particularly in the mid 1990s.
at least their excitement shone from the page.
Well yes, because they didn’t have any other register, did they? Never knowingly understated, Jon Savage.
Marqusee nails Marcus for this sort of thing: even his best writings lean too heavily on the notion that in any historical moment there’s an all-embracing Zeitgeist and that it is the job of the journalist or cultural historian to nail it down in a phrase. Though at least Marcus could occasionally nail it down in a phrase you could follow properly the first time you read it.
To my mind these people are hypes and frauds. They pretend to learning that they do not have, they write without objectivity and therefore without honesty, and they do so in order to draw attention to themselves.
I was young. I needed the excitement. I had the rest of my life for rigour and balance.
You’re a gloomy kind of a feller, aren’t you, ejh?
It’s all froth of course, you’re right, but in some ways everything is froth. No harm done. And quite a bit of good. Not least entertainment.
I started reading the NME when I was 13 in 1973 – I remember a piece by Andrew Tyler on Victor Jara (about 8 tabloid pages over 2 weeks – can you imagine anything running over a page in the current music press, never mind about someone unlikely to make anymore records?), a three parter by Nick Kent on Nick Drake that went deeply into his state of mind over his last year. I remember Mick Farren’s ‘Titanic’ pieces that called for the overthrow of the dinosaurs and indirectly heralded punk (now I wonder how we thought it was all that bad TBH – compared to now, the early ’70s was a creative golden age).
Sure, an awful lot of it was faux- hard boiled, too hip by half – and the next generation -Parsons/ Burchill on the one hand, Morley/ Penman very much on the other could be insufferably pretentious or cruel, but there was an idea – or ideas -of what pop could be, and musicians were examined in the light of such notions, and not simply pumped on behalf of record companies – criticism in other words. And also, and not trivially, the occasional pretentious allusion to Derrida or Barthes would cause the intelligent youngster to find out who these people were, and since, in the 70s/ early 80s, the bright young working- classes were still less than likely to go to university, this was a powerful spur to the auto-didact to compete with her more privileged peers. Compare that to now where most writing aimed at young men assumes a range of interests limited by tits and football………
And to run with that thought a bit further, music in the 1980s when I came to it seriously was very much something where classes mixed and where there was a ferment of ideas, etc.