Dan Snow's History Hit - Motherhood, Working and Pandemics

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Being a working mother is now an entirely normal part of life but this was certainly not always the case and was often seen as a social ill in the past. Helen McCarthy, author of Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, joins Dan to help chart how the role of women in the workforce has changed over time and what impact the last year in lockdown has had on women, work, education and the structures of family's as a whole. 

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I wanted to get Helen McCarthy back on the podcast, partly because she's just been nominated quite rightly for the Wilson History Prize and partly because we talked just as we were going into lockdown just over a year ago and we both agreed it'd be interesting to come back and talk about the experience of lockdown, what we've learned about its impact on women, on work, on education, on all of our lives. And so it's a great privilege to have Helen McCarthy back on the podcast, talking about some of the hugest societal shifts in the past, from working motherhood to not working, to working again to not working,

and perhaps try to sketch out the first draft of history, how we think we'll remember the last year and a bit, in terms of its impact on families, men, women, children, and our lives. If you want to listen to previous podcasts of Helen McCarthy, you can do so at historyhit.tv. It's our digital history channel. You go there, you sign up, you listen to all the back episodes of the podcast, our ads, you can watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries. It's everything a history lover needs in this bright, new, exciting future. In the meantime, everybody, please enjoy this podcast with Helen McCarthy.

Helen, thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you for having me. We were going into lockdown last time. It seems crazy to think about it. We speculated last time how we thought you might have to update this book, writing it in 10, 20 years time, when you'll still be a very young historian. What's your first draft? What are your first thoughts after living through the experience we've had? Yes, I was just thinking back to our conversation a year ago, and I think I was in a state of shock. And to be honest, I think I've remained in a kind of

mild haze of disbelief really ever since. But I suppose a year on, thinking about some of our speculations and what's come to pass, I mean, I think the economic impact of the lockdown on women's careers and women's economic status more generally, it looked pretty grim and it has been pretty grim. So we know now that women are more likely to have lost their jobs, to have been made redundant, that some of the big sectors hit by the lockdown, retail, hospitality, catering, are feminised sectors. We know that women have been more likely than men to reduce their hours or to go part time or to take unpaid leave in order to juggle childcare and homeschooling. time or to take unpaid leave in order to juggle childcare and homeschooling. And I think it's probably still too early to tell what the long term impact on gender equality in the workplace will be. But the indicators are certainly not looking great. And we also know that working mothers have been hit hardest in terms of mental health and stress and depression,

and loneliness and social isolation. So all of those things combined would make for a pretty bleak new chapter to my book. And depressingly, it looks like domestic abuse has been on the increase as well, as people are often locked in with their abusers. And although we talk a lot about violence against women in the light of the recent Sarah Everard case, where a stranger could have committed an act of appalling violence on the street, women are usually killed by people they are intimate with. abuse helplines. And this has all been a result of this sort of intensified home life. You know, I don't know about you, but my experience of just the home and the domestic space is just so intense because we're sort of spending so much time at home and with our immediate family that the family life has just become so emotionally intense. You could say that again. I think also homeschooling,

which is something that's different. Well, is it different? Obviously, early years education probably was quite a feminised space through much of our history in as much as it took place. And I do think, again, perhaps anecdotally, that women have borne the brunt of homeschooling. I hasten to add, not in the snow snow household where I have been in charge of whatever sparse education of what has been going on partly because my wife works a lot harder than I do but I think that's been something else that people have been saying has been an extra burden it's one of those great examples of the internet supposedly making everything easier and in fact adding to our workload yeah I mean this whole new skill set that parents have had to acquire in order to support their children with the home learning. And you're right. I mean, historically, one of the tasks of mothers was to provide for the moral welfare and the education of their children, if not to deliver it themselves, then to engage governesses and tutors, and to make sure that their sons and daughters were learning what

they ought to be learning and then picking schools for their children. I suppose I'm talking more about the middle and upper middle classes, but that sense of mothers as having a responsibility for overseeing the education of their children has actually got a very long pedigree. It's a perfect storm in a way because we've asked women and some men but we've asked families to well we've confined them to the domestic space we've turned the clock back lots of women as you say have been forced to stay home for child care reasons but we haven't had any of the kind of wider i don't want to glamorize the past but the wider support networks the neighborhood networks the closeness of siblings and aunties and mothers that we might have once been able to rely on. So in a way, it's been all the disadvantages of both the traditional gender roles and this kind of

ultra-modern phenomenon of total isolation as well. Yes, that is a longer-term trend, really, since the mid-20th century. Although, interestingly, in the last 10 or 20 years, grandparents have been doing a great deal of childcare for their children, partly to plug the gaps within our absolutely inadequate childcare system in this country. But one of the other aspects of the lockdown was just the severing of those ties. So you couldn't have grandparents coming around to do their regular childcare for you anymore. So that kind of source of informal childcare was cut off during the periods of lockdown. I think one of the lessons learned actually from the first lockdown was that that really was just incredibly tough for working

families. We've now got childcare bubbles for the second and third lockdowns, which I think has meant that that aspect of those sort of informal support networks have been able to be sustained rather more than they were initially. It's interesting, it's an economic calculation that's built on historic injustice, which is, I guess, lots of women have dropped out of the labour market to look after kids, to keep households going, because of the two partners, they're being paid the least, I suppose. And the reason they're being paid least is because of historic inequality. So it's very much a contemporary problem, but absolutely rooted in the kind of research you've

done in the past. Yeah, it's structural. It's entirely structural, and it's deeply embedded historically. And it goes right back to the era of the Industrial Revolution and the development of wage labour and the demands for a family wage, which male trade unionists made their centrepiece, their central demand in the 19th century. So the idea of the male breadwinner is a male head of household who earns a large enough and secure enough wage to keep all his dependents. And that ideology has been incredibly powerful and incredibly enduring. And it's also helped to shape deeply embedded patterns of occupational segregation within labour markets, which means that, as you say, women don't have access to the higher paying jobs to the same extent as men.

And that then has a knock on impact when it comes to these decisions about who's going to step back from work, who's going to step back from a career when children arrive. So actually, yes, you're right. The lockdown sort of intensified or magnified some of those pre-existing sexual divisions. Because as you say, if someone has to step back, it makes more sense economically for the person who brings in the smaller income to step back. I didn't just get you on the podcast to talk about women so I could talk about men, but I do apologise because I've got a kind of thought bubble about masculinity

because in my relationship, I'm very struck by, often my wife is doing more important work than I am. And yet for some reason often my wife is doing more important work than I am. And yet, for some reason, my work is considered important to keep my sense of worth, basically protect my own mental health. And I wonder if it even more than the structural inequality, but whether there is deep identity issues around men needing work to get them out of bed to make them feel good about themselves and therefore dropping out of the labor market perhaps in some cases even though i don't know one or two cases where economically it's made more sense the other way around but for the sexual politics of the

relationship and the politics the family the man has stayed in work almost to protect the family from him having a breakdown basically yeah no Yeah, no, you're right. And clearly the gender ideology and the psychosocial effects of that over generations is a really important part of the puzzle as well. And it's so interesting you say, you know, men need jobs to kind of get them out of bed. One really important part of the debate in the late Victorian period around working mothers, some sort of Victorian reformers were very late Victorian period around working mothers. Some sort of Victorian reformers were very disapproving of working mothers because they thought that if mothers

went out to work, then all incentives for men to work would be taken away. And that actually, you need to prevent mothers from working so that men will pull their fingers out and look after their families and provide for their families. So there's always this sort of other story about male fecklessness or work shyness or their fundamental laziness. And that if mothers work too much, then that lets men off the hook. And I still don't think that that has quite gone away, that idea that a working mother or even a working wife endangers or sort of demoralises the husband or demoralises the father. I'm always sort of very struck by how there's very recent research that shows that marriages in which women earn more than their partners, that's often a real point of tension.

And it's something that women don't necessarily advertise to friends or to acquaintances that they earn more than their husbands because of fear of emasculating. You're right. I mean, there's all sorts of things going on there around masculinity and this really sort of enduring kind of structure of ideas about gender and sexual difference. If you listen to Ansel's History, we're talking working motherhood with helen mccarthy more after

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history hits there are new episodes every week it's so strange though because is it about industrialisation and the weird domestic family units that we found ourselves in? Because traditionally women worked all the time. Where did the idea come from that the woman should be protected within a home and that the man should leave it to work and somehow provide? There's this big debate amongst historians about the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the family and on gender ideology. And there's this sort of idea that it gave rise to an ideology of separate spheres in the 19th century, where the public world of work and politics and business was the male world, and the world of domesticity in the family

was the female world. One can also think about the rise of evangelical Christianity as a middle class ideology in the early 19th century where families of capitalists who had done very well in the industrial revolution wanted to parade their wealth and their cultivation by keeping their women folk at home. So this idea that if you can afford to keep your women folk at home, this is a kind of mark of your success and of your respectability. So all of these things are happening in the early 19th century. And that's often seen as kind of the crucial moment when these new ideas about gender and about the family become fixed, if you like. like yeah and so what does your

experience over the last year would you change anything you've written i've been asking all the historians that come on the podcast because so many of them have written about pandemics and looming prospect of sovereign debt defaults or like scary scary stuff and in your case has your experience of living through this year changed your approach to the sources? Do you think it's changed your scholarship? I think it's made me think a lot more about the home as a workplace. That's a theme which actually I write quite a lot about in my book so homeworking is something that mothers have done all the way through I mean before the industrial revolution the household

was the unit of production for many families but right through the 19th and 20th century women have done paid labour in their homes often sort of quite low level manual labour and then in the later 20th century with kind of new forms of teleworking and computers in the home. So I think that that strand, that's something which I would have thought about a lot more if I was beginning the research for this book. Now, I would probably want to trace that history in much greater depth, because it really does look like home-based working is going to be a much, much bigger part of our lives into the future. I mean, I'm already getting a sense just sort of anecdotally talking to friends and colleagues

that big firms are making plans now for this new world in which people are only coming in one or two days a week. And they're dramatically reducing their office space. And the home is going to be a much more significant place of work for millions and millions of people. I'm really struck by that and I wonder about the history of women and work because I've been reading a lot about Asian economies. Young kids, they want to go to work. They're desperate to go to the office because they're sharing apartments with three or four generations and they've got siblings in rooms and things and i'm wondering if it suits the man right so that the management have gone hey i live in the cotswolds i've suddenly realized i have to commute

every day and i save money on rent this is great what about these people at lower down the organization in the entry-level jobs the postgraduate jobs whatever it is for whom leaving the home sometimes escaping the home was quite an attractive going into the cosmopolitan centre, socialising out with the gaze of your neighbours, husband, mother, whatever. That's quite interesting, isn't it? I sort of wonder whether it will become rather a cool thing that some firms will say, actually, you know, come work in Soho and get away from it all. Yeah, and it's so difficult to predict these things, isn't it? It could be that there's a sudden kind of flip back

and suddenly everyone wants to be in the office. I mean, I don't know, it's too soon to tell, but it could have massive ramifications for inner cities and for the design of cities and for the design of our city centres if actually office space is much reduced and people's apartments and homes and flats are going to be their workplaces. But just to come back to working mothers, it is interesting that we have this sort of image of paid work as a kind of liberating or emancipatory experience for women,

because it takes them out of the home, because it takes them away from children and from housework and from interruptions. And clearly, if working from home becomes a permanent part of the landscape of the workplace, then we have to think really hard about what that means for mothers. And if paid work was actually a way of avoiding social isolation, and was actually a kind of way of enjoying sociability and making friends and also actually very importantly joining trade unions so it's very very difficult to organize a home-based workforce and to make them aware of their colleagues and to organize collectively so those are all sort of things that we have to bear in mind when it comes to working from home that it can be very flexible and attractive but

it can also be isolating and it can have other effects which we need to be aware of as a society. A lot of it seems to come back to child care and the provision of child care which either exacerbates or solves many of the things that we've talked about. There's a huge debate in the States at the moment about pre-k they call it and we always seem to be talking about it here in the UK as well. Is that something that has followed trends in working motherhood or did it precede it and enable it? So in Britain, and my book is primarily about Britain. There has never been significant investment in daycare by the government or by employers, except during the two world wars. And in those cases, it was on a purely temporary basis in order to mobilize women for essential war work. So because

Britain has a liberal welfare tradition, and that has tended to see childcare as something that families sort out for themselves. So you either sort out some kind of informal arrangement, perhaps with neighbours or relatives, or you pay your own way for a childminder or a nanny. So it's daycare, nurseries, workplace nurseries have developed very, very slowly and have never, ever met demand. So the expansion of the employment of mothers, which has taken place, particularly since the Second World War, has proceeded largely despite Britain's childcare system rather than because of it. One part of the answer to that is part-time working. So part-time employment has always been a really, really big factor in driving up women's employment rates in Britain. And it's, you know, from the government's point of view, from an employer's

point of view, it's great because it means that you don't have to invest seriously in childcare because you assume that families can kind of sort it out for a few hours a day. Well, if big statism is back in, if COVID has taught us that we like big government, then perhaps childcare, daycare will be an essential part of the plan as we rebalance our working practice over the next few years. Well, I wish I could agree with you, but it's a topic on which this government has been almost entirely silent. It's not a priority in any COVID recovery plan. And that's really depressing, because if we don't want to see a reversal of years of progress in terms of gender equality in the workplace and women's access to the labour market, then we have to do something about childcare. Because one of the other things that's happened during lockdown is many childcare

providers have really, really struggled to survive, because they had a massive reduction in demand, and they need a lot of money to keep going. So I think that childcare should be a priority. But I don't see any sign of that as yet. There are other silos of government policy that I'm sure we could say the same about with this government, but there we go. Okay, Helen, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast.

The book is out in paperback now, and it's called? It's called Double Lives, A History of Working Motherhood. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All the traditions of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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