'I DON'T think mothers have the same right to work as fathers. If the good Lord had intended us to have equal rights to go out to work, he wouldn't have created man and woman.' This 1979 proclamation of Tory ideology on the family by Patrick (now Lord) Jenkin is completely contradicted by statistics on women and work during the early years of Thatcher's rule.
By 1982 60 per cent of married women saw themselves as economically active, and that excluded full-time students and 5 per cent unemployed. In addition 14 per cent did some regular or occasional paid work. So, 79 per cent of married women were in one way or another either working or looking for work.
This gaping chasm between Tory rhetoric and reality in the early 1980s has not narrowed since. But there have been significant structural changes in the nature of work and in the workforce in the last 13 years, which have lead to changes between the levels and types of male and female employment. of May 1993 women are now 49 per cent of the workforce compared to 40 per cent in 1973. But this does not mean that men and women enter the work force on equal terms, nor that they do the same kinds of Lost jobs The decline in heavy industry has led to massive job losses in the traditional male areas of employment - steel, coal mining, engineering, ship building etc. More recently there has also been a loss of white collar jobs, both in the private These were more equitably divided between men and women. The only growth area has been in Social Services!
At the same time there has been an increase in work in the service sector, in the tourist and leisure industries, and some small growth in small scale manufacturing. These changes have led to an extraordinary overall loss of 2.8 million "male' jobs and a rise of 2 million 'female jobs' between 1973 and 1993.
The loss of 'male' and rise in 'female' work is not a straight swap. The free domestic labour that women provide in the home, caring, feeding and cleaning -reproducing the current and future labour force - has always meant that women go to work on unequal terms to men.
Working in different jobs, at a greater rate of exploitation and in worse conditions, has been the lot of the vast majority of working women, with black women in the very worst positions.
The current growth in women's employment is an increase in part-time, temporary, flexible, seasonal work and homeworking. What has changed is that these poorly paid and highly exploited women are now often the sole wage earners in the family.
Part-time
45 per cent of women workers are now in part-time jobs and this shift in work patterns is being used to force men too into part-time jobs. Compared to a previously insignificant percentage, 10 per cent of men now work part-time.
Tory rhetoric on the sanctity of the family and the need for women to remain in the home is at complete odds with ordinary people's lives. People know it is ridiculous to blame every social ill on single parents or bad parenting.
But the Tories need this kind of rhetoric to divert attention rom the fact that while: trying to create a low-wage econcrease in unpaid domestic labour.
The number of children taking school meals has dropped by 16 per cent in one year, with a parallel increase in packed lunches by 15 per cent in the same period.
At the same time the women workers in the school meals service had their jobs casualised, ending their permanent contracts, had their hourly rates cut, had their holiday retainer abolished.
So, women were hit in both parts of their lives: at work they faced worsening conditions and greater exploitation, while at home the burden of unpaid domestic labour was increased.
The 1980s saw a change in the relation between women's paid and unpaid labour which is continuing into the 1990s.
• Cuts in the state welfare services and benefits seek to shift the onus of caring for the very young, the old, the ill, the disabled onto the family - in other words women - many of these changes being laughably described as 'Community Care'.
• Attacks on conditions of work by a combination of anti-trade union legislation and giving free reign to market forces, deregulation and the abolition of rights for large numbers of workers. The objective is to produce a large part-time and flexible workforce, much of it made up of women workers, with black women worst off.
Pressure
This secondary workforce is being used as pressure on the better paid, fulltime predominantly male workforce, to accept worse conditions and less pay.
The combination of increased responsibility as unpaid domestic labourers and as a badly paid part of the workforce, even where women are sole breadwinners, will continue to put extreme pressure on the institution of the family, creating an obvious contradiction between Tory ideology and daily reality.
The Child Support Act, focus of the Tory attack on single parents - depicted as feckless, irresponsible and female - is just one element in their attempt to place the economic crisis and its concomitant social distress at the feet of women.
Whether the /Tory strategy succeeds or not depends partly on how the labour movement responds in the next period to attacks on the welfare state and on the standard of living of public sector workers.
What we can be sure of is that women, when they move into action against this government, will be at the sharp end of the fight - both at home and at work.