Roundabout
The All-Purpose Wife
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN
The Grannies are the Mums; When Bobby wants his homework done It's Dad who does the sums; For Mum makes cash and cash is what Keeps homes from being slums.
This, roughly, is the purport of a pamphlet published recently with the high-sounding title of Woman, Wife and Worker (HMSO, 2s.). It reports the investigations made by an LSE Social Science team into the ways and worries of a sample of 300 female biscuit-workers in South London. There is no necessary reason why a female biscuit-worker should share prob- lems with, say, a female singer or social secretary any more than a navvy with Mr. Macmillan; but as there is a certain sameness about washing up in any walk of life, almost anything about work- ing women is apt to interest all other working women strangely.
In one respect, the biscuit wives of Bermondsey have things all their own way. The biscuit factory has just about stood on its, head to accommodate their needs (and nearly, one gathers, gone crackers in the process); they can therefore work a variety of shifts and even take unpaid leave as an alterna- tive to constant absenteeism, especially in the school holidays. Probably shift-working, part time, is the best conceivable system for a married woman : freelancing, or out-work to be done at home, jobs with no clocking-in or clocking-out are always supposed to be ideal for married women, but it is not necessarily so : working at home leaves out the vital fact of companionship, and timeless freelancing has the effect of making the working wife feel guilty just about all the time : if she mends socks she feels she ought to be 'working'; if she is working, she probably ought to be cooking the dinner.
The Bermondsey wives are almost all on part time, especially those with young children : 42 per cent, of the sample had young children or school-age children, but only 2 per cent. worked full time, and those only from dire financial necessity. Just about all the wives said they were working for money first and foremost and only secondarily for a chance to get out of the house and gossip at bench level. However, the money was not usually to be spent on themselves, but on better equipment, better decoration for the house, better toys and treats for the children, and an annual chance to pick seashells off a beach instead of hops off a vine as before.
The women all, it is alleged, put their families first (hence the absenteeism). How much this is due to natural instinct and how much to the ceaseless plugging of the women's magazines I would not presume to speculate; it appeared that, in one way or another, the husbands were doing the same thing : at least the women claimed that they were closer to their families than fathers whose wives did not work. A good many of the husbands were inextricably welded into the domestic machinery, even to the extent of polish- ing floors and baby-sitting while their wives were on evening shift. Most of the husbands had been against their wives working at first, but had be- come keen supporters of the idea since.
And that, I must say, strikes a chord. Any woman who reads women's magazines (i.e any woman) sustains a terrific barrage of anti-career propaganda, in which husbands are shown wist- fully hoping that one day they will come home and find their wives have given up their jobs and were busy warming their slippers, tastefully arranging the flowers, lowering the lights and the standard of living. But the experience of all my friends is the same as mine : that at the slightest sign of our slackening up, our husbands' roars of rage and pain can be heard all over London. Only where a highly employable wife is married to a virtually unemployable husband (a poet, say) is this pattern noticeably reversed. Maybe I have the wrong kind of friends—or maybe there is simply a new generation of husbands who reckon that wives can be useful in more than one way. The survey made it clear, too, that these Ber- mondsey women felt that it was the non-working wives who were 'neglected'; obviously their moral priorities were their own, and not the women's magazines'. Which, when you consider that (ac- cording to government figures published this week) one woman in three is at work, is just as well.
All this, of course, makes it easy to go on work- ing—but rather hard to know when to stop. This is a serious problem, for leading this double life is, more than anything else, a matter of having enough energy—and energy may flag. Simple enough if it is assumed that you stop work when you marry; or when you have children; but if you carry on into your forties, do you have to slog away till you are ninety? A woman can go on feeling that work is expected of her long past the point where it ought to be. And one of the sadder sights of the competitive professions is the woman who has brought her children up with one hand and kept on her job in her thirties: who then finds herself losing ground in her career, but has already forfeited her best chance of retiring gracefully. Presumably the work- ing wives of Bermondsey will have to stop when their daughters are grown up in order that they may in their turn be the Grannies upon whom two-thirds of the children of these mothers depend : they may not take kindly to the role.
The matter of simply ceasing to be a wage- earner may be tricky, too. I have seen letters to women's magazines from women worried frantic by the need to stay at work in spite of failing health; they seemed certain that their husbands would not go back to providing housekeeping money after so long without having had to. And even in more enlightened households the prob- lem is there. Wives who don't work usually have a perfectly coherent idea of what their share of the money should be; and their spending is, I sus- pect, ruled by certain fixed convictions about what is or what isn't a sensible price to pay for a particular type of goods. But at the back of a working wife's financial feeling there is always the unexpressed (let us hope) conviction that she ought to be allowed to spend it because she 'earned it; and I have the impression, though this may be entirely personal, that she is much more likely to add up how much money the family, has at any point, and see whether the funds will run to some- thing or not, than to have immutable inhibitions about prices—based on the family's status in a general way. When she stops work it is very hard for her not to feel that she has lost her claim to her share of the budget—a hard adjust- ment to make.
The Bermondsey experiences suggest that in that area at least the `problem' of the working wife is under control; the problem of the non- working wife is not one that is supposed to pre- sent many difficulties. But in the changes between the two, trouble lies : interesting trouble. Maybe someone will do a survey on that soon.
'What do you know about plankton?'
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