Motherhood and the spirit of the new capitalism.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Manne, Anne
• Date: 22 March 2005

Capitalism is and always has been brutal ... Whenever there has been change, people have been ground up. People like stability, so to get them to leave a dying industry or whatever, you have to burn them ... [By way of analogy, farmers] had to be hammered before they'd get off the land, had to really be hurt ... 'The old labour-intensive way of caring for children is no longer viable.' (1) Are we OK with the fact that baby may say his first word to the childcare worker, and grandma her last word to the nursing home aide? (2) A Good Weekend feature in 2002 depicted a woman lawyer conducting a 10 pm international phone conference. (3) An unremarkable event, except that while making 'pithy remarks' in a 'steady voice' she was also on all fours, rocking back and forth in premature labour with her first child and suppressing moans of pain. She had 'promised herself months earlier that having a baby would not compromise her career. During her pregnancy she had worked even longer hours than usual to prove her commitment to the job ... [She] didn't want to be the one who ended [the conference call] ... "you'll look like a wuss"'. (4)

How do we 'read' such a story? As an example of women's liberation to lives not dominated by biology but centred on achievement in jobs once reserved for men? Or as an example of a mother whose participation in the corporate world comes at a high price--of 'managing like a man', despite her female embodiment; obeying and internalizing the Stakhanovite work norms of the globalizing new capitalism?

My argument in this article is that anyone who thinks the great movement of women into the workforce, the dismantling of old meanings of motherhood, and the accompanying transformation of the landscape of childhood, is solely about women's emancipation--on women's own terms--is living with their eyes wide shut. The contemporary redefinition of motherhood is instead profoundly shaped by the new capitalism.

What are the constituents of the new capitalism that we need to consider? The 'new capitalism' is the term coined by Richard Sennett in his landmark study The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. (5) As Anglo-American societies have transformed from economies based on production, especially manufacturing, to service-based, high-consumption ones, a new 'risk society' has developed. Consistent labour shedding has produced a treacherous workplace culture of 'no long-term'. An atmosphere of 'dull continual worry' accompanies the process where 'perfectly viable businesses are gutted or abandoned, capable employees set adrift rather than rewarded simply because the organisation must prove to the market that it was capable of change'. (6) A hand-grenade of insecurity has been thrown at previous assumptions of predictable, life-long careers. In a workplace marked by the importance of weak ties (where fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections), 'detachment and superficial cooperativeness' are 'better armour' than personal qualities like reciprocity, mutual commitment, trust and loyalty. The labour market has bifurcated into two strands--a highly paid, highly skilled group working within a long-hours culture, and those who are part of what Ulrich Beck calls the Brazilianization of the labour market; a vast army of low-paid, insecure workers who, among other things, service the former as house cleaners, gardeners, nannies, daycare workers and dog walkers. (7)

In the new capitalism, consumption is absolutely central. It is a shift not just of economic activity but of sensibility, away from delayed gratification as part of the Protestant work ethic and towards the hedonism of high consumption. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observes, the code of the producer/soldier has been replaced by one belonging to the 'hedonistic sensation gatherer'. (8) Those on the wrong side of globalization, like the unemployed, are transgressors not only of the contemporary ethic of work but also the ethic of spending. They are flawed consumers.

The new 'necessity' for families to have more than one wage-earning adult is integral to 'influenza', the luxury fever of conspicuous consumption. Social commentators like Robert Frank and Clove Hamilton provide portraits of the first mass affluent class in history. (9) A few examples will suffice. Houses in the United States are now twice as big as those in the 1950s and have twice as many bathrooms as the 1970s. In Australia, as the average dwelling size swelled to 250 square metres, the average number of people living within them shrank to 2.6. The average Sydney mortgage in 2002 was around $1,200 a month. (10) Although rarely made explicit, the new capitalism is contingent on a trade-off: higher productivity is translated not into more time with families but more hours worked per family per year to service our consumption habit. (11) In France, for example, workers have more family time via a shorter working week and average seven weeks of holidays per year, but slightly lower consumption patterns (although still a very high standard of living) compared with the United States where they have less than four weeks annual leave, but bigger cars, houses and disposable incomes. (12)

In the new capitalism, too, the meaning of work has changed. It has been socialized. 'More and more, work enlists good conscience on its side. The desire for joy already calls itself a "need to recuperate" and is beginning to be ashamed of itself.' (13) As Ulrich Beck writes in The Brave New World of Work, the 'dominion of work' has triumphed--there is a new 'totalitarian value cycle of work' to the exclusion of all else. The title of a recent book summed it up, Better Than Sex: How a Whole Generation Became Hooked on Work. (14) So little in life is opposed to it; 'to such an extent', Beck argues, 'that almost no alternative remains ... The biblical curse--that only those who work shall eat--has become the work morality grounding human existence; only those who work are truly human'. (15)

Those aspects outlined above--the new 'risk' society, high consumption patterns, the socialization but simultaneous destabilizing of work--all make it unsurprising that the new capitalism has thrown up, even demanded, a new family model. Even when presided over by social conservatives like Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, the imperatives of the new economy are at least in tension, but more often in direct conflict with the single-income male breadwinner model. 'Individualism and choice are supposed to stop abruptly at the boundaries of the family and national identity. But nothing is more dissolving of tradition than the permanent revolution of market forces.' (16)

Yet the new family type is hardly supported by recent changes to the labour market or state services. An 'efficient' economy in a globalizing marketplace is characterized by the contraction, not expansion, of state spending. Any deviation from that contraction risks swift and devastating punishment by the international monetary market. Most notably for this article, the central aim of reducing state spending has affected both the quality, affordability and availability of childcare services.

When two wage earners are juggling both care and work, they require an updated, re-regulated labour market to reflect modern realities, such as job-protected, extended parental leave; leave to care for sick children or the elderly; and the right to part-time work. Despite Howard's declaration that the stress of the dual-wage-earning family is the 'great barbecue stopper', the Australian government has refused both the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) recommendation for three months of paid maternity leave and that of the Industrial Relations Commission to extend parental leave to two years. Instead it has obeyed the dictates of the new capitalism--a core aspect of which is the deregulation of the labour market. Hence the most significant reform of 2005 has been the harsh new industrial relations laws.

In consequence, the model of the dual-earning 'symmetrical family' is inseparable from the process Fredric Jameson alluded to as the essence of late capitalism: the transformation of even private relations into commodities bought and sold in the marketplace: 'the prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas'. (17) All this makes for a highly interesting relationship between the new capitalism and feminism and what Sandra Farganis calls the 'reconstitution of the feminine character', especially with respect to motherhood. (18)

Arlie Hochschild's powerful essay, The Commercial Spirit of Intimate Life and the Abduction of Feminism: Signs from Women's Advice Books, suggests:

Just as Protestantism, according to Max Weber, 'escaped from the cage' of the Church to be transposed into an inspirational 'sprit of capitalism' that drove men to make money and build capitalism, so feminism may be 'escaping the cage' of a social movement to buttress a commercial spirit of intimate life that was originally separate from and indeed alien to it. Just as market conditions ripened the soil for capitalism, so a weakened family prepares the soil for a commercialised spirit of domestic life. (19) Hochschild's focus is on how the emancipatory potential of the women's liberation movement may be in the process of being abducted to legitimize a central aspect of the new capitalism--'the commercialisation of intimate life'. Bauman, too, points to the ways that 'liberation rhetoric' often merely disguises what is really going on: namely, the commercialization of relationships previously outside the 'cash nexus'.

The American conservative Irving Kristol once observed, 'feminism today is a far more potent enemy of capitalism than radical trade unionism'. (20) My sense is, rather, of the easy incorporation of mainstream feminism into the emerging economic...