David Willetts vs teh Feminizm

Via Quiet Riot Girl, where I posted most of this as a comment already.

According to The Telegraph, David Willetts, the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition's Universities Minister has published a book, and made remarks, to the effect that feminism held back working-class or socially-deprived men by letting women take their places at universities:

[ETA: The Guardian has its own report on this here.]

The Government’s social mobility strategy, which will conclude that movement between the classes had “stagnated” over the past 40 years, will be published next week and Mr Willetts blamed the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the lack of progress for men.

“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.

The problem I have with this is that it presents a false dichotomy: "either we have middle class people (regardless of gender) going to university and working class people (regardless of gender) don't or we have men going to university (regardless of social class) and women don't. We can't have both women and working class/socially deprived men going to university."

There is a reason why I did not add the clause (regardless of social class) to "women" in the second part of the logic statement there.

That reason is that prior to feminism, women were a de facto working class or even "serf" class, regardless of their social background - the Telegraph's use of the term "housewives" (i.e. unpaid domestic servants) acknowledges that this would have been the situation otherwise. So what Mr Willetts hopes to do is to set one form of egalitarianism against another. It is no different from the ways in which racists try to set working class White men against immigrants from non-White backgrounds.

Mr. Willetts says that: "it widened the gap in household incomes because you suddenly had two-earner couples, both of whom were well-educated, compared with often workless households where nobody was educated."

In 1978 there was scandal when unemployment figures reached 1 million for the first time. After Thatcher came to power, unemployment rose rapidly to double and then triple that number. Because of IMF restrictions, which resulted from misleading financial figures having been presented to the Labour government in 1976 by economists (who were beginning to be swayed by monetarist theories), the rise in unemployment was already beginning due to the introduction of monetarist theories such as those endorsed by Thatcher's government. Prior to 1976, it is arguable that successive governments mismanaged the economy of Britain (and it was a managed economy based on Keynesian principles), which got it into a mess. [Sources: When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett and The Vote by Paul Foot - Beckett's book appears to argue that monetarism was a necessary and even positive step at the end of the Seventies; Paul Foot obviously argued the opposite!]

So Mr Willetts is probably wrong to point the finger at feminism as the major cause of families ending up with "often workless" members while others have two high-income earners. Successive governments, starting with either the first Wilson govt or Ted Heath's, then Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher in turn, all contributed by their mismanaged economic policies in far more effective ways than did feminism. (It is also worth noting that unions campaigning for percentage pay increases across the board also served to increase income gaps.)

[ETA: The Guardian report linked above carries the following, which supports my analysis:

Sarah Veale, the TUC's head of equality and employment rights, said: "It's disappointing to hear this Neanderthal take on our current unemployment crisis coming from a minister serving in the current government. If ministers want clues as to what has held 'working men' back, they should look to their predecessors in the 1980s, hardly a golden age for equal rights, who oversaw the sharp decline of manufacturing and other key industries."

]


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I would like to add that I think it is a fair criticism of a lot of feminist thought and action that it centres on the life and experience of White, middle-class women first and foremost. The challenge for feminism isn't so much "you held back working class men" but "you held back working class women". And indeed, there has been some debate about this impact and what it means for feminism negotiating capitalist spaces. The logic I argued above from two different sources is not new. I have seen and heard variations on it probably going back to my university days myself, some 15 years or so.

I do not think it is a strike against the feminism that exists in 2011. It is not even a big strike against feminism as it existed in the '70s and '80s, because it was still a step that had to be taken if women were to be recognised as equal human beings, and not "housewives". It could, perhaps, have been taken better, but that is the past and the real question is, "how do we make the steps we take now, better than that one?"