Should Ms Reeves be offered a cabinet post in the wake of a Labour victory, however, the timing would not be a problem: she has announced that she would be perfectly capable of abolishing the “bedroom tax” within about a fortnight. She’d then nip off a month before the summer recess to give birth, resuming the post of work and pensions secretary in September.
Bloody hell. I take a week off if I stub my toe.
So I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Andrew Rosindell, Tory MP for Romford, when he questioned Ms Reeves’s suitability for the post by saying: “I don’t want to say someone who is having a baby is not eligible to be a cabinet minister, but I certainly think perhaps the demands of that particular job will require someone to give it their full attention.”
Oh poor Andrew Rosindell. Poor, tired, middle-aged Andrew Rosindell.
I don’t doubt for a moment that fizzy, energetic, motivated thirtysomething Rachel Reeves is able to work until the baby comes and be back at her desk a few weeks later, juggling career and childcare with the dexterity and determination you’d expect of someone who’s achieved the meteoric success she has already.
But Andrew Rosindell is just normal, just human; just a hapless backbencher on the cusp of 50, who’s probably knackered at the thought of taking his dog for a walk.
It’s been an exhausting few years for Andrew Rosindell. His struggle to reinstate the death penalty continues without success. He’s been in trouble for parking in a disabled space, claiming £1.31 for a pot of jellied eels and voicing his love of General Pinochet.
When Andrew Rosindell looks wearily at Rachel Reeves as she zooms, blooming, between her shadow cabinet post, her constituency and her various BBC gigs, and he says her prospective new job would “require someone to give it their full attention”, what he means is: “It takes my full attention to get the lid off the biscuit tin. God help me if I’m trying to watch Wolf Hall at the same time. I have to keep rewinding. Which Thomas is that again? The Catholic one?”Equal marriage has been legalised and animals banned from circuses, despite Andrew’s best attempts to campaign otherwise. The world is ruined. It’s all gay brides and happy elephants. Everything’s awful.
But be careful what we wish for. At the other end of the spectrum from lovely-juggly Rachel Reeves and her couple-of-months’ maternity leave is Tracey Wright of Suffolk, a divorcee and mother who’s just been told by a judge that she should get a job and stop expecting her ex-husband (a millionaire racehorse surgeon) to support her for life.
Lord Justice Pitchford upheld last year’s ruling from Judge Lynn Roberts that: “The world of work has innumerable possibilities … It is possible to find work that fits in with childcare … Vast numbers of women with children just get on with it and Mrs Wright should have done as well.”
Rachel Reeves is getting on with it, and how. Does that mean every woman should? If so, when? Mrs Wright’s marriage broke up when her children were seven and one. She had been a stay-at-home mother. Perhaps she felt it would have been too traumatic for the children, as well as herself, to change everything at once.
She’s now 51, with a 10-year-old at home, and she’s been out of the job market for many years. What’s she going to be offered? Not the post of work and pensions secretary, that’s for sure.
I don’t know the emotional circumstances of this case or who left whom (which always strikes me as morally relevant in divorce settlements, even if it’s never taken into account for practical reasons), but I think we need to be awfully careful.
All genders have inherent biological frailities. Of the main two: men die younger, and possess in their youth an aimless physical energy that means they are not only more likely to commit violent crime but also to be a victim of it. Their role in childbirth, however, is over after a few ecstatic seconds and they can keep performing it pretty much forever. It doesn’t really interfere with any options at all.
Whatever the warp and weft of the world, has anything really changed when a man marries a woman at 25, they have a few children and he runs off with someone younger when his wife is 55? It’s still likely that the wife has compromised or at least delayed her career potential with the physical and emotional brakes of childbirth. It is certainly the case that the man has more to offer future partners, being able to start again with a whole new family, while the woman’s fertility has fizzled out.
The wife’s future is bleaker, lonelier and (ironically) longer in that break-up; the whole point of the marriage contract was to protect her from it. Men were promising that, if they took the benefit of a woman’s youth, fertility and freest years, they’d stay for ever.
When that idea became old hat, divorce settlements were a depressing but vitally protective replacement. But if a woman now can’t expect that support to last a lifetime (as Tracey Wright has been told), then what does the original contract mean? No more than a tissue-paper Valentine’s card.
Enabling the ambitions and abilities of driven women like Rachel Reeves was an important early step in feminism. I shiver to think of a world before I was born, when all women were dismissed as weak and frail.
But, in learning to respect that kind of rubbery, bounce-back strength, don’t let’s start demanding it of everybody. That would be a frightening world, too.
Source:- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/01/maternity-leave-not-all-women-are-created-equal
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