Another triumph of the divorce generation

[fpb]

According to a recent piece of research that the BBC is heavily publicizing, one good third of British teen-agers do not consider their parents people they admire or want to imitate. Even disregarding the obvious notion of teen-age rebellion, this is rather a worrying number. However, the BBC does not draw one clear conclusion from it: if teen-agers have learned to despise or disregard their own parents, does that have nothing to do with the prevalence of divorce? Does it have nothing to do with Mother telling them all kinds of awful things about Fathers, and Father teaching them to hate Mother, and both of them instructing them to repeat the same stories in the divorce court? Stories the more damaging because they were often based on some truths - Father and Mother knew each other, after all, they knew how to defame each other in the most hurtful ways possible?

As I said elsewhere, the reasons for the prevalence of divorce are real and serious. But when you consider the damage it does, let alone the cost, is there no ground for a serious policy of reducing it?

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That' s unhistorical. First, the introduction of technology released millions of women for paid employment. Then - at least two generations later - the scandal of different pay rates for men and women became obvious, and the trades unions - which originally had not even welcomed female employment - finally set about setting it right. The presence of millions of women in the workplace, you ought to see, is the pre-condition for finding differential rates of pay unfair, as well as for having the ability to do something about it. I do not believe that equal pay became an issue until the late sixties, whereas mass female employment had been a feature of the landscape since the First World War.

And I would ask you to beware of cliches. I was not speaking about "mistress of the house"; most women never did reach that exalted position - they were not born to it, for one thing. However, both servants and mistresses and anyone in the intermediate area - governesses, poor relations, nurses, etc. - shared a common area of activity, of interest, of fulfilling social life, with friendships and hates, feuds and reconciliations, dramas and comedies, a real life. The rivalry between the parlourmaids, the bad character of the cook, the supposed affairs of the pretty between-maid with the mistress' younger son (love affairs between upstairs and downstairs were so frequent as to become a cliche'), the unfairness of the mistress and the bad influence of her spinster sisters, were enough to fill days and lives, just as such things fill the lives of bloggers now. That it matters to nobody but them does not matter, so long as it matters to them. It is a life, and, between work and society, a full one. What I tried to point out in the Snow-White essay is that the vanishing of the female-based domestic society left much of the female life feeling increasingly false and empty; women came to depreciate it just as much as men already had, and began to cast their idea of "liberation" into a conquest of those active and satisfying male preserves, which had not been destroyed by social change, namely work, sports, clubs and male social life, even the army and the church. Very few women before the eighteen-nineties would have told you they felt oppressed; many of them would have laughed at the suggestion - "if anything, it is I who oppress my husband!" And indeed, a good deal of the male areas, especially pubs and clubs, had the sense of being places of refuge from female predominance.

The collapse of the extended family with servants, due entirely to the progress of technology, changed this balance completely. You can follow it in the image of women in fiction: the women of Wilkie Collins and Trollope (Dickens is a case apart) are ten times as adult and powerful as the flappers of the twenties, let alone Snow-White.

Cliches?

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Should I beware of cliches, even when they are yours?

"The role of housewife now has a lot less life in it than that of mistress of the house had a century or two ago, and as a result women want out of it".

Re: Cliches?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That was poorly phrased, but I tried to make it clear from the beginning that I was speaking about the whole female world of the household.

Re: Cliches?

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

It was clear, I just couldn't resist a wee poke.