Reading Accord's recent research on marriage was one of those "2½ cheers" moments. They were 2½ hearty cheers, mind you, because How was it for you? contains much that is insightful, thought-provoking and perceptive.
The half-cheer went missing on pages 41 and 42. There, author Anne Ryan states that "equity discourse", that is, the belief that there are gender differences between men and women, automatically leads to inequality. She declares: "Assumptions of fundamental gender difference are a barrier to equality, which itself is essential to the health of relationships." The cheer turned to a sigh.
That sigh in part stemmed from the rueful knowledge that any arguments I make which assert that there are fundamental differences between men and women will be heard in a way which allows people to nail me firmly into a box labelled traditionalist at best, or at worst, "fundamentalist religious conservative desirous of chaining women to the dishwasher". This is in spite of the fact that I have always been the primary wage-earner in my family, and my husband works full-time in the home as the primary carer of our children.
I will continue to believe that there are fundamental differences between men and women, and that biology influences the differences. They are not so huge as to make men and women separate species, and the degree of difference varies from man to man and woman to woman. True, many of the things which are invoked as being natural consequences of these differences are constructed to some degree by society, but dammit, the differences remain.
Having now forsaken all hope of ever being considered right-thinking, let me tell you what is good about the Accord report. Using discourse analysis, it looks at a small sample of happily married couples, with ordinary concerns, like childcare, careers and affording a home. (Discourses are the mental frames through which we see and interpret reality. Many are implicit, and so normal to us that we do not reflect on or challenge them.)
There were two interesting discourses which shaped couples' experience of the first year of marriage. The first, described as a consumerist discourse, accepts that money is a solution to life's challenges, that two salaries are necessary, that "the trappings of contemporary life are both necessary and costly".
Such couples often feel a lack of control over their lives, a sense of serious overload and "time poverty". They often feel trapped but see no way out because they accept the basic premise that material things bring happiness. They tend to see having children in terms of accessing paid professional childcare, and considerations of parental responsibility for childcare or the welfare of the children do not figure highly.
In contrast, those who operate within a "quality of life" discourse perceive that they have choices, which include opting out of the earning and spending rat-race. They challenge the dominant idea that babies have to be expensive. They work fewer hours in order to prioritise children and their relationship. People in this discourse are much more likely to have consciously chosen it, whereas people operating out of a consumerist paradigm often can see no alternative.
So far, so wonderful. The report includes a summary of an interesting book entitled The Cultural Creatives, which identifies three groups in the Western world: modernists, traditionalists and cultural creatives. The largest group, the moderns, believe that economic growth is an unquestioned good, and "actively prize materialism and the drive to acquire money and property. They tend to spend beyond their means, take a cynical view of idealism, caring work, unpaid work, and those who define success in terms not related to money and status".
Traditionalists are described as those who see the past as a golden era, without recognising the darker, more oppressive aspects of it. They are associated with "religious conservatism and fundamentalism". They also believe in the value of caring work, volunteering, and working to create a better society.
Cultural creatives reject many of the modernist ideas, but also reject the rigidity of the traditionalists. "They put forward new ways of living that often come out of the same roots as many of the best traditions, such as care for children, community and spirituality, but they give a different expression to these, drawing on social movements such as feminism, environmentalism and anti-racism".
Somewhat contradictorily, Dr Ryan goes on to say that there is no blueprint for "sustainable families and relationships" while at the same time embracing standard feminist rhetoric that traditional roles "preclude women's self-development by means of participation in the paid workforce".
The Catch-22 of this viewpoint is that if you decide that the way to be culturally creative is to have one person working full-time in the home, and that person happens to be the mother, this disqualifies you from cultural creativity and consigns you to the traditionalists.
The future apparently lies in both spouses sharing in paid and unpaid work. This may work for some, but there are serious drawbacks. What about the enormous strain which both spouses trying to be part-time paid workers and parents puts on a relationship? Often you become ships passing in the night, handing the children and a list of instructions to each other as you pass.
If it were decreed that all paid work was to become part-time, there would be uproar, as people declared their profession or craft impossible to follow in a part-time fashion. However, declaring that homemaking is a full-time task which is very difficult to do on a part-time basis is apparently regressive.
Some of the brightest and most creative women I know are full-time mothers and have consciously chosen to be. But that kind of diversity is apparently a bridge too far. What a pity, too, that a study which challenges dominant discourse, subscribes unquestioningly to the idea that fundamental gender difference is merely a construct. As someone who has done a significant amount of challenging of gender roles, I bow to the expertise of the people who matter, my children. And they tell me that mother and father are not interchangeable.
bobrien@irish-times.ie