Once questions had been asked about how these changes were affecting men and women rather than how they were affecting communities or families or different social classes, it was impossible not to notice that men and women had gradually been affected in opposite ways. Endless articles in the 1980s had documented high-achieving women and women’s new economic and social clout. This had been, in the media cliché, the ‘women’s decade’, with Margaret Thatcher delivering the message that nothing stood between a determined woman and her ambitions. The fact that the markets suddenly began to deliver the kinds of work and working patterns for which feminists had campaigned added to the perception that women were on a roll. Simultaneously, though more difficult to prove, individual women seemed to be buoyed up by a sense of overthrowing the old obstacles to women’s achievements and suddenly finding themselves the prototype employee for global capitalism.
By the late 1980s men were appearing in the opposite light. The huge increase in male unemployment, both in heavy industrial and small businesses, accompanied by visible signs of recession, suddenly revealed men as disproportionately affected. Psychologically they were unprepared. The media began to note the effect on households where unemployed men refused to consider taking ‘demeaning’ women’s jobs as well as refusing to help in the home while the women struggled with both. Feminism had given women the confidence to move into masculine areas, combining work and motherhood, seeing new opportunities in new work patterns. Men, by contrast, were experiencing their work changes, this so-called feminization of labour, more like a smack in the eye.
Evidence of male difficulties came from every quarter, including statistics on suicide and male homelessness. It also came from the so-called lucky ones, the employed. Frustration and resentment were rife, especially over any calls for positive discrimination. The Equal Opportunities Commission began to receive complaints from men; by the mid-1990s it was receiving more complaints from men than women.
The concept of a male backlash does not begin to address what was happening here. A report published in 1995 by Parents in Work showed that men were suffering from very real insecurity, not some imagined loss of prestige. Britain had the longest working hours in Europe and the lowest productivity. Some feminists joked about these statistics; they proved women’s suspicions that overtime is often empty macho time, an ethos expressed clearly in an advertisement for an engineering firm spotted by Professor Pahl: ‘people with outside interests need not apply.’ But these long, unproductive hours were evidence of a desperate desire to hold on to jobs at all costs. At the time, Ray Pahl said: ‘People are scared of not being seen as good workers although in a rapidly changing market, they are not clear what that means. The traditional male career has collapsed. One response is extreme competitiveness, ruthlessness about getting to the top and getting vast salaries. But the other is anxiety and even disillusionment about work altogether.’ According to surveys conducted in the mid-1990s, such distrust and anxiety was endemic, a crisis of confidence which spread across all classes and age groups (Demos Report, No Turning Back, 1995).
Demos, the left-liberal think-tank which conducted a survey of attitudes among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, elsewhere referred to these changes as merely ‘women’s enhanced role in the economy’ (Tomorrow’s Women, 1997), a gradual evolution towards a more level playing field. The public, however, did not always see it that way. By the time knowledge of these changes entered public consciousness, they already had a particular spin on them, connected with general anxieties about society and what was happening to the family. None of this was happening in isolation. Other social changes were pushing men into the forefront of social concerns: recession and unemployment; depression and school failure; changing family patterns; the increase in violent crime with young men as both its perpetrators and victims; and a preoccupation with yobs and their ever-younger counterparts, ‘evil-boys’. Each crisis further undermined the old feminist way of viewing men as potentates. Increasingly they were appearing as both cause and symptom of a society in crisis.
Perhaps these economic changes would not have been taken up as so critical for men had they not coincided with growing insecurities about the family. However, they were experienced by most ordinary people as part and parcel of difficult times. When Britain entered the 1990s, it entered a dark period both socially and politically. Scarcely a day went past without news of ever more shocking acts of violence and immorality: stories of increasing lawlessness, joy-riding, riots on estates, drunken violence and property destruction. Many of these stories concerned younger and younger children. There were twelve-yearolds who had killed children when their stolen car veered out of control; there were lawless youngsters intimidating estates; there were thirteen-year-olds accused of rape. Kenneth Clarke, then Home Secretary, vowed that his government would deal with ‘nasty persistent, juvenile little offenders’. This violence among children seemed to symbolize a rot which had spread from adults into the very core of society. In February 1993 came the ultimate tragedy – the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, abducted, tortured and sadistically killed by two ten-year-old boys.
Jamie Bulger’s murder was set against the background of the changing economy and the changes in domestic life. For many it was the apotheosis of a time out of joint. It signified the ruin of old communities, of poverty and increasingly harsh conditions. Above all, it was seen as a crisis of morality, a moment when we were invited to ask whether we were rearing monsters. ‘The case fills us’, said A. N. Wilson in the Evening Standard, ‘with the uneasy dread that this horrifying crime is somehow symptomatic of something which has happened to our society at large.’ The Bulger murder came to symbolize what happens in a society of divorced parents, single mothers, unemployed fathers, drunkenness, and no authority or discipline. ‘Few can doubt the family is in trouble,’ pronounced the Sunday Times in March 1993. ‘Parliament and the people are now casting around for solutions to what is seen as a problem of epidemic disorder – rising crime, intrusive squalor, spreading welfare dependency, collapsed community.’ This anxiety about the family would frame all further discussion of gender roles.
Of course, ever since the first stirrings of feminism there had been a vocal minority who warned of the dire consequences of women’s push for greater economic and legal autonomy from the family. But even in the heyday of Thatcher this remained a relatively marginal, backward-looking position. If one dares use old Marxist terms, libertarian and feminist views were still ‘hegemonic’, meaning that the emphasis was still on the obstacles to women’s full independence, and crime and social disorder were still seen as stemming from poverty and hardship not from the disintegration of the traditional family.
Increasingly, however, politicians of both Left and Right began to express concern that many social problems had their source in the demise of the traditional family and men’s displacement within that. ‘Across the political, moral, intellectual and religious spectrum there is today agreement that small, warm, caring families are the one way of virtually guaranteeing that children do not end up as criminals, but they seem to be a dying breed. The abnormal family seems now to be the norm’ (Sunday Times 1993). As Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said in 1992: ‘There is something very wrong with our society …criminals of 10 or 11 don’t just happen. Broken homes, bad housing, poor education, no job or training, lack of hope or opportunity – affect the way a child develops.’
Clearly, optimism about the liberalizing changes of the 1960s and ‘70s – including the vast improvements in women’s position – had unravelled. The ‘enhanced role’ of women in the economy was not seen in isolation but alongside everything