The only form of child-care which the state does not help or subsidise is the sort where a mother brings up her own sons and daughters

Mar 20, 2023 by Jill

by Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday:

How bizarre that the keystone of a supposedly conservative budget is a plan to help women abandon their children and go out to work. Anti-family socialists and dogmatic hard-line feminists – often the same people – have long sought to turn women into wage-slaves. The old Communist East Germany managed to cram 90% of its women into factories and offices in the 1980s, and counted it a great triumph. Some modern feminists admire this to this day.

For them, the only good life is the life of paid work. The only ‘working women’ are those who work outside the home. The huge, responsible, future-defining task of raising the next generation as good women and men is dismissed as servitude, and farmed out to paid strangers. Interestingly, big business has felt the same way, seeing the new untapped female workforce as much preferable to the old male working class, most of which was chucked on the national scrapheap during the Thatcher years, along with the blast-furnaces, pithead winding gear, rolling mills and greasy, noisy old-style car production lines where such people used to toil.

Yet in those days most families could manage on one wage, whereas now it takes two, plus a lot of tax breaks (and who pays for those in the end?). So what did we gain? The only form of child-care which the state does not help or subsidise is the sort where a mother brings up her own sons and daughters.

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