Soon after coming to power, Tony Blair asserted that “we are all middle class now” – a kind of non-abrasive new Labour version of Hartley Shawcross’s 1946 victory cry: “We are the masters now.” What the Prime Minister appeared to mean was that, under new Labour, we could stop worrying about class (masters, too, presumably). It has been strangely effective. By and large, the Labour Party – which used to worry rather a lot about class – has found other ways of talking about the widening chasm between the rich and the poor. We hear about exclusion, social mobility, lifting families out of poverty, even, occasionally, “decent working people”, but no longer much about class. For, if we are all middle class, the description has ceased to be a useful way to categorise people.
As a result, the adjectival phrase “middle-class” – journalistically, at least – tends mainly to precede such abstracts as “values” (Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph) and “neighbourhoods” (Guardian and Independent).
Recently, though, there has been a resurgence in the British press of the adjectival use of “middle-class” in front of “woman” or sometimes “mother” or “mum”. Of “middle-class man” or “father”, we hear less, they presumably having taken new Labour’s words to heart and, with toffs and blokes, melted into a homogenous, back-slapping football crowd. How strange, then, that their wives and girlfriends are frequently perceived as marooned on an island of anachronistic class privilege.
“Middle-class woman” (MCW) is becoming as pejorative a tag today as “male chauvinist pig” (MCP) was in the 1970s. Whenever the phrase appears, you can be sure you are about to read a tale revealing behaviour that is selfish, antisocial or exploitative. MCW drives her children to school – making them fat and fearful, and harming the environment. MCW neglects her children – wanting it all and going out to work, at great cost to her soon-to-be-delinquent offspring and to the nation as a whole. MCW is drinking more (more than she used to, that is, not more than men). Labour MCW politicians (such as Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt) are particularly scorned, being, it has been said, out of touch with working men and women (unlike, one supposes, the wallpaper connoisseur Derry Irvine).
In short, middle class, applied to women, has become a term of abuse. Applied to men, it remains (pace Ms Dynamite’s swipe earlier this year at white middle-class male politicians) largely a historical social concept.
MCW’s latest much-discussed misdemeanour has been to employ people to do her housework. Her ability to go to work (“enter the workforce” is the preferred phrase, suggesting hallowed territory) has been, it is argued, at the expense of poor female migrants who clean “her” house, feed “her” children and rock “her” baby to sleep. The thesis was argued forcibly by the American socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich at the Edinburgh Book Festival this summer. “We women in the rich countries work,” she said. “So we need someone else to do the work at home and look after our children. Our children learn quickly in this servant economy that some people are more worthy than others. New hierarchies emerge because, increasingly, cleaning women are women of colour, so you imprint racism very early.”
The rise of the servant economy coincided with the rise of feminism, she went on. “Feminism may have made great gains for middle-class women, but the other 70 per cent who are still doing stereotypical female jobs have not seen much change.” Middle-class families had “bred a callousness and solipsism”. They had become complacent in their privilege.
This is all bad. None of us wants to be seen as callous or selfish. But according to Ehrenreich, it is much, much worse than that. “Paid housework is more damaging in some respects than violence in films,” she told the Edinburgh audience, where, one can guarantee, sat many a MCW with mobile on vibrate mode, alert to the emergency call from her childminder. Childminders, Ehrenreich went on to point out, may have been “lured here for cleaning or childminding jobs by traffickers [but] end up in brothels”. Guilt, then, for MCW on a monumental scale.
Ehrenreich, who in her research did her own stint as a cleaner (hot cleaning tip: always top to bottom, left to right, spray in one hand, cloth in the other), pulls back from blaming women alone (men must do more housework; we must all be more alert to exploitation). None the less, the message is that middle-class women have let their black sisters down.
Caitlin Flanagan, writing in September’s Atlantic Monthly, took up the same theme: “That some of the most significant achievements of the women’s movement – specifically, liberation from housework and childcare – have been bought at the expense of poor women, often of poor, brown-skinned women, is a bitter irony that very few feminists will discuss directly.”
Yet in service-based economies such as the US and Britain, we are all part of an unending chain of serving and being served – though certainly solicitors get paid rather more for their services than canteen workers for theirs. Why, then, is this an issue for women alone to address? Why is the use by a middle-class woman of a paid-for service a grosser form of exploitation than the benefit her husband receives from the same domestic help, or from a laundry or car wash? Or, since both Ehrenreich and Flanagan mention race, why is it worse for a white MCW to employ a cleaner than for a black middle-class man to do so? Indeed, to single out black middle-class men as prime exploiters of a particular group of workers would risk being seen as racist.
“White middle-class woman” is, it seems, even more contemptible than MCW. When she is not being a hypocritical exploiter of others, she is a figure of derision. Social commentators lament that WMCWs are the only people undertaking charity work or going to church or reading a particular magazine (as if bee-keeping or praying would be worthier pastimes if undertaken by black teenage boys). Even the prejudice-alert think-tank Demos, in a report on social exclusion, lamented that the image of volunteering needed to be addressed: “The perception of a volunteer is very narrow – white, middle-class women – and this must be broadened to attract more people.”
Strangely, the numerous near-monopolies held by white middle-class men (travelling business class on aeroplanes, for example, eating lunch in expensive restaurants, driving large cars without children in the back) are not considered to be lesser activities in need of the fillip provided by a better racial and sexual mix.
If even feminists and progressive thinkers find MCW fair game for a sneer, those already predisposed to hostility to working women can really stick the knife in. In August, the Daily Mail reported the “findings” of an anti-feminist organisation that claimed to have uncovered gender discrimination policies at the Department of Trade and Industry. “Predominantly male work-forces have been targeted for gender cleansing at management level . . . as [Patricia Hewitt’s] policy of ‘positive’ discrimination becomes subjugation of the white male workforce,” the paper reported. “Not that black men and women do any better in the DTI. The only people to benefit are white, middle-class women. Women exactly like the Australian feminist [Hewitt] herself.”
The start of the school year was the cue for further abuse. Those MCWs were clogging up the roads outside primary schools in large cars, causing tailbacks the length of the M1. Schools were exhorted to devise plans to get parents and children walking (a worthy but, for many parents with jobs, unworkable ideal). But few reported that school-run traffic is just 20 per cent of daily commuting traffic. The remaining 80 per cent of commuters are predominantly male, usually with one occupant per car. And yet, any debate on city congestion and car use will start by trying to solve the problem of the MCW in her people carrier, which is frequently carrying the children of more than one family. The school gates are also where MCWs wearing clothes suitable for work have earned the additional epithet of “yummy mummies”, which at least has the advantage of being open about its disdain.
Around the world, men and women suffer privations and indignities caused by other men and women. But no one has yet written a book lamenting that men’s ability to undertake well-paid jobs – to trade, to create, to write, to rule – has been at the expense of the street sweeper, the paper seller, the office cleaner, not to mention domestic toilers, wives included.
It is a triumph that we are learning not to pigeonhole people according to class. And another triumph, too, that racism, if not vanquished, is certainly socially unacceptable. So why are we so uncritical of blatant sexual stereotyping? We should see this casual unquestioned misogyny towards middle-class women for what it is – a sneer that otherwise thoughtful opinion-makers would not dream of directing at any other group.
Barbara Gunnell is middle class, probably
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