Nation states in the developed world are finding the cost of welfare programmes hard to meet, and are alarmed by the speed and scale with which these costs are projected to rise. In this context, the debate about the family is one of the mechanisms through which states are seeking to redefine the relationship between the family, the market and the state. This process of redefinition is crucially dependent on portraying the family as an autonomous unit that is responsible for its own relations with the market. If a family fails to provide for its members then this failure is an individual one and may be attributed to a lack of effort or to the dysfunctional nature of the family unit. There has been an increasing tendency to blame women as wives for the failures of marriage and women as mothers for the misfortunes that befall their children. However, the material presented in the previous sections cannot be explained as the result of inadequate mothering or marital dissolution. Families are under pressure.
However, many women are under very specific kinds of pressure. Research shows that women shoulder a disproportionate share of the costs of child care and the reproduction of human capital, and the disadvantage of female-headed households provides graphic evidence of this fact. Women receive no compensation from either the market or the state for the burden they carry. The inability of female-headed households to manage in some contexts is a result not of the fact that they are dysfunctional families but of the discrimination that women suffer in the labour market and of the unequal distribution of labour and income within families.
The supposed indicators of ‘family crisis’, marital conflict, youth crime, disadvantaged children and lone mothers are not the result of ‘dysfunctional’ families, and must also be seen in the context of the strain placed on certain family relations and categories of individuals by poverty and extreme economic hardship. Lack of control over their lives forces many disadvantaged families into situations where personal relations breakdown under stress. Loss of self-esteem both for parents and for children, combined with joblessness, unwanted pregnancies, substance abuse and despair, is made worse by the fact that poverty also dispossesses people of their political as well as their economic rights. Those who are not employed and have little education are very unlikely to have much say in the conditions of their citizenship and/or in political processes in their countries.
The increasing tendency to blame families, and very often women within those families, for their inability to survive the structural changes wrought by increasing market integration and globalization is one way of avoiding an analysis of the causes and consequences of poverty and immiseration. Progressive market integration has led to increasing differentiation both between and within countries. What is more alarming is that processes of social and economic differentiation have intensified along lines of gender, race and class (and other forms of difference) with potentially disastrous effects for certain groups within populations.
Women shoulder a disproportionate share of the costs of raising children and they therefore carry a disproportionate share of the costs of the reproduction of human capital, of those who will support us all in the next generation, the labour force of the future. Investing in children, in their education, security and health, means investing now in their mothers. It means recognizing that mothering and motherhood are diverse practices that necessarily respond to variable family/ household structures and strategies. They are not natural categories or activities, but complex means of providing children with emotional and material support. The available research suggests that increasing the health, education and welfare of women leads to increased benefits for children. It is extremely unlikely that legislation or coercive pressure applied through welfare sanctions will bring down the divorce rate, transform the nature of marriage or increase family stability. The simple recognition of this fact should encourage policy makers to look at ways of improving the welfare of children as part of a strategy to safeguard the
productive capacity of the future. Such a strategy will have to be
based on supporting the women on whom those children depend.