For three years in the mid-1980s I taught at the University
of Jyväskylä in Finland, where I therefore had the good fortune to witness at
first hand a still only partially monetarised economy, the experience made all
the more tangible and real by the fact that, at that time, my wife’s parents
still ran a small, mixed farm on the island of Himalansaari on Lake Saima,
Finland’s largest lake.
They did, in fact, have two cash crops: milk from a small herd
of dairy cows which they sold to the local dairy – receiving butter, cheese and yoghurt in return as
part payment – and
timber from a sizeable area of forest, sections of which they felled whenever they
needed to make a significant capital purchase, such as a new car or tractor.
Apart from the petrol and diesel to put into these capital purchases, however,
it was often difficult to see what they otherwise needed money for.
There was certainly very little cash input into the farm
itself. Keeping a dairy herd in Finland, where the cows have to be kept indoors
for six months of the year, they naturally had to produce a huge amount of
winter feed, which meant that most of their non-forested land was devoted to
growing grass, for which no seed had to be bought and no fertiliser was
required beyond that naturally provided by the cows themselves. Admittedly, they
also had two small fields of wheat and rye. But any monetary outlay these crops
required was more than compensated for by the fact that most of the milled
flour produced was used by my mother-in-law to make her own bread, which she
baked in the large brick oven which stands at the centre of most traditional
Finnish homes.
They also grew a large quantity of potatoes, both for winter
feed and for human consumption, along with a host of other storable vegetables,
including carrots, cabbages and beetroots, which would also have required
some cash outlay. The result, however, was that, except in late spring and
early summer, before their own new crop of vegetables was ready for harvesting,
they hardly ever had to buy food from the local market.
This was particularly true with respect to meat. For having
a small dairy herd, they usually had at least the two or three male carves which
they slaughtered each year, sharing the meat with the abattoir and butcher in
return for their services, but retaining a large amount for their own freezer. To
top this up, my father-in-law was also a member of a consortium of local
farmers which usually obtained permits to shoot three or four elk each autumn, the
meat from which was then shared between the hunt participants, including the
many beaters who always turned out on such occasions.
Then, of course, there was the fish. Living on an island on
a lake, one of my father-in-law’s favourite summer evening occupations was trawling
for ‘muikku’, a small sardine-like fish which we regularly caught in quite
considerable quantities –
sometimes up to 100kg in a single evening – along with salmon and a few other fish caught in the
net.
Summer also brought with it a vast cornucopia of berries for
the picking. Wherever trees had been logged the previous winter, wild
strawberries would somehow magically appear. All along the edges of the fields,
where unearthed rocks had been stacked for generations, huge numbers of
raspberries grew. And in the forest itself, large areas of the forest floor
would be carpeted in blueberries, which my mother-in-law would pick by the
bucketful, along with numerous varieties of mushrooms, including my own
favourite, chanterelle.
Nor was it only people with continuing family connections to
the countryside, such as my wife and I, who benefitted from nature’s largesse in
this way. Most Finns at that time either owned or had access to a lakeshore
summer cottage, where they not only spent their summer vacations but most
weekends throughout the summer and autumn for as long as the weather held.
There, they would lay static nets which they would check each morning for
salmon, before spending their days foraging for berries and mushrooms and their
evenings going to sauna, barbequing sausages and swimming in the lake.
During haymaking, which, at that time, was extremely
labour-intensive, friends and family would also come out to the farm to help
with the work. One family from Helsinki, whose precise connection to my
father-in-law I never actually discovered, used to take their summer vacation
on the island every year, cheerfully working long days in the fields in return
for their board and lodging and long summer evenings out on the lake, as well
as a bag or two of frozen meat and fish to take home with them at the end of
their stay.
My father-in-law also used some of the of muikku he caught
as a kind of good-will currency. Whenever we had a particularly good catch, the
following morning he would take trays of the fish around to various people he
knew, one of whom, I discovered, was the local car dealer who, through my
father-in-law’s agency, had given me a very good deal on a used Saab when I had
first landed the job in Jyväskylä.
Thus it was that this non-monetarised economy reached out into
almost every corner of Finnish life, not just by virtue of the outdoor culture
which the country’s natural environment quite naturally encouraged more or less
everyone to participate in, but as a concomitant result of the kind of
relationships to which the unexpected bounty of such participation so often
gave rise. For when one has caught, grown or picked more than one needs, one
has two options. One can either hire a stall in the local market and sell one’s
surplus into the monetarised economy –
which, of course, some people did –
or, with far less effort, one can simply share.
The thing about sharing, however, is that when you share,
you quite naturally expect others to share too. In fact, most people get pretty
annoyed when others fail to live up to this expectation, which then has two
further consequences. Firstly, those who are delinquent in this regard tend to
be shunned and cast out of the network
of friends, family and neighbours who remain, while in this latter group a
community of trust and mutual obligation is almost unconsciously created, which,
in rural Finland, as I then knew it, was not just a natural and normal part of
everyday life but was, in many ways, a matter of practical necessity.
I say this because while the picture I have so far painted
of Finland probably makes it seem idyllic – which, in summer, it can be – in winter its can also be a very hard and daunting
place to live, especially if the life you have chosen for yourself is that of a
small farmer living on a mostly forested island in the middle of nowhere,
where, should anything go wrong, being able to depend upon your neighbours is
absolutely essential.
Living in such a daunting environment, what is even more
essential, however, is that you cherish the life, itself, and are therefore
prepared to accept the numerous demands and obligations it places on you. For
getting up at four o’clock in the morning to milk your cows when a metre of
snow has fallen overnight and the temperature outside is -30°C is certainly not for
the faint-hearted. While living such an independent life bestows on those who
have chosen or been bequeathed it an enormous amount of freedom, it also,
therefore, lays on them a huge amount of responsibility. For the cows simply have
to be milked, whether you like it or not. And while you may be able call upon a
neighbour for assistance if you have slipped on some ice and broken your leg,
he’s not going to come and milk your cows for you if all you want is a lie-in
in the morning.
And the same is true of all the other jobs that have to be
done on a largely self-sufficient farm. If you don’t plough your fields, plant
your seeds or harvest your crop, it’s not just that you go out of business, but
that you literally don’t eat. And yet for my wife’s parents, and I suspect most
of their generation, it was precisely this – both the freedom it gave them and the
responsibility it entailed, along with the mutual respect and sense of
community which such autonomy inspires among those who embrace it – that made it a life
worth living and ensured that, by its completion, it had therefore been a life fully
lived.
My purpose in providing this snapshot of rural Finland in
the mid-1980s, however, is not merely to eulogise about a way of life which I
suspect has now largely disappeared, but rather to prompt, through its more
starkly drawn example, a recognition that, until quite recently, many of the
essential features of this way of life were not exclusive to Finland, but were to
be found throughout most of Europe and the western world. What’s more, these
features – common
to all non-monetarised economies –
were not confined merely to rural areas and an agrarian way of life, but could
be found just as commonly in towns and cities, albeit in a slightly different
form. For throughout the industrialised world, what traditionally marked the
boundary between monetarised and non-monetarised work was not the separation of
town and country, but rather the division of labour between men and women, with
men going out to work in the monetarised economy, while women worked at home, filling
a role in society which, today, is often derided and dismissed, but in which they
very often contributed as much to their family’s standard of living through
their unmonetarised labour as their husbands contributed through their pay
packets, thereby making it possible for families – often with three, four or even five children – not just to live on the
income of a single wage earner, but to live well: something which would be more
or less impossible for most families today and which many people probably now find
it almost impossible to comprehend.
This is because the changes that occurred in our economy during
the 1960s and 70s, as more and more women went out to work, while gradual and
incremental, were structurally fundamental to our entire way of life, with the
result that to many people today, the world we inhabited before this
transformation – even
if they could fully envisage it –
would almost certainly seem as alien as the life lived by a self-sufficient
Finnish farmer in the 1980s, and equally as daunting, especially to women, many
of whom very likely shake their heads in disbelief, not only at how their
grandmothers could have submitted themselves to such a circumscribed existence,
but at how they could have coped with all the seemingly endless demands this
existence placed upon them, not just in terms of the number of roles they were
required to fulfil –
and hence the range of skills they had to acquire – but, even more significantly, in terms of the sheer
amount of work involved in producing ‘homemade’ what they can now simply go out
and buy.
Take, for instance, the preparation of food. Back in the
1950s, when I was growing up, there was virtually no industrially produced food
and no supermarkets from which to buy it. The raw ingredients for producing a
meal therefore had to be bought from each of the specialist retailers which
then lined most high streets: butchers for meat, fishmongers for fish, bakers
for bread and greengrocers for fruit and vegetable. Even the general grocers
which then existed far more closely resembled today’s delicatessens than modern
supermarkets, having counters from behind which men in white coats and aprons weighed
out and served their customers with the requested quantities of cheese, bacon and
other cured meats which were among the few processed foods that were then
available. Apart from bacon and eggs for breakfast and the occasional ham salad
for a Sunday tea, every other meal which women prepared – along with the numerous cakes and other confections
which they regularly baked –
required a huge amount of ‘value-added’ labour in order to turn the basic
ingredients involved into the home-cooked favourites which their families
enjoyed: value labour which, today, is worth billions of pounds each year to
the UK food industry.
Nor was food production the only sector of manufacturing which
was then mostly carried out in the home. Every year millions of ‘homemade’ items
of clothing were also produced there. Most women, for instance – or, at least, most of
the women with whom I came in contact in the largely working class area in which
I grew up – not
only knitted but carried their knitting around with them, to be taken out
whenever they had an otherwise idle moment, often while minding children – either their own or
those of a neighbour or other family member – for whom they knitted a continual supply of sweaters
and cardigans, alongside a constant flow of baby clothes, in pastel blues and
pinks, for the soon to be born or recently arrived siblings of the children
currently being minded. This was, after all, the era of the ‘baby-boom’
generation.
Many women also made their own skirts and dresses, cut out
from patterns bought in haberdashery shops: Aladdin’s caves of multi-coloured
treasures, whose shelves were lined with skeins of wool, bolts of cloth, coils
of silk, and all manner of pins and needles and other dress-making tools and accoutrements.
Even today, I can remember wandering round such establishments as a small boy, fascinated
not only by all the mysterious paraphernalia on display, but by the multifarious
sensory delights of these essentially female domains, which were as wondrously
impenetrable to me as the workings of the sewing machine which I watched my foster
mother use to stitch together the cut-out pieces of a new dress.
Of even greater importance than the value-added goods which
women produced in the home, however, were the unpaid services which they also
rendered, the most important of which, of course, was the care of children. For
in those days, there were no paid child minders or commercially run day-care
centres, the very idea of which would have probably struck most women as
wonderful, but as also totally fanciful and slightly worrying. After all, unless
she was the queen or otherwise inordinately wealthy, it was, by definition, the
role and responsibility of a mother to look after her children. If she didn’t
do that, then what was she? What was her role? Did she even have a role at all?
Amid all the cooking and cleaning, making and mending, most women
therefore instinctively and unquestioningly accepted that their first priority
was not just to attend to their children’s many disparate needs, but to keep
them beneficially occupied: a task which, back in 1950s Britain, was made all
the more difficult by the fact that our two television channels only broadcast for
limited periods each day prior to 5.00 pm, and only offered fifteen minutes of
programming dedicated to the under-fives. Including such classics as ‘The
Wooden Tops’ and ‘Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’, far from serving as a
distraction for children, however –
and therefore as a welcome break for busy mums – these programmes were specifically designed to be
watched by children in their mothers’ company, so that, as part of their
children’s early education, mothers could reinforce the programmes’ overt moral
and practical lessons. Indeed, this was actually given in guidance to mothers
by the BBC. For as if they didn’t already have enough on their plates, pre-school
education was yet another of the responsibilities women, at that time, were
expected to fulfil, the minimum requirement being that their children should be
able to count, recite the alphabet and understand the basic rudiments of
reading before they arrived at school.
Nor did women’s role in caring for others end there. For
with few old people’s homes, and no home support provided by social services – such support being
regarded as the responsibility of the family – the task of looking after elderly parents, or at
least making sure that they were all right, also quite naturally fell to their
daughters, who would ‘look in’ on mum or dad at least twice a week, to see if
they needed any shopping done, to take round something for their tea, or to
help with some of the more physically demanding jobs around the house.
With so many different responsibilities and demands upon their
time, it could thus truly be said that a woman’s work was never done, making it
wholly unsurprising, therefore, that from time to time many women may have wished
that they could change places with their husbands, whose only responsibility
was to go out to work each day and do the job for which they were paid, before
coming home each evening to a clean and tidy house, a home-cooked meal and the
prospect of a peaceful hour or two in front of the fire with the evening paper
and a pipe. Indeed, to many women, it must have seemed as if they had drawn the
short straw. For while, unlike their husbands, they may have been free to
organise their working week in whatever way they chose, like the Finnish farmer
who has no choice but to get up at four o’clock in the morning to milk his
cows, they were not free to simply abandon their duties altogether. For if they
didn’t do the laundry, then their children went to school in dirty clothes; if
they didn’t cook the family’s supper, then they all went to bed hungry: outcomes
which were not just unthinkable but the potential cause of considerable shame.
For just like the otherwise self-sufficient farmers of rural
Finland, women at that time were also partially dependent on the communities of
which they were a part: networks of friends, family and neighbours, all of whom
were in exactly the same position as themselves, and who would therefore offer
their help and support whenever necessary, looking after each other’s children
in emergencies, and even shopping and cooking meals for another woman’s family if
the circumstances required. However, they would not do any of these things for
women who simply shirked their responsibilities. Indeed, as I remember it, most
women at that time could be extremely censorious of other women who failed to
perform their required duties, especially if this involved neglecting their
children. Even more significantly, it was women, themselves, who set these
standards and defined the rules, and it was women who enforced them by shaming
any of their sisters who failed to live up to them.
As a result, many of the women who, prior to the 1960s,
chose paid employment rather than marriage as their preferred option in life, almost
certainly did so as much in rebellion against what they regarded as the
small-minded tyranny of this matriarchal order as to escape the limitations of a
life spent of domestic drudgery: these two prominent features of many women’s
seemingly inevitable fate being merely two sides of the same constrictive coin,
which any woman with the necessary education and aptitude might therefore quite
reasonably choose to decline.
The fact is, however, that for every woman who took this
course, staying on in the careers that were then available to them, as
secretaries, nurses and teachers etc., there were many more women for whom
marriage and a family were still their primary aspiration, not least because of
the financial security marriage brought with it.
To many readers, of course, this may sound rather
counter-intuitive, in that a desire for financial independence is generally
assumed to have been one of the primary incentives for women to eschew their
traditional role. While this may well have been a factor in the decision-making
of some well-educated middle class women who could command a higher salary, however,
for most working class women, what financial independence actually meant was either
destitution or domestic drudgery without any of the benefits which marriage bestowed,
not the least of which was a significant amount of control over their husbands’
monetary income.
This was because most working people, at that time, were
paid in cash and didn’t even have bank accounts. This meant that women not only
controlled and carried around in their purses all the money they needed for the
family shopping, but were also responsible for paying most of the regular household
bills. Without a bank account, for instance, the weekly rent was not magically collected
by direct debit, but by a rent collector, who called at the house during the
day while only women were at home. In a similar vein, gas and electricity bills
were not paid monthly through the bank, but through coin operated meters which
had to be continually fed with shillings as the energy was used. The upshot was
that just about all of a family’s regular outgoings were handled by women, with
the result that in most working class households – at least all those of which I was aware when I was
growing up – the
men simply handed over their pay packets at the end of each week and allowed
their wives to look after the weekly budget.
Yes, one reads tales of abusive husbands drinking away most
of their weekly pay even before they got home on a Friday evening, leaving
their wives to manage the household costs on virtually nothing. And I’m sure that
such dysfunctional marriages occurred, especially in cases where the marriage
had already ceased to be congenial to either or both parties. But if this had
been the norm, then the traditional marriage as it then existed would have very
quickly died out. For no woman who had ever watched her mother go through such
trials and believed them to be inherent in the institution, itself, would ever
have ever agreed to get married. The fact is, however, that women in those days
had a lot more power than they are now often represented as having, not least
due to the fact that while women may have been financially dependent upon their
husbands, their husbands were dependent upon them for just about everything
else.
Not being trained in any domestic skills, few men, for
instance, could even boil an egg, let alone cook their own dinner. Unmarried
men who did not still live ‘at home’ consequently tended to live in boarding
houses: establishments usually owned and run by widows – or otherwise unmarried women – who happened to own a property
but had no other income, and who therefore chose to make use of their single asset
by taking in lodgers, providing them with room and board for a weekly rent. For
a man to have a home of his own, he either had to be wealthy enough to employ a
housekeeper or he simply
had to get married. Marriage was thus a partnership of both mutual dependency
and reciprocal obligation, in which men were obliged to go out to work – often doing jobs that
were both dirty and dangerous and which they didn’t want to do, but which they
disciplined themselves to do anyway for the sake of their families – while women, in return,
provided their husbands with comfortable and welcoming abodes to which come
home, which they wouldn’t otherwise have had.
It is one of the reasons why divorce was so rare. It wasn’t just
that the existing divorce laws made divorce very difficult; it was equally as
much that, economically speaking –
in the broadest sense of this term, combining a married couple’s monetary and
non-monetary contributions to their shared prosperity – men and women simply could not live without each
other. And although there may well have been some form of power struggle at
some point during many married couples’ lives together, eventually all couples had
to come to a some kind of accommodation: an arrangement acceptable to both
sides which both sides regarded as equitable, even though in many cases – especially in those parts
of the country dominated by mining and heavy industry – many working class women would have almost
certainly accepted that they had the better part of the deal. For watching
their husbands come home each evening physically exhausted, running a hot bath
for them and helping them wash the coal dust or foundry grime out of their skins,
it is hard to imagine that many women would have really wished their roles
reversed.
It therefore took a lot more than just the siren calls of a
few middle class academic feminists to lure these women out of their matriarchically
ordered homes, where they not only made most of the rules but were more or less
free to organise their time in whatever way best suited them, and persuade them,
instead, to follow their husbands into the male-oriented world of paid
employment, which was not only rigidly structured and strictly disciplined in a
very masculine way, but was also inherently hierarchical, meaning that women
joining the work force would inevitably do so in subordinate positions, where
they would remain for many decades to come. Indeed, looked at in this way, it
is hard to understand why any woman, except those with higher career
aspirations, would have voluntarily chosen to take this course: an assessment
which, over the years, has led me to doubt whether quite so many of them would
have done so, had it not been in tune with the wishes of the two most powerful
forces in the post-war world, government and big business, neither of which, of
course, had any intrinsic interest in women’s liberation, but both of which had
much to gain from getting women out of the unmonetarised regime of the home and
into the monetarised economy of the factory.
This is not to say, of course, that this was ever on
anyone’s explicit agenda, or that those fighting for women’s rights, such as the
then Labour government’s Minister for Trade and Industry, Barbara Castle, had
any other motive but to see women achieve equality with men in the wider world.
Least of all am I suggesting some kind of conspiracy. It is just that history
tends to flow along channels of least resistance, especially where the
interests of those with power and influence coincide, as here in the case of women
producing billions of pounds worth of value-added goods and services each year,
in an unmonetarised environment in which neither the goods and services,
themselves, nor the benefits which women and their families derived from this
homemade source of wealth could be taxed, and on which business could make no
profit.
Worse still, from the point of view government, was the fact
that while all this home-based economic activity remained unmonetarised, it
could not be measured. And while it could not be measured, it could not be
included in the nation’s GDP figures: an impediment to political usefulness
made all the more galling by the fact that, by the 1960s, electoral campaigns
were becoming increasingly focused on economic growth and the increased
standard of living politicians claimed their policies would produce, claims
which could only be quantified and substantiated in terms of GDP. Potentially,
therefore, there were massive political gains to be made by taking as much of
the work that women did in the home as they possibly could and putting it into
a factory, where it could then be monetarised, measured and included in GDP
figures, while the women recruited to work in these factories could also be
taxed on their income, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
For big business, the issues were even simpler. For while
production remained in the home, not only could business make no profit on it,
but women themselves had very limited potential as consumers. They may have
been the managers of their family’s budgets, but while they had no monetary
income of their own, their purchasing choices were severely constrained by the
responsibility this placed upon them. By luring them into paid employment, business
could therefore obtain two major benefits. Not only would it force women to buy
readymade what they had previously made themselves – no longer having the time to do so – but it would also provide
them with additional income of their own with which to treat themselves to
goods and services which they may have previously regarded as a selfish misuse
of their family’s limited funds.
And if all this wasn’t enough for businesses to put maximum
effort into inducing women to join the monetarised workforce, then there was one
final clincher: the fact that, at a time of low unemployment, when male wages
were correspondingly high, women also represented a pool of very cheap labour. For
shocking as it will seem to most women today, back in the 1950s women largely
accepted the fact that they would be paid less than men. In fact, on both sides
of the Atlantic, there were even women who campaigned to maintain this pay
differential. For they feared what indeed has since come to pass, that once
women started entering the workforce in any significant numbers, they would
begin to compete with men for ‘men’s’ jobs and undercut them, thereby lowering
wages across the board, with the result that while, initially, two wage-earner
families might be better off, eventually the real value of their combined
monetary income would begin to decline, thereby making it a matter of necessity
rather than a question of choice as to whether a married woman should go out to
work or not.
In addition to increasing the supply of labour and therefore
bringing down its value, there were also a number of other reasons for this.
The first and probably most important of these was that monetarising a woman’s
production didn’t necessarily mean that she produced more. In some cases and
some industries, such as the garment industry, for instance, production, as it
happens, did increase. This was because making a single dress by hand, at home,
took a lot of time, which, because women were having to fit this work in
between other jobs, also meant that they had to spread it over several days, if
not weeks, thereby further adding to the inefficiency of this way of working.
Moving production into a factory, where multiple dresses could be cut out at
the same time and seamstresses could sew together dozens of dresses per day,
therefore vastly increased productivity. This consequently brought down the
price of new ready-to-wear garments, which in turn created a boom in retail,
especially in the early 60s, when fashion, which had previously be confined to
the realm of haute-couture, became
accessible to everyone.
This, however, was not the case in all of the industries that
women joined, the food industry, in particular, being a case in point. For
while the industrialisation of food production certainly improved productivity,
increases in overall production were strictly limited by consumption. And while,
in the 1960s, the population of Britain may have started to consume more food in
certain categories, such as cakes and biscuits, for instance, which, when baked
in the home, were largely luxuries for high days and holidays, but which now
became everyday snacks –
much to the detriment of the nation’s bulging waistlines – there was nevertheless an
overall limit to how much more food an already well-fed nation could eat. The
result was that most of the additional money that women earned as a result of
the industrialisation and monetarisation of food preparation simply added to the
amount money in circulation without a concomitant increase in the amount of
goods and services being produced. And, as any economist will tell you, when
you increase the amount of money in people’s pockets without increasing the
amount of goods and services which that money can buy, what happens is
inflation.
Nor will it come as any surprise that it was almost
certainly in the food industry or, rather, that part of a family’s budget
dedicated to the purchase of food, where this inflation would have first occurred.
For while in the past, women only had to buy the ingredients from which they
made their families’ meals, they now also had to pay for the labour and other
manufacturing costs that went into producing these meals ready-made. And while
manufactures would have naturally forced down the cost of ingredients to
compensate for these additional costs, both by buying wholesale and by using
poorer quality ingredients than one would use at home – usually disguising this drop in quality with
artificial flavourings and colourings –
it’s hard to imagine that they could have forced down ingredient costs enough
to fully offset, not just their own manufacturing costs and the profit which their
shareholders required them to make, but the distribution and retail costs which
this new form of food preparation also entailed.
What is surprising, in fact, is that food manufacturers
actually managed to get away with it. For what this all amounted to, in effect,
was a simultaneous reduction in quality combined with an increase in price, the
public’s acceptance of which can only be explained, I think, by the fact that it
happened very slowly, with women initially only buying readymade food when they
absolutely had to, when they were rushing home from work to get a meal ready
for their families, for instance. The inferiority of the product and its
increased toll upon the family’s budget were consequently accepted as the price
one had to pay for convenience. Besides which, two wage-earner families could
now afford the luxury of a ‘take-away’ or a ‘ready meal’ now and again, the
gradual increase in the cost of living which this represented being lost in the
overall changes to the family’s spending patterns, especially as this increase
did not actually show up in official inflation figures.
This was because the official inflation figures, as represented
by the Retail Price Index (RPI), only chart changes over time in the price of a
selected set of items. They do not chart changes in the overall cost of living
which result from changes in our purchasing behaviour. And yet this was
precisely what was happening as working women went from purchasing the ingredients
for a steak and kidney pie and then making it at home, to purchasing a steak
and kidney pie ready-made.
Moreover, because this kind of transformational inflation
was neither measured nor recorded, officially it did not exist, thereby
creating a lacuna in our collective economic consciousness which had two
further consequences.
The first of these was that it wasn’t reflected in wage
negotiations, which, during the 1960s and 70s, when official inflation in the
UK was already at record highs –
reaching an astronomical 28% in 1974 –
only ever referenced the RPI. The result was that, ignoring transformational
inflation, real earnings inevitably failed to keep pace with the true cost of
living, which was only made affordable because more and more households had two
wage earners.
What this also meant was that, throughout this period, without
people being properly aware of it, the real value of money, itself, was actually
declining, though by how much it now is almost impossible to tell. If one uses
the RPI to calculate the comparative value of a pound today against its value
in 1960, for instance, the answer is £22.62. This, however, is almost certainly
an undervaluation of the pound in 1960 which,
using other forms of comparison, such as commodity prices, for instance, could
have been worth as much £79.99 in today’s money. Thus when governments tell us
that, based on comparative median pay, we are all much better off than we were
in 1960, they are being more than a little disingenuous.
That’s not to say, of course, that all of this hidden
inflation was purely due
to the monetarisation of the previously unmonetarised work done by women in the
home. For women joining the monetarised economy and increasing the amount of
money in circulation also had many beneficial effects upon the economy,
stimulating the demand for goods and services all across the board, especially
white goods and consumer electronics, which were now being bought in ever
increasing quantities by the increasing number of two-wage-earner families. As
the economy expanded, moreover, and more and more goods and services were
produced at lower cost, this further induced more and more women to join the
workforce so that their families could benefit from the higher standard of
living which this new ‘consumer’ society represented. From the individual’s
perspective, it may have cost more to live in this new modern Britain, but not
only were there opportunities to earn more, there was also much more to buy.
By
drawing more women into the monetarised economy, however, this led to even more
of the work which women used to do at home being outsourced and monetarised,
some of it through the creation of whole new industries.
Take, for instance, the child care industry, which burgeoned
in the 1980s when working parents discovered that, after a decade or so of
relying on their own parents to look after their children when at work, this
older generation was no longer willing to shoulder the burden of a second
generation of child rearing. The result was the creation of an industry which
is now worth £5.5 billion per annum, and which successive governments have been
happy to tax and add to the annual GDP figures, demonstrating just how
magnificently the economy has performed under their stewardship. The problem,
however, is that this industry has merely replaced the unmonetarised work which
women used to do at home with a monetarised version of the same. No more work
is being done because no more children are actually being cared for. It is just
that whereas, in 1960 say, children were cared for by their mothers without financial
reward, this work is now being done by strangers for monetary payment, thereby
adding £5.5 billion to the nation’s cost of living without any additional goods
or services being produced.
Of course, it will be argued that professional child carers
free up mothers to pursue their own productive careers, thereby adding to
national output indirectly. The fallacy of this argument becomes immediately
apparent, however, as soon as one realises that the converse is also true: that
mothers could simply stay at home and looked after their children, thereby
freeing up the professional child carers, themselves, to do something more
productive.
Indeed, the negative and wholly inflationary effect which this
whole way of looking after children has had upon the economy is evidenced by
the fact while governments have been happy to see the creation of this
additional taxable GDP, they are themselves now having to cover some of the
cost. For with part time nursery places costing an average of £6,600 per annum,
full time places costing nearly double this, and even after school clubs
costing around £3,000 per year, looking after children in the UK has now become
so expensive that, despite having two wage-earners, it is still beyond what
many families can afford, leading to more and more demands on government to
provide more child care funding, as if this is not going to be paid for out of additional
taxation, therefore further adding to a family’s cost of living.
Nor is this the only area in our lives in which the added
cost of participating in the new consumer society has brought little in the way
of additional tangible wealth. For in order to keep all our two-wage-earner
families in work, consumers have to continue consuming. This means that, unlike
our grandparents, who had far less money to spend on consumer goods, and who
consequently based most of their purchasing decisions on quality, in the hope
and belief that their purchases would therefore last longer, we, in contrast,
have become what is undoubtedly the most wasteful society in history. Driven by
fashion and the latest technology, from clothes to consumer electronics, we
throw away and replace perfectly serviceable items long before they have come
to the end of their useful lives, adding untold billions of pounds to our cost
of living each year and depleting the planet’s finite natural resources in ways our grandparents
would have considered insane and, quite frankly, immoral.
Worse still is our attitude to food. When women shopped each
day and planned meals to get the most out of their weekly budgets, almost nothing
was wasted, least of all left-overs. The steak and kidney pie I mentioned
earlier, for instance, was typically made using the diced up left-over roast
beef from Sunday lunch, bulked out with cheap offal – in this case pig’s kidney – and cooked in Sunday’s left-over roast beef gravy inside
a homemade shortcrust pastry case. With food shopping in many households now being
undertaken just once a week, however, and most of the food items bought being
at least partially prepared, not only is it impossible to build such integrated
efficiency into our meal planning, but it is very difficult to plans meals with
any precision at all. Indeed, one suspects that many household’s food shopping
is largely undertaken on the basis of repetition and contingency, which is to
say that we mostly buy what we bought last week, only varying this on the basis
of what we think we might want or need: an approach which more or less ensures
that a certain amount of food will be wasted.
In 2015, in fact, the latest year for which I have found
figures, households in the UK threw away a total of £13 billion worth of food,
not including that which was dumped by supermarkets for being past its sell-by
date: £13 billion which is again added to our collective cost of living without
providing us with any tangible gain.
The result is that far from being able to live on the income
of just one wage earner, many families toady – even with only one child – struggle to survive on the combined salaries of
both parents and are forced, therefore, to rely on borrowing, either on credit
cards or overdrafts or, worse still, pay-day loans. The result is that average,
unsecured debt, not including mortgages, has now reached £15,400 per household,
with many households, of course, owing significantly more than this.
However, it is not just the economic consequences of this
transformation in our way of life with which we are now having to deal. There
are also societal consequences, many of which stem from the sheer increase in
workload which both women and men now have to bear.
I say this because, in the 1950s, a husband and wife had
just two full time jobs between them. The husband went out to work to earn the
money his family needed in order to live; his wife looked after that family and
provided them all with a comfortable and welcoming place to live. When the
husband came home in the evening, he did not therefore have to worry about
domestic issues: they were all taken care of. Yes, he had certain jobs to do around
the house and garden –
looking after general maintenance, for instance, mowing the lawn and tending
the vegetable garden –
but these were all jobs he did at the weekend and did not add to the burden of
his working week. Similarly, his wife had all day to schedule the work she
needed to do around the house, with the result that once the children had been
fed and washed and put to bed, she too could relax and spend the evening with
her husband, very possibly even choosing to have an early night, with all that
that euphemistically implied.
Not so for many of today’s couples. For while we now have
many labour saving devices that weren’t around sixty years ago, household tasks
still have to be done. Someone still has to do the shopping. The laundry still
has to be put in the washing machine. The ready-made food still has to be
heated in the oven or the microwave. On top of which, the children have to be
taken to school or collected from the child minder, with the result that while
a modern couple may not have three full time jobs, they certainly have more
than two, balancing dozens of different home and family-related tasks with
their paid employment, which quite naturally takes priority, leading to the inevitable
marital tensions that arise when a promise to pick up the dry cleaning remains
unfulfilled.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that both men and women look at
marriage today and wonder whether it’s really worth it, often putting it off
until well into their 30s when their career is a little more advanced and
they’ve managed to save enough for a deposit on a house. Even then, with a
mortgage to pay, they still need two incomes simply to get by, with the result
that few couples are able to step off the economic treadmill for long enough to
have more than one child or even any children at all. The result is that fertility
rates in Europe have fallen to just 1.59 live births per woman, far below the
2.1 required for population replacement.
Worse still, with all the economic pressures now placed on
marriage, and little to hold couples together, 42% of all marriages now end in
divorce, with the further consequence that, in the UK today, there are over 2.6
million people over the age of 45 who live alone. From the extended family of
the 19th century, through the nuclear family of the post war era, we
are rapidly becoming what has been dubbed the atomised society, in which most
of us live die alone, not in the care of a loving family, but in an
under-funded, state run old people’s home, under the not so gentle
ministrations of a professional care giver.
In fact, both of the two most fundamental ‘caring’
relationships which women used to carry out in the unmonetarised setting of the
home and family –
the care of children and the care of the elderly – have now very largely been moved into the
monetarised economy, much, I believe, to society’s detriment. For the elderly,
of course, this merely means a sad, lonely end; for our children, however, it
could be far worse. For with rates of drug abuse, mental illness and suicide
all rising, and the general sense of hopeless nihilism which many young people
now evince, one cannot help but think that the societal transformation we have
brought about in the last half century has not been to their benefit. Or,
indeed, to ours.
And what of Finland? When I first went to Finland in 1976,
it produced 95% of its own food, largely on small farms like that of my wife’s
parents, which were protected from foreign competition by massive tariffs on
imported food. In fact, when I first arrived and saw the price of food in the
shops, I didn’t know how anyone could afford to live there. What I didn’t understand,
of course –
ignorant foreigner that I was –
was the huge amount ‘free’ food to which most Finns had access in the
unmonetarised economy.
In 1995, however, Finland joined the EU and could no longer
impose tariffs on food imported from other member states, most of which, of
course, had far lower farming costs. For a while, subsidies were provided to
help Finnish farmers manage the ‘transition’. As the subsidies decreased over
time, however, it was very quickly realised by most farmers that the transition
in question was their own transition into no longer being farmers. The result is
that, today, most of the small farms have disappeared – returned to forest – and with them a whole way of life and culture.
Older people of my wife’s generation still of course go into
the forest to pick blueberries and mushrooms. And I’m told that even some young
people try to keep the traditions alive. But most Finns now buy their
blueberries from supermarkets in little plastic punnets, picked by seasonal
migrant workers from the Baltic states: the ultimate symbol, not just of
paradise lost, but of something far worse, of paradise monetarised.
In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell:
‘Don’t
it always seem to go
That
you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone
The
day Paradise put up a parking lot.’
