Carol Sarler en At last! A pill giving power to the poor <div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Control over one's reproductive system is a class issue</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Jeannette Kupfermann, white, middle class, blessed with education and, I dare say, a bank balance on the healthy side, was right up there with the vanguard of protest against the advent of the "morning-after" pill. "Yet another blow against the family!" she howled from the pages of Monday's <em>Daily Mail </em>- although she was not alone. The announcement that, from 1 January, there will be over- the-counter availability of this drug, designed to intervene between unprotected sex and pregnancy, was bound to push all the usual buttons. And so, with tedious predictability, it did.</p> <p>It was predictable that the fury would spew out, without exception, from those who share Kupfermann's social status, just as it was predictable that the argument would be as rocky as it was robust. There was unsubstantiated fear-mongering - how do we know it's safe, just because "they" say it is? There was a nod to values - "putting sex into a moral vacuum". There was a quick swipe at rap music and pornography because, hey, why not while you're at it? And all the commentators cited their chief credential, as they always, always do: "Speaking as a mother, I would like to say . . . "</p> <p>There wasn't a word of it that we have not heard before from these mothers, who regurgitate the identical script whether we are talking contraception, abortion or medical confidentiality for teenage girls. And the flaw in their script, likewise, is the same old flaw: mothers they may be, but their own daughters have nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at stake.</p> <p>Control over one's reproductive system, as well as available coping resources should that control slip, is class-ridden to stink point. And always has been. Long before the Pill joined the party in the 1960s, it was widely accepted that, come a certain age, gymkhana girl would visit Mummy's private gynaecologist for "a fitting", there to cross his palm with silver - while sink girl crossed her fingers, instead.</p> <p>If there was a bit of an oops! nevertheless, gymkhana girl went back to the good old doctor for "a bit of a D &amp; C - women's stuff, down below, you know" and no further questions asked. Sink sister turned to the gin, the knitting needles and the kitchen table, knowing even as she did so that, at best, she faced indescribable agony and, at worst, she faced death.</p> <p>If abortion was out of the question, for any reason, gymkhana girl's family would have - and still has, today - a network of support. In my own nice Surrey childhood home, we had a cousin from Wales who came to stay for a few months; I clearly remember her getting very fat and spending a tremendous amount of time knitting. Only years later did anybody explain it.</p> <p>And sink girl? A hostel, perhaps. A shared room, with her baby, in an already overcrowded, underemployed family home. Or, if she's really, really fortunate, a small flat of her own at the top of a council tower block, where the urine-soaked lift works only sometimes, and where she sits alone all day with a crying child, trying to eke out her pitiful benefits - all the while facing daily accusations in the press that she chose to become pregnant to put herself at the top of the list for such luxury.</p> <p>(I have often thought, if this lifestyle really<em> is</em>, as the bellowers do bellow, a matter of choice - what on earth were the other choices that the poor young woman rejected as being worse?)</p> <p>Nor is the class divide just a matter of economic deprivation; there is learning, too. The middle-class mother who reads the newspapers and who follows the medical advances is well placed to advise her daughter. She can establish dialogue based on real information, and it is that same information, I venture to suggest, which allows liberalism to prevail in their home. Not for her daughter the long, scary walk alone to the chemist or the clinic; Mum will be walking right alongside.</p> <p>Even at school, the differences rule. The sink school, packed to the gills with social problems as it is, is going to have less time to attend to the sexual insecurities of one shy girl, further crippled by embarrassment, than is Roedean - and none but a fool or an optimist pretends otherwise. (I actually know of one case where a girl at a private school was fast-tracked through a course of treatment for venereal disease, lest the antibiotics disturb her equilibrium during the sitting of her GCSEs.)</p> <p>Kupfermann wrote, in her <em>Daily Mail </em>essay, that "teenage pregnancy often has more to do with low self-esteem, boredom, a lack of goals and poor education". Indeed. But among her own children and their friends? I think not. And I'm damned sure she thinks not, too. She and her fellow critics know full well that, on the one hand, their daughters are less likely than most to "get into trouble" in the first place - and that, on the other, if they do they will be able to reach out for help and guidance with ease and with certainty that their needs will be met.</p> <p>Our other girl citizens, deprived of such money, support or know-how, will be left to fend for themselves - and anything the rest of us can provide for them, be it free walk-in clinics, non-judgemental advisers, safe and reliable contraception or the easy availability of an emergency morning-after pill, we should provide it.</p> <p>It is the very least we can do, and it ill behoves any of us who are privileged to advocate a removal of such resources from the less fortunate.</p> <p>For a young, working-class woman to be able to control her own fertility means being able to seize power over her life and her destiny - and even, just perhaps, to change it. You can't help wondering, sometimes, whether that is precisely what so frightens her middle-class detractors. </p> <p><em>Carol Sarler is a columnist on the </em>Daily Express</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 18 Dec 2000 12:00:00 +0000 Carol Sarler 139240 at Divorce your husband and watch him get rich <div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A new study reveals what women have suspected all along: from tower block to trading floor, the man </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>A great fable has swept across this land in recent years. It builds in volume and conviction the more it is told, but the gist is always the same: that we should pity, yes pity, the divorced man.</p> <p>As two in five marriages end in divorce, the storytellers boast a pattern. After barely a decade in wedlock, through little or no fault of his own, the married man - most usually in his late thirties at the time - will find himself ejected from the bosom of his family by the ingrate he married.</p> <p>She who instigates the parting (and it probably will be she; 75 per cent of divorces are moved by women) will then proceed to strip him limb from asset. Even his precious pension, if it is larger than hers, is soon to be added up from the date of marriage to the date of divorce - and half of it handed to her greedy grasp. In the meantime, she will make sure that the Child Support Agency harasses our gentleman for child support payments that equal most of his salary, and should he be bold enough to marry again such payments shall not be decreased to account for his commitments to his new family.</p> <p>In especially exciting cases, divorced man will then be hounded unto penury or suicide or, if we really want the juices flowing at the <em>Daily Mail</em>, both.</p> <p>The only problem with this salutary, sign-of-the-times fable is that, according to a new study by the Institute of Social and Economic Research, it is all just so much bollocks.</p> <p>Taking a huge sample of 10,000 people, and monitoring them over a period of ten years, the study found that men benefit tremendously from divorce: on average, their disposable income will increase by 15 per cent - while the women left behind, and most usually the children, too, will see theirs decline by a discomfiting 28 per cent.</p> <p>Far from being impoverished by their familial responsibilities, less than half of the men will regularly cough up the full child support that they should, and nearly a third of them will somehow manage to pay absolutely nothing at all.</p> <p>Meanwhile, unfettered by a structured schedule - even those men who never did lift a finger about the home were nevertheless governed by the insistent rhythm of family life and its mealtimes - our man in his late-thirties prime is now able to walk the extra economic mile; for some the extra shift on double time, for others the promotion-winning late hours at the office desk.</p> <p>In other words, they are freed to do what so many discover they do so very well: to channel their energies into looking after Number One.</p> <p>Not much of the above will come as a surprise to the divorced woman, who will now join that group known as "lone parents" (three in five lone parents were, in fact, once married). For the first time in her life, she might well find herself grappling with the intricacies of income support or the working families tax credit, with government agencies lurking all the while to penalise her should she seek honest labour for more than a meagre handful of hours in a week.</p> <p>Her erstwhile husband, in between gadding about in the car and on the holidays he can now afford, will drop by with such support - moral or otherwise - as and only if he chooses. It is nonsense to state baldly, as one newspaper did this week, that "courts compel the man to support his children until they have finished full-time education". So they do. But what happens if he still doesn't pay? When is a woman to find time or money to go back, and back again, to those courts? </p> <p>After all, it's not as if she has time on her hands for a fight. Another survey published last week estimated that, if the work that went into caring for a family were costed as paid work, it would be valued at around £25,000 a year. So if only one person is doing the caring, that's £25,000-worth of time when she cannot be earning elsewhere - and £25,000-worth of time when he can. And we are to pity him?</p> <p>The stark figures speak for themselves: 91 per cent of lone parents are women, most of them divorced. And lone parents have now officially overtaken pensioners as the poorest group of people in this country.</p> <p>But if those are the facts, we might consider why they stand so at odds with the might of the "poor-bloke" fable. Perhaps part of the answer is that the facts are too redolent of the gloomy, high-rise tower block for our average newspaperman to become involved; the first rule for a proper underclass, as we know, is that it stays under - well under- eye level.</p> <p>Alongside that, and not at all mutually exclusive, is the feeling that the realities of the situation are parked on the back of what sounds too old-fashioned to be worthy of comment. We have been mostly speaking, it is true, of a declining family unit, one where wife stays home, undereducated and undertrained, thus incapable of earning much in the first place, while husband trots off to slay the family bacon.</p> <p>The commentating world, fancying itself, probably correctly, to exist at the other end of the social spectrum, is peppered with women who think that their credentials and qualifications will conspire to protect them from falling into a post-divorce poverty trap. Well, they wish.</p> <p>Granted, this is a straw poll, but allow it if you will. There are three women in my social circle alone who have stumbled badly in the dissolution of thoroughly modern marriages. Their details vary so little, we could treat them as one. Each marriage brought forth two children, and in each marriage the wife and mother was also the breadwinner, thanks to her studies and subsequent professional standing - oh yes, and to his unemployment.</p> <p>The reasons for his circumstances varied, though not much, between sloth and vanity; he either could not greatly be bothered and/or would be happy to work when the right job "came along". In the meantime, in the first flush of romance, may God forgive them, each of the women allowed that the family home be placed in joint names, before going out to earn the mortgage payments.</p> <p>You have probably already guessed that when they re-turned home from their toils there was the dinner to prepare and the children to bathe - but let us not digress too far, save to say that the devil doth indeed make work for idle hands, and in each case the man's empty days were soon to be filled with illicit affairs.</p> <p>In the end, the women recognised that there was nothing in this for them, that they were being taken for the biggest fairground ride in the world, and that the marriage should cease. From which point, they began to suffer financially, as they suffer still.</p> <p>The house, irrespective of their having paid the mortgage, was to be sold and the proceeds divided. They inherited the children, along with sole concern for childcare and the inflexible demands of their trades. They and their children had to move to whatever could be bought with half of what they once had; in each case, this obviously meant reduced circumstances. And child support? Don't be daft; he's unemployed, isn't he?</p> <p>But here comes the icing on the cake: each of these women considers herself more or less lucky so far, because each has been warned by her solicitor that, should things turn nasty, he could now apply for her to pay him maintenance.</p> <p>We asked a solicitor: let's get this right. A man can screw around during his marriage, take half of everything his wife worked for at the end of it, and then claim his bar bills money from her for ever after? "Exactly so," said the solicitor. "Just as has long been the case for men when the position is reversed." Well, yes - but then, when the position is reversed, the man is almost never the one left to raise the children as well, is he? "Exactly so," said the solicitor.</p> <p>From tower block to trading floor, then, divorce is a better deal for men than it is for women. Yet, still, overwhelmingly most divorces are brought by women. They do it, by and large, because they have had enough of a bad marriage; even in these days of "no fault" divorces, lawyers will tell you that the woman generally makes her move because of ill treatment of herself or her children. And when she does so, she does it in the full knowledge - factually or intuitively - that their financial circumstances will suffer. But she does it anyway. Some of us call that immense courage.</p> <p> </p><hr /><p><strong>Divorce by numbers</strong></p> <p>Marriages registered in 1999: 267,300</p> <p>Divorces granted in 1999: 145,214<br />granted to husbands: 43,053<br />granted to wives: 101,795<br />granted to both: 366</p> <p>Judicial separations: 2,282 </p> <p>Divorcing couples with children: 70 per cent<br />with children under 16: 80 per cent</p> <p>Average age of divorcing couples<br />Males: 39 years<br />Females: 37 years </p> <p><strong>Grounds for divorce</strong></p> <p>Adultery:<br />granted to husbands: 13,708<br />granted to wives: 22,611</p> <p>Behaviour:<br />granted to husbands: 11,450<br />granted to wives: 53,807</p> <p>Desertion:<br />granted to husbands: 298<br />granted to wives: 492</p> <p><strong>Marriage by numbers</strong></p> <p>The number of married households is projected to reduce by about one million between 1996 and 2021. Cohabiting couple households are projected to increase by more than 1.3 million in the same period.</p> <p>Average age of first marriage:<br />Males: 30 years<br />Females: 28 years</p> <p>Cost of a prenuptial agreement on the internet: £29.99 (<a href=""></a>) Prenuptial agreements are not binding in English courts in the event of a divorce.</p> <p><strong>Child support</strong></p> <p>- More than one million children are listed on the Child Support Agency's computer system</p> <p>- One in ten UK households is headed by a single parent. The UK percentage of lone-parent families is the highest in Europe</p> <p>- 32 per cent of non-resident parents receive income support or Job Seekers Allowance </p> <p>- 16 per cent receive income from other benefits, irregular employment or investments </p> <p>- Average maintenance assessment is £20.26 per week. For employed non- resident parents, it is £38.28</p> <p>- One in 16 parents with care is male (the parent in care lives with the children)</p> <p>- The average age of a parent with care is 35.1 years </p> <p>- Almost 85 per cent of non-resident parents and parents with care live in the same area, and approximately 76 per cent of them live within 13 miles of each other</p> <p>- The north-east has the highest proportion of lone-parent families</p> <p>- Maintenance benefit lasts until the child is 16 or has completed full-time education</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 30 Oct 2000 12:00:00 +0000 Carol Sarler 138875 at Why women aren't sisters at the office <div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">When two high-flying females lunch together they don't drink wine. Carol Sarler explains why</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Amanda Platell, head honcha of spin at the beleaguered Conservative head office, is about to descend on the bookstalls with <em>Scandal</em>, the novel she wrote during and about her previous incarnation as a newspaper executive. In the best style of her new trade, its release has been tantalising: little nuggets carefully thrown just far enough for us to know that the story is one of a good gal editor (not at all dissimilar from Miss Platell) and her rivalry with a bad gal editor (hints of bints abound - Eve Pollard? Bridget Rowe? Rosie Boycott?).</p> <p>But even as they speculate, what appears to have startled the privileged few who have seen an advance copy is that <em>Scandal</em> is no feminist tract. Indeed, they tell us, and not to put too fine a point on it, it's pure bloody bitch. If this book is to be believed, they say, women at work are not at all nice to each other. If these critics are to be believed, then I say Amanda Platell deserves a medal just for telling the truth.</p> <p>Like Platell, I only have direct experience of the various industries within the communications media, so I suppose it is just about possible that in the world of, say, science, women are cuddle-bunnies with each other. But I doubt it. Because the clearest lesson learnt in the past quarter of a century is that the concept of "sisterhood" was the most ludicrous of the pups we were sold from the feminist litter. Women don't support each other, most especially in the upper echelons of the workplace. Broadly speaking, they hate each other.</p> <p>Oh, they cover it up well enough. They form their excruciating trade organisations - Women in Journalism, for instance - which, they will swear on their nail polish, exist so that they can network and help each other. In fact, they have a thoroughly good time boasting about their own achievements, spying on their rivals and patronising the younger idiots daft enough to believe the manifesto.</p> <p>Just watch, if you will, two female colleagues taking lunch together; that lunch they have been whinnying about loudly for weeks, that lunch where they can "catch up on all the girl-talk". Each of them, lunching with a man, would enjoy sharing a bottle of good wine. But at this lunch they will stick firmly to the fizzy water - not, as you might glibly think, because they are watching their weight but because they are watching their tongues. Wary control and winner takes all.</p> <p>There is nothing new about the manipulative ferocity of women. The survival of the species has depended upon it. This might be why the worst (or best) bitches are the middle-aged daughters of the stay-at-home mothers of the generation before them. They learnt at their mother's knee that praise is heaped upon the woman who will stop at nothing to protect her own: "Aah," was the admiring cry in those days, "she's <em>such</em> a Mother Tiger." </p> <p>Did anyone really think that there would be fewer teeth and claws called into play when what a woman had to protect and nurture was not her baby, but her job?</p> <p>Indeed, nobody much minded when the enemy of aspiring Woman was Man. It was pretty much taken for granted that in order to tackle the inherent sexism of the workplace, women could not win by the male rules; they would have to make their own. Move a few goalposts, as it were. My personal favourite was the pre-menstrual syndrome scam: "You don't understand how dreadful I feel," Woman would wail to Moon and Man until, finally, Man caught on that Woman was bonkers for a quarter of her working month and he should - with great sympathy, naturally - treat her as such. Then she had him: "How <em>dare</em> you treat me differently from the men?" she would rage.</p> <p>That was an early victory which would define the battleground for years to follow. Women demanded - and got - the right to behave as irrationally as would suit their day. I remember the<em> Sunday Times </em>section editor who sacked her third consecutive sub-editor while stamping her foot and screaming: "I always said I couldn't work with Capricorns." I remember, too, the hugely ambitious beauty editor I once worked with, who arrived at work, in November, in a bikini top . . . and then made a complaint that "the sexist pig of a doorman stared at me".</p> <p>These women won. The simple, linear male mind stood no chance. So Man opened the door to the boardroom and in walked Woman, chin up against the line of men . . . but hang on, what's this she sees at the far end of that long table? Well knock her down with a mascara wand if it isn't another woman!</p> <p>The horror of it slowly dawns. The only way that other woman could possibly have got to that seat is the same way that she did. Which means that there is someone who knows all the same tricks, all the same manoeuvres, and who will be just as relentless and ruthless as she is.</p> <p>The men, who used to be the enemy, are a piece of cake by comparison - for this, surely, is an enemy worthy of the name. And the tactics start at once. "Hello," she smiles over her extended, duplicitous hand. "How nice to see another woman here. We must have lunch; catch up on all the girl-talk . . . "</p> <p>Me, I'm long through with the air- kissing. If you don't like 'em, then all that is really required is the bare civility that keeps the working wheels in motion. If you do like them, it's probably because you have never either competed or worked together; a set of conditions that applies, incidentally, between myself and Amanda Platell, whom I like very much.</p> <p>And for what it's worth: on the couple of occasions when we have had lunch - we drank the wine.</p> </div></div></div> Mon, 15 Nov 1999 12:00:00 +0000 Carol Sarler 136121 at