Sunday 9th March was International Women’s Day. Aside from the double spread in the Independent on Sunday showing the world’s most powerful women and the BBC’s World Service’s post on the BBC website simply titled ’50 Women Who Made it Happen’ (well worth making time for) there were several things of note that popped their heads above the parapet.
Sat on the sofa on the Andrew Marr show, Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor, Sunday Times, expressed her delight over India Knights’ article in the same paper on why the best spies are middle aged Mums – “inconspicuous and able to shuffle around with shopping bags”, equipped with unrivalled powers of tickling. I have thought exactly the same thing myself many, many times. It’s why female suicide bombers are such a valuable weapon – the fairytale of woman’s innocence vs. man’s wickedness is a well-established tactical tool.
Reference was made at some point to the recently published Family and Childcare Trust’s Childcare Costs Survey. Reading the report for myself, I was shocked but not entirely surprised in the rise in cost of childcare but in particular, the statistic that part-time care from a childminder has risen by 4.3 per cent in the past year. I have many friends who are childminders and the rise in this cost is clear: the government continues to raise the bar in terms of standards of care whilst cutting funding. Mandatory training courses, which used to be free, are no longer funded and in my area, free to access Sure Start run playgroups and the like are now off limits to childminders – the costs of these have to be met somewhere and childminders already earn very little for doing a very demanding job. This in the face of the House of Lords Committee on Affordable Childcare asserting that more money needs to be spent on bringing more graduates into the private, voluntary and independent sector and that Government funded 2-year old places should be in settings that are rated as Good or Outstanding by Ofsted. More for less seems to be the way of things across the board these days but I can’t help thinking of the damage this is doing not just to working parents and the private childcare industry but also the small people who have no say in these things.
Then, a little later in the morning, the last item on Nicky Campbell’s Big Questions (BBC1) asked: is it more important for Christians to do good than God? This prompted some often heated but well-reasoned discussion between several female academics and writers. Interesting stuff, I thought, sat on the sofa in my pjs and slippers, cup of tea in one hand, six year old daughter on my knee. The issues raised included the man-made nature of doctrine and whether women were historically excluded from the process. Perfectly good points, I felt – perhaps even pivotal to the whole discussion. Bravo, I thought as I quaffed more tea.
That was until Peter Hitchens, columnist for the Daily Mail, opened his pie hole and dismissed the previous ten minutes’ discussion as “bureaucratic, theological flim flam” and continued to sum up his opinion thus:
“There has to be something in your mind which stops you from doing a wicked thing when the temptation is there to do it. If you have no doctrine, you will do that wicked thing because there will nothing to stop you. That’s why our society, each year, kills 180 thousand babies in the womb and thinks it’s good.”
And boom! We all whiz back fifty years and the women may as well have not bothered turning up (or going to school for that matter).
So, this is where the room for growth lies. Yes it’s in speech, yes it’s in education and yes, it’s in giving women the mobility to get into positions where they can bring balance to the important decisions we make as a society but it will take a while for the dinosaurs who choose to adhere to the old ways to die out. For now, we must keep them happy with pie and wait for their ideas to fade with them.
Any suggestions on pie fillings?
