The Last Page
Rustin, Margaret
To BE or not to be? That was Tony Blair's question this past spring when the British prime minister debated whether or not to take paternity leave after the birth of his fourth child, Leo. The...
...The feminist aspect of all this has a sharp edge...
...This generation of parents is in a different mood from previous ones...
...It is striking to note that in the same week a woman Member of Parliament with small children attacked the House of Commons, when announcing her resignation, for being effectively an Old Boys' Club, where the realities of women's lives are excluded from consideration...
...Certainly the carefully chosen photographs of Leo and his parents suggest this...
...She pointed out that there is a shooting gallery in the House, but no day care center...
...Blair was widely known to want him to take time off, for once the values of family intimacy may have displaced those of the public world...
...But maybe that is over-cynical, and what we are witnessing is the emotional impact of birth being felt 128 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 and acknowledged in a way that Blair had not expected...
...Blair's arguing in court for paid leave for mothers and fathers and for British compliance with European Union practice, while revealing in public her wish for Tony to follow the Finnish prime minister's example and take time off...
...Most mothers can have no such confidence, and anger about the quality and affordability of child care is bubbling...
...Recent improvements in the legal framework, though inadequate compared to more generous standards of paternity and maternity leave in continental Europe, have nonetheless been a move in the right direction...
...The expectation that men may want to be at home more now links with the greater similarity of life trajectory between men and women...
...Loss of industrial jobs, problems in transport policies, the troubles in the National Health Service and our beleaguered schools, Northern Irish anxieties, and the increasingly daft saga of the Dome exhibition— all were delightfully eclipsed by the quasi-royal treatment of the Blair baby's arrival...
...Because Mrs...
...The political and the personal came together in the extraordinary coincidence of Mrs...
...Tony Blair may have presented himself as a man who can run the country by day and still "do the night shift," but we've seen him looking tired and changing his mind about what really could be managed...
...There is no doubt that such a high profile preoccupation with paternity leave is a step toward its becoming a more frequent reality...
...Is this more spin, in which superman is repackaged to show a suitably tender concern for wife and baby...
...Suspicions about news management are hard to sort out from other thoughts about these events...
...Companionate partnership and men's greater involvement in the upbringing of their children are related phenomena...
...MARGARET RUSTIN...
...It was probably a brilliant move at the level of image, but it was also a significant incursion of reality into the political realm...
...This is one area of policy to which Labour needs to give urgent attention...
...The fascinating thing about this question was the number of column inches it inspired in the Western press...
...One wonders how much the spin managers may have anticipated this and engineered mainly friendly attention for him at a time when his domestic popularity is under threat...
...What of the disjunction between Blair's position before Leo's arrival—"This is not the sort of job one can take leave from"—and his subsequent decision to stand aside from public duties for a couple of weeks...
...Most women work outside the home for most of their lives...
...It has been widely noted that unpaid parental leave means little for the poorer sections of the population...
...Unease about the more presidential and less democratic nature of our prime minister's style and about "spin" as a crucial feature of modern politics has to be voiced alongside the fact that concerns about child care and nonmarketplace values have made it to center stage...
...Blair could go on working (she is a successful lawyer) until the week of the birth and plan a return to work in the knowledge that there is plenty of money to buy good domestic help and child care...
Vol. 47 • July 2000 • No. 3
