At a party last week I met two women, both pregnant. One didn't even know which of her lovers was the father: the other had been in a one-night stand. Far from being chastened or downhearted, both exuded an air of gloating triumphalism. They had achieved the ultimate feminist goal: career followed by motherhood - minus the millstone of a man.
I was horrified at the insoucience of these otherwise intelligent women. Fifteen years down the single parent line I know that no matter how loving and apparently financially robust the environment they grow up in, these women's children will lack a central ingredient to their wellbeing and long-term happiness. Namely a father.
In these days of Welfare to Work, New Labour's drive to lift single mothers in Britain out of the dependency culture, this is a near treasonable view. However, last week columnist and social commentator Melanie Phillips put a cat among the pious pigeons of the Left. In a pamphlet entitled The Sex Change State, she roundly challenges the feminist orthodoxy that says that we shall all be happier when men and women are virtually indistinguishable. "This desire to eradicate sexual and gender differences in order to re-engineer men is a totalitarian impulse with which a liberal society should have nothing to do," she writes.
What makes her polemic more than just a discardable reactionary rant, however, is that she comes not from the Right, but from the Left. Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the liberal-leaning Observer. The Right (Daily Mail and Telegraph) were quick to applaud her. The Guardian, in the shape of writer Maureen Freely, took a more jaundiced view, pointing out that the pamphlet is published by the Social Market Foundation which also recently published The End Of Order by Francis Fukiyama which covers much the same territory. Its agenda, Freely writes, "is to support a neo-paternalist top-down form of social policy and suppress any effort to replace it with something more democratic".
Phillips's main thrust is that the root cause of family disintegration is the marginalisation of men rather than poverty. The old-style family of Dad going out to work, Mum in the kitchen and the children within earshot, gave both parents roles they were happy with and could take pride in. Take Dad out of the equation and the children lose a whole dimension of otherness: a window on the world, an understanding of male/female relationships, a security based on the understanding that "the other one who made me" is as important and caring as the one who is around all the time. They also lose a mediator without whose benign presence the tightrope of love and discipline can stretch to breaking point. And then the problems, from drugs to crime, begin.
This 1950s-style daguerrotype of happy family life is far from the whole truth, as we all well know. Drunkenness, abuse of mother and children, have darkened far too many lives. But throwing out the baby - or rather the Dad - with the bathwater is not the answer, she argues, and getting mothers into some kind of paid job is missing the point.
It may reduce the benefits bill in the short term, but long term it is setting up major problems in society as a whole. The independence so vaunted by those who believe that women can only play their part by working in paid jobs, is entirely specious. The fact is that a mother is always dependent: on the father or the State for financial support; on family or paid childcare to spread the dayto-day burden of feeding, cleaning, protecting - a complex network without which no mother can survive.
This is as true for the well-paid professional married woman as it is for the never-married no-hoper. Phillips's contention that paid childcare can never be as good as a parent's (particularly a mother's) is particularly poignant in the light of the Louise Woodward trial. Every working mother knows this is palpably true. Which is why every working mother suffers huge guilt, whether they have to work from financial necessity or choice. Melanie Phillips's betes noires are "female supremacists" - women who fundamentally despise, distrust and dislike men, and whom she cites as architects of the new orthodoxy (notably Harriet Harman, now a British cabinet minister).
"Men in general and fathers in particular," she writes "are increasingly viewed as superfluous to family life. There are no longer key roles that only fathers can fill. Indeed it tells us that masculinity itself is either unnecessary or undesirable." Masculinity has become shorthand for aggression. Yet seen objectively, aggression is only misrouted (or unchanelled) energy. Properly harnessed it clinches deals, fuels competition, drives bargains. Remove a man's responsibility for caring for wife and children, she says, and it is no wonder that he ceases to be responsible. (Any parent, teacher or manager knows that the way to get someone to behave responsibly is to give them responsibility, not take it away.)
Yet through the exponential growth of male unemployment, as women continue to increase their share of the available work cake, men are denied both a physical channel for their drive, and their role as breadwinner, supporting, and being seen to support, their family.Irresponsible man reverts to boy behaving badly, free to cut loose leaving somebody else to clear up the mess.Increasingly that somebody is the State.
Until the pill and women's control of their own fertility, the role of the sexes was comparatively clear-cut.If you had sex you had children - and you had to look after them. Male and female roles were defined, not on any intellectual basis, but on the basis of their biology. And you don't require a degree in psychology to recognise that those basic traits are still there. Deny them, she says, and the problems begin. Even though they might still foot the household bills, middleclass fathers are not immune from the process of marginalisation, as can be seen from the growth of male-bonding groups and newspaper columns devoted to their plight. Written out of the family script, relegated to the role of weekend visitor, they present dangerously ineffectual role-models for both their sons and daughters.
Knowing who we are is crucial to our own emotional well-being. Mothers have no problem in that sphere. The umbilical cord never loses its pull, even 20 years on. Men have no such biological connection. Maureen Freely's sarcastic rebuttal that Phillips's own husband (and father of her children) has, no doubt, "found a way of being a father figure his children need and respect" is cheap and shows the paucity of her argument.
Melanie Phillips is married and her husband no doubt has a job with status. It is no answer to those fathers lower down the economic ladder where increasingly the status of a job is absent. And lower down the ladder is where the problems really arise. In these days of equality for all it takes a brave voice to counter the PC view that jobs for women and childcare-for-all are the answer to society's ills - but rather a pied piper leading our children into the dark. Melanie Phillips may not have endeared herself to the Left, but in throwing her cap into the ring she has at least opened a real debate.
The Sex Change State by Melanie Phillips is published by the Social Market Foundation in Britain, price £8.50 sterling.