Glass-ceiling rhetoric of privileged condescends ordinary women

Like Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, both Merkel and May married into success, Margaret Hickey 

WHEN Hillary Clinton failed to win the Democratic nomination in the last US presidential election, she said: “this time, we did not succeed in breaking the highest, hardest glass ceiling, but ... we have put about 18m cracks in it and the light is shining through like never before”. It looks more likely she will succeed this time (she is the presumptive nominee), but would her victory open new horizons for other women, just because she, with her extraordinary advantages, has succeeded?

In the UK, Theresa May has followed Margaret Thatcher and has become the second female Conservative prime minister. There is no evidence that Thatcher would have seen her personal achievement as a watershed for women, or that May would. Likewise, Angela Merkel, who heads Germany, the most powerful country in the EU, would be unlikely to talk about shattering glass ceilings for others to follow.

For the millions of women who struggle with families and jobs, this rhetoric is more irritating condescension than encouragement. There were women prime ministers long before feminism, even in countries where the concept would be alien. These women, Indira Gandhi of India, Golda Meir of Israel, and Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, attained the heights of office through the privilege of family and a gold standard education that took them, like Thatcher, May and Clinton, to Ivy League colleges, where gender has, for a long time now, mattered less than brains and influence.

Not all of these women were equally privileged, but they all had an abundance of family support and educational opportunity to smooth the path of ambition. Furthermore, they married ‘well’. Thatcher was the daughter of a well-read grocer and local politician, who affirmed and encouraged her. She married a wealthy husband. The birth of her twins, just as parliamentary opportunities were opening up for her, did not put a brake on her career. She could afford a live-in nanny, along with other domestic help.

Merkel and May are the daughters of church ministers and while parsonages are not usually thought of as places of exceptional privilege, they are places that value learning. Jane Austin and the Brontes had broken the literary glass ceiling in their fathers’ parsonages in previous centuries. Like Clinton and Thatcher, both Merkel and May also married into success. Such is the interplay of talent and privilege in the rarified world of the most fortunate.

Merkel and May have no children and Thatcher and Clinton have three between them. However, in the ‘real’ world, it is not just the ties of children that limit career advancement, but the other obligations of family life, whenever the challenges of illness, disability, and age arise.

American poet, Maya Angelou, summed up women’s work wryly in the lines,

‘Children to tend,

clothes to mend,

floors to mop,

food to shop’.

Such chores have not gone away. In fact, domestic life has become more complicated. If she was writing her poem today, Angelou would need to add school runs, swimming lessons, school meetings and more. It might take, as Clinton famously opined, ‘a village to raise a child’, but it takes a demanding and exhausting system of family logistics to cater for the needs of a 21st century growing family, while the rest of the village, family by family, is doing pretty much the same thing.

How do you delegate all of this on typical incomes of €28,000 and pursue a career, when creche care for two children can touch almost the limits of that income?

Adding to the stress of life in modern Ireland is the horrendous cost of housing, which puts the dream of owning a home out of the reach of perhaps the majority. Being told by people like Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, to ‘lean in’, is the very opposite of motivational talk. Sure, you can have it all, if, like her, your income is stratospheric and the father of your children is the CEO of another digital behemoth.

Sheryl Sandberg

What is our government doing for struggling young couples who want to keep a sane work-life balance? Not surprisingly, perhaps, our government prioritises people like themselves. Public servants get handsome, tax-free lump sums on retirement. Public money is liberally dispensed on politicians’ expenses.

New recruits to the teaching profession take a cut, while trade unions defend increments for longstanding members. Top-level pay in the public sector is excessive by the norms of other, wealthier countries. Public money flows as freely to a plethora of quangos. A telling example was the HSE allocation of €70,000 a month to Console. All the while, too, the Charities Regulation Authority was being funded by the taxpayer.

The same hard-pressed taxpayer will somehow find the money to pay for follow-up, independent enquiries, just as there never seems to be a shortage of money for commissions and tribunals that hold the questions until they can be answered in the super-qualified, super costly language of lawyers, often after public interest has cooled.

Small wonder, then, that struggling families are disillusioned with established politics. We already see signs of an anarchic, Brexit-style protest vote here.

Mainline parties need to reach out to Middle Ireland, to families, and not to vested interests or elites, if we are to avoid further social alienation.

Another woman emerging to the fore in British politics is Angela Eagle, who was challenging for the Labour leadership, but withdrew. The daughter of ambitious, working-class parents, she says her success is due to the commitment to the needs of poorer families by a Labour government that allowed her sister and herself to advance in both academia and politics. Family-orientated policies and educational opportunity facilitate the social mobility that leads to sustainable equality.

For now, however, the glass ceiling remains intact, though, for the privileged few, it may dissolve into a silver mist, like Alice’s looking glass, allowing them to pass through with stately ease.

But, then, having it all can be a big ask, even for the powerful. Margaret Thatcher said, in a sad interview towards the end of her life: “it has been the greatest privilege being prime minister of my country.. . but I wish I saw more of my children”.