In my teaching job I've just started to teach A level Psychology which has required me to start studying Psychology for the first time. My first lesson was on evolutionary theories in Psychology and that all population-wide behaviours in humanity are adaptive; i.e. that they helped us survive in the Stone Age, get with more hot Stone age dudes and have more babies, passing our adaptive genes and behaviours on to them. Sorry for lifting that wording straight from 'On the Origin of Species'.
It's made me think hard about choices in this society and what we consider as normal and abnormal. Firstly, relationships. The received wisdom is that you get married for life and that separation or divorce is an aberration from the norm. However, historically people simply didn't live as long as us,life was brutal, work hard, disease rife, hunger ever-present, quite apart from the likelihood of dying in childbirth. We have an assumption that we are marrying for life, but that 'life' is far far far longer than any human population before us. So maybe a behaviour like Judaeo-Christian marriage that was born out of late Iron Age requirements to pair up for mutual survival is a ridiculous strategy in a world where you could be together for upwards of fifty years; a lifespan unimaginable at the time the behaviour developed (unless Methuselah was real).
This is one of the instinctive feelings I have about marriage. I know my boyfriend's avowed wish is to marry me and I'm totally resolute that I don't want to. Not that I don't love him but that I don't believe in the institution of marriage. I'm happy to commit for seven years or so, which, rather non-scientifically, appears to be the period for which most of my friends' marriages managed to last. But not with a wedding ring on my finger because extricating oneself from a legal marriage is far too long and expensive. If I'm asked, I'm honest. The friends who are getting married soon I wish a lifetime of bliss and marital felicitation to, but wishing that and believing it will happen are rather different things. I just think that what I think is 'I hope you're really happy for about a decade and then move on in a mature and non-acrimonious way if that's what happens'. And, remember, that decade was probably a 'lifetime' in aeons gone by.
Due to the improvements in medicine and diet we live longer and so, thankfully, do our children. They are fewer in number and we don't ever imagine the ever-present horror of times gone past that we could lose them. But, I'm assuming that throughout history people ended up bringing children up on their own as a lone parent when disease or famine or war or accident took the other partner away. I know that at the end of World War 1 and World War 2 there would have been thousands and thousands of mothers bringing children up on their own. Bet they weren't called single mothers and treated with contempt. Mr fury was raised by this
article in the Guardian that said that the cuts will take an average of £1012 per annum away from a couple and £1880 from a lone parent. When I mentioned this on Facebook I got a familiar response about lazy bastards living in their council houses with tonnes of kids and living it up on benefit. I don't doubt they exist but I don't know any lone parents like that. The lone parents I know are like me, Jen, Emma, Zena, Caroline, Kathryn, Claire, Kelli, Teresa, Michelle, Spencer, Debbie, Sarah, Liz, Louisa, Anne, Nadine and Shirley who all work really hard. We hold down jobs and do practically all the childcare bringing up well-balanced and happy kids. At most we have maybe 3 kids. Only of us is on welfare and that person is a PhD who is overqualified for all the jobs she applies for. As lone parents we are due to be punished by an additional £800 being taken from our pockets than couples. We have to support TWO people on ONE salary and more money is being taken from us than couples. This is sold as a crackdown on welfare scroungers. Well, thanks. I work bloody hard. I don't scrounge and I'm being financially punished because my ex scarpered.
The answer I am given to understand is that they should 'get a job'. Well, I have one so it's not the greatest answer for me. Also, people fail to see the problems with being a lone parent. Somebody has to look after your child whilst you work. If you are on your own this pool of people is frighteningly limited. You can put them in nursery but you are looking at £800 per month upwards. From studying Psychology I took in Bowlby's theory that attachment between mother and child is very important up to the age of two when the child has an instinctive need to be with the mother for most of their time. Throughout history this was possible: the mother would work with the baby strapped to her. I'd like to see my school's reaction if someone brought their baby with them every day in a papoose. Instead the babies are dumped in daycare where, at best, they are cuddled a couple of times a day. It's brutal and if babies are not securely attached to a person in babyhood it affects their ability to form relationships throughout life. It could be argued that by forcing women out to work by labelling them scroungers you are psychologically damaging their babies for life. Great. If I regret one thing, it's that my son went to nursery as a baby instead of me staying home with him.
There's a famous 1970s feminist slogan: 'the personal is the political'. I take the ConDemNation choices as a political campaign that personally harms me. It also psychologically harms me as a lone parent. All of my sorority and brethren are tarred with the 'welfare scrounger' brush despite that practically none of us are. And we are financially punished for transgressing against Stone Age partnership expectations.
