Former Superwoman Shirley Conran entered a skirmish recently on behalf of Tony Blair's government. Her target was working mothers. Such women, she argued, needed to get their act together, stop whingeing and to practise time management. Don't blame the boss, blame yourself or blame your partner. The problem is both your faults.
Working mothers had not been whingeing, neither had working fathers. Most were probably too worn out to do more than groan. But read in the context of various inflammatory statements by the UK Institute of Directors, Conran's words brought home once and for all how 20th-century the debate on family and work culture remains.
Forty-two per cent of British employers admitted they had serious reservations about employing a woman of child-bearing age, so a few childless and child-free women fell into line behind them. Irresponsible working mothers were queering the pitch for all women, and should keep their problems to themselves, they whinged. Inasmuch as it was picked up here, the arguments followed similar lines.
What makes the argument so 20th-century is its reliance on old stereotypes about gender and parenting which hard evidence simply does not support. The facts are that the time working mothers spend on work-home duties here and in Britain is of the same order as that spent by working-class housewives surveyed in the 1930s.
The facts are that working fathers here and in Britain have less time to spend with their children than fathers anywhere else, save the US.
It's not our fault: things just won't fit. Charles Handy's expert management analysis repeatedly makes that point. True, parents are the primary educators of the child, and employers can't be expected to compensate for an employee's parenting deficits.
But the child has economic, social, cultural and human rights which the wider community must respect as a matter of principle, not least its long-term survival. So far, their rights come last.
Work is, in a way, the new family. All those kinship bonds which once characterised the extended family are replicated in the professional networks we maintain. We learn to know our place, respect our elders and decide on that basis when and how to make bids for power that may move us one step up in the pack. The beauty of this arrangement is that professional etiquette holds in check those raging and powerful emotions which periodically disturb all families. When it fails, the pack rules say offenders must move out.
The danger of this low-rent debate is that working mothers will become to the new workfamily as unmarried mothers were to older kinship systems.
Sure, they will have some rights - minimal paid maternity leave, perhaps a few hours off for doctors' appointments if they are in full-time employment and the pack leader nods an affirmative - but the child has none. From the new work-family's perspective, the child of a serving employee is for all practical purposes a "bastard" that doesn't fit in, just like the illegitimate child was to the 1950s family.
The family may be honourable, but they cannot take any more than rudimentary responsibility for the bastard child. You made your bed and all that guff. Here it comes again.
Low-rent attacks on working mothers represent the short-term agenda. It's a clear message for workers to put up or shut up, designed to maintain what few parent-friendly measures as are now in place at their current low level. Roughly, that means poor for mothers and negligible for fathers.
Fathers aren't victimised within the workfamily, it's just that workwise, the category hardly exists.
Articulating the rights of the child is the centre to which 21st-century debate will shift. For pragmatic reasons, it must. Labour shortages mean that employers must compete for workers as workers once competed for jobs. Losing workers after the age of 30-something when the biological clocks hit alarm, or forcing them to reduce their hours for reasons of overall workhome time management, will become a luxury employers can't afford.
Individual employers can't deliver rights single-handedly. If, however, the community of work-families which constitutes the workplace insists on rewarding attendance at work, which has the secondary effect of fostering time-deprivation within the home, then the workplace is negligent, no matter what amount of hand-washing it tries to do.
The State colludes in maintaining the work-home muddle: education focuses on work-related skills, but not on how to integrate them with our wider lives. "Problem? What problem?" the education system suggests to teenagers, which is a 21st-century version of depriving adolescents of information about their bodies.
No wonder people are caught by surprise. Boys and girls are encouraged to believe they can have it all. At no stage do educators hint about the complexity of choice they will have to make, and about what impact that may have on their careers, fertility and lifestyle.
If Ireland follows the message of Blair's messenger that the problems of balancing work and home are simply a matter of sorting out your personal organiser, we will remain with Britain at relegation level in the European league for pro-child and pro-parent workplace measures. Aren't we more competitive than that?
Conran's generation coined the phrase "all men are bastards", which led women to believe that once men started to do the ironing, equality for women would steam ahead. It has, but now the ironing is piling up and, meanwhile, legal rights to find the time for parenting are stuck in the work-home mangle. This does not represent "win-win".
Key time-management principles of putting "first things first" will certainly help deliver better organisation of work-home tasks, but forcing the effluent from un-family friendly workplaces into the closed chute of the domestic family clogs everything up.
You cannot change the laws of physics.
No matter how we figure it, three into two still won't go.