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Are Women More Left-Wing - UnHerd
Are Women More Left-Wing - UnHerd
unherd.com
The Tories’ women problem is back. Polling suggests that Labour are on track to
win over 17% of the women who voted Tory in 2019, but barely 3% of men. But it
seems unlikely that this shift is a consequence of the two sex scandals that
precipitated this week’s by-elections — after all, tutting at sexual indiscretion is
more a feature among conservatives than today’s “sex-positive” progressives.
A report published last weekend sheds light: the female drift away from
conservatism is structural and is a worldwide trend. The authors offer some
speculation as to why, such as the need for state-subsidised childcare since we
entered the workplace. But this is to see things backwards. It’s not so much that
women are becoming more progressive, as that progress is leaving men behind.
If the Unabomber declared in the manifesto he sent to the New York Times and
Washington Post in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences
have been a disaster for the human race”, we’re now some decades out of the
industrial era and into the “information age” — a much more asymmetrical
disaster, whose principal weight has been borne by working-class men.
Meanwhile, the Left that once stood up for those men has been colonised by a
female-heavy new class of knowledge worker, that wields progressivism as a
means of legitimating its interests. And the implications of this change reach well
beyond the Tories’ electoral prospects with female voters.
In the smoking rubble of the Second World War’s aftermath, a new dream took
hold: cleaner, safer and more modern than the industrial one. Post-industrial
“knowledge societies” would be governed by rules-based internationalism;
manufacturing could happen anywhere, and what mattered was ideas and
innovation. In 1963, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the country that a
new Britain was rising, and would prosper in the “white heat” of scientific
revolution. Wilson wrote later that his speech’s aim had been to “replace the cloth
cap [with] the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British labour”.
This post-war push from an industrial to a knowledge base created new
opportunities for women. For while men are, on average, considerably physically
stronger than women, and as such more likely to be able to perform heavy
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industrial work, an economy that’s more geared toward desk-based work places
no such constraints on the sex of employees.
And this, in turn, reshaped the Left. As a movement born out of 19th-century
trade unionism, and premised on the power of working-class people to exact
better pay and conditions from their bosses through collective action, the
industrial Left’s relation to women was historically ambivalent. Speaking in 1875,
for example, TUC secretary Henry Broadhurst declared that the aim of trade
unionism was a situation “where wives and daughters would be in their proper
sphere at home, instead of being dragged into competition for livelihood against
the great and strong men of the world”. Even in 1906, many within the Labour
Party argued that including women in the demand for universal suffrage would
weaken their cause.
But de-industrialisation levelled the employment playing-field between men and
women. From the mid-century onward, these changes combined with a flood of
new consumer technologies that eased the previously arduous work of
housekeeping, and medical ones that meant women could enjoy an active sex life
with minimal risk of pregnancy. Thus liberated by technology, women demanded
the right to seize those opportunities on the same terms as men — and second-
wave feminism was born.
Between 1964 and 1970 women accounted for 70% of new trade union members;
today, women make up a majority of trade unionists. This then accelerated with
deliberate de-industrialisation under Thatcher, aimed at breaking the power of
the unions. Wakefield, site of one of tomorrow’s by-elections, illustrates this shift:
once the home of the physically arduous and thus male-dominated mining
industry, the city’s biggest single field of employment is now health, which makes
no such physical demands.
Women also flocked to the universities: the proportion of female undergraduates
increased sharply over the same decade, and by 1979 women outstripped men in
the US as a proportion of undergraduates. It took until 2010 for women to
outnumber men at university in the UK, but similar trends hold in most
developed-world economies.
And with women making up a growing proportion of academia, it’s hardly
surprising that the political interests of an increasingly female-heavy class of
knowledge worker should begin to make their presence felt there too. It was in the
Sixties that the New Left began to shift the focus of progressive politics away from
labour issues in the industrial sense, toward civil rights, environmentalism,
feminism and gay rights. This, too, represented a turn away from the “cloth cap”
as an emblem of the industrial worker. But the New Left’s direction of travel was
less toward lab coats than mortarboards and black polo-necks: a colonisation of
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men against those who would class their priorities and perspectives as
“deplorable”.
Hawley’s suggestions include re-shoring industries, financial support for marriage
and families and cracking down on university-driven talk of “toxic
masculinity”. Whether that would make enough (or any) meaningful difference is
moot; I can only imagine the outrage it would occasion (as it did in America),
particularly from progressive women. But I doubt I’m the only woman who would
rather this than an escalating militant, macho, jack-booted backlash, powered by
working-class rage and served with a side-order of embittered misogyny.
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