Half a wife: The Working Family's Guide to Getting a Life Back - review

Esther Walker10 April 2012

Half a Wife
by Gaby Hinsliff
(Chatto, £12.99)

When Gaby Hinsliff resigned as political editor of The Observer in 2009 many at the newspaper were very surprised. Of course she had a toddler at home and a working husband but couldn't she stagger on regardless like everyone else?

Yes, she explained in her swansong article, she could. But she didn't want to. Leaving your child to be brought up by someone else, doing everything in a panic at work and then doing everything in a panic at home, was possible but miserable and impractical. "My job had always been demanding," says Hinsliff in her prologue, "[but] combining it with motherhood seemed to create a monster."

Half a Wife claims on its cover to be a sort of working family's manual to preserving sanity but really it is a longer version of that swansong - the director's cut. It is partly a confessional piece about the perils of assuming (as many women secretly do) that working mothers who drop out are wimps and that you are different, tougher, more organised. It is also a report on the experiences of other working families in the UK. It is not so much The Condition of the Working Class in England as The Condition of the Middle Class in England but none the less engrossing - or valid - for it.

The problem, says Hinsliff, is our ideas about work are now outdated and incompatible with family life: if you don't want to do 9am-6pm (minimum) Monday-Friday, it's part-time work in a bookshop for you, dear. Companies talk a good game about supporting working mother employees yet most maternity-returners find opportunities blocked and every early home-time sourly noted by "someone".

It doesn't help that men would like a bit of what Hinsliff terms "wife time" (childcare, tidying, cooking) but are as oppressed by this silly macho work culture as women. "The disapproval of other men," she says, "and the conscious or unconscious fears of the women they live with sabotage many men's attempts to do things differently." The result is that men are stuck at work missing their children and feeling distant from a wife who is stuck at home, going quietly berserk.

It's not all moan, moan, moan - a solution is presented: in order for both sexes to be "half a wife", we all need to be more modern about when and where we work. And there needs to be a culture shift towards more sympathy for families because it comes to most of us in the end. In parallel, the Government must sort out the housing crisis, as affordable housing means everyone can kill themselves a little bit less at work.

Hinsliff's case studies to support her theories of a solution are inspiring and wide-ranging, from the trials of single working fathers in Cheshire seeking flexitime, to entire government departments in the US that abandon fixed working hours.

Half a Wife is important; wave after wave of parents blunder into miserable work/family situations because no one talks openly about what it's really like, out of fear that they're the only ones getting it wrong and having a horrible time, and out of fear of being accused of whinging.

Hinsliff has risked being labelled a silly softie but gets away with it because she's right, damn it. Why should we all have an awful time just because that's the way it's always been? Why shouldn't we see our children and also pursue some sort of intellectual life? We can be happy, says Hinsliff, if we just try. She's not very British about it. And thank God for that.

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