What women REALLY want: Forget the working Superwoman ideal, mothers value spending time at home with their children most of all

By Steve Doughty for the Daily Mail
Updated: 03:29 EDT, 9 October 2009

Women do not want highpowered careers and find more fulfilment in motherhood than work, a prominent liberal commentator said yesterday.

Millions have been left frustrated and miserable by Government policies that push them into jobs and their children into nurseries, Cristina Odone said.

She backed her argument with a poll that showed fewer than one in eight mothers want to work full-time and that only one in a hundred mothers in two-parent working families with young children think it is right for them to have a full-time job.

Miserable: Many women want to be stay-at-home mums with their husbands taking the role of bread-winner, according to leading commentator Cristina Odone

The research found women feel bombarded by images of 'superwomen who manage everything, plus a high-profile career', when many just wanted to be stay-at-home mothers with their husbands taking the role of breadwinner.

The call for a reversal of the march of women into work came from a former deputy editor of the New Labour house magazine, the New Statesman, and editor-of the Catholic Herald. 

Miss Odone condemned her feminist colleagues in media and politics as a 'small, influential and unrepresentative coterie' who assume that women must achieve self-realisation through work.

What women want: Cristina Odone says mothers will be more fulfilled staying at home with their children than working

She added: 'We need to break the stranglehold that the small coterie of women, who work full-time and buy into the macho way of life, enjoy on our public life.

'They have for years misrepresented real women who reject the masculine value system for one that rates caring above a career and interdependence above independence.

'Real women do not want to commit full-time to a job. The future belongs to the real woman, who points to a lifestyle embracing feminine values. Let's hope this government, or the next, is brave enough to heed her call.'

The attack, published by the centre-right think tank Centre for Policy Studies in a pamphlet titled What Women Want, comes against a background of growing political pressure on mothers to go out to work and on companies to ensure women staff are offered flexible hours and better pay.

Ministers have redoubled efforts to persuade mothers to take jobs in the face of evidence that a big majority of the poorest families are two-parent families in which only the father works.

Labour leaders believe they can never hit their targets for reducing child poverty unless more mothers go out to work.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Trevor Phillips, and equal pay pressure groups, say that mothers are often anxious to go back to work but are pressured into a caring role by lack of opportunities for flexible hours, lack of affordable daycare, and the reluctance of male partners to take over a share of the childcare.

As a riposte, yesterday's report produced a YouGov poll which showed that only 12 per cent of mothers wanted to work full-time and nearly a third, 31 per cent, did not want to work at all.

In families where there were two children under five and the father worked, one per cent of mothers said it was right to work full-time and nearly half, 49 per cent, thought a mother should not work at all.

Official figures show that 57 per cent of mothers of children under five work either full- or part-time.

The findings, taken from two separate YouGov polls taken in February and March among 2,270 and 2,420 adults, said disaffection with paid work was not confined to mothers.

They indicated that 19 per cent of all women, nearly one in five, said they wouldn't work if they didn't have to.

Miss Odone called for an end to state support for child daycare which has over the last ten years topped £21billion.

Some of the money could be spent on marriage support services and pointing out to women the dangers of unmarried cohabitation.

She said the tax and benefit system that treats single parents much more generously than couples with children should be reformed, and regulation and red tape should be cut to open up more part-time jobs of the kind most attractive to mothers.

She called for a 'cultural shift' to 'stop forcing women into a mould'.

Footnote: Cristina Odone, 48, is married to another journalist. She has given up full-time work and now brings up her daughter, six, and two stepsons, aged 14 and 16. She has a comic novel, The Good Divorce Guide, published later this month