Angela McRobbie, Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare, Polity, 2020; hbk £50, pbk £15.99.
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Although some readers will be thoroughly familiar with Angela McRobbie's work, it is not as widely drawn upon in the field of critical international political economy as it might be: for example, it is cited in only one chapter (McCracken, 2018: 489) of the Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender (Elias and Roberts, 2018), in relation to the beauty industry, and then only in passing. If you happen not to know it, this book is a good place to start, along with 'Top Girls?' (McRobbie, 2007), and her warm and evocative vignette of Stuart Hall's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where she arrived as a PhD student in 1974 (McRobbie, 2013). Hall has been a continuing influence; and as regards critical political economy, while McRobbie is mostly associated with media and cultural studies, there is a strong thread running through her work that speaks to production and social reproduction, work and welfare, and disciplinary neoliberalism. I recommend it for the debate it opens up on the nature of the current conjuncture and especially the contemporary significance of femininity, motherhood and the generational reproduction of the population, and for the generous and open-ended manner of its approach.
'Top Girls?' identified a 'new sexual contract' in the manner in which the UK and other advanced democracies addressed young women, linking sexual freedom, control of fertility, carefully planned parenthood, and the consumption of fashion and beauty products to ambition and advance in education, employment and careers. It identified this as 'an integral part of resurgent global neo-liberal economic policies', 'inscribed within a more profound and determined attempt, undertaken by an array of political and cultural forces, to re-shape notions of womanhood to fit with new or emerging (neo-liberalised) social and economic arrangements' (p. 721): 'From being assumed to be headed towards marriage, motherhood and limited economic participation, the girl is now a social category understood primarily as being endowed with economic capacity', and might be imagined as 'a highly efficient assemblage for productivity'; so women figured in government discourse (that of Blair's 'New Labour', of course, in the UK) 'as much for their productive as reproductive capacities' (p. 722). This inaugurated a new gender regime:
'In singling out young women for this special attention, New Labour and other governments are displacing the role and legitimacy of feminist interventions in the politics of education, while also orchestrating this opportunity to instil new values of competitive individualism on the basis of emerging gender divisions intersecting in novel ways with class and ethnicity so as to produce re-configured entanglements seemingly characterised by openness and opportunity rather than older structural rigidities' (p. 728).
In short: 'The logic of the new flexible capitalism in the affluent West and the decline of the welfarist underpinning of the so-called family wage means that everyone who can work must do so' (p. 730). Although McRobbie's theoretical frames of reference are rather different (prominently, along with Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Jacqueline Rose, Catherine Rottenberg, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler), the affinities of the analysis here with the field of critical international political economy are clear. It is no surprise that this essay is headed by a declaration from World Economic Forum Chief Economist Augusto Lopez-Claros in 2005 that the education of girls 'is probably the most important catalyst for changes in society', as the 'Top Girl' will grow up in due course to become 'Davos Woman' (Elias, 2013). No surprise, either, that Elias herself takes McRobbie (2008), in which this essay appears again along with others, as the basis for her argument.
The Politics of Resilience explores these themes more than a decade on, in a deliberately tentative, exploratory and open-ended way that invites a constructive response. McRobbie declares, at the midpoint of the book, in a section ('Critique of Resilience', pp. 59-63), that if read first provides a good initial orientation to the book as a whole:
'feminist cultural studies are often driven by a sense of urgency, and by a commitment to making a kind of diagnosis of our present conditions of living, as a template for more extended scholarship. Our studies are often pursued tentatively, in the hope of highlighting and making connections so as to draw attention to something that is taking place in the here and now. This kind of work conforms more with the model established by Stuart Hall, attempting a conjunctural analysis by drawing together seemingly dispersed elements and showing how ideological patterns converge by means of articulation effects, to produce a new politics of meaning' 61.
McRobbie's first step is to reproduce an essay that complements 'Top Girls?', and was first published in New Formations, 81, in 2013 - 'Feminism, Family, and the New Multi-Mediated Maternalism'. It provides a stepping-stone from the world of New Labour to the world of today, reflecting, so to speak, that the Top Girl was also expected, in due course, to be a Top Wife and Mother. Bookended by discussions of the Sam Mendes film Revolutionary Road (2009) and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (2012), it explores the significance of the figure of the middle class professional wife and mother in the transition from liberal to neoliberal feminism, and the invention and promotion, variously in New Labour, the then-ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, mumsnet and the Daily Mail, of 'a repertoire of woman-centred positions that will confirm and enhance the core values of the neoliberal project' (15), centred on the imperative for women to enter the labour market and stay in it, and counterposed to the negative image of the 'abject maternal figure, typically a single mother with several children fathered by different men, reliant on benefits, living in a council house, and with an appearance that suggests lack of attention to body image, all of which within today's moral universe implies fecklessness, promiscuity and inadequate parenting' (21). In the new moral economy of the family, the successful (white, middle-class, heterosexual) woman will not only be a career-oriented Top Girl, but at the same time an exemplary 'professional mother' who manages and oversees the success of the family as an enterprise as the supports of the welfare state fall away. McRobbie argues that 'this work of family responsibilization, at least in the UK, is entrusted to the feminine mass media and popular culture', and proposes the term 'visual-media-governmentality' to capture 'the wide range of regulative mechanisms put in place to ensure that normative femininity is ... accomplished': 'Femininity exists then as a seemingly fundamental and universal dividing practice, one which within the time and space of Western modernity has been constantly produced and reproduced by the various offices of the state and by the giant media corporations' (34); in the present, the 'new maternal-feminine' or 'new familialism' performs a double function for neoliberal hegemony, providing the centre right and the centre left with 'a more up-to-date way of engaging with women and women's issues, while simultaneously it expunges from popular memory the values of the radical and social democratic tradition, which had forged such a close connection with feminism through the pursuit of equality and collective provision for families' (40-41).
For McRobbie, then, the re-engineering of femininity, either by governments or through popular culture, is an accommodation within the frame of 'Western modernity' to the neoliberal order. This is reaffirmed at the start of the first new chapter, which has the same title as the book itself:
'What are the mechanisms by which some notional idea of feminism is adopted, taken up and made compatible with the needs and expectations of consumer capitalism as it has historically directed itself towards women within a frame of normative femininity? By which I mean the organization of the designated female body according to a set of cultural codes and practices and craftings, which over time are constitutive of a gender formation understood widely as other than the designated male counterpart' (42, and ft. 1, p. 128).
(I have no time for the practice of dividing a single thought between the widely separated main text and endnote, so I have put the two sentences so allocated together again. It's of minor importance, but McRobbie is a serial offender in this regard). The point at issue is the status within neoliberalism, or capitalism, or even 'Western modernity', of a gender formation that rests upon contrasting normative understandings of femininity and masculinity, and for me this is the most problematic aspect of the book. McRobbie addresses it through what she calls the p-i-r, a set of three related terms that together 'comprise a dispositif for the management of emerging feminisms' (43): 'These are the 'perfect', which appertains to lifestyle and the terrain of the feminine 'good life'; the 'imperfect', which offers some scope (within carefully demarcated boundaries) for criticism of and divergence from these ideals; and 'resilience', which becomes the favoured tool and therapeutic instrument for recovery and repair' (42). Here the function of the perfect is 'to encourage women to succeed meritocratically, while simultaneously introducing heightened competition, constantly redifferentiating and establishing division, resulting in a feminism that is infinitely divided and gradated, defining ways of living that can also be compatible with what were originally the aims of liberal feminism and are now more closely articulated to what we might call neoliberal "leadership-feminism"' (43-4). The imperfect, in turn, is 'a response to the unviability of the emphasis on success, and it too relies on a feminist voice, this time to engage with the idea of failure, while also drawing tight lines around those terrains of experience where it is possible to fail, where flaws can be entertained'. 'Resilience', which has 'a much longer history in clinical psychology', here 'springs into existence as a "bounce-back" mechanism, finding expression across a whole terrain of popular culture' (44).
It is no coincidence that the idea of resilience finds expression too across the whole terrain of neoliberal political economy, and nowhere more so than in the regulatory frameworks developed and advocated by international organisations whose business it is to manage the global economy, and, through member governments, the individuals active in it. Whether in resilient ecosystems, resilient cities, resilient communities, resilient economies, or resilient labour markets, resilience is the counterpart of risk - either the unwanted risk that comes from the prospect of climate change or ecological destruction, or the necessary risk, to be induced if it is absent, that is central to competitive markets. On the former, the definition of resilience offered in the World Bank's recent Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks (Bowen et al, 2020: 118) shows just how marked the parallels are:
'The ability for households to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to shocks in a manner that protects their well-being, ensuring that they do not fall into poverty or destitution. This definition suggests that a more resilient person will possess three interlinked
capacities that help to minimize and resist a shock’s negative impacts. The higher the person’s capacity to prepare, cope, and adapt, the lesser the implied impact of a shock and the likelihood of a faster “bounce back,” recovering to pre-shock levels of well-being. With this definition, the generalized vulnerability of the poor and vulnerable to covariate shocks can be ascribed to a deficit in terms of the capacity to prepare, cope, and adapt.'
It is in the latter area, though - the deliberate fostering of risk as a necessary element of a competitive economy and society, and the part played in it by the reform of welfare and its reinvention as 'social protection' - that the parallels appear strongest. Whereas welfare offered some protection from the disciplines of the labour market, social protection is conceived as a means of making the labour market work efficiently, by acting as a 'springboard' to propel individuals back into work if they lose their jobs, as from time to time they inevitably will. The resilient individual here is one who takes responsibility for herself, and has the cognitive and emotional skills to bounce back into the constantly changing and fundamentally precarious world of work, and both the OECD and the World Bank have recently devoted annual flagship publications to spelling out the mechanisms, institutions and attributes associated with this ideal worker (OECD, 2019; World Bank 2018). Perfection here is represented by the individual who has succeeded at school and beyond, acquiring relevant qualifications and skills that lead to successful entry into the labour market, and who voluntarily keeps those credentials and skills up-to-date as new technologies and patterns of work emerge, and accepts and practices the flexibility and mobility that the contemporary world of work requires. Those who fall short, but within manageable limits - the 'imperfect', so to speak - are not abandoned, but offered a package of services, from vocational training to guidance on preparation, self-presentation and job opportunities, along with the management of their expectations downwards towards lower paid and precarious forms of employment, at the limit without either protection against dismissal or guaranteed hours of work. Resilience, as much a characteristic of the labour market and the regime of social protection as of workers themselves, is supported through employment- and skills-related services, and at the same time made imperative by the reduced scale and conditionality of unemployment and related benefits. The world of work, too, has its own 'abject', whether young NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training), or 'troubled families' stereotyped as predominantly single-mother/feckless couple, multiple children households with nobody in work, dependent on benefits, habitually involved in petty crime, and given to various forms of anti-social behaviour. Their lives are surveilled intensively, and targeted by government for 'improvement' (DWP, 2017; Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017; Hargreaves et al, 2019).
The line McRobbie takes through these issues is rooted in analyses of media and popular culture, but at the same time nourished by a sociological perspective on neoliberalism:
'If neoliberalism promotes enterprise and competition with a specific address to the individual's capacity to be self-responsible, then the question arises as to how to inculcate such a competitive ethos among women who might previously have been exposed to different value systems, for example, as nurterers, home-makers, teachers and carers - in short, as women who were willing to subordinate their career ambitions to fit with family life' (47).
For McRobbie, education and consumer culture 'train' young women to be more competitive: in the latter there is 'a clustering of themes which focus around female success, in work, in family life, in self and in body', while 'a distinctive genre shift' is reflected across the editorials of the leading magazines, where a more serious note is struck, 'especially with regard to work and employment' (48). As a result, pressures pile up on young women in particular:
'The right job is nothing without the perfectly sculptured body. There is also a Fitbit wristband telling you how well you have done today. The perfect marks out the contours of female competition as inscribed within the mundane features. It informs and shapes particular forms of popular media. It is not just about the body beautiful, but also about being able to follow recipes and prepare and serve beautiful-looking food, laid on a well-set table, with candles and with distinctive and stylish tableware' (48).
And, courtesy of Michelle Obama's autobiography and Tesco Magazine, September 2018:
'Competitive femininity here finds itself at home in the domestic sphere: the young working mother, getting up at 5.a.m. for her work-out, preparing healthy breakfasts for the children with help from her feminist-friendly husband, heading off to work while also scheduling in a hair appointment at lunchtime, remembering to do some "batch cooking" in the evening, mindful of the need to 'be calmer and more contented' with 'random acts of self-kindness' (48).
McRobbie argues that 'the perfect carries violent intent not just in its racial and class-based exclusionary effect but also in its acts of inclusion, for those directly within its embrace' (52). She notes the particular pressures on pre-teen and early teen young women, and the incidence of chronic anxiety, and at the limit, suicide, then offers two examples of the politics of resilience: Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Hazelden Press, Minneapolis, 2010), and the magazine Red. The first is a best-selling work of pop psychology, focused in the main on 'busy mothers and wives', whose title is entirely self-explanatory (54); the second is a luxury lifestyle product founded by Hearst UK in 1998, aimed at women 'from their late twenties to their early forties' (56): its readership 'appears to be young adult women who are either on the cusp of settling down with a partner or who are already embarked on family life and "juggling" with small children, a partner and a career' (57), and the (successful) women it features all profess 'a need to acknowledge their failings and not feel they all are having to to judge themselves against ideas of a perfect life' (59).
The 'Critique of Resilience' section follows here (59-63). It opens by noting the warning from Rose and Lentzos (2016) against a sweeping conflation of the array of resilience practices with 'neoliberalism' as an all-purpose term of critique, and leads, by way of an acknowledgement that the discussion of welfarism in the following chapter may open McRobbie herself to this charge (ft. 18, p. 129), to the passage cited above on her 'commitment to making a kind of diagnosis of our present conditions of living', along lines established by Stuart Hall. The reference is apposite, as the position McRobbie adopts is easily construed in broadly Gramscian terms: she describes the p-i-r as playing 'a role in translating from the new activist feminism to the embedded power relations which underscore contemporary capitalism and its consumer culture', and specifically 'bridg[ing] the gap between feminism and capitalism, delivering something that is palatable and will not deter advertisers' (61). But while Gill and Orgard (2015) see resilience techniques as a response to austerity politics, and 'confidence apps' and the like as 'part of the way contemporary neoliberal society institutes norms of female selfhood that have recourse to resilience techniques, while disavowing ideas of political anger accruing from perceived gender injustice' (62), she herself
'attributes to resilience a more ambivalent role: yes, it substitutes as an alternative to the collectivist and organizational energies required of a new feminist politics - and so it does indeed stand as a substitute for earlier, more caring regimes, essentially for welfare - but more specifically it draws audiences and readers back from the cliff edge of hard neoliberal leadership-feminism, towards the more familiar terrain of liberal feminism, where work-life balances signal, ironically, a less altered gendered hierarchy in the field of paid employment, especially in the corporate world' (62).
The need for resilience, that is, 'becomes part of our everyday common sense, one which binds us to its terms and reconciles us to its conditions' (62-3). In essence, McRobbie makes two suggestions. First, generally, it plays a role 'as a pro-capitalist therapeutic device attending to, while nevertheless reproducing, the ills wrought upon women as a consequence of prevailing gender inequalities, and also deriving from the specific constellation of contemporary life as a time of risk, uncertainty and precarity', and in this guise it can 'assuage the more radical threat posed by new feminisms, usurp its place its place while stealing some of its thunder'; second, contesting a 'hard neoliberal' interpretation: 'In this subterfuge role it seems to propose a pathway back to liberal feminism away from the excessive competitiveness of neoliberal leadership-feminism' (63). There is an obvious parallel here with the question of whether the alleged shift from the 'Washington consensus' to the 'post-Washington consensus' reflects a similar move away from the perceived harsh neoliberalism of the 1990s to a softer version, or rather represents a broadening and deepening of its disciplinary mechanisms, and a tightening of its grip. McRobbie proceeds by noting that popular culture is 'by definition a place for simplification and easy-to-absorb messages', and moves, by way of an excursion into psychoanalysis and the relevance of the super-ego to the pain and pleasure of self-beratement, to the conclusion that a class factor is at work - middle-class and well-educated young women get high-brow art and literature as a resource (Hamlet and Don Quixote are mentioned), while the less privileged get self-help literature, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. And she rounds off the chapter by appealing to Judith Butler's advocacy of an alternative set of values anchored in interdependence and compassion as a basis for a more just society.
From this point, the focus turns directly to the world of work, picking up again the theme that 'everyone who can work must do so'. Two ideas in particular shape the approach adopted. The first, well established, is that the summoning of young women into the labour market delays the timing of the first child, a development that McRobbie neatly terms 'contraceptive employment'; the second is that popular culture and media are 'tasked' with carrying out as a civic duty the feminization of morality to emphasize self-esteem, respectability, pride in personal appearance and other traits that will enable the disadvantaged and excluded to get work, even if it is casual and low-paid (74-5). So, McRobbie ventures: 'We might envisage overall the transition 'out of welfare' as a matter of the Job Centres somehow acting in conjunction with those various forms of media and popular culture, including Reality TV, so as to rescue failing femininities, bringing them into a realm where the post-welfare discourses can do their work' (75). This is something of a daring hypothesis. It is hazardous to move directly from the logic of capital or the state on the one hand to popular culture on the other, for any number of reasons: privately owned media are not at the beck and call of either; as McRobbie repeatedly shows, they have their own agendas and structural constraints, such as the need to engage consumers while meeting the goals of advertisers; in their diversity, they are as likely to repudiate as to share the goal enhancing subservience to capital; and they may lag considerably in adjusting to changes in the conjuncture, even when they do so. But at the same time, cultural products aimed at particular audiences (let's say, in this case, young people in the lower socio-economic brackets, and perhaps young women in particular) can reflect, reveal and even initiate shifts in social pressures and responses to them. So let's see. McRobbie offers a 'three-pronged' argument:
'first, that work and workfare for women are favoured means by which neoliberalism adopts or co-opts something of a feminist rhetoric ('neoliberal feminism'); second, that popular culture and the popular media, making use of various entertainment formats, step forward to act as agents for welfare reform; and third that in the UK work is foregrounded as the means by which the family is enabled to shoulder the burden of the social goods once provided by the state' (75).
Employment for women becomes 'a defining mark of status and identity', with the World Bank (itself incidentally an old hand at securing the insertion of neoliberal messages into soaps and other forms of popular entertainment: see Berg and Zia, 2013), to the fore in pushing hard for gender equality as 'smart economics'. A consequence of this in the UK in particular is that 'family obligations are pushed, for better or worse, into a secondary place, with the exception of that small strata of well-off women who can make the "choice" to prioritize home-making' (76):
'Overall fertility in the UK is defined within the normative frame of planned parenthood. This is a complex terrain where social policy and public health both work seemingly by stealth or behind the scenes to reshape family life so that it accords with the requirements of the new economy. It is hard to find government policy documents explicitly stating this seeming downgrading of family in favour of work. Instead it is within the media and celebrity-driven popular culture that these encouragements take place, where specifically middle class and white norms of successful femininity require putting off having children until "the time is right"' (76).
'With the proviso that women first get ahead with a career or at least a regular job,' McRobbie concludes, 'family life is being made to comply more emphatically with the nuclear model' (78); and it is here that I part company with her analysis. I have no quarrel with the line of argument that leads her to the conclusion that 'women now stand at the heart of the new work economy' (97). But first I think it is a mistake to overlook a simpler explanation for changes in patterns of fertility (which are marked): they are as much if not more a response to the new (political) economy itself as to cues from popular culture. Young women facing the prospect of a 'full working life', more likely to be in low-paid and precarious forms of employment if they are not mobile, flexible, and able to devote time to building skills, aware that welfare support is poor and likely to get worse, and unable to be confident in their ability to afford child care, opt out of motherhood. Only later may such a shift be reflected or reinforced by popular media and culture. Second, the most striking feature of the situation is not just that government policy documents don't address openly the downgrading of family life. It is that they show no concern whatsoever for the steady fall in the fertility rate, by now well below the rate required for society as a whole to reproduce itself over time, or for the impact of austerity upon families, whether 'workless' or 'hard-working'. If this is so, McRobbie's argument, daring as it seems, is actually not daring enough, and her assessment of the current conjuncture is too backward-looking. An alternative perspective is that the only concern on the part of government is that women and men should be equally available for work, with the welfare system adjusted accordingly, so that benefits depend more on having work and less on having children. The character of households and families then changes as a consequence of induced individual choices - not in the direction of a return to the 'nuclear' family, as fewer than one in four UK households consists of a heterosexual couple, married or not, with one or more dependent children - but in the direction of later marriage, rising numbers of young adults remaining in the family home, more single-person households (or multiple 'singles' sharing, this being a statistically small but rising trend), and childless couples, extreme deferral of age of first child (since 2015 the only cohort in which the birth rate in the UK has increased year on year is 40 years old and over) and greater incidence of voluntary lifelong childlessness.
In 2018, the social class by age cohort in which most babies were born was socio-economic class 2 (of 8), lower managerial and professional occupations, ages 30-34, followed by socio-economic class 1, higher managerial and professional occupations, also ages 30-34; the conception rate in England and Wales fell to its lowest level since 2004, while the share of conceptions that led to a legal abortion increased to its highest point (24 per cent) since records began in 1990 (ONS, 2019, 2020, a, b). Specifically, the decline in rates of conception for women aged 15-17 years 'has been particularly evident since 2007, which also coincided with the start of the global financial crisis. Since our records began in 1969, there has not been such a prolonged decrease in conception rates for women aged under 18 years' (ONS, 2020b, p. 5 and Figure 3, p. 6). The data are attended by caveats, and do not all point in the same direction, but a daring set of hypotheses would be first that under pressure of economic circumstances, exacerbated by policy 'reform', child-bearing is becoming predominantly a lifestyle choice for reasonably or very financially secure women over thirty (and a full picture including parenthood through surrogate births for heterosexual or same-sex couples would intensify the class character of parenthood); second, to summarise crudely an argument I make in detail elsewhere, that 'capital' does not care whether the population reproduces itself from generation to generation or not (Cammack, 2020); and third, that whether neoliberal or not, contemporary capitalist regimes do not require femininity of anyone, and certainly do not require any binary division between femininity on the one hand and masculinity on the other. Particular capitals in specific industries, such as fashion and beauty, may still promote particular forms of femininity as a commercial strategy, but even that, in these days of androgyny and gender-fluidity, seems like a failure to catch up rather than a winning formula. If so femininity as a concept is distinctly passé, and there is no need to cultivate any particular 'norm' around it; and these various factors explain, in turn, why the (once) new familialism has disappeared from the governmental agenda. This does not invalidate the three hypotheses cited above from page 75; but it does place a large question mark against the wider argument within which they are set.
This more radical reading of the current conjuncture actually seems compatible with McRobbie's own argument in this chapter: working-class women are 'now fully defined as workers', while 'family obligations are pushed, for better or worse, into a secondary place, with the exception of that small strata (sic) of well-off women who can make the "choice" to prioritize home-making' (77); women, 'including single mothers, are being drafted into work, often with the threat of losing benefits if they refuse or if they turn down available jobs, even if these are on "zero hours" contracts' (79); 'one key element of the transition in British society to a fully neoliberal regime is that disadvantaged women are compelled to prioritize paid labour and "contraceptive employment" (often at the low-pay end) over and above maternal obligations or indeed the desire to become a mother' (81); and a new wave of 'femocrats' has emerged, not least in the areas of public service oversight of workfare, social entrepreneurship and related fields (88-9, citing Farris, 2017 and Newman, 2016, 2017), subsequently thoroughly if reluctantly adapted to 'market feminism' (90, citing Kantola and Squires, 2012). There is no evidence here that the UK government looks at women and men any differently, let alone that it subscribes to the notion that a particular form of femininity is to be promoted, or even that motherhood is anything other than an inconvenience, to be grudgingly accepted but generally discouraged. Nor could there be. The logic of contemporary 'welfare reform' is to squeeze the maximum amount of labour market participation out of everyone, and therefore to bear down on every category of exemption or welfare support. This is most conspicuous in the recent onslaught on 'joblessness' and 'underemployment' led by the European Commission in partnership with the OECD and the World Bank, and devised in direct response to the global economic and financial crisis. This took the household as its basic point of reference, aimed to raise the 'household intensity of [paid] labour', and identified six groups from which more labour could in principle be extracted. 'Inactive [i.e. not in paid work] women and stay-at-home mothers' was one, alongside middle-aged job losers, youth not in employment, education or training, early retirees, including the disabled, the long-term unemployed and the rural unemployed (Sundaram et al, 2014: 41-6). The UK was in the forefront in pursuing this across-the-board approach, especially under the coalition government, and it is significant that it has continued on this path despite the evidence repeatedly put before it that it is sharply increasing the number of children living in poverty (Morris, 2016; Savage, 2019; Townsend, 2020). 'Have children if you must,' the welfare reforms say, 'but you must shift for yourselves if you do, and so must they'. Underlying this, as Lydia Morris points out, is a 'refashioning of public sentiment to support a distinct moral foundation for reconfiguring economic relations' (Morris, 2016: 99). McRobbie cites Morris, commenting that in her account 'there is no particular focus on the role of the media in the roll out of neoliberalism in the UK, and no specific attention to the way in which women have been addressed in this regime', but making nothing of this except to refer to the requirement that 'single mothers whose youngest child is five years old will attend sessions to propel them rapidly into paid work' (96). This is surely to the point: the only interest the government takes in single mothers is to get them back to work as soon as possible. Femininity doesn't come into it.
Following this, the final chapter focuses in the main on what has been termed 'factual welfare television' (De Benedictis, 2017). The central focus is on the Channel 4 programme Benefits Street, broadcast in 2014 and attracting almost five million viewers (I was not among them). McRobbie's analysis highlights the risk involved in relying on the popular commercial media to deliver a particular message dear to the heart of government: 'The powerful force of tabloid media-led anti-welfarism, with its repertoire of folk devils ... struggled in this case to contain the meanings that came into play around the figure of the white working-class female subject' (112). This is not surprising. The World Bank could literally write the script to insert messages promoting financial prudence in the South African 'soap' Scandal! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys5eSxTetF4), but real-life documentary subjects are not so pliable. White Dee, who emerged as the dominant figure in the programme, seems to have exhibited resilience, compassion and public-spiritedness as much as role-modelling abjection: she escorted her neighbours to hospital appointments and advised them on matters relating to benefits (111). A closing section then draws out some of the historical and contemporary differences in the relationship of white and black working class women respectively to the welfare state, and their treatment (or lack of it) in popular media, concluding with the judgement that poor black and ethnic minority women only come to notice at times of crisis, 'such as the aftermath of the 2011 riots in the UK or, more recently, after the fire at Grenfell Tower in London in July 2017. Drawing on O'Hagan (2018), she notes that 'the great majority of these women are in low-paid work: almost every single one of the women he interviewed, as well as those who died in the fire, belonged to this sector of the London workforce. They were mostly employed in local shops and stores, in care services and in health work, part of the global city's service sector' (120). The same goes today for workers in the NHS, low-paid, neglected and unsung until the COVID-19 epidemic brought them to light and temporarily made them media heroes, as it does to the super-exploited sweatshop workers in Leicester garment factories among whom the epidemic has spread with devastating consequences, attracting affected outrage from local authorities whose revenues depend on their existence, and politicians who were themselves the architects of the 'reforms' that brought them into being - and extracting crocodile tears from boohoo, whose dramatic incursion into the fashion market was built on their exploitation.
Overall, then, this short volume makes a thought-provoking start on the crucial task of mapping the current conjuncture - a task on which McRobbie readily acknowledges there is still much to do. Having read it, the overwhelming impression that remains is of the sharp class and generational contrast between the affluent leaners-in who combine perfect motherhood and domestic sainthood with stellar careers (and whose role models and lifestyle tutors, whether Brené Brown, Katty Kay, Michelle Obama or Sheryl Sandberg, were all born in the 1960s, and deferred motherhood until they had achieved, wealth, status and security) and the struggling 16-24 year-olds for whom survival is the priority, motherhood increasingly a future devoutly not to be wished for, and the goal of 'being able to follow recipes and prepare and serve beautiful-looking food, laid on a well-set table, with candles and with distinctive and stylish tableware' (48, cited above) no doubt entirely alien. The universe these young women inhabit is not as well captured here as it might be, and I am certainly no authority on it: it must revolve more around new social media than on the likes of Red and Tesco Magazine, and I doubt that they read Brené Brown, but I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to be more specific than that. Equally, I doubt that any norm of femininity, old or new, favours capital more than any other or none at all, or shapes the attitude of government towards them.
References and further reading
Berg, Gunhild and Bilal Zia. 2013. Harnessing Emotional Connections to Improve Financial Decision: Evaluating the Impact of Financial Education in Mainstream Media. Policy Research Working Paper, 6407, World Bank, April.
Bowen, Thomas, et al. 2020. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks. World Bank: Washington DC.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction. Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cooper, Melinda. 2007. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
DWP (Department for Work and Pensions, UK). 2017. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families. DWP: London.
De Benedictis, Sara, Kim Allen and Tracey Jensen. 2017. Portraying Poverty: The Economics and Ethics of Factual Welfare Television. Cultural Sociology, 11, 3, 337-358.
Elias, Juanita. 2013. Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Competitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum. International Political Sociology, 7, 152-59.
Elias, Juanita, and Adrienne Roberts, eds. 2018. Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham.
Farris, Sara. 2017. In the Name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press: Durham NC.
Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgard. 2015. The Confidence Cult(ure). Australian Feminist Studies, 30, No. 86, 324-44.
Hargreaves, Charlotte, Phil Hodgson, Jayne Noor Mohamed and Alex Nunn. 2019. Contingent Coping? Renegotiating 'fast' disciplinary social policy at street level: Implementing the UK Troubled Families Programme. Critical Social Policy, 39, 2, 289-308.
Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires. 2012. From State Feminism to Market Feminism. International Political Science Review, 33, 4, 382-400.
McCracken, Angela B.V. 2018. The political economy of beauty. In Elias and Roberts, eds, above, 486-502.
McRobbie, Angela. 2007. Top Girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract. Cultural Studies, 21, 4-5, 718-737.
McRobbie, Angela. 2008. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. Sage: London.
McRobbie, Angela. 2013. Angela McRobbie interviews herself. Cultural Studies, 27, 5, 828-832.
Morris, Lydia. 2016. The Moral Economy of Austerity: Analysing UK Welfare Reform. British Journal of Sociology, 67, 1, 97-116.
Newman, Janet. 2013. Space of Power: Feminism, Neoliberalism and Gendered Labour. Social Politics, 20, 2, 200-222.
Newman, Janet. 2017. The Politics of Expertise: Neoliberal Governance and the Practice of Politics. In Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner, eds, Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, pp. 87-105.
Nunn, Alex, and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage. 2017. Disciplinary Social Policy and the Failing Promise of the New Middle Classes: The Troubled Families Programme. Social Policy and Society, 16, 1, 119-129.
OECD. 2019. OECD Employment Outlook 2019: The Future of Work. OECD: Paris.
O'Hagan, Andrew. 2018. The Tower. London Review of Books, 7 June.
ONS (Office for National Statistics). 2019. Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales: 2018. ONS: London.
ONS. 2020a. Number of live births and age-specific fertility rates by age mother and socio-economic classsification (dataset), 2018. ONS: London.
ONS. 2020b. Conceptions in England and Wales: 2018. ONS: London
Rose, Nikolas, and Filippa Lentzos. 2016. Making Us Resilient, Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times. In Susanna Trnca and Catherine Trundle, eds, Competing Responsibilities, Duke University Press: Durham NC.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2014. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Cultural Studies, 28, 3, 418-437.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Sandberg, Sheryl. 2012. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Knopf: New York.
Savage, Michael. 2019. Welfare shake-up 'will double number of children in poverty'. The Observer, 12 May, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/12/welfare-children-poverty-low-income-families.
Sundaram, Ramya et al. 2014. Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion. World Bank: Washington DC.
Townsend, Mark. 2020. Cases of child malnutrition in England double in last six months. The Observer, 12 July, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/12/cases-of-child-malnutrition-double-in-last-six-months.
World Bank. 2018. World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work. World Bank: Washington DC.
'Top Girls?' identified a 'new sexual contract' in the manner in which the UK and other advanced democracies addressed young women, linking sexual freedom, control of fertility, carefully planned parenthood, and the consumption of fashion and beauty products to ambition and advance in education, employment and careers. It identified this as 'an integral part of resurgent global neo-liberal economic policies', 'inscribed within a more profound and determined attempt, undertaken by an array of political and cultural forces, to re-shape notions of womanhood to fit with new or emerging (neo-liberalised) social and economic arrangements' (p. 721): 'From being assumed to be headed towards marriage, motherhood and limited economic participation, the girl is now a social category understood primarily as being endowed with economic capacity', and might be imagined as 'a highly efficient assemblage for productivity'; so women figured in government discourse (that of Blair's 'New Labour', of course, in the UK) 'as much for their productive as reproductive capacities' (p. 722). This inaugurated a new gender regime:
'In singling out young women for this special attention, New Labour and other governments are displacing the role and legitimacy of feminist interventions in the politics of education, while also orchestrating this opportunity to instil new values of competitive individualism on the basis of emerging gender divisions intersecting in novel ways with class and ethnicity so as to produce re-configured entanglements seemingly characterised by openness and opportunity rather than older structural rigidities' (p. 728).
In short: 'The logic of the new flexible capitalism in the affluent West and the decline of the welfarist underpinning of the so-called family wage means that everyone who can work must do so' (p. 730). Although McRobbie's theoretical frames of reference are rather different (prominently, along with Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Jacqueline Rose, Catherine Rottenberg, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler), the affinities of the analysis here with the field of critical international political economy are clear. It is no surprise that this essay is headed by a declaration from World Economic Forum Chief Economist Augusto Lopez-Claros in 2005 that the education of girls 'is probably the most important catalyst for changes in society', as the 'Top Girl' will grow up in due course to become 'Davos Woman' (Elias, 2013). No surprise, either, that Elias herself takes McRobbie (2008), in which this essay appears again along with others, as the basis for her argument.
The Politics of Resilience explores these themes more than a decade on, in a deliberately tentative, exploratory and open-ended way that invites a constructive response. McRobbie declares, at the midpoint of the book, in a section ('Critique of Resilience', pp. 59-63), that if read first provides a good initial orientation to the book as a whole:
'feminist cultural studies are often driven by a sense of urgency, and by a commitment to making a kind of diagnosis of our present conditions of living, as a template for more extended scholarship. Our studies are often pursued tentatively, in the hope of highlighting and making connections so as to draw attention to something that is taking place in the here and now. This kind of work conforms more with the model established by Stuart Hall, attempting a conjunctural analysis by drawing together seemingly dispersed elements and showing how ideological patterns converge by means of articulation effects, to produce a new politics of meaning' 61.
McRobbie's first step is to reproduce an essay that complements 'Top Girls?', and was first published in New Formations, 81, in 2013 - 'Feminism, Family, and the New Multi-Mediated Maternalism'. It provides a stepping-stone from the world of New Labour to the world of today, reflecting, so to speak, that the Top Girl was also expected, in due course, to be a Top Wife and Mother. Bookended by discussions of the Sam Mendes film Revolutionary Road (2009) and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In (2012), it explores the significance of the figure of the middle class professional wife and mother in the transition from liberal to neoliberal feminism, and the invention and promotion, variously in New Labour, the then-ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, mumsnet and the Daily Mail, of 'a repertoire of woman-centred positions that will confirm and enhance the core values of the neoliberal project' (15), centred on the imperative for women to enter the labour market and stay in it, and counterposed to the negative image of the 'abject maternal figure, typically a single mother with several children fathered by different men, reliant on benefits, living in a council house, and with an appearance that suggests lack of attention to body image, all of which within today's moral universe implies fecklessness, promiscuity and inadequate parenting' (21). In the new moral economy of the family, the successful (white, middle-class, heterosexual) woman will not only be a career-oriented Top Girl, but at the same time an exemplary 'professional mother' who manages and oversees the success of the family as an enterprise as the supports of the welfare state fall away. McRobbie argues that 'this work of family responsibilization, at least in the UK, is entrusted to the feminine mass media and popular culture', and proposes the term 'visual-media-governmentality' to capture 'the wide range of regulative mechanisms put in place to ensure that normative femininity is ... accomplished': 'Femininity exists then as a seemingly fundamental and universal dividing practice, one which within the time and space of Western modernity has been constantly produced and reproduced by the various offices of the state and by the giant media corporations' (34); in the present, the 'new maternal-feminine' or 'new familialism' performs a double function for neoliberal hegemony, providing the centre right and the centre left with 'a more up-to-date way of engaging with women and women's issues, while simultaneously it expunges from popular memory the values of the radical and social democratic tradition, which had forged such a close connection with feminism through the pursuit of equality and collective provision for families' (40-41).
For McRobbie, then, the re-engineering of femininity, either by governments or through popular culture, is an accommodation within the frame of 'Western modernity' to the neoliberal order. This is reaffirmed at the start of the first new chapter, which has the same title as the book itself:
'What are the mechanisms by which some notional idea of feminism is adopted, taken up and made compatible with the needs and expectations of consumer capitalism as it has historically directed itself towards women within a frame of normative femininity? By which I mean the organization of the designated female body according to a set of cultural codes and practices and craftings, which over time are constitutive of a gender formation understood widely as other than the designated male counterpart' (42, and ft. 1, p. 128).
(I have no time for the practice of dividing a single thought between the widely separated main text and endnote, so I have put the two sentences so allocated together again. It's of minor importance, but McRobbie is a serial offender in this regard). The point at issue is the status within neoliberalism, or capitalism, or even 'Western modernity', of a gender formation that rests upon contrasting normative understandings of femininity and masculinity, and for me this is the most problematic aspect of the book. McRobbie addresses it through what she calls the p-i-r, a set of three related terms that together 'comprise a dispositif for the management of emerging feminisms' (43): 'These are the 'perfect', which appertains to lifestyle and the terrain of the feminine 'good life'; the 'imperfect', which offers some scope (within carefully demarcated boundaries) for criticism of and divergence from these ideals; and 'resilience', which becomes the favoured tool and therapeutic instrument for recovery and repair' (42). Here the function of the perfect is 'to encourage women to succeed meritocratically, while simultaneously introducing heightened competition, constantly redifferentiating and establishing division, resulting in a feminism that is infinitely divided and gradated, defining ways of living that can also be compatible with what were originally the aims of liberal feminism and are now more closely articulated to what we might call neoliberal "leadership-feminism"' (43-4). The imperfect, in turn, is 'a response to the unviability of the emphasis on success, and it too relies on a feminist voice, this time to engage with the idea of failure, while also drawing tight lines around those terrains of experience where it is possible to fail, where flaws can be entertained'. 'Resilience', which has 'a much longer history in clinical psychology', here 'springs into existence as a "bounce-back" mechanism, finding expression across a whole terrain of popular culture' (44).
It is no coincidence that the idea of resilience finds expression too across the whole terrain of neoliberal political economy, and nowhere more so than in the regulatory frameworks developed and advocated by international organisations whose business it is to manage the global economy, and, through member governments, the individuals active in it. Whether in resilient ecosystems, resilient cities, resilient communities, resilient economies, or resilient labour markets, resilience is the counterpart of risk - either the unwanted risk that comes from the prospect of climate change or ecological destruction, or the necessary risk, to be induced if it is absent, that is central to competitive markets. On the former, the definition of resilience offered in the World Bank's recent Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks (Bowen et al, 2020: 118) shows just how marked the parallels are:
'The ability for households to prepare for, cope with, and adapt to shocks in a manner that protects their well-being, ensuring that they do not fall into poverty or destitution. This definition suggests that a more resilient person will possess three interlinked
capacities that help to minimize and resist a shock’s negative impacts. The higher the person’s capacity to prepare, cope, and adapt, the lesser the implied impact of a shock and the likelihood of a faster “bounce back,” recovering to pre-shock levels of well-being. With this definition, the generalized vulnerability of the poor and vulnerable to covariate shocks can be ascribed to a deficit in terms of the capacity to prepare, cope, and adapt.'
It is in the latter area, though - the deliberate fostering of risk as a necessary element of a competitive economy and society, and the part played in it by the reform of welfare and its reinvention as 'social protection' - that the parallels appear strongest. Whereas welfare offered some protection from the disciplines of the labour market, social protection is conceived as a means of making the labour market work efficiently, by acting as a 'springboard' to propel individuals back into work if they lose their jobs, as from time to time they inevitably will. The resilient individual here is one who takes responsibility for herself, and has the cognitive and emotional skills to bounce back into the constantly changing and fundamentally precarious world of work, and both the OECD and the World Bank have recently devoted annual flagship publications to spelling out the mechanisms, institutions and attributes associated with this ideal worker (OECD, 2019; World Bank 2018). Perfection here is represented by the individual who has succeeded at school and beyond, acquiring relevant qualifications and skills that lead to successful entry into the labour market, and who voluntarily keeps those credentials and skills up-to-date as new technologies and patterns of work emerge, and accepts and practices the flexibility and mobility that the contemporary world of work requires. Those who fall short, but within manageable limits - the 'imperfect', so to speak - are not abandoned, but offered a package of services, from vocational training to guidance on preparation, self-presentation and job opportunities, along with the management of their expectations downwards towards lower paid and precarious forms of employment, at the limit without either protection against dismissal or guaranteed hours of work. Resilience, as much a characteristic of the labour market and the regime of social protection as of workers themselves, is supported through employment- and skills-related services, and at the same time made imperative by the reduced scale and conditionality of unemployment and related benefits. The world of work, too, has its own 'abject', whether young NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training), or 'troubled families' stereotyped as predominantly single-mother/feckless couple, multiple children households with nobody in work, dependent on benefits, habitually involved in petty crime, and given to various forms of anti-social behaviour. Their lives are surveilled intensively, and targeted by government for 'improvement' (DWP, 2017; Nunn and Tepe-Belfrage, 2017; Hargreaves et al, 2019).
The line McRobbie takes through these issues is rooted in analyses of media and popular culture, but at the same time nourished by a sociological perspective on neoliberalism:
'If neoliberalism promotes enterprise and competition with a specific address to the individual's capacity to be self-responsible, then the question arises as to how to inculcate such a competitive ethos among women who might previously have been exposed to different value systems, for example, as nurterers, home-makers, teachers and carers - in short, as women who were willing to subordinate their career ambitions to fit with family life' (47).
For McRobbie, education and consumer culture 'train' young women to be more competitive: in the latter there is 'a clustering of themes which focus around female success, in work, in family life, in self and in body', while 'a distinctive genre shift' is reflected across the editorials of the leading magazines, where a more serious note is struck, 'especially with regard to work and employment' (48). As a result, pressures pile up on young women in particular:
'The right job is nothing without the perfectly sculptured body. There is also a Fitbit wristband telling you how well you have done today. The perfect marks out the contours of female competition as inscribed within the mundane features. It informs and shapes particular forms of popular media. It is not just about the body beautiful, but also about being able to follow recipes and prepare and serve beautiful-looking food, laid on a well-set table, with candles and with distinctive and stylish tableware' (48).
And, courtesy of Michelle Obama's autobiography and Tesco Magazine, September 2018:
'Competitive femininity here finds itself at home in the domestic sphere: the young working mother, getting up at 5.a.m. for her work-out, preparing healthy breakfasts for the children with help from her feminist-friendly husband, heading off to work while also scheduling in a hair appointment at lunchtime, remembering to do some "batch cooking" in the evening, mindful of the need to 'be calmer and more contented' with 'random acts of self-kindness' (48).
McRobbie argues that 'the perfect carries violent intent not just in its racial and class-based exclusionary effect but also in its acts of inclusion, for those directly within its embrace' (52). She notes the particular pressures on pre-teen and early teen young women, and the incidence of chronic anxiety, and at the limit, suicide, then offers two examples of the politics of resilience: Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are (Hazelden Press, Minneapolis, 2010), and the magazine Red. The first is a best-selling work of pop psychology, focused in the main on 'busy mothers and wives', whose title is entirely self-explanatory (54); the second is a luxury lifestyle product founded by Hearst UK in 1998, aimed at women 'from their late twenties to their early forties' (56): its readership 'appears to be young adult women who are either on the cusp of settling down with a partner or who are already embarked on family life and "juggling" with small children, a partner and a career' (57), and the (successful) women it features all profess 'a need to acknowledge their failings and not feel they all are having to to judge themselves against ideas of a perfect life' (59).
The 'Critique of Resilience' section follows here (59-63). It opens by noting the warning from Rose and Lentzos (2016) against a sweeping conflation of the array of resilience practices with 'neoliberalism' as an all-purpose term of critique, and leads, by way of an acknowledgement that the discussion of welfarism in the following chapter may open McRobbie herself to this charge (ft. 18, p. 129), to the passage cited above on her 'commitment to making a kind of diagnosis of our present conditions of living', along lines established by Stuart Hall. The reference is apposite, as the position McRobbie adopts is easily construed in broadly Gramscian terms: she describes the p-i-r as playing 'a role in translating from the new activist feminism to the embedded power relations which underscore contemporary capitalism and its consumer culture', and specifically 'bridg[ing] the gap between feminism and capitalism, delivering something that is palatable and will not deter advertisers' (61). But while Gill and Orgard (2015) see resilience techniques as a response to austerity politics, and 'confidence apps' and the like as 'part of the way contemporary neoliberal society institutes norms of female selfhood that have recourse to resilience techniques, while disavowing ideas of political anger accruing from perceived gender injustice' (62), she herself
'attributes to resilience a more ambivalent role: yes, it substitutes as an alternative to the collectivist and organizational energies required of a new feminist politics - and so it does indeed stand as a substitute for earlier, more caring regimes, essentially for welfare - but more specifically it draws audiences and readers back from the cliff edge of hard neoliberal leadership-feminism, towards the more familiar terrain of liberal feminism, where work-life balances signal, ironically, a less altered gendered hierarchy in the field of paid employment, especially in the corporate world' (62).
The need for resilience, that is, 'becomes part of our everyday common sense, one which binds us to its terms and reconciles us to its conditions' (62-3). In essence, McRobbie makes two suggestions. First, generally, it plays a role 'as a pro-capitalist therapeutic device attending to, while nevertheless reproducing, the ills wrought upon women as a consequence of prevailing gender inequalities, and also deriving from the specific constellation of contemporary life as a time of risk, uncertainty and precarity', and in this guise it can 'assuage the more radical threat posed by new feminisms, usurp its place its place while stealing some of its thunder'; second, contesting a 'hard neoliberal' interpretation: 'In this subterfuge role it seems to propose a pathway back to liberal feminism away from the excessive competitiveness of neoliberal leadership-feminism' (63). There is an obvious parallel here with the question of whether the alleged shift from the 'Washington consensus' to the 'post-Washington consensus' reflects a similar move away from the perceived harsh neoliberalism of the 1990s to a softer version, or rather represents a broadening and deepening of its disciplinary mechanisms, and a tightening of its grip. McRobbie proceeds by noting that popular culture is 'by definition a place for simplification and easy-to-absorb messages', and moves, by way of an excursion into psychoanalysis and the relevance of the super-ego to the pain and pleasure of self-beratement, to the conclusion that a class factor is at work - middle-class and well-educated young women get high-brow art and literature as a resource (Hamlet and Don Quixote are mentioned), while the less privileged get self-help literature, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. And she rounds off the chapter by appealing to Judith Butler's advocacy of an alternative set of values anchored in interdependence and compassion as a basis for a more just society.
From this point, the focus turns directly to the world of work, picking up again the theme that 'everyone who can work must do so'. Two ideas in particular shape the approach adopted. The first, well established, is that the summoning of young women into the labour market delays the timing of the first child, a development that McRobbie neatly terms 'contraceptive employment'; the second is that popular culture and media are 'tasked' with carrying out as a civic duty the feminization of morality to emphasize self-esteem, respectability, pride in personal appearance and other traits that will enable the disadvantaged and excluded to get work, even if it is casual and low-paid (74-5). So, McRobbie ventures: 'We might envisage overall the transition 'out of welfare' as a matter of the Job Centres somehow acting in conjunction with those various forms of media and popular culture, including Reality TV, so as to rescue failing femininities, bringing them into a realm where the post-welfare discourses can do their work' (75). This is something of a daring hypothesis. It is hazardous to move directly from the logic of capital or the state on the one hand to popular culture on the other, for any number of reasons: privately owned media are not at the beck and call of either; as McRobbie repeatedly shows, they have their own agendas and structural constraints, such as the need to engage consumers while meeting the goals of advertisers; in their diversity, they are as likely to repudiate as to share the goal enhancing subservience to capital; and they may lag considerably in adjusting to changes in the conjuncture, even when they do so. But at the same time, cultural products aimed at particular audiences (let's say, in this case, young people in the lower socio-economic brackets, and perhaps young women in particular) can reflect, reveal and even initiate shifts in social pressures and responses to them. So let's see. McRobbie offers a 'three-pronged' argument:
'first, that work and workfare for women are favoured means by which neoliberalism adopts or co-opts something of a feminist rhetoric ('neoliberal feminism'); second, that popular culture and the popular media, making use of various entertainment formats, step forward to act as agents for welfare reform; and third that in the UK work is foregrounded as the means by which the family is enabled to shoulder the burden of the social goods once provided by the state' (75).
Employment for women becomes 'a defining mark of status and identity', with the World Bank (itself incidentally an old hand at securing the insertion of neoliberal messages into soaps and other forms of popular entertainment: see Berg and Zia, 2013), to the fore in pushing hard for gender equality as 'smart economics'. A consequence of this in the UK in particular is that 'family obligations are pushed, for better or worse, into a secondary place, with the exception of that small strata of well-off women who can make the "choice" to prioritize home-making' (76):
'Overall fertility in the UK is defined within the normative frame of planned parenthood. This is a complex terrain where social policy and public health both work seemingly by stealth or behind the scenes to reshape family life so that it accords with the requirements of the new economy. It is hard to find government policy documents explicitly stating this seeming downgrading of family in favour of work. Instead it is within the media and celebrity-driven popular culture that these encouragements take place, where specifically middle class and white norms of successful femininity require putting off having children until "the time is right"' (76).
'With the proviso that women first get ahead with a career or at least a regular job,' McRobbie concludes, 'family life is being made to comply more emphatically with the nuclear model' (78); and it is here that I part company with her analysis. I have no quarrel with the line of argument that leads her to the conclusion that 'women now stand at the heart of the new work economy' (97). But first I think it is a mistake to overlook a simpler explanation for changes in patterns of fertility (which are marked): they are as much if not more a response to the new (political) economy itself as to cues from popular culture. Young women facing the prospect of a 'full working life', more likely to be in low-paid and precarious forms of employment if they are not mobile, flexible, and able to devote time to building skills, aware that welfare support is poor and likely to get worse, and unable to be confident in their ability to afford child care, opt out of motherhood. Only later may such a shift be reflected or reinforced by popular media and culture. Second, the most striking feature of the situation is not just that government policy documents don't address openly the downgrading of family life. It is that they show no concern whatsoever for the steady fall in the fertility rate, by now well below the rate required for society as a whole to reproduce itself over time, or for the impact of austerity upon families, whether 'workless' or 'hard-working'. If this is so, McRobbie's argument, daring as it seems, is actually not daring enough, and her assessment of the current conjuncture is too backward-looking. An alternative perspective is that the only concern on the part of government is that women and men should be equally available for work, with the welfare system adjusted accordingly, so that benefits depend more on having work and less on having children. The character of households and families then changes as a consequence of induced individual choices - not in the direction of a return to the 'nuclear' family, as fewer than one in four UK households consists of a heterosexual couple, married or not, with one or more dependent children - but in the direction of later marriage, rising numbers of young adults remaining in the family home, more single-person households (or multiple 'singles' sharing, this being a statistically small but rising trend), and childless couples, extreme deferral of age of first child (since 2015 the only cohort in which the birth rate in the UK has increased year on year is 40 years old and over) and greater incidence of voluntary lifelong childlessness.
In 2018, the social class by age cohort in which most babies were born was socio-economic class 2 (of 8), lower managerial and professional occupations, ages 30-34, followed by socio-economic class 1, higher managerial and professional occupations, also ages 30-34; the conception rate in England and Wales fell to its lowest level since 2004, while the share of conceptions that led to a legal abortion increased to its highest point (24 per cent) since records began in 1990 (ONS, 2019, 2020, a, b). Specifically, the decline in rates of conception for women aged 15-17 years 'has been particularly evident since 2007, which also coincided with the start of the global financial crisis. Since our records began in 1969, there has not been such a prolonged decrease in conception rates for women aged under 18 years' (ONS, 2020b, p. 5 and Figure 3, p. 6). The data are attended by caveats, and do not all point in the same direction, but a daring set of hypotheses would be first that under pressure of economic circumstances, exacerbated by policy 'reform', child-bearing is becoming predominantly a lifestyle choice for reasonably or very financially secure women over thirty (and a full picture including parenthood through surrogate births for heterosexual or same-sex couples would intensify the class character of parenthood); second, to summarise crudely an argument I make in detail elsewhere, that 'capital' does not care whether the population reproduces itself from generation to generation or not (Cammack, 2020); and third, that whether neoliberal or not, contemporary capitalist regimes do not require femininity of anyone, and certainly do not require any binary division between femininity on the one hand and masculinity on the other. Particular capitals in specific industries, such as fashion and beauty, may still promote particular forms of femininity as a commercial strategy, but even that, in these days of androgyny and gender-fluidity, seems like a failure to catch up rather than a winning formula. If so femininity as a concept is distinctly passé, and there is no need to cultivate any particular 'norm' around it; and these various factors explain, in turn, why the (once) new familialism has disappeared from the governmental agenda. This does not invalidate the three hypotheses cited above from page 75; but it does place a large question mark against the wider argument within which they are set.
This more radical reading of the current conjuncture actually seems compatible with McRobbie's own argument in this chapter: working-class women are 'now fully defined as workers', while 'family obligations are pushed, for better or worse, into a secondary place, with the exception of that small strata (sic) of well-off women who can make the "choice" to prioritize home-making' (77); women, 'including single mothers, are being drafted into work, often with the threat of losing benefits if they refuse or if they turn down available jobs, even if these are on "zero hours" contracts' (79); 'one key element of the transition in British society to a fully neoliberal regime is that disadvantaged women are compelled to prioritize paid labour and "contraceptive employment" (often at the low-pay end) over and above maternal obligations or indeed the desire to become a mother' (81); and a new wave of 'femocrats' has emerged, not least in the areas of public service oversight of workfare, social entrepreneurship and related fields (88-9, citing Farris, 2017 and Newman, 2016, 2017), subsequently thoroughly if reluctantly adapted to 'market feminism' (90, citing Kantola and Squires, 2012). There is no evidence here that the UK government looks at women and men any differently, let alone that it subscribes to the notion that a particular form of femininity is to be promoted, or even that motherhood is anything other than an inconvenience, to be grudgingly accepted but generally discouraged. Nor could there be. The logic of contemporary 'welfare reform' is to squeeze the maximum amount of labour market participation out of everyone, and therefore to bear down on every category of exemption or welfare support. This is most conspicuous in the recent onslaught on 'joblessness' and 'underemployment' led by the European Commission in partnership with the OECD and the World Bank, and devised in direct response to the global economic and financial crisis. This took the household as its basic point of reference, aimed to raise the 'household intensity of [paid] labour', and identified six groups from which more labour could in principle be extracted. 'Inactive [i.e. not in paid work] women and stay-at-home mothers' was one, alongside middle-aged job losers, youth not in employment, education or training, early retirees, including the disabled, the long-term unemployed and the rural unemployed (Sundaram et al, 2014: 41-6). The UK was in the forefront in pursuing this across-the-board approach, especially under the coalition government, and it is significant that it has continued on this path despite the evidence repeatedly put before it that it is sharply increasing the number of children living in poverty (Morris, 2016; Savage, 2019; Townsend, 2020). 'Have children if you must,' the welfare reforms say, 'but you must shift for yourselves if you do, and so must they'. Underlying this, as Lydia Morris points out, is a 'refashioning of public sentiment to support a distinct moral foundation for reconfiguring economic relations' (Morris, 2016: 99). McRobbie cites Morris, commenting that in her account 'there is no particular focus on the role of the media in the roll out of neoliberalism in the UK, and no specific attention to the way in which women have been addressed in this regime', but making nothing of this except to refer to the requirement that 'single mothers whose youngest child is five years old will attend sessions to propel them rapidly into paid work' (96). This is surely to the point: the only interest the government takes in single mothers is to get them back to work as soon as possible. Femininity doesn't come into it.
Following this, the final chapter focuses in the main on what has been termed 'factual welfare television' (De Benedictis, 2017). The central focus is on the Channel 4 programme Benefits Street, broadcast in 2014 and attracting almost five million viewers (I was not among them). McRobbie's analysis highlights the risk involved in relying on the popular commercial media to deliver a particular message dear to the heart of government: 'The powerful force of tabloid media-led anti-welfarism, with its repertoire of folk devils ... struggled in this case to contain the meanings that came into play around the figure of the white working-class female subject' (112). This is not surprising. The World Bank could literally write the script to insert messages promoting financial prudence in the South African 'soap' Scandal! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys5eSxTetF4), but real-life documentary subjects are not so pliable. White Dee, who emerged as the dominant figure in the programme, seems to have exhibited resilience, compassion and public-spiritedness as much as role-modelling abjection: she escorted her neighbours to hospital appointments and advised them on matters relating to benefits (111). A closing section then draws out some of the historical and contemporary differences in the relationship of white and black working class women respectively to the welfare state, and their treatment (or lack of it) in popular media, concluding with the judgement that poor black and ethnic minority women only come to notice at times of crisis, 'such as the aftermath of the 2011 riots in the UK or, more recently, after the fire at Grenfell Tower in London in July 2017. Drawing on O'Hagan (2018), she notes that 'the great majority of these women are in low-paid work: almost every single one of the women he interviewed, as well as those who died in the fire, belonged to this sector of the London workforce. They were mostly employed in local shops and stores, in care services and in health work, part of the global city's service sector' (120). The same goes today for workers in the NHS, low-paid, neglected and unsung until the COVID-19 epidemic brought them to light and temporarily made them media heroes, as it does to the super-exploited sweatshop workers in Leicester garment factories among whom the epidemic has spread with devastating consequences, attracting affected outrage from local authorities whose revenues depend on their existence, and politicians who were themselves the architects of the 'reforms' that brought them into being - and extracting crocodile tears from boohoo, whose dramatic incursion into the fashion market was built on their exploitation.
Overall, then, this short volume makes a thought-provoking start on the crucial task of mapping the current conjuncture - a task on which McRobbie readily acknowledges there is still much to do. Having read it, the overwhelming impression that remains is of the sharp class and generational contrast between the affluent leaners-in who combine perfect motherhood and domestic sainthood with stellar careers (and whose role models and lifestyle tutors, whether Brené Brown, Katty Kay, Michelle Obama or Sheryl Sandberg, were all born in the 1960s, and deferred motherhood until they had achieved, wealth, status and security) and the struggling 16-24 year-olds for whom survival is the priority, motherhood increasingly a future devoutly not to be wished for, and the goal of 'being able to follow recipes and prepare and serve beautiful-looking food, laid on a well-set table, with candles and with distinctive and stylish tableware' (48, cited above) no doubt entirely alien. The universe these young women inhabit is not as well captured here as it might be, and I am certainly no authority on it: it must revolve more around new social media than on the likes of Red and Tesco Magazine, and I doubt that they read Brené Brown, but I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to be more specific than that. Equally, I doubt that any norm of femininity, old or new, favours capital more than any other or none at all, or shapes the attitude of government towards them.
References and further reading
Berg, Gunhild and Bilal Zia. 2013. Harnessing Emotional Connections to Improve Financial Decision: Evaluating the Impact of Financial Education in Mainstream Media. Policy Research Working Paper, 6407, World Bank, April.
Bowen, Thomas, et al. 2020. Adaptive Social Protection: Building Resilience to Shocks. World Bank: Washington DC.
Cammack, Paul. 2020. Marx on social reproduction. Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cooper, Melinda. 2007. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
DWP (Department for Work and Pensions, UK). 2017. Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families. DWP: London.
De Benedictis, Sara, Kim Allen and Tracey Jensen. 2017. Portraying Poverty: The Economics and Ethics of Factual Welfare Television. Cultural Sociology, 11, 3, 337-358.
Elias, Juanita. 2013. Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: Postfeminist Politics and Competitiveness Promotion at the World Economic Forum. International Political Sociology, 7, 152-59.
Elias, Juanita, and Adrienne Roberts, eds. 2018. Handbook on the International Political Economy of Gender. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham.
Farris, Sara. 2017. In the Name of Women's Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press: Durham NC.
Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgard. 2015. The Confidence Cult(ure). Australian Feminist Studies, 30, No. 86, 324-44.
Hargreaves, Charlotte, Phil Hodgson, Jayne Noor Mohamed and Alex Nunn. 2019. Contingent Coping? Renegotiating 'fast' disciplinary social policy at street level: Implementing the UK Troubled Families Programme. Critical Social Policy, 39, 2, 289-308.
Kantola, Johanna and Judith Squires. 2012. From State Feminism to Market Feminism. International Political Science Review, 33, 4, 382-400.
McCracken, Angela B.V. 2018. The political economy of beauty. In Elias and Roberts, eds, above, 486-502.
McRobbie, Angela. 2007. Top Girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract. Cultural Studies, 21, 4-5, 718-737.
McRobbie, Angela. 2008. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change. Sage: London.
McRobbie, Angela. 2013. Angela McRobbie interviews herself. Cultural Studies, 27, 5, 828-832.
Morris, Lydia. 2016. The Moral Economy of Austerity: Analysing UK Welfare Reform. British Journal of Sociology, 67, 1, 97-116.
Newman, Janet. 2013. Space of Power: Feminism, Neoliberalism and Gendered Labour. Social Politics, 20, 2, 200-222.
Newman, Janet. 2017. The Politics of Expertise: Neoliberal Governance and the Practice of Politics. In Vaughan Higgins and Wendy Larner, eds, Assembling Neoliberalism: Expertise, Practices, Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, pp. 87-105.
Nunn, Alex, and Daniela Tepe-Belfrage. 2017. Disciplinary Social Policy and the Failing Promise of the New Middle Classes: The Troubled Families Programme. Social Policy and Society, 16, 1, 119-129.
OECD. 2019. OECD Employment Outlook 2019: The Future of Work. OECD: Paris.
O'Hagan, Andrew. 2018. The Tower. London Review of Books, 7 June.
ONS (Office for National Statistics). 2019. Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales: 2018. ONS: London.
ONS. 2020a. Number of live births and age-specific fertility rates by age mother and socio-economic classsification (dataset), 2018. ONS: London.
ONS. 2020b. Conceptions in England and Wales: 2018. ONS: London
Rose, Nikolas, and Filippa Lentzos. 2016. Making Us Resilient, Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times. In Susanna Trnca and Catherine Trundle, eds, Competing Responsibilities, Duke University Press: Durham NC.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2014. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Cultural Studies, 28, 3, 418-437.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2018. The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Sandberg, Sheryl. 2012. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Knopf: New York.
Savage, Michael. 2019. Welfare shake-up 'will double number of children in poverty'. The Observer, 12 May, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/12/welfare-children-poverty-low-income-families.
Sundaram, Ramya et al. 2014. Portraits of Labor Market Exclusion. World Bank: Washington DC.
Townsend, Mark. 2020. Cases of child malnutrition in England double in last six months. The Observer, 12 July, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/12/cases-of-child-malnutrition-double-in-last-six-months.
World Bank. 2018. World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work. World Bank: Washington DC.