Are men surplus to requirements? The answer, after more than half a century of feminism and the welfare state, depends largely on class. Men from the employable and educated classes are still in strong demand among women. But much lower down the socioeconomic scale, among the least privileged, men have become — or have come to seem — entirely optional.
Already we have what the tabloid newspapers call an epidemic of single motherhood — young women who have chosen to have babies on welfare, without husbands or boyfriends. One in four mothers is single and more than half of these lone mothers have never lived with a man and survive on welfare.
As many of these women become grandmothers, a new pattern has emerged of three generations of mothers without a man in the house — lone granny, lone mum and fatherless children, all expecting the state to stand in for daddy, as of right. These women are not so much welfare queens as matriarchal dynasties of welfare Amazons.
In a study presented to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the sociologist Geoff Dench argues from the evidence of British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983 that there is a growing number of such extended man-free families: “Three-generation lone-mother families — extended families without men — are developing a new family subculture which involves little paid work.”
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