Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  Lynn burst out, ‘Even now the best that they can come up with is that motherhood is an insurable risk and — now shut up, Jim, it’s my turn — having to find excuses for doing things for women in terms of children, “the nation" and men feeling disinherited!’

  ‘I didn’t —’

  His repentant face defeated her. ‘Wherever their real sympathies lie. It’s a good scheme, Jim. Is it yours?’

  ‘Oh — planning groups. You know.’ He fidgeted. ‘We’d love to have more women in the Party, mum, but they don’t join.’ She shrugged. ‘The men feel responsible,’ he went on, ‘Well, the ones I know do. They don’t know how they can make amends, but they want to. What do the women want?’

  ‘I don’t know, Jim. Why don’t you ask us?’

  The all-party parliamentary committee that was drawing up plans for a social security system that would deal fairly with women and meet the needs of the modem era, proclaimed The Women’s Day. The London Eurodome (there was one in every capital city of Europea, a vast people’s palace for the use of any people’s organisation, a symbol of Europea’s commitment to progress through democracy) would be the site of a conference. Ten thousand women were to come and say what they wanted. They were exhorted to be just, warned to be realistic and promised that serious note would be taken of what they said. The government promised that no bugs, journalists or stool-pigeons would be planted; and the conference could continue into a second day if necessary.

  Selecting the ten thousand turned out to be a problem. The old FAMILY organisation could hardly be used; feminist networks were in disarray and technically illegal. So the parliamentary committee reopened the Europop Women’s Centres for one day and told women to go there and vote for delegates. The response was apathetic. The government shrugged and sent off free transport vouchers.

  The night before the conference the princess (who had been invited to attend the Eurodome but was not going) delivered an address to the men of the nation.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, smiling sadly down from screens in homes and city centres, studio lights gleaming in the dampness of her eyes, ‘tomorrow you are going to have new duties because your wives will not be at home. I understand that even those women who have not been chosen as delegates are holding meetings of their own, so in anticipation of the problems this might cause, The Women’s Day is being declared a national holiday at my request. Care lovingly for your youngsters — perhaps even turn your hands to a little spring-cleaning as a surprise. Furthermore, do not assume that the women will necessarily return in a frame of mind to resume their old roles where they left off. I anticipate — indeed, I hope for — nothing less than a quiet revolution.’

  Meanwhile Lynn Byers was putting reluctant finishing touches to the opening address she was going to give at the Eurodome. She had been furious when she received the invitation.

  ‘This is your doing,’ she fumed at Jim.

  ‘We were all asked to suggest names. I thought, well, you’re not a mad radical and you’ve lived through this without taking sides —’

  ‘Good Godl’

  ‘Well, someone’s got to do it, Mum,’ he said reasonably.

  ‘Possibly, but it doesn’t have to be me, I wasn’t even going. And it doesn’t have to be someone appointed by the government.’

  ‘I’m hardly the government.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about women’s meetings, Jim. They’ll probably decide they don't want anyone to chair it.’

  ‘He spread his hands. ‘Okay,’ he said, for the tenth time, ‘if that’s what they decide. But how can ten thousand people decide anything if there’s no one to say, right, the meeting’s open, what do you want to do?’

  Ten thousand! She quaked. Still, he was right, and maybe this was all she could contribute. What should she say? But no — should did not come into it, what could she say? Only what she felt. And if other women responded to that, that was okay, and if they reviled and overthrew her, that was okay too. She didn’t even know what she hoped for, but it was not what she saw when she got to the Eurodome.

  Only a few hundred women for a start — sitting in ones and twos in the serried ranks of chairs, docile and dwarfed by the great white egg of the ceiling. Like a slide-show in her mind she saw still pictures of the women’s conferences of her youth. The endless tables selling badly-printed literature. The women hugging each other and nothing ever beginning on time. The random motions, appeals for solidarity, intense workshops, furious indignation if anyone suggested anything so reactionary as an agenda or a time-limit on speakers. The exasperation and ecstasy — but this pitiful gathering might be new girls at a school awaiting the arrival of a strict mistress. Was it their age, their background? They seemed to be a mixture. They seemed to be in a state of shock. Or maybe they were intimidated by the place. The dome had a sort of muffled feel to it. It was too comfortable — you felt manipulated, as if the whitish feel and colour and taste of the air were signalling comfort to your brain while bypassing your senses. As if you were being soothed by music you could not hear. Yes, maybe that was it. Or maybe the respectful silence (as an absurd little escalator carried her five feet up on to the platform) was the lull before the storm, and as soon as she opened her mouth there would be an organised coup.

  She gazed out into the expanses of the hall, striped with empty chairs, wondering who could be organising anything. Her eye lighted on Jane, who hadn’t wanted to come (being one of the lucky ones, being mother of one of the youngest and healthiest babies in Britain, but who had agreed when Lynn said it would make her less nervous) and she smiled encouragingly. The slide-show started up again — there was Posy (why on earth should she think of Posy?) gibbering with impatience and yearning to take the lead; there was Marsha calming Posy down; there was Marsha chained to a bed in a cell ...

  ‘It seems a bit silly,’ Lynn tried, ‘for me to shout. Why don’t we all move a bit closer, up to the front She wasn’t shouting, she didn’t need to shout. The hall’s acoustics were perfect and there was no sign of microphones. Her voice rolled round xhe glistening walls like marbles on a drum. ‘Can everyone hear me all right —?’ No one moved except to nod, yes, they could hear her all right.

  In a minute, she thought, the doors will open and there will be a radical feminist takeover. Or a bourgeois-liberal feminist takeover. Or something. This can’t be all! A lady in a fur coat was looking at her watch; Lynn should have opened her mouth to speak two minutes ago.

  ‘I’ve come — I want to ask your permission for me to chair this meeting. The first session, that is. I want to make some opening remarks. May I?’ Not a flicker. Maybe she’d got it all wrong. Maybe she had to take command. Jane caught her eye, mouthed ‘Water?’, fetched her some. Jane seemed to be the only person alive out there. ‘My name’s Lynn Byers.’

  ‘Byers. Is that your father’s name or your husband’s?’

  Did she imagine it? She looked for the source of the question. The acoustics told her nothing. Every face was expressionless. She did imagine it. But just in case: ‘My mother used to call me Lynn.’ Silence. She wondered. The sort of person who asked that sort of question wasn’t usually subdued so cheaply. She’d see. ‘We’ve all come together in the wake of appalling tragedy to tell the government what we want them to do about it. I thought first we might take time to offer comfort to the sisters who’ve suffered. Perhaps if those of you who’ve lost babies could stand?’

  A few stood, one of them Astrid, whom Lynn had not noticed. Had someone elected her as a delegate or had she just drifted along? She was pale as milk, numb and sandbagged with grief. The other women were the same. It was an embarrassing moment, utterly misjudged.

  The voice that had spoken before said, ‘Some of us may prefer not to.’

  Lynn said, ‘I didn’t mean —’

  ‘It’s one way to get cosmetic unity, of course.’

  Lynn’s eyes were quick and she spotted her attacker while her lips were still moving. At first she thought she kn
ew her; then she realised she could be any of the Collindeane daughters: seventeen or eighteen, frail but steady-eyed in her thick patched coat and boots. She was small but swamped her chair by sprawling her limbs, as if contemptuous that such a paltry piece of furniture should aspire to contain a woman. Her hair was red — but not as red as mine was, Lynn thought, looking straight at her. Just as she was seeming to wilt another voice, kinder but no less determined, said, ‘It’s a good idea, Lynn, to remind ourselves of the dimensions of the atrocity inflicted on women by men, but I think some of us find it a bit intrusive.’

  Not even trying to identify the second speaker, realising it was only a matter of time, Lynn started to speak.

  ‘I belong to a generation that remembers when governments didn’t put chemicals into the drinking water to stop women having babies. On the contrary. Once.you decided to have a baby or once you had one, deciding didn’t always come into it — that was your business. So much so that when you were looking after it, you were assumed to have, dropped out of the life of the nation altogether. Not economically active was the term they used. If you were inconvenient enough not to have a man to support you while you were being not economically active they gave you your keep — on the same basis as the long-term unemployed, otherwise known as idle parasites. Now, to call the long-term unemployed idle may have been technically true, if less than charitable, but as most of you know, to call the mother of young children idle is a downright lie.’ There was a slight spattering of applause. Lynn hadn’t expected it, but she was glad; it was the more conventional-looking women applauding, the ones who might once have been in FAMILY. The red-haired girl’s hands were still, though; flat on her knees. And her eyes and lips smiled gentle warning.

  ‘If you were married, of course, you got nothing. Well, you didn’t need anything, did you, if you had a man to support you. Whatever the terms he set for your support, whatever he required you to do, however often he beat or raped you, whatever it did for your self-respect to go crawling to him for pocket-money after your twenty-four-hour day of economic inactivity.

  ‘So we stopped. We got fed up, we demanded the means to stop and we stopped. Some of us called it the women’s liberation movement. We demanded jobs on equal terms with men, and proper birth control, and creches. Some of us chose to be lesbians, others wanted to go on living with men but as equals, not as domestic servants. We stopped, in other words, doing all the things that it has been taken for granted we would do till the end of time.

  ‘A lot of people didn’t realise this was what was going on, least of all us. It had plenty of names. Career women. Dual-career families, one-parent families, one-child families, no-child families. Latchkey kids, underachieving kids. The permissive society, decline of marriage, decline in the birth-rate. Abortion, divorce, pressure on the social services. What it boiled down to was individual women looking at what was expected of them and saying — no. I’m not going to do that.

  ‘I’ve talked a lot. Do you want me to go on? Do you?’

  She glanced almost playfully at the red-haired girl.

  ‘Finish what you have to say, madam chairman.’

  ‘So along came Benefit. The final solution. Pay women at home and keep ’em there. The last-ditch stand of a welfare state that realised what it was going to be lumbered with if we gave up entirely. Plus, of course, the state realised — what we in the women’s movement didn’t, or didn’t care to admit — that most women didn’t want to give up entirely. Most wanted to have families and give them a lot of love and time. They didn’t want to be taken for granted, despised, impoverished, discounted for doing it, but they had feelings of love for their kids and they saw family links could be good and strong and cohesive, and they didn’t see those feelings or those links as a male conspiracy ... which was how many of us in the women’s movement saw them, mistaking the way they’ve been exploited for the thing itself.

  ‘That’s what we’ve got to beware of today, sisters. Mistaking the way Benefit was exploited — and the horror that's come out of it — for the thing itself. Because what I’m going to do now is defend Benefit and I hope you’ll hear me out. I’m not defending the reasons we were given it, or the way it let the Department of Family Welfare — sic, sic, sic! — think it had bought shares in our wombs — but the principle that people whose life’s work is raising kids should be rewarded in the same way as people whose life’s work is anything else, particularly as it’s unlikely that that "anything else" is more important or difficult than raising kids. It’s a principle that our government’s in a mood to yield, and I think that —’ she raised her hand, ‘yes, yes, whatever our attitudes to the government, whatever alternatives we’re going to propose to government, we should keep it in the forefront of our minds. Because a social order that penalises good mothers for being good mothers won’t survive and won’t deserve to.

  ‘Just one more thing.’ Her face was burning. She sipped water.

  Her voice was giving out. ‘I don’t suppose I need to say this here, but there used to be, and doubtless still are, people who think mothers should be content to be paid for their labours in the love of their families and the respect of society. Well, when we have a society in which love and respect are negotiable currency, that’ll do. Until then —’

  Astrid was on her feet again, swaying. She screamed: ‘It won’t do! I won’t go through that again, not for love, not for respect, not for money, not for —’

  Lynn saw Jane go to her, put her arms round her. She saw the red-haired girl glance at her watch: come in, Mrs Byers, your time is up. ‘What was that?’ the red-haired girl sneered, ‘a party political broadcast?’

  Don’t you shake your red hair at me, young lady, Lynn flashed back, I’m not impressed. She said, ‘I’ll stand down, if the meeting wants me to.’

  The kinder voice she’d heard before said, ‘Weren’t you overlooking something, Lynn?’ A black girl, same age as red-head, wide capable eyes and a halo of hair. ‘You talk as if it’s just a matter of deciding what’s going to happen about Benefit and getting on with our lives. We can’t have babies any more. Whether we want to or not.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ Astrid whimpered, ‘and I won’t.’

  ‘We’ve been poisoned, we can’t.’

  The meeting was coming to life.

  ‘We daren’t.’

  ‘It’s all right for you, Lynn, with your grandchild —’ Who was that? It didn’t matter. Someone had done her homework. It was only a matter of time now. A spot of resistance, though, would still be decent.

  ‘Look, let’s be realistic, about this poisoning business. I don’t want to underplay it, but sooner or later they’re going to come up with something —’

  ‘But who’s going to believe them?’ Everyone seemed to be shouting now. ‘When they come to us with their little green pills, tomorrow or next year or ten years from now and say, it’s all right now, girls, we’ve perfected it and we’ve tried it out on beagle bitches and black women so off you all go and get pregnant because we’re feeling broody and all our obstetricians are out of work —’

  ‘And our population projections are going haywire —’

  ‘After all, they only say they’ve stopped the experiments —’

  ‘How do we know this isn’t part of one?’

  Lynn felt like a very old puppet that had played its last part and was ready to flop in a comer. ‘Do — you — want — me — to — stand — down?’ she shouted, and a soft voice beside her said, ‘Yes,’ and she looked into the green eyes and red hair of the youngster from the floor who thought this had been a battle and thought that Lynn had lost.

  It was purposeful and humane, the way they ousted her; six teenagers, very calm and organised, half black, half white. She was shown to the escalator, hobbling like a crone. Jane stepped forward as if to catch her, offered her a handkerchief. She dashed it away but didn’t object when Jane mopped her eyes. When she could see and hear again the kind black girl was speaking, introduci
ng herself and the others who flanked her like a military junta. Her name was Cath. Like the others, she was a second-generation feminist; she had grown up in a women’s community in the Midlands; the others came from different parts of the country, including one from London, though not Collindeane, which Lynn found she minded.

  ‘We are The Women. You are The Women.’ You could see the capitals as Cath crooned and spat them. ‘We are all The Women, and this is The Women’s Day, but this is not The Women’s Conference, if you take my meaning.’

  Glances exchanged among her audience suggested they did not.

  Cath smiled. ‘You see, this meeting, with its chairperson — who is one of The Women — was foisted upon us, and we rather think women have had enough foisted on them for the time being. There are other things going on. The reason, you see, why there are so few “delegates” here today is that when women got together under government orders to elect them in the Women’s Centres — which incidentally are now Women’s Centres because The Women don’t propose to move out of them — they decided they would prefer to decide things themselves. One of the things they decided was to send us here today — not as delegates but as messengers, and the message is to ask you to rejoin them, because that is the way The Women work out what is to happen now: on the reclaimed site of our oppression and with every woman having a voice.

  ‘For example, here is something that will have to be decided by each woman. The sister —’ she nodded to Lynn, pleasantly enough. ‘The sister thinks we should ask for Benefit back. Well, yes, that is all right as far as it goes — I’m sure that if we were going to have babies again we would be glad to have money of our own that we could pool to rebuild our old communities and make schools and playgrounds (they would be the same thing, of course) for our children — but the point is — are we going to have babies? Ever? The feeling at the other meetings, and here, I think, a few minutes ago, is that it can’t be taken for granted.