A prominent liberal commentator in the UK has said that women do not want high powered careers and find more fulfilment in motherhood than work, published in The Daily Mail.
Millions have been left frustrated and miserable by Government policies that push them into jobs and their children into nurseries, Cristina Odone said. She backed her argument with a poll that showed fewer than one in eight mothers want to work full-time and that only one in a hundred mothers in two-parent working families with young children think it is right for them to have a full-time job.
The research found that women feel bombarded by images of 'superwomen who manage everything, plus a high-profile career', when many just wanted to be stay-at-home mothers with their husbands taking the role of breadwinner.
The call for a reversal of the march of women into work came from a former deputy editor of the New Labour house magazine, the New Statesman, and editor-of the Catholic Herald.
Miss Odone condemned her feminist colleagues in media and politics as a 'small, influential and unrepresentative coterie' who assume that women must achieve self-realisation through work.
She added: 'We need to break the stranglehold that the small coterie of women, who work full-time and buy into the macho way of life, enjoy on our public life. They have for years misrepresented real women who reject the masculine value system for one that rates caring above a career and interdependence above independence. Real women do not want to commit full-time to a job. The future belongs to the real woman, who points to a lifestyle embracing feminine values. Let's hope this government, or the next, is brave enough to heed her call.'
The attack, published by the centre-right think tank Centre for Policy Studies in a pamphlet titled What Women Want, comes against a background of growing political pressure on mothers to go out to work and on companies to ensure women staff are offered flexible hours and better pay.
Miss Odone called for an end to state support for child daycare which has over the last ten years topped £21billion.
Some of the money could be spent on marriage support services and pointing out to women the dangers of unmarried cohabitation.
She said the tax and benefit system that treats single parents much more generously than couples with children should be reformed, and regulation and red tape should be cut to open up more part-time jobs of the kind most attractive to mothers.
She called for a 'cultural shift' to 'stop forcing women into a mould'.
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