Women in Confinement: Can Labour Law Deliver the Goods?

Abstract

'minimum standards' for the protection of employees have been transformed from the status of basic rights to rare rewards - or have they? With the maternity provisions and indeed employment protection generally openly under attack as part of the present government's policy of deregulation, the question arises as to what extent these provisions are worth preserving.2 It may appear obvious that feminists should engage in the struggle to preserve these hard-won rights especially given the increasing percentage of women, particularly married women, entering the labour market and attempting to combine home and work responsibilities.3 However, feminists may be in danger here of becoming locked in a struggle which will produce little in the way of results. The debate over maternity rights raises the crucial question of strategy in a particularly revealing form. Feminists engaged in promoting women's interests are constantly faced with the question of what exactly those interests are. Sometimes women's immediate interests do not correspond with their long-term strategic interests when informed by an understanding of the nature and causes of women's oppression. For example, feminist campaigns in the inter-war years to improve maternity services arguably did as much to strengthen the ideology of motherhood as to promote women's rights. As Jen Dale observes: . the 'woman question' had been largely collapsed into the 'mother question' as women's individual needs were subordinated to those of the mother-child diad.4