I might be single, but I’m not a failure

The other evening I was settling down to share a bottle of wine with a male friend. My mood was one of rare Browning-esque contentment: God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Then my friend, who is the husband of a well-known London hostess and a father of three, said: ''That property man you broke up with a year ago – why don’t you make it up and marry him?’’ I was incredulous: ''But you said he was so dull.” (My friend had also said that, in a beauty contest, the man would have come in joint-last with Lon Chaney.) ''It doesn’t matter,’’ came the response. ''You have to get married and have children. It’s the only thing that will improve your economic and social status.’’ I pushed my glass aside as if it had become splints of nettle. For this remark was neither glib nor an aberration. My single, childless state has been a subject of discussion for some time. It started with the newspaper columnist Julie Burchill, whom I have never met. A few years ago, Ms Burchill launched an astonishing personal attack upon me in an article. So below the belt was it, I ended up hunched on the floor in misery. Burchill wrote that, as a woman, I was a failure and had run aground. With all the mercy of a gangland hit man she described me as “barren”. I rallied. But I began to notice that other single, childless girlfriends were subject to similar disapproval (couched with slightly more politesse). There was the friend who was told: ''You must have a baby. People will think you’re abnormal.’’ There was my cousin, who, after admitting she was losing interest in her beau, was admonished thus: ''You can always divorce. A divorcee is better than a spinster.’’ To add to this Euripidean Chorus were schoolfriends who bemoaned the difficulty of inviting women like me to dinner because we ''hardly ever brought a man”. (I forbore to say that I often brought champagne, which costs more money.) If some of you feel inclined to dismiss this as trivial – don’t! For it is illustrative of an ugly and unspoken truth. Middle-class women who are single and childless are systematically isolated. The progressive views articulated in Westminster and sections of the media often belie what the supposedly enlightened really feel about females in my situation. Recently, a famous (male) broadcaster said to me: ''The trouble is, single women without kids don’t really fit in.” He’s right. We don’t fit in to their social and economic comfort zone: a partner, a Victorian semi, and a car full of infant detritus. History tells us that every society needs a social group to pick on in order to assuage its fears, particularly when times are bad. Once, homosexuals, Jews and black people fell into this category. Now it’s no longer acceptable to persecute such minorities; it is the single and childless female, or SAC, who is subject to choler and discrimination. Let us consider the work place. Despite the oft-vaunted triumphs of feminism, it is a myth that the SAC, with her university degree and her work ethic necessarily enjoys an agreeable professional life. Women in general are faring worse than men as employers cut jobs. Overall, female unemployment in the last quarter of 2011 rose by 32,000, while for men it was up by only half that number. In the private sector alone, female unemployment increased by 18 per cent, compared to eight per cent for men. And SACs are among the first to be sacked. A breakdown of unemployment figures shows that 79 per cent of women who joined the dole queue last year were single and childless. I have worked all my adult life. As a SAC, I have rarely taken time off. I have sacrificed numerous public holidays to allow colleagues to celebrate with their children. And don’t get me started on maternity leave (up to 12 months!). Then, last autumn, I was made redundant from a newspaper. When I relayed this to a married colleague she was less than sympathetic: ''It would be far worse if you had dependants.’’ A single and childless girlfriend who was fired recently was told something similar by her ex-boss: “It’s not as if you have children to support.” But SACS do have dependants, just like other women. Often they are elderly parents (I had been giving part of my salary to my widowed mother), but we have no husbands to share the financial strain. And what does the Government do for us, once we have lost our jobs after decades of soldiering on? One in five women in Britain, aged 35 and over, is single and childless. Do we not deserve some reward for our contribution to the nation’s coffers, not to mention the problem of over-population? Not according to the state. We have never lived in such a child-centric society, and those who fail to worship at the altar are penalised. As a SAC, paying a mortgage of £350 a week, not to mention utility bills and council tax, the maximum I am able to claim in benefits is £65. Were I married with a child I would receive £283. So would my spouse, if he was also unemployed, bringing our state-funded income up to £567 a week. Just having a baby entitles one to comparative wealth. Compare my position to that of a woman with a child under five. She is entitled to £415. I sometimes wonder if friends are right to say the only way of improving my prospects is to marry the next man I meet, and eventually find myself in what used to be called “an interesting condition”. Far from inhabiting a progressive society, we seem to have regressed into a world that would be more familiar to Jane Austen or Trollope. According to a new report by the Office of National Statistics, after 40 years of decline, the number of marriages that took place last year rose by 3.7 per cent. It seems unlikely that the sole reason is a resurgence of romantic idealism. The pressure to behave in accordance with a particular bourgeois stereotype is becoming hard to resist. It is no wonder that, according to figures also published this week, married couples have a greater sense of well-being than those who are single. For as well as being the victims of financial cuts, SACs are being cut socially. Sometimes I joke that our plight is reminiscent of the secret lives that gays were forced to lead before the liberal reforms of the Sixties. All but one of my father’s homosexual friends married to avoid being snubbed by society. Now SACs are ostracised. The other day I asked a male acquaintance if he was going to a mutual (female) friend’s 40th birthday party? ''No,’’ he replied. “Since I got married, I don’t have time for her. And what’s she got to celebrate? Forty years of never being able to close the deal?’’ Women can be worse. As the recession bites, friendship is becoming démodé. I know one hostess who now divides people into the categories of “useful” and “useless”. SACs who are not influential high earners often fall into the latter category. ''I can’t afford to entertain people simply because they’re nice,’’ she says. ''These days you need friends who can pull strings, or who have a villa somewhere hot you can take the kids to. Single women with no children or money can’t do anything for you. Most of them are a bit freakish, anyway.’’ Freakish! It is not as if all SACs have taken a conscious decision to live unmarried and childless. It is mis-timing and bad luck that has prevented me from meeting a man to grow old and grey with. As for children, it is no achievement merely to give birth. Consider Julie Burchill. She may not be “barren”, but dare she call herself a “mother”? She walked out on her eldest son when he was five. Her other son, by her second husband, was also brought up by his father after the couple split. Married men and women have no concept of the resilience required of the single and childless. One SAC I know speaks of a grey void that numbs and nauseates and has her reaching for a glass of wine at noon. Yet women with children are inundated with support, not only by the state but by websites such as Mumsnet. Founded in 2000 by journalist Justine Roberts, it provides aid and a discussion forum to parents, and receives nearly 32 million hits a month; Gordon Brown called it ''one of the great British institutions’’. Sorry, but it makes me want to barf. Mumsnet is an excuse for inane females with nothing better to do to chatter about matters so simpering that you want to knock their teeth out. ''Is the name Alfie really a no-no for a birth certificate?” is one of the questions currently being debated, as well as “feminine names for girls that end in an "a". Banal as this is, why is there no equivalent for childless women? Don’t we need support? There are 6.2 million of us and we have had enough. We are weary of being penalised by the state; sickened by the way many employers treat us; and as furious as baited dogs at “friends” who, having partaken of our hospitality when they were single or childless, now deny us the succour of their dinner tables. In the bad old days, members of those earlier minorities who were brave enough to be interviewed on television used to have their faces blacked out. I, for one, will not have my face, nor my life, blacked out any longer. Aux armes, ladies!