Work and Life - Helen Wilkinson

Feminism is dead. Or rather, the feminist movement as it is best known -- the crusade for feminine identity inspired by Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, among others -- has become mostly irrelevant. It triumphed, after all. Women have been liberated, by new economic forces as much as by any ideological awakening, to seek individuality and autonomy, to dictate the terms of their lives. They have not achieved equality. (Witness the persistent gender pay gap and the paucity of female senior executives.) But at least they're allowed to play on the same field as men, under the same rules.

Helen Wilkinson is a beneficiary of the feminist movement. Growing up in Mold, a working-class Welsh town where her father was a steelworker, she watched as Margaret Thatcher bulldozed a highway into politics for women. Indeed, Wilkinson's mother became mayor of her town. A recipient of government-sponsored grants, Wilkinson was able to pay her own way through school at the University of Leeds. She acquired in adolescence a vigorous sense of entitlement. "As a teenager," she has written, "I remember confidently and boldly proclaiming that I wanted to be prime minister when I grew up."

But she also was wary of what she labeled "soft-focus feminism" -- symbolic advances without practical effect. She lamented its tendency toward academic abstraction, which allowed conservatives to seize control of the family debate. So today, as Britain's leading progressive voice on gender and family, Wilkinson is recasting the women's movement in terms that resonate with women -- and men -- who are grappling not just with their gender identities but with some of the urgent human concerns in the new world of business: the ongoing work-life conflict, the struggle for quality child care, and the troubling reality of disintegrating families.

Call it postmodern feminism. In her first manifesto of sorts, "No Turning Back: Generations and the Genderquake" (Demos, 1994), Wilkinson called the women's movement to task for failing to move past "the assertion of rights relative to men and the demand for quantitative changes," thereby antagonizing younger women. In other words, she argued, don't just get a raise -- get a life. Progress for women depended on far-reaching social solutions: Come up with ways for women to cope with the impact of the high-flex job market on the costs of mortgages and health care. Change school hours to accommodate the needs of working parents. Reinvigorate the role of the extended family and other community-support networks.

And, perhaps most important, give men some respect. The remarkable surge of women into the labor force has muddied men's roles at home and in the workplace, Wilkinson says. Expanding women's freedom requires economic and social policies that encourage new patterns of male behavior. For example, Britain, like the United States, has mandated that employers offer both men and women unpaid leave after the birth of a child. Wilkinson argues, though, that since men typically make 33% more than women, few will forfeit their salary for parental leave. A policy requiring paid leave for both men and women would provide incentive for men to share the responsibility at home.

What has given these ideas special heft in Britain has been Wilkinson's perch at Demos, the think tank (populated by staffers in their twenties and thirties) that has had an unusual degree of impact on the Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Wilkinson left her post as a BBC producer in 1994 to help Demos cofounders Geoff Mulgan and Martin Jacques develop a research and communications strategy. Over the next five years, she authored a flood of books and pamphlets that crystallized the work-family debate in Britain and helped define social policy.

One reason why Wilkinson's ideas have achieved such clout is that she has a knack for packaging and marketing them in terms that people can understand. Her writing is populist, filled with catchy labels and eye-opening anecdotes. Her most notorious work in Britain was an article published in the "New Statesman" in August 1998, in the midst of her yearlong American sabbatical as a research associate at the Families and Work Institute in New York City. In "The Day I Fell Out of Love With Blair," she accused the Labour government of abandoning women and, more broadly, its promise of creating an open, empathetic organization. "Power remains firmly in male hands," she wrote. "I feel an outsider in a new Labour culture which parades rootless, individualistic, brash and boastful boys."

So Helen Wilkinson has become, in fact, an outsider -- a free agent at work on her own agenda. She writes frequently for London newspapers on politics and family policy, comments on radio and television, and recently presented a BBC documentary on changing family patterns. Her next book, "The Age of Androgyny," is scheduled to be published by HarperCollins in 2001.