Working girls

Heated arguments over whether mothers should stay at home with small children are familiar. What gets far less attention is the impact of recent change beyond the family. The revolution in female opportunity has also had a huge effect on the public services and voluntary work. It has reinforced other changes - the decline in religion, the glorifying of self-actualisation - to transform our behaviour and values. Welcome to the end of female altruism.

The period from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was a golden age for the caring sector in one important respect. The most brilliant, energetic and ambitious women, who worked in the sector as paid employees, also gave enormous amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do neither.

Here, too, the changes are most obvious among the elite. By the 17th and 18th centuries, upper and middle-class women were educated, cultured and well read. They also had no career open to them other than marriage. Paid employment for an impecunious female member of this class was restricted to the education of the young as a governess or the care of the old as a companion. But in the 19th century, education was transformed and, with it, women's careers.

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, teaching attracted many of the most academically able women. Clever working-class girls progressed from pupil teachers to schoolmistresses, while growing numbers of middle-class girls also entered the profession. This has radically changed, and schools have been the big losers.

Does any of this matter? The first century of professional paid work for women saw traditional female concerns move into the public sphere. If the able women of 70 or 100 years ago entered classrooms and hospital wards merely because nothing else was available, they would have brought little commitment to their work, and greater choice would clearly have benefited them and society alike. But this is not how it was. These women mostly saw their jobs as a vocation. Many of them lived in a world that took for granted such duty and service to others and a belief that their jobs mattered, especially to the future of other women.

The relative decline of these values and the number of such service-oriented women is sometimes cited as a reason for the perceived deterioration in health and education services, despite the far greater sums of money being spent on them. The apparent decline of a specifically female public service ethos is impossible to measure but is surely connected to the retreat of religious belief.

The pioneering female professionals of the 19th and early 20th centuries were imbued, in an unselfconscious way, with the language and values of religion. Duty to God and duty to their fellow women and men were inextricably combined. Most educated 18th-century women regarded the traditional women's work of caring for home and children not with '60s feminist disdain but with the values of love and duty, fortitude, propriety and resignation.

The centrality of religious belief in public pronouncements and private lives marks out the different country of the past, a world where actively "doing good" was both a key part of many women's lives and intrinsically linked with religious faith and instruction. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the development of myriad charities with religious links and almost all of them relying heavily on female volunteers.

Today, the middle class, working-age female volunteer has all but vanished. Voluntary organisations are increasingly run by professionals. Religion has become marginal to the lives of most of us. Theda Skocpol, in Diminished Democracy, notes how mass membership, cross-class organisations in the US have been replaced by professionally staffed advocacy groups concerned about influencing policy-makers and the direction of public funding.

Few phenomena have a single cause. That middle-class women are all out at work is one reason, not the only one, for the decline of voluntary action. Equally important is professionalisation of almost all occupations and the increasing importance of government in the nonprofit sector. Yet the virtual disappearance of home-based, educated women (at least below the age of 60) has had an effect. A path once followed by able women across the developed world led to university, teaching, then motherhood, homemaking and voluntary work. Such women are now too busy.

There is a chasm between the moral purpose voiced by female pioneers and the female advertising slogan of today: "Because I'm worth it." We could, I suppose, write off the beliefs of the former group as the opium of the educated female classes, developed to reconcile them to unequal lives. But then we should see our own obsession with female occupational success as an ideology too.

As late as the '40s and '50s, education white papers were still imbued with the language of morality and idealism. Today's are concerned almost entirely with the economic benefits of schooling and the delivery of occupational skills. This mirrors the priorities of mainstream feminism, which is equally focused on the workplace and which evaluates female advance accordingly.