How A New Generation Of Bright Young Women Have Realised Their Mothers Were Sold A Lie By The Sisterhood - And Are Proudly Seeking Fulfilment In Their Family

'Looking back, I think we were brainwashed'

By Bel Mooney: Let's hear it for the homemakers! According to a leading academic, today's young women are rejecting the idea that they have to go out to work to be respected, and are proudly embracing domesticity instead.

Think of the popularity of The Great British Bake Off and how the BBC's Sewing Bee makes skill with a needle positively glamorous. Think of the enticing kitchenware endorsed by beautiful Nigella and the plethora of home-style, cookery and gardening features in the media. They wouldn't be there unless there was an appetite for what they represent.

Creating a home and looking after a family has never seemed sexier. And about time too. Professor Maggie Andrews's new history of the Women's Institute is called The Acceptable Face Of Feminism.

Why 'acceptable'? Because, she suggests, 'feminism and the Women's Institute have come together a little bit, in that domesticity isn't such a bad thing as people thought, or possibly that the workplace is not as much fun'.

Once, feminists poured scorn on the old WI skills such as making jam and cakes. Not any more.

Professor Andrews believes modern feminists see 'a more complex picture - domestic space as one area of women's power - in a way they didn't once'.

You have only to remember New Labour's dogma about shunting all women back to work to realise how radical this is. The assumption behind much of what Labour politician Harriet Harman, for example, said on the subject seemed to be that only through work can a woman be truly fulfilled.

She and I are from the same generation of educated baby-boomers who embraced women's liberation and rejected housework and childcare as drudgery. If you wanted to find personal satisfaction and be useful to society, you could only do so by working.

Professor Andrews points out that in the Eighties 'feminism was all about escaping from the home, getting a job, being financially independent'.

But at what cost? My generation desperately juggled the demands of jobs and family, believing we had to establish a career or be judged failures. We were usually exhausted - but secretly pitied friends who chose to remain at home.

As for those women - well, I remember a sister-in-law's shame and anger after she told someone she was a stay-at-home mum and saw their eyes glaze over. She was made to feel worthless.

You're home with the kids all day and iron their clothes and cook their meals? How tedious!

The truth is, I thought that, too.

When I had my son, Daniel, in 1974, I spent the first nine months at home with him, but then felt bored - itching to be back in the saddle as a journalist.

So I hired a series of hopeless young mother's helps, handing him over to other women and then feeling anguish because they didn't do the interesting things with my boy that I'd have done.

But I couldn't possibly stay at home making a mess with finger paints and making Lego, could I? My husband and I would have thought that a waste of my ability. That was the spirit of the age.

My neighbour was married to a doctor and loved her role as housewife. 'But what does she do all day?' I thought, with something of a pitying sneer.

Our sons played together and I felt guilty that I bought cakes, but hers were home made.

Then one day I went round to collect Daniel from her house. I'd struggled home from the centre of London on a packed Tube after a hideously stressful day in a newspaper office, and I felt tired and miserable.

And there was Alison, looking relaxed and happy (and very attractive, too) watching the boys play as she sipped a glass of white wine, in a welcoming kitchen filled with the sound of Blondie. How I envied her.

One day an editor I worked for confided about her angst over the work-life balance. She told me that when she got home at night and stood in the hall listening to her only daughter laughing merrily with the nanny, she would sneak away and cry.

Young as I was, I tried to help by pointing out that at least it proved the child was happy.

'But I want her to be happy with me,' she wailed, mascara running down her cheeks. It was impossible to square the circle: to be fulfilled in her career and feel she was a great mum, too.

Over the years I've met countless women caught in that double bind, and know how tough it is. Some women work because they need the income; others because they need the satisfaction of the job. For some it's both. For very few is it easy.

Perhaps ours was the first generation of women for whom work became a political statement. It wasn't one part of a rounded identity, but the defining aspect of who you were. How limiting - yet it was a key tenet of feminism in the Sixties.

In contrast, my grandmother worked as a dinner lady and cleaner, but was also the best homemaker I have ever met. Her little rented house gleamed.

For hardworking women like Nan, making cushions, creating good meals from cheap cuts, polishing shoes and brass ornaments with equal energy, baking scones and taking care of the family was your purpose on earth. When she ironed our clothes, the task was done with delight and love.

My mother's generation continued in the same way. The point is, although those women worked out of necessity, homemaking and motherhood were not devalued. On the contrary, what was called 'a woman's role' gave you self-esteem.

But do you remember the Wages for Housework campaign of the Seventies, where feminists demanded that running a home be recognised by governments as work and that women be paid accordingly? It set domesticity up as the Great Enemy.

Even at the time I remember thinking the slogan stupid. Surely you clean your house because you take a pride in it and love your family? Why should that be equated with, say, going down a mine?

Of course, men should share the chores if they can, but I remember arguing furiously with a militant friend who said men must do 50 per cent of housework.

I pointed out that my husband worked very long hours, so it was impossible. No matter, she said, even if he got home at 10.30pm he should have to clean the bathroom.

There was no room in such a rigid philosophy for a quiet truth . . . shhh . . . that you might enjoy cleaning the bathroom because you were proud of it.

That folding towels might bring satisfaction. That running up a pair of curtains and hanging them was just as creative as sitting around a magazine office (in my case) trying to think of headlines.

That cooking good meals for your family, sitting around the table eating and talking, then reading long bedtime stories to the children was as important a task as you could fulfil this side of heaven.

But nobody told us that. For me a turning point came in the early Eighties when I was asked to co-present a pilot for an important Radio 4 programme.

It required two or three days in Manchester. My family was in Bath - and although my husband was home to share the childcare with our nanny, I remember phoning home to hear my daughter Kitty screaming. Why? She was ill and wanted Mummy.

'What the hell am I doing?' I thought, marooned in that bleak hotel room. 'This isn't right.'

What felt right was to move to the country and embrace domesticity. I was lucky, because I was able to start writing children's books, which allowed me to stay put, whereas it would have been much harder had I been a lawyer or manageress.

Because my husband travelled a lot I decided our children deserved a parent who was present most of the time, and I never regretted the TV jobs I turned down. Instead, I learned how to bottle fruit and felt so proud of myself!

At last I could admit that I'd learned homemaking at my grandmother's knee. I could be proud that my mother used to make all my clothes.

I realised that throughout my own early years as wife and mother I'd suppressed a key element of my real self - my very femininity.

Looking back, I think we were brainwashed - deceived into thinking we had a right to 24-hour childcare and that Great God Career was everything.

Some of my friends went straight back to work after having their kids, and later felt they'd missed out.

I met women who had day nannies and night nannies and talked to their children on the phone from the office, troubleshooting sibling quarrels from a distance.

I often wonder how those families turned out. That's not to make a judgment on choices made by my fellow women. It is to wonder whether the particular strand of iron-bound feminism sold us a pup.

What's more, the insidious propaganda continues.

It makes me angry that a younger generation of women still has to battle against people like Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, who tells them they have to 'lean in' (the title of her bestselling book) and work hard to ascend 'the corporate ladder' - when really they'd rather be cooking a Jamie Oliver recipe.

But it seems as if they're resisting at last. Of my own daughter's group of four close schoolfriends, three have chosen to embrace motherhood. Only one is juggling a high-flying career and baby son.

I admire all of them for having the confidence to listen to their own hearts.

Perhaps a new version of feminism might embrace being at home with the children as a conscious choice.

In a threatening world, full of insecurity, domesticity can bestow a quiet, centred autonomy.

Yes, you may have less money, but if you cook from scratch, you'll be in creative rebellion against all the expensive ready meals your mothers shoved down your throat.

Yes, you may be vexed or bored from time to time, but rejoice that (as my daughter says): 'Bringing up these children is the most important thing I'll ever do.'

What the feminists of my generation left out of the equation was love - which is the raison d'etre of domesticity.

Love of family and friends cooks the meal, then does the washing up. Love of children changes nappies and irons clothes and reads stories. Love of a partner realises that demands don't make a good relationship, but compromise does.

These days I feel gloriously liberated to say that love of home is the centre of my life, and that being at the centre of four generations of family, sitting round my table, is far more important than anything I've achieved in a long career.

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