{"id":20299,"date":"2013-05-17T07:55:03","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T12:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20299"},"modified":"2014-07-22T10:04:56","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T15:04:56","slug":"zoe-fairbairns-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/05\/17\/zoe-fairbairns-benefits\/","title":{"rendered":"Zoe Fairbairns\u2019 Benefits<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neil Davenport<\/a> talks about the recent re-publication of Zoe Fairbairns\u2019 dystopian feminist novel, Benefits<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain, Benefits<\/em> is about a future state\u2019s sinister attempts to control women\u2019s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal \u2018wages for housework\u2019 benefit.<\/p>\n

Although rarely out of print since it first appeared in 1979, Benefits<\/em> has recently been re-issued, with a new introduction by Fairbairns, for the e-reader age. It is now being marketed as a political attack on \u2018anti-welfarist Tories\u2019, yet as Fairbairns points out, anyone who views Benefits<\/em> as simplistically \u2018anti-Thatcherite\u2019 is missing its key point: that welfare benefits can become a weapon of social engineering and control. On top of critiquing aspects of welfarism, Benefits<\/em> lays into radical feminism\u2019s self-defeating slogan, \u2018The personal is political\u2019, while passionately championing women\u2019s liberation and equal rights — feminism\u2019s one-time aims.<\/p>\n

Like many dystopian novels, Benefits<\/em> is rooted in the fears, the panics and the politics of the period it was written in. So although it is set in the dying days of the twentieth century, it rather charmingly echoes the late 1970s: all tower-block grime; politico slogans on walls; squats; communes; poorly designed radical pamphlets. It also speaks to the more alarmist rhetoric of that period of the mid- to late 1970s. From ecologists predicting Europe-wide famine to the New Right\u2019s panic over single mothers to respectable racists complaining about \u2018coloured immigration\u2019, the political feeling in Benefits is unmistakably mid-Seventies.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Equally prescient in Benefits<\/em> is the way its fictional state believes that \u2018poor parenting\u2019 can have a corrosive impact on the individual and society; this has become an unquestioned orthodoxy today.<\/p>\n

Many dystopian novels hint at a future in which pornography has become staple entertainment. Benefits<\/em> does that, too, and this also speaks to the reality of twenty-first-century life, especially to today\u2019s increasing separation of sex from genuine intimacy (it talks about \u2018all that sex and no babies\u2019).<\/p>\n

In Fairbairns\u2019 nightmare vision, women who want to receive benefits must undergo \u2018a programme of education for motherhood\u2019. This sounds suspiciously like parenting classes, which are increasingly common today, especially for poorer families, or what David Cameron calls \u2018chaotic families\u2019. Also, in imagining a future in which parenting is redefined as a \u2018national service\u2019, Benefits<\/em> hints at today\u2019s creeping nationalisation of individual families. The novel even features a supra-sovereign state called Europea, where British politicians willingly offload their own parliamentary responsibilities. Sound familiar?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neil Davenport talks about the recent re-publication of Zoe Fairbairns\u2019 dystopian feminist novel, Benefits: Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain, Benefits is about a future state\u2019s sinister attempts to control women\u2019s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal \u2018wages for housework\u2019 benefit. Although rarely out of print […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,4,28],"tags":[263,987,85,545,43],"class_list":["post-20299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-media","tag-1970s","tag-feminism","tag-sf","tag-socialsecurity","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5hp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20299"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26964,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20299\/revisions\/26964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}