Is there a new family? (Society).

I AM HONOURED to be the first woman ever to deliver he Archbishop Sir James Duhig Memorial Lecture. So I thought I should choose a topic to which I could perhaps bring a uniquely feminine insight. It is an insight which was born of many years' struggle in the common pursuit which most of the world's women share and which indeed I call my real life's work--as distinct from the journalism that I do. I am of course referring to the business of being a wife and the mother of a large family. So it is about the nature of the family, and the perception that this bedrock institution has changed due to the changing role of women, that I shall speak. It was actually from being so immersed in the motherhood game that I first entered the journalism game. So what you are going to get--and I am afraid I must particularly warn the boys of the college--is the very thing you probably left home to avoid: a lecture from Mum.

As with most ideas there was a moment of inspiration, a particular incident in my life which constituted a sort of epiphany which triggered my activism and perfectly illustrates my central theme here. It happened a few years ago, before I had begun to write.

I was having dinner with my husband and a rather dull, politically correct acquaintance (after all a night out is a night out), when in the middle of the conversation about some event of great political moment this man asked me about my job. Now most stay-at-home mothers in ,the rarely experienced company of other adults hate being asked that inevitable question, "What do you do?" but I am usually less perturbed by the question than by the uncertain response of the questioner when I reply, "Oh, I'm the mother of nine children."

The reaction varies depending on the tone of the company and the real level of interest in me as distinct from my husband. It can range from an alarming level of spluttering and gagging--threatening epiglottal emergencies, and once a spray of half-imbibed champagne all over my evening finery--to a genuine interest in the dynamics of such a family.

However, the reaction from this particular specimen of SNAG was quite unexpected.

When I told him I was at home with several small children, this didn't satisfy him. He had obviously assumed that since I had managed to join the conversation and make a few vaguely sensible remarks that I must be a practising journalist. So with as much civility as I could muster I explained that I believed a family could not cope with more than one person working twelve-hour days, so I had no intention of returning to full-time work.

Well, he declared, his wife would never tolerate that! She was too intelligent and too well educated for domestic slavery. Although her intelligence and education weren't apparent in her choice of husband, the sheer contempt in which this man held the stay-at-home wife was a revelation to me.