Well, Cherie Blair has sounded off again, in her usual arrogant Left-wing elitist manner: this time giving us an almost archetypal specimen of feminist hostility to traditional marriage. It is also another specimen of hostility to what the Church thinks about marriage, and thus of her own very odd brand of secularised Catholicism-lite (she and her husband, of course, are notoriously great pals of Hans Küng). Last week, at an international conference of “most powerful women”, organised by Fortune magazine, she explained that mothers who gave up work in order to concentrate on bringing up their children were making “a dangerous mistake”. “Every woman needs to be self-sufficient”, she said; “and in that way you really don’t have a choice - for your own satisfaction; you hear these yummy mummies talk about being the best possible mother and they put all their effort into their children. I also want to be the best possible mother, but I know that my job as a mother includes bringing my children up so actually they can live without me.” Finally, she claimed, astonishingly, that “what is important is that women have a choice”: though that, doesn’t, apparently, include the choice which many polls have shown most mothers would actually prefer, which is to stay at home to look after their children. The reason they would prefer that is deep in a mother’s instinct that her child needs her. Perhaps the most poignant moment in a working mother’s day is the point at which (with or without the help of the local taxi service or other after-school child-collecting provision) the child, in her absence, arrives home to find, day by day, an empty house or apartment. The effects of this on many children are well-documented. Here, almost at random from an internet trawl (this example is interestingly from the South African Journal of Education - this is a worldwide problem), is an extract from one study, based both both on original research and on a survey of the existing literature: