The word “housewife” itself has become something of an embarrassment, like negro or mongoloid or cripple, a reminder of grimmer, less enlightened times. In the mid-Eighties, a celebrated campaign for Persil featured a skinhead desperate to get his kit cleaned up but abandoned in his hour of need by Mum, who ends up doing it himself. Now the detergent giant Unilever has administered the coup de grace: in its new campaign for Persil, to be launched this summer, all references to housewives are to be scrapped. Instead the campaigns in the press will target individual groups of detergent users: “Dinks”, for example, or single young men, the latter to be reached through campaigns in magazines such as Loaded and GQ.
It is not the first time that the soap companies have tried wooing some of the other people besides women who find themselves using washing machines.

The figure whose gleaming, caring, energetic, ever-cheerful countenance once dominated advertisements for soap powder, breakfast cereals, soups, Oxo cubes and many other domestic necessaries has steadily been fading from view. For years the housewife has been on the wane. Three Law Lords have backed the Court of Appeal in ruling that a 10-year-old Zulu boy must leave his white “mother” in London and return to his natural parents in South Africa. On 5 March, Lord Justices Neill and Ward decided that the boy, a ward of court identified only by the initial “M”‘, should be returned to his native Leboa, in the Transvaal.
Now, after a private hearing, Lords Keith, Mustill and Hoffman in the House of Lords have backed that decision, and ruled that the boy be immediately returned to his natural parents; leave to appeal was refused.The boy was brought to the UK by the white woman, a British citizen with an Afrikaans background, who wanted him to be adopted as a member of her family and to live in London and be educated at a leading British school.His natural mother, who worked as a housekeeper and nanny for the British woman, initially agreed to the adoption but later changed her mind..

“This was not a properly grown ponytail or attractively groomed by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. “It was a clump of hair which has been described as looking like a doctored dog’s tail and looked extraordinary.”She added that if a female officer sported such a hairstyle, the officer would be told by a sergeant to “tidy it”.. “I do not wish to discuss the reasons why I was returned to uniform duty,” he said, “but I realised if I turned up at work with my hair in a style such as it was, it would not go unnoticed.”I had chosen to have my hair in that style as a matter of personal choice. But I received a disciplinary punishment which will stay on my record for four years.”PC Morris, whose hair is now cut in the a classic “short-back-and-sides”, says that his actions were spurred by strong beliefs in equality rather than by frustration at being forced back into uniform because of irregularities in the way he filled out his time-sheet.The hearing closed with the panel deciding to reserve its decision until a later date.Dinah Rose, a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police, said yesterday that PC Morris’s ponytail was untidy and unacceptable. She accepted, however, that a well-organised nursery school might be the best option if children had to be parted from their parents.. A policeman told an industrial tribunal yesterday that he knew he was breaking the rules when he wore his hair in a ponytail for uniformed duty.

Constable Graham Morris, 33, stationed at Marylebone, in central London, said he knew it “would not go unnoticed”.
An officer for 15 years, PC Morris claims he is the victim of sex discrimination because his superiors in the Metropolitan Police ordered him to cut off theponytail.He argues that under Equal Opportunity law he should be allowed to wear his hair long, like his female colleagues.On the third and final day of the London hearing, he said he decided to keep his hair long when he was returned to uniformed duty in November 1993 after working undercover with a pickpocket squad.The officer said that although he believed his hair was tidy, he knew the ponytail was in breach of the regulations. Mrs Holmes said that research over many years showed that the younger children were taken away from their mother or stand-in mother for many hours a day, the more likely they were to have problems later. Each member school formulates its own policy, taking account of Government rules on under-fives’ education.Rosemary Murphy, chair of the National Private Day Nurseries Association, disputes Mrs Holmes’ remarks in an article to be published tomorrow in the magazine Nursery World. She says: “Parents are not dumping children in nurseries but are using them because they are the best place for a child and ten hours happens to be the length of the working day.”The number of two-year-olds in independent nurseries went up by 27 per cent last year to 4,584, the biggest increase for any group. She has acted honourably and promptly and, as far as I am concerned, my high regard for her has not been at all diminished.”The letter points out that the association has no formal policy on the education of very young children.