‘Before Article 41.2 is deleted, let us face the honest truth about the “woman in the home”: it was never more than window-dressing’

But before Article 41.2 is deleted, let us face the honest truth about this famous affirmation: it was never more than window-dressing, or what my Galway aunts would call “ráméis” — eyewash. The “woman in the home” was not honoured by the Irish State: she was ignored. The “housewife”, as she came to be called, was seldom esteemed or respected, and rarely, if ever, thanked for the contribution that she made to “the common good”. Once in a while, maybe, a politician might cock an ear to “the housewives’ vote” — maybe the price of bread or children’s shoes would get an airing — but otherwise, the “woman in the home” didn’t carry much heft.

Even organisations which purported to represent the “woman in the home”, such as the Irish Housewives Association, founded by the formidable Hilda Tweedy in the 1940s, tended to campaign as much for women outside the home as inside it — equal pay, jury service, consumer rights, the promotion of woman police officers, were among its admirable causes.

Other organisations, such as Nora Bennis’s Women Working at Home in the 1990s, just petered out, while WITH — Women in the Home, founded by Áine Uí Ghiollagáin, has become a group for carers’ rights, Cúram.

Carers’ rights are a good cause, and will probably replace the offending “woman in the home” article. But this obscures the point that the woman who was not in paid employment, but stayed at home to support her spouse and family, had very little status. Stalin awarded mothers of large families “Mother Heroine” medals (the “Order of Maternal Glory”): maybe a cynical ploy to increase population, but at least there was some formal recognition that such a person as a “heroic mother” existed.

I knew those mothers in my Dublin childhood: the brave and valiant women who raised large families in small houses in Ringsend and Rialto; who scrimped, sacrificed to put food on the table; battled for their families; nursed disabled children and defended them like tigresses — so magnificently portrayed, even embodied, by Brenda Fricker in the My Left Foot, the story of Christy Brown. The doctor who first treated Christy only did so because of the dogged valour of his mother’s fierce love.

But, wrote Victoria White in a book of lacerating anger and frustration, Mother Ireland: Why Ireland Hates Motherhood, women who stay at home to care for their families are second-class citizens. She correctly fingers my generation of feminists — coming of age in the 1970s — for this hostility to women who are home-makers. June Levine called the home “the housewife’s cage” and marriage “slavery”: every woman should be out at work in paid employment.

And that, wrote Vicky White, has been the aim and policy of the Irish State and economy ever since — especially promoted by the EU, which regards stay-at-home mothers as an anachronism to be corrected by all means possible. “Gender equality” means “paid employment”, and women who are not in paid employment are a problem and an obstruction. The Lisbon Strategy spelled this out: women should be in paid jobs outside the home, whatever their own preference. Childcare must be provided so as to reach the target of getting all women into the workforce.

When De Valera wrote the “woman in the home” article into the Constitution, Ireland was still an overwhelmingly agricultural society, and paradoxically, women involved in farming life probably did enjoy, at least in some instances, domestic respect and status. The renowned Harvard anthropologists Arensberg and Kimball may have had a somewhat rosy view of Irish country life in the 1930s, but they were probably accurate in portraying the Irish family farm as basically a co-operative, where men and women had to work together and respect each other’s contribution to that “common good”. 

Women at home lost status with suburbanisation: the man was out in the world earning a pay packet: the woman was the passive recipient at home, dependent on “a good husband”. (Children’s allowances weren’t due to the mother until 1974). The good husband duly shared his wages, but the skinflint might have to be humoured.

The social agenda, in the later 20th century, has been getting women out of the home, with little recognition of the contribution the home-maker made to “the common good”. Before we move on, this should be acknowledged. Yet, perhaps the pandemic has nudged us towards more awareness of that contribution, as women working from home have had to take on the lioness’s share of the “common good” which sustains home, and work, life.