Jennifer Horgan: It is an injustice that women are still told what they should do

But as Terry Prone correctly points out this week, people rarely listen to what they should feel, or think, or do. And yet, at its core, this article is a giant should in the life of every woman.

Women still feel they should be at home and/or with their children. I still feel this way. I am made to feel it when I’m automatically invited onto school WhatsApp groups, and my husband is not.

I’m made to feel it when listening to female friends chronicling their 700 trips a week to pick up and drop off their children, their daily trials and tribulations that seem, so often, to occur in the absence of men.

I should be doing the same, society tells me. Because I am a woman.

The same article lurks in the male-dominated corridors of power, in the absence of women in political and public life. It lurks in the decision made by Holly Cairns this week to close her constituency office in West Cork to avoid further abuse and intimidation.

Women should stay at home. Holly Cairns should stick to her primary duties and be satisfied by them.

In reality, there was only ever a small cohort of women for whom the article functioned well, middle-class women who married to stay at home and have children. It worked okay for my mother who stayed at home to mind us four whilst my father, a good man with the privilege of an education, went out and earned an income.

But my home was not like every home in twentieth-century Ireland.

There were homes wherein women felt frustrated and unsatisfied. In other homes, good men failed to materialise, and when they left, drank, squandered their income, brutalised their dependents, women had no power and even less choice.

Many working-class women were forced to seek labour beyond the home, with restricted options of course, and were made to feel guilt and shame for doing so. 

For decades, when a man was unemployed, a wife got welfare payments through him. Women, often left with nothing, were nonetheless expected to manage “their duties in the home”.

As former Labour Party politician Kathleen Lynch explained to me this week: “The consignment of women to economic dependency on men, without any independent welfare entitlement, was a sign of the deep patriarchal thinking at the heart of the State.

“The Constitution of 1937 consolidated the enforced domesticity and impoverishment of women.”

Conversely, Catholic commentator Maria Steen, writing for the Irish Times in 2022, described this forced domesticity for all women in glowing, fuzzy, unicorn and rainbow terms, declaring “the universal truth that a woman makes a house a home”, adding that “the work she does in creating a supportive, nurturing environment for her family is beyond price. Its value is such that the State could never afford to pay for it”.

The word should looms large, and there are so many questions in the folds of it.

If a woman is too busy to ‘make a house a home’ is she a bad woman? If a man stays at home is he any less man?

Women recognised the should element of our Constitution when it was being drafted by Catholic men all those decades ago. The Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers in 1936, comprising sixteen women organisations wrote to, and eventually met, Éamon de Valera to make their feelings against the Constitution clear. They also argued against the marriage bar, introduced over a decade earlier, which forced women to give up work in the civil service upon marriage.

That was then. This is now. And now, the Constitution is even more uniformly detrimental to women, not just poor women.

The notion, and I can only bring myself to call it a notion, not a fully formed idea — the notion that we should keep the reference to a woman’s “life within the home”, to reflect the work she continues to do, is idiotic. It is most often a woman who cleans and minds the children, but there is rarely any choice involved. It is also true that Traveller children continue to be disproportionally failed by our education system. Should we put that into our Constitution? Dress it up as recognition?

It is an injustice that women are still being told what they should do. I could share all the statistics of how unfairly care work is distributed both inside and outside the home, but it is as clear as the nose on your face. But it does not follow that it should be this way, or indeed that it should stay this way. And it most certainly does not follow that we need an article in our Constitution to make it seem okay and equal when it is neither okay nor equal.

A woman of particular means may choose to work in the home, and good on her. It is one part of the most important work on the planet. I would never tell a person what they should do based on biological sex.

But for many, staying at home is not feasible. Or, it is simply not what they want to do. And so women work outside the home and they juggle. Within some couples, the load is shared. In most homes, where both partners work, it is not. And this load is particularly unmanageable for single parents, who are, yes, you’ve guessed it, predominantly female.

And let us be clear about it, all this article ever did was offer a sort of watery consolation in the absence of practical supports. That is the point ‘No’ voters gloss over. This is the crux of the matter. The article rests on the erroneous assumption that women can and indeed should manage all house and care work, whilst offering no real supports to make that possible. It is an insult.

Nobody wants to be told what they should do, think or feel. But we must recognise that this article screams the word should.

And even though Brigid, born with her mother’s feet both inside and outside the home, shows us that a woman can be anything, the Constitution says something very different — it only screams the word should at women.