Jill O'Sullivan: 'I don’t see myself reflected in Article 41'
Assistant The Jill (legal) Is Irish O'sullivan Editor Examiner With
I’m voting Yes for the Care Amendment (Article 41) - here’s why.
What even are my “duties within the home”? Our Constitution doesn’t list them, so I’ll make a leap here and assume they include personally feeding, watering and clothing the kids, keeping the house dusted, gleaming, well-ordered and something about the husband – let’s say feeding and watering again, dosing him with Vit D through winter and what-not.
I agree the provision of food, shelter, clothing and other basics for our children are among parenting’s first duties - and all are achieved by me through paid work outside the home. I’ve had the luck and opportunity to be in paid work for over 25 years, and for 15 of these I’ve also been a parent. Providing for the kids is not the only reason I work, but it sure is a massive part of how I parent.
The fully grown-up husband feeds and waters himself and makes his own GP appointments. He bought the kids’ school shoes last week and mostly cooks the dinners; I do the parent-teacher meets and mostly organise the washing. I'm fairly confident this mish-mash of who does what describes many thousands of families today.
Finally on duties within the home, if having a sparkling house is a duty for anyone, it shouldn't be so easy to have extremely low standards. Like, it’s not as if anyone’s checking. And even if they were, I don’t accept a woman has any more responsibility for cleaning that home than the other adults living in it. She may care more – I know some (not all) women do – and there may be conflict around the fairness of who does what, but I’ll take those rows any day over a ‘duty’ to do it all myself.
I don’t see myself or almost any of the women I know reflected in Article 41. Most are in paid work and juggling everything else with their partners.
So, if it’s not about me and most of those I know, maybe the Constitution got it right for the previous generation of women?
My mother was six-years-old when the Constitution was written, and died this year at 92. She trained as a nurse, specialised in midwifery and did the exact job depicted in Call The Midwife, cycling around post-war London delivering babies in women’s homes. She came home to north Cork to take up hospital nursing and, once married at 29, was forced by the marriage bar to jack it in.
It's not clear to me what benefits accrued to my mother by the Constitution’s recognition of her “life within the home”. But I know she loved midwifery and theatre nursing, and the marriage bar took that choice from her. She accepted this as the reality and norm of the time, and gamely took on her domestic career. Even so, is it unreasonable to think that the Constitution’s special recognition for a woman’s ‘life within the home’ helped create an underpinning logic for the marriage bar and other laws – including tax laws - that penalised a woman in paid work?
I’m voting Yes because I prefer our Constitution – our national statement of reality, mission and intent - to fully include the women, families and society I recognise. It can and should respect and recognise women who work full-time in the home. But not only them. Not any more.
- Jill O'Sullivan is Assistant Editor (Legal) with the Irish Examiner. Her day-to-day work touches three particular areas of law - defamation, copyright and data protection. Her background is in journalism, especially in digital publishing and breaking news.