The current chatter would have you believe that the reference in the Constitution to the value of women’s work in the home was inserted by those seeking to do women down when the document was finalised in 1937.
However, there is an intriguing reference in Ríona Nic Congáil’s biography of Úna Ní Fhaircheallaigh (Úna Ní Fhairceallaigh agus an Fhís Útóipeach Ghaelach) to the fact that the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU) did not back the opposition to the inclusion of Articles 41 and 42 in Bunreacht na hÉíreann.
The reason for that was because many of the members of the union believed that it was right that women could work in the home rather than in the sort of jobs occupied by IWWU members.
Nic Congáil was referring to a paper written by Maria Leddy for the Royal Historical Society in 2004 on the opposition to the Constitution from feminists. The Constitution was approved by plebiscite in December 1937 by more than 56%.
Those opposed were a mixed bag of republicans who rejected any notion of a 26 county state, others who wished to retain the constitutional connection to the United Kingdom, and Free Staters who would have voted against Dev if he proposed that there were 7 days in the week.
Leddy explained that the IWWU’s decision to withdraw from the public campaign led by middle class women’s groups such as the Women’s Graduate Association was due to their satisfaction in persuading De Valera to amend the draft proposals to a now largely-overlooked provision, Article 45, which reads that “citizens shall not be forced by economic necessity to enter avocations unsuited to their sex, age or strength”. This Article had previously stated that only “women and children” be thus protected.
Leddy’s reading of this is that what was “crucial to the position of the IWWU was that Louie Bennett, the leader of the IWWU, and many women trade unionists, believed that women’s place was in the home and Bennett, like de Valera, believed that male breadwinners should earn enough to allow wives to remain in the home.”
In addition, according to Victoria White in The Examiner, UCG historian Caitriona Clear, said that Article 41.2 was “never intended to confine women in the home” and that “Dev got annoyed when anyone suggested it did”.
“Its insertion was inspired by the work of the US feminist Ivy Pinchbeck who wrote movingly about the conditions of young mothers in factories,” she wrote.
This reality – that many women would prefer the choice and the right to raise their children at home – is something that appears to have been lost sight of by the modern left, much of it divorced from its own origins within the working-class movement. I knew older women of the 1930s who I would feel fairly safe in stating that not one of them would have preferred that their daughters would have had to work from the age of 12 or 13 on farms and in factories rather than to remain in school to 15 or 16 or older.
Nor would my grandmother have preferred to have remained working in Jacobs biscuit factory alongside her sisters and father and mother rather than be married, have her own home and just about enough to raise a family in the wilds of Drimnagh. That was all part of the “progress” that the left evinces to cherish above all things.
Women and girls being able to have the same educational opportunities as boys and men is also part of that progress – as is women being able to attain jobs and be paid on an equal basis. None of this was ever impeded by the current Constitutional provisions proposed to be deleted. We might also question too whether the fact that most working households under a certain age have to have two incomes in order to pay for their own home, whether bought or rented, is “progress.”
Perhaps the contemporary left might even dust off, or in most cases read for the first time, the classics of their own icons. Karl Marx was, in common with racing tipsters, a poor predictor of future events. He was, however, a reasonably good economic historian and in Capital he sets out the reasons why the capitalists were anxious to employ women and children.
In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels had noted that “the more modern industry become developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women… All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.” The family, which had become the basis of western Christian civilisation along with all other “reactionary” customs, was a barrier to that.
The disintegration of society under the forces of primitive capitalism was averted in the west by the resilience of those traditions and of Christian and civic culture. Part of that culture allowed the grievances of working people to be expressed in trade union organisation and through democratic politics. The 1937 Constitution reflected those rights imperfectly as stated in Catholic social teaching.
Marx, paradoxically one might think, welcomed all that was destructive in the Behemoth of Capital because the “immiserisation of the proletariat” was an unfortunate but necessary stage on the journey towards the inevitable revolution and the equally inevitable victory of socialism on the way to “full communism.” His latter-day heirs, despite all the horrors that have bookended the total discrediting of such mystical nonsense, still hold to one thing.
That is that the destruction of every traditional bond of family, nation, community and culture is to be greeted as another step on the road to societal collapse out of whose ruins they will crawl like cockroaches. Cockroaches who will then reveal themselves as the architects of a Better World.
They won’t, any more than actual cockroaches transform into butterflies. All that matters to them in any debate and given any choice is that one road invariably and inevitably is the road to ‘Progress’. Thus, the elimination of the offending sections of the Constitution next weekend will mark another notch on the tally stick of ‘Change.’
A concept that seemingly exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination of contemporary Ireland that the largest opposition party, indeed the largest party in the country, thought that endlessly parroting this word would be sufficient to ensure its inexorable path to power. Who could be against ‘Change’? Only oul reactionaries.
The thing about change is that despite the Pollyanna belief that it is always for the good, it is not.
Thus, while the current proposal to further amend the Constitution has its origins in a combination of wishing to keep the feelgood Virtue Aspidistra flying it may have unintended consequences. It will not make one whit of a difference to the lives of women, nor do anything in practical terms to address the real concerns of working women.
What it may do is further undermine what remains of any traditional conception of the family: the concept that united De Valera and the Dublin working class members of the Irish Women Workers Union. The concept whose destruction was the apple of the eye of every totalitarian from Lenin and Hitler to Pol Pot and Mao.
The reality of the destruction of the family can be seen in the Clockwork Orange ghettoes of every large and not so large western city. The one almost invariable constant in every metric of that disintegration is the absence of anything resembling a functional family in the histories of most of the mainly male criminals who are vanguard of the societal collapse fondly imagined by the Prophet of the British Reading Room and actively pursued by his disciples.
When unsure of what changing something might mean, and when there are no practical benefits from doing so, then it is wise to reflect on whether it might be the best option.