Ireland says NO to abolishing mothers

Interestingly when asked to approve the murder of the unborn and pervert 'marriage', the Irish said 'yes', but they voted these amendments down.

From the Reactionary Feminist

By Marry Harrington

Last Friday, on International Women’s Day, the Irish people were encouraged to vote to remove explicit mention of mothers. The proposed constitutional amendment reworded in gender-neutral terms the statement that “the state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”.

Another amendment proposed to gender-neutralise the State’s obligation “to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

Indications are that the Irish people have voted in a landslide against this version of feminism: one Ireland’s taoiseach Leo Varadkar himself made clear he endorses. This vision claims it’s always and everywhere in women’s interests to be treated as interchangeable with men, and by extension that any (or no) family structure is as good as any other. On this model, explicit provision for women as distinct from men, on the basis of sex, is viewed s as “sexism” and “stereotype”, as in this statement on the Irish constitutional amendment issued by Ireland’s human rights commission.

This vision has been in the ascendant for a century, across the English-speaking world. It emerged from economies that industrialised much earlier than Ireland, and has been increasingly imposed on Ireland since that nation’s rapid industrialisation from 1960 onwards. Now, an Ireland that to date appeared to be helplessly speedrunning cyborg theocracy has voted overwhelmingly against “progress” understood as sameness. Is the pendulum swinging?

A glance at an England may shed some light. From the beginning of English industrialisation, as its social transformations upended agrarian family life, debate on “the woman question” was vigorous and ongoing. Over the 19th century, a consensus emerged in which women’s distinct contribution to the common good was understood to occupy a distinctly female “sphere”. This “sphere” was understood to include a power to raise the moral tone, to exert private influence on public men, and to raise and educate the next generation. At scale, women’s civic participation was undertstood to lie via philanthropy and public service.

Bourgeois female philanthropic organisations such as the Mothers’ Union, the Girls’ Friendly Society and the National Union of Women Workers mobilised women for such service. This was seen as both the civic duty of the upper classes to the lower, and also the proper role of bourgeois women relative to men: a matrix and hierarchy often explicitly framed as the scaled-up version of mothers’ contribution in the home.

With this in mind, it’s easier to understand the mindset within which the Irish constitution was drafted. What makes it an historical curiosity is the fact that a document written in 1937 makes explicit provision for a dualist view of the common good that was by then already rapidly disappearing across the water in England.

The pressures driving its disappearance are complex, but (ironically) include 19th century bourgeois female social reform work itself. These labours, usually explicitly maternalist in rationale, sought to relieve the far-reaching social disruption and squalor occasioned by rapid industrialisation. Then, as the 19th century wore on, women’s philanthropy grew gradually more institutionalised, and increasingly funded by the taxpayer. In turn this both undermined the case for public philanthropic maternalism as a key pillar of the common good, and also strengthened the one for women’s direct economic and political participation.

In this sense, it’s fitting that Ireland’s would-be modernisers should have chosen International Women’s Day for their effort to abolish the last constitutional vestige of “separate spheres”. For the original name for IWD was International Working Women’s Day, and it was first proposed in 1910 at an international conference of socialist women, by the German Marxist theorist and women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin. Called “the grandmother of German communism”, Zetkin’s aim was to promote women’s suffrage, and within it women’s equal participation in work and thus also union activism - all with the wider aim of promoting socialist transformation. It was, in other words, a day inaugurated in pursuit of women’s political agency and economic participation on the same terms as men. Logically, therefore, it also sought the nationalisation of women’s social and caring roles.

For as socialist feminists argued, if women are to enter the market the caring work previously viewed as women’s “sphere” must be addressed by some other means. The Marxist feminist Alexandra Kollontai, for example, showed how, in 1920, new modes of production had evacuated most of women’s productive work from the home. At the same time, she pointed out tha these changes had already forced working-class women from domestic productivity to factory labour. Under those circumstances, Kollontai argued, the only solution was communism, which would replace women’s residual private, domestic labour with a state-provided version of the same services. Cooking, childcare, laundry and so on could all be provided centrally, freeing women for leisure: “Communism liberates women from her domestic slavery and makes her life richer and happier.”

Progressive feminists in the capitalist West also imagined some mix of technology and social reorganisation could both make up the care shortfall working-class families already suffered, and liberate bourgeois women from the strictures of their “sphere”. The American 19th-century suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, argued in Women and Economics (1898) that the homes of the future would not need kitchens, as all domestic labour could and would be collectivised, liberating women for more useful and productive work.

And while neither Gilman’s nor Kollontai’s vision ever exactly materialised, it was ironically those women most committed to the Victorian dualist vision, and thus often most vehemently opposed to the feminism of sameness, who helped to build its prototype. For in time, what began as maternalist social reform gradually merged with taxpayer-funded state welfare. The English Victorian writer, philanthropist and anti-suffragist Mary Augusta Ward, for example, argued that women contributed best not via direct political participation through public, maternal-coded philanthropy in a sphere distinct from that of men. And one of her philanthropic works, a playscheme inaugurated in 1899 at the Passmore Edwards settlement, was so successful that in 1904 London County Council agreed to fund similar schemes through local taxes.

And this long, slow nationalisation of what English 19th century maternalists viewed as women’s distinctive contribution to common life eventually made arguments for women’s “separate sphere” seem increasingly redundant. (Ward came increasingly to advocate a women’s council adjacent to formal Parliament, to represent women’s voices in the political space.) At the same time, this shift reinforced the case for women’s direct political participation, as aspects of their erstwhile “sphere” came increasingly to fall within the remit of government.

State welfare - that is, the nationalisation of women’s erstwhile “sphere” - proceeded rapidly thereafter, through the twentieth century. From our vantage-point today, an Irish constitution drafted for a world where this was yet to occur - indeed one that in 1937 was still largely agrarian - might well seem a bizarre relic. Nursing, childcare, poor relief, public health, and campaigns for moral reform are now generally viewed as the state’s job. Why should women not see ourselves as functionally interchangeable with men?

Well, some aspects of being female are still irreducible: gestation being the obvious example. There’s also the matter of what women (especially mothers) prefer, where family balance is concerned. And - however you choose to explain this - women’s revealed preference remains stubbornly different, on average, from that of men. And the benefits to women of pretending otherwise were always ambivalent, as well as unevenly distributed.

As the Irish people clearly understand, better than their own leadership, the legal and political erasure of women’s sexed nature is not always and everywhere in women’s interests, especially where motherhood is concerned. I argued in the book that the pursuit of formal human interchangeability is long past the point of diminishing returns for women, and already cannibalising earlier feminist gains such as single-sex toilets and sports. An Ireland recently appalled by the routine housing of violent psychotic trans-identified men in the women’s prison estate has perhaps already had enough of scraping the barrel.

The women’s movement has always been at its most righteous when confronting too perfect an ideology with the complexities of women’s lived reality. Those women who challenged 19th-century bourgeois maternalism, for example, often did so from a first-hand grasp of its blind spots: the vulnerability of abused wives in an age before divorce or female property ownership, for example, or the double powerlessness of impoverished working women. Now, with the ideology of sameness seemingly triumphant across the developed world, I suspect the coming decades will see more of Ireland’s quiet resistance, as women respond ever more forcefully to new blind spots engendered by an over-emphasis on formal equality.

Feminists already challenge egalitarianism’s blindness to male-pattern violence and the ongoing real-world importance of our distinct physiologies. I think we’ll find ever more raising their voices for the distinctiveness of mothers as well. The women’s movement seemed inextricable from the pursuit of formal equality for a century. Now, perhaps change is in the air.