The jungle drums are beating in my neighbourhood. It started on Wednesday night. Women started phoning other women. They were frighteningly practical.

"What are we going to do?" they asked.

And the strategy wasn't long coming. Join Women in the Home - that dignified group won't know what hit it. Phone Mildred Fox. Find lists of people who will phone Mildred Fox. Phone every woman TD in the area.

These of course are women "in the home", women who the motherland needs "back at work". Well, they are at work all right but in not quite the way that Charlie McCreevy and his colleagues intended.

My neighbours are not a cowed lot. It is not lack of confidence that is keeping them at home. They are a highly skilled bunch, some had intimidatingly high-earning, high-status jobs before they decided to stay at home. Years of nappies and sleep deprivation have not blunted their acuity.

And they are hopping mad.

They are not dumb. They are digesting the information that the Economic and Social Research Institute, usually on the side of the angels in matters of social advance, had recommended something akin to the measure introduced in the Budget which discriminates in favour of two-income households.

But what these women see is that now a neighbour down the street with no children and two incomes will pay less tax than a family with however many children on the same single income. And more importantly, what they hear is the language being used about them - they are to go "back to work".

What are we doing now, they ask? If this is not work, what is? They think of their tedious hours sorting washing, steering trolleys around supermarkets, cleaning house, cooking meals. And then they think of the real reason why they gave up paid employment for this, this nurturing role - their children: the four-month old who is still feeding at the breast, the 15-month old who is learning to walk and must be watched every minute, the five-year old who is struggling with that first term in junior infants.

Some of them have taken on an even wider nurturing role: caring for ailing parents or the children of employed siblings. Some are the kind of dynamos around whom whole neighbourhoods revolve: they are raising funds for the under-funded national school, helping out at the youth club, attempting to educate the local dog-owners on poop-scooping.

These women have taken a conscious decision at this time in their lives, not necessarily for all time, to drop income - in some cases very substantially - and to value their children's early years above all else.

Some of them might have chosen differently had the world of paid employment been more accommodating to their families' needs, had they or their spouse had the option of flexible and reduced hours in those early vital years of child development. Now they are being told - stay at home and you will drop income again in relative terms. And what they are hearing is: this society does not value what you are doing or accept the validity of the decision you have made. The interesting question is how precisely does society benefit if all these women with young children go into paid employment. Well, they can return to their previous jobs as teachers, nurses, corporate financiers, civil servants (this is, I confess, a middle-class neighbourhood). The Budget will reward them, and with these rewards they will then seek other women to employ to clean their houses, care for their children, nurse their mothers. Those women will be earning too, and all these incomes will be counted in the great national statistics and we will all be richer because GNP will have gone up.

That is the theory. Of course it is a nonsense and all it shows is the limitations of national statistics. Why on earth should we be richer as a society because young babies are cared for by some one other than their parents? And more importantly, is this the best thing for the babies? Fine, if a mother can't wait to get back to the job she trained for and loves, fine if she can organise first-class alternative care. But every mother? Whatever her deepest desires?

This debate won't go away. We have reached a crossroads about how we view children and childcare and how we value the nurturing role.

Older women remember the 1940s when the men came back from war. In the western world, women were thanked for their efforts in the munitions factories and told the boys needed the jobs. In the 1950s women were packed off home.

In that dismissal lay the roots of the women's liberation movement of the next 20 years. Women fought long and hard for equality, for the right to work - and by that, they meant paid employment. But through the 1970s and particularly in the 1980s they realised that they were in a new kind of trap, in a straitjacket of working hours designed for men with wives at home, and that they, their children and their marriages were suffering. A growing number of women who could afford to do so voted with their feet and left the paid labour force.

They are not going to walk right back in now and certainly not on the terms that are being offered. Women's liberation has succeeded in this: women value what they do, whatever it is. Their current battle is to have society value it.

Penelope Leach in her controversial book Children First quoted a 1992 British Gallup Poll in which two-thirds of mothers said only economic necessity prevented them from staying at home to care for their pre-school children. A survey the same year in the US found that almost 80 per cent of American women wished it were possible for them to care full-time for their very young children.

Over the last week before the Budget, in casual conversation, two women told me independently that they would go into paid employment if they could get part-time work so they could care for their families the rest of the time. One investigated her local supermarket - only full-time work on offer. The other was qualified for administrative work in a university which is crying out for staff but won't offer part-time work.

The choice for our society is not between a return to de Valera's Ireland and a wholehearted embrace of the world of full employment. It is between two visions of modernity.

In one, every woman is in paid full-time employment and every child from three months of age is in full-time childcare. In the alternative vision and the one which I would argue is the more modern, not to say enlightened, children and especially very young children are so valued that the role of nurturing them, by whichever parent, is fostered by the State and employers.

Of course, typically, the Budget went neither route. The first would have required a huge investment in childcare places to truly free women from the home. The second would have required civilised, Swedish-style parental leave for the first two years of life, followed by the introduction of flexible working arrangements in addition to the funding of a State-wide nursery-school system. There are many combinations of measures like increases in child benefit which could have been introduced to show how this society values the rearing of children but, of course, that is not what the Budget was about.

The Budget's misogynistic effort to recruit female cannon fodder is of a piece with its irresponsible and inflationary tax-cutting for the rich at a time of boom and its failure to tackle homelessness. What the Budget was about was an unthinking pursuit of growth without counting the cost to society.

Maev-Ann Wren is a former Economics Editor of The Irish Times.