Madam, - I regret that my brief response to a question on women's equality in a recent wide-ranging interview has apparently given rise to some confusion and controversy. I am grateful to Mary Raftery, Gemma Hussey and others who understood the point I wished to make but did not make clearly enough.
My long-held view is that the women's movement should value the lives and choices of all women. It should expressly value the child-rearing, home-making and care-giving roles which women substantially fulfil and which society as a whole has consistently undervalued. At the same time, if the 21st century is to be the century when women play a leadership role at all levels, women must be supported and encouraged in career choices which enable them to reach positions of leadership in society.
The trend now observed in the US is not about the individual choice of a well-qualified woman to elect to stay at home with her young children, a choice we must continue to value and support. It is about the wider pressures which young women graduating from schools of law, business, medicine, etc tell me about - pressures that lead them to conclude that their only realistic option is to give up their professional or business jobs when they have children and perhaps return later to part-time work, or in some cases full-time careers.
The "cop-out" I referred to - but I acknowledge did not explain - is a cop-out by a number of women and men who appear to accept as inevitable an anti-social and anti-family work environment.
The equality struggle for those women and men is to seek to influence the competitive bias towards longer hours and shorter holidays of our globalising world; and for more men consciously to embrace a larger responsibility for child rearing and home-making so that these enriching experiences do not become a burden falling so heavily on women who continue to pursue their careers. There is a danger that work pressures together with ideological pressures in the US today will reinforce gender stereotyping instead of encouraging women to fulfil their true potential.
Doubtless the debate on this issue will continue. It is an issue which all our societies need to discuss more fully. - Yours, etc,
MARY ROBINSON, New York, USA.