It is wonderful that young women take equality for granted, and yet deeply worrying
ANYONE TEMPTED to write off the positive impact of feminism should read the centre pages of The Irish Times'ssupplement, "Sisters – 40 Years of Change in the Lives of Irish Women", published this week.
Headlined “10 things an Irish woman could not do in 1970”, it makes scary reading. For example, she could not keep her job in the public service or bank when she married, refuse to have sex with her husband, or get a barring order against a violent partner. However, as someone who teaches teenage girls, I am aware that 1970 seems scarcely less remote to them than 1870.
It is wonderful that young women take equality for granted, and deeply worrying, because the battles are far from won. Some of the wrong battles may have been fought in the first place, with long-term consequences only becoming apparent decades later.
“Sisters” is fascinating in many ways, but for me, a comment by Dr Margaret MacCurtain raised some of the most interesting questions. She speaks about the gains of second-wave feminism.
She says post-modernism and post-feminism, followed by recession, have caused the gains of equality legislation to rapidly wither. “The speed with which Irish society succumbed to the attraction of unregulated wealth, accompanied by celebrity and ‘hyper-sexualised’ culture that targeted young people, demands explanation.” Indeed it does. Not that you can blame the women’s movement for the rush to unregulated wealth and celebrity culture. It played a small part, with no intention of doing so.
The first misstep was to emphasise economic independence as a prerequisite for full equality. Unless women earned and controlled their own money, the mantra ran, they would be second-class citizens.
As a child, I never thought it odd that my father did not own a wallet. When he went to the local village for messages, he pocketed my mother’s purse and used that. He is 93 this year, a traditional man in many ways, but it would never have occurred to him that simply because he was male he had a right to keep his wife in an economic stranglehold.
By defining independence by what a person earns, the whole value of interdependence waned. So did the value of unwaged work. The work of care became more and more devalued.
Instead of increasing women’s choices, accompanied by changes in men’s lifestyles, women earned the right to grow ulcers trying to juggle paid work with everything else. Wealth became ever more important as a success marker.
Then there was the great mantra of the women’s movement, a woman’s right to choose. Perhaps the thing that alienated women from feminism more than anything else was the insistence that you could not be a real feminist without being pro-choice. For very good reasons, more women than men are anti-abortion. Women experience profound unease about something which pits the rights of women against the right to be born in the first place.
Look where normalising abortion has led us. In a March 4th article, "The War on Baby Girls", the Economistsaid "Women are missing in their millions – aborted, killed, neglected to death". The Economistidentifies as causes "the ancient preference for sons; a modern desire for smaller families; and ultrasound scanning and other technologies that identify the sex of a foetus". In China and India, girls are aborted at phenomenal rates. How ironic that in the West, abortion was seen as essential to women's liberation. It is now being used for what the Economistcalls "gendercide". See www.stopgendercidenow.com.
The early women’s movement was intellectually confused. There was an underlying motif of women’s moral superiority. But Thatcher and other examples illustrate that a world ruled by women is not necessarily better.
At the same time as asserting women’s superiority, there was a ferocious denial of differences between the sexes. But you can’t have it both ways. Women cannot be the gentler, nicer, more just sex, and be considered exactly the same as men, aside from insidious gender programming.
It is true that gender roles are socially constructed, to a large extent. In 1975, what innate aspect of women rendered them incapable of sitting on a jury, for example?
Another curious side-effect of the claim of no significant gender differences was that sexual behaviours associated primarily with males became the norm for both sexes. Hence the “hyper-sexualised” culture MacCurtain refers to.
Ironic, that more independence and choice would lead to young women often dressing and acting like the male fantasy figures of pre-feminist times.
As I have often said, we sure as heck would not go back. But how do we go forward? Two trends of the early 21st century, of higher spiritual consciousness and a burgeoning Green movement provide some clues. Nothing focuses the mind like imminent disaster. In less-developed areas of the world, it is women and children who already suffer most from effects of climate change.
By trying to live more spiritually developed lives, with more sustainable ways to share this planet, perhaps we can move towards a truly human way of living together. That was the aim of feminism in the first place.