WOMEN IN IRISH SOCIETY

Women in Irish Society

Role of Women in Irish Society

Introduction

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute”

This quote, spoken almost a century ago, is still relevant in the Ireland of the new Millennium and even the roaring of the Celtic Tiger cannot drown it out. Women can vote, can serve as jurors, judges, TD's or Taoiseach. Equal pay is protected under legislation. We have certain rights to maternity leave. We have equal access to education, we can study honours maths and physics at school, we can become engineers and are encouraged to take FAS courses in electronics. There is EC grant money aimed at women setting up in business. The Civil Service marriage bar was abolished in 1972. Contraception is more readily available. There are radio programmes, feature articles, government ministers and Oireachtas bodies specifically aimed at women's affairs. Most sport clubs are open to women. We can hold property in our own right, we don't need our husbands permission to get a bank loan, we are allowed into pubs and can drink pints, just like men.

In other words, a lot of the institutionalised oppression that women such as my mother would have argued against in the 1960's has disappeared.

Discussion

Yet it is also obvious that women are still far from equal. For the majority of us, our right to choose the way of life we wish to lead is as limited as it has always been. Rather than being liberated, we are still tied by virtue of our poor wage earning abilities to the home and family. A study recently published in Fortune magazine indicated that the leading occupations for women in 1990 weren't so different from the top jobs for 1940. The average hourly earnings of woman are still 68% of those of men. In hard cash terms, men earn on average, £1.83 more per hour than women do.

Women's work is still seen as that of 'love labour', that of working in the home raising a family and taking care of the housework without pay. Men on the other hand are seen as the breadwinners, their work is paid labour. Their job is to go out into paid employment and provide for their family.

There are two knock on effects of women staying a home minding the family. Firstly they are not financially independent. They do not earn any money and are dependent on income received from their partners. Because nobody gets paid for rearing a family it's status as an occupation is at the bottom of the ladder and because women are dependant financially for money on their husband it means they in the past have had less input into the decisions affecting the family resulting in no input into the decisions affecting society. A woman's place was in the home. A second effect of women's position in the ...