Back to the home we will not go!

As the resurgence of feminism is overshadowed by the depths of the financial crisis and global recession, Angela Nagle draws attention to the attempts to roll back the advances and improvements made by women over generations and sounds the alarm on the forced return of women to the home.

Just over a year ago, around the time of the release of Natasha Walter's Living Dolls, an inexplicable resurgence in feminism saw the issue make headlines and become part of mainstream political discussion for the first time in over two decades. After a long exile brought on by a successful media backlash and prolonged by relative economic prosperity, feminism was welcomed back with open arms by excited but somewhat baffled feminists. I recall a rather giddy Susan McKay explaining to a packed audience at last year's International Women's Day event held by the National Women's Council that they had to pull back a wall partition to expand the meeting room to almost twice the size and ask many to stand at the back because of the unexpectedly large numbers of people in attendance. Soon after, young women who were completely unknown in feminist or left-wing circles had set up popular feminist social networking groups in Dublin, Belfast and Cork and seemed to be totally unaffected by the stigma that had forced so many of us into the feminism closet for the previous two decades.

Then, just as that was peaking, and in the context of a global dowturn, the Tories came to power in Britain and in Ireland the realities of recession, the bank guarantee and the extent to which we were absolutely fucked economically all started to come to light. While this resurgence of feminism has by no means gone away or run out of steam, understandably, it appeared to have been somewhat overshadowed at that point.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that the sudden defensiveness about women's rights was a warning of things to come, because with all economic recessions, as with this one, women and the advances and improvements that had been made in women's lives were about to come under attack and the time for playful but complacent 'post-feminism' was over.

Since the beginning of the recession, Dublin Well Woman Centre has reported an increase in women seeking crisis pregnancy counselling, with one in five citing financial concerns. Chief executive Alison Begas listed among these concerns unemployment, debt and the inability to afford crèche fees. This situation has, unsurprisingly, also been directly linked to an increase in Irish women seeking abortion illegally in the UK. For employed women who have chosen to have children during these turbulent times, UNITE trade union have reported a sharp increase in the abuse of Irish women in the workplace, especially around issues of maternity cover, with pregnant employees being verbally abused and told they would be replaced. For unemployed women who have chosen to have children during these turbulent times, the situation is also grim, with social welfare and child benefit being cut, the cost of education being increased and the chances of remaining in the home and falling permanently into a cycle of poverty rising by the day. Dublin Rape Crisis Centre reported a 42% rise in calls to their now even more under-funded emergency helpline in 2009 and refuges from domestic violence have noted an increase in demand for their services of over 40%. Women's Aid have found themselves only able to answer one out of two calls because of a lack of resources and 70% of Irish women who reported being victims of domestic abuse cited economic dependence as the reason why they could not leave.

It is in the context of all this, with a pitiful 25 female TDs out of 166 convening in the new Dáil, the majority male government which has accepted without question the directives of the ECB and IMF, has rebelled against them on only one piece of economic advice; that women's equality and inclusion in the labour market should be prioritised in a recession because it would be central to economic recovery. Europe advised: 'Gender equality is not only a question of diversity and social fairness, it is also a precondition for meeting the objectives of sustainable growth, employment, competitiveness and social cohesion. Gender equality policies should therefore be considered as a long term investment and not as a short term cost.' From Waterloo Bridge to the American manufacturing industry during WW2, governments have a rich history of completely changing their attitudes to gender when it suits the economy, celebrating women's work one minute and forcing them back into the home the next, but in this particular case they know that it doesn't even make good economic sense to do so, proving that they would rather damage the economy further at such an unforgivable cost to women's lives than to allow the indignity of a female-led recovery.

Our choice now is either to get back onto the streets or get back into the home

It is also in this context that 'pro-life' activists have moved their usual hysteria up to an even more odious level. Last month a member of the Marie Stopes pregnancy counselling clinic had to be escorted from NUI Maynooth campus amid fears of attack from pro-life protesters. The representative was on campus because of Sexual Health Awareness and Guidance (SHAG) week. The pro-life lobby, like most institutions in Ireland, is headed primarily by a bunch of old men who, either privately or publicly, don't think too highly of female empowerment. Presumably, at some point, in debates or newspaper articles, life-long members of these pro-life groups must have encountered the facts. Greater access to contraception and greater sex education substantially reduces abortion rates; criminalising abortion does not. With this and their lack of concern for pregnant women's dire economic situation and its direct correlation to abortion rates, the pro-life lobby cannot be said to be anti-abortion in any honest or rational sense but are simply acting out a deeply embedded Catholic cultural neurosis, based on the idea that the only appropriate atonement for female sexual enjoyment is the pain of childbirth. The Catholic right used it to justify the sexual, psychological and physical abuse of perfectly innocent women in the Magdelene laundries, they used it to keep Irish women in a constant state of pregnancy and as a direct result, poverty, for generations and now under the guise of 'pro-life' harass and bully young women on college campuses and on O'Connell street with images designed to make women feel ashamed. It is hard to think of a category of person in Irish society with less legitimate claim to moral authority that these people. Right when they should feel deeply ashamed, they only feel emboldened.

What we are witnessing in Ireland today is nothing less than a forced return of women to the home that DeValera and Archbishop McQuaid would have approved of. In 1937 they enshrined into the Irish constitution, and it still remains today, 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' and 'the State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.' With over one third of single mothers living below the poverty line and women being punished for being employed or unemployed, having children or seeking abortions, the agenda which threatens women today is in fact a step beyond the misogyny which was central to the foundation of the Irish state. It punishes women no matter what choice they make and it marries old fashioned sexism with a distinctly neoliberal kind, which pats women on the head for their 'flexible' work ethic while using the very same ideological framework to make them vulnerable to recession, easier to exploit and ultimately, more likely to live and die in poverty.

With a taste of economic independence and greater levels of freedom and education behind them than any previous generation, the Irish women who came of age during the Celtic Tiger find themselves with all that potential, that confidence and that readiness for change, and now with no future and nothing left to lose. Our choice now is either to get back onto the streets or get back into the home.

[Image top via x-ray delta one on Flickr]