The Return of the Housewife

Five years ago the people of Ireland voted, through a referendum, to allow some legal abortions. The procedure is still not as easily available as its proponents would like, but there is more to women’s rights than abortion rights.

Take the issue of liberating women from the obligation to make homes. The advent of second wave feminism saw a general revulsion about the role of housewife. Women read Betty Friedan and threw off the shackles that bound them to their stoves and their laundries. 

The result, dare we mention it, was a slew of broken homes. And, fewer people were getting married. The new customs threated the nuclear family, as it had never been before. Apparently, American people and people in most of the Western world had overcome their misogyny and no longer saw women as potential or actual housewives. 

Women were free to pursue their careers and household chores would be divided equally between spouses. A new era had dawned. Hallelujah!

Or so we all believed, until we read a column in the Financial Times, by Pilita Clark. She was reporting on a referendum that took place in Ireland, regarding female equality. Referendum proponents wanted to scrap Ireland’s constitutional affirmation of women’s place in the home. No more would housewifery be written into the nation’s constitution. I imagine that you did not know that it had been so inscribed.

Now, you would have thought that the enlightened inhabitants of the Emerald Isle would have rejected misogyny and embraced the new language. In fact, however, they did not. They voted to keep the constitution as it was. Clark calls it a blow against female equality. 

This month, the people of Ire­land did something shock­ing. They voted over­whelm­ingly not to boost female equal­ity. On March 8, Inter­na­tional Women’s Day, a resound­ing 73.9 per cent voted against chan­ging a part of their 87-year-old con­sti­tu­tion that in effect says a woman’s place is in the home.

The offend­ing sec­tion declares: “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.

“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”.

I cannot tell you what the polls were predicting. I cannot tell you about the public debate in the media or on social media. 

In any case, Clard adds that the Irish public also rejected 

a more woke redefinition of marriage:

Voters were asked to scrap this archaic guff and approve a new clause say­ing the state would aim to sup­port care­giv­ing “by mem­bers of a fam­ily to one another”. But voters did not.

A slew of explan­a­tions have been offered for the biggest No vote in Irish ref­er­en­dum his­tory. There were fears the change would cement the idea that caring is an unpaid fam­ily respons­ib­il­ity with no guar­an­tee of state sup­port. The amend­ment was tricky to explain. The Yes cam­paign was uneven.

And 67.7 per cent of voters also rejec­ted a sep­ar­ate amend­ment that would have recog­nised fam­il­ies were based on “dur­able rela­tion­ships”, not just mar­riage.

In any event, the Irish people voted for traditional marriage. It does not seem like a freakish accident. It happens at a moment when young American women are rediscovering the role of wife, which they call being tradwives.

This is more than passing strange.

Now, Clark considers that the issue is equal rights. One might also suggest that the issue is the traditional household division of labor. Recall that Emile Durkheim argued in his book, The Division of Labor in Society more than a century ago, that marriages needed a division of labor in order to function.

Are we living a reaction against feminism? The movement against it seems to have taken root around the world. It’s not just about Ireland.

When it comes to giv­ing women equal rights with men, a sober­ing 53 per cent now think things have gone far enough in their coun­try, up from 42 per cent in 2019. The swing is evid­ent from Thai­l­and and Peru to Sweden and the UK. Nearly half the Brit­ish pop­u­la­tion agree it is job done on women’s equal­ity — up from less than a third who thought that five years ago. Worse, 47 per cent of Brits think we’ve done so much to pro­mote women’s equal­ity that we are dis­crim­in­at­ing against men. A sim­ilar share thinks that way in Ire­land (45 per cent) and glob­ally (46 per cent).

As it happened, the younger generation, the one that was raised in a culture that most closely embodied the division of labor, is most likely to favor a return to more traditional roles. If feminism wrecked your parents’ marriage, you are less likely to feel like you want to overthrow the patriarchy.

Clark is surprised. As are we:

It turns out someone in Gen­er­a­tion Z, who has yet to turn 30, is much more likely to hold these views than a boomer twice their age.

Those who have lived under the new regime are most opposed to it. What are we to make of all this?

Consider the following line of reasoning. The breakdown of the division of household labor was first promoted and proposed by one Friedrich Engels. He wanted women to become part of the vanguard of the Revolution. To do so they would need to throw away their aprons and cease making dinner for their children. 

Even today many feminists insist that they are promoting the Revolution, whereby they will overthrow the patriarchy and demolish capitalism. 

One hates to be the bearer of bad tidings, but during the twentieth century we saw several radical and grandiose efforts to produce a Workers’ Paradise, following strict Marxist principles. And we ought to know by now that these efforts failed miserably. More than a hundred million people died for this bad idea. 

Does the vote in Ireland tell us that people are discovering that these grandiose schemes and efforts to reorganize everyday life have produced nothing but calamity. 

It is well past time that people give up their adolescent dreams about the Heavenly City, and get down to work. Beginning with a sane division of household labor.

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