BACK PAGES: A week-long series of articles about Women's Liberation in The Irish Times in 1970 brought a huge response, a selection of which was published in the Women First page with this introduction:
TWO THEMES ran through many of the letters, phone calls and chance conversations that followed Women First’s week of Women’s Lib. One was “there’s no need for a movement; it’s up to each woman to arrive at an individual solution”; the other was “but what will become of the children?”
The second is valid debating ground, but I doubt if the first is. Individual solutions, however desirable for individuals, won’t do much to increase public awareness or encourage democratic discussion on women’s rights . . .
Perhaps it should be stressed here, though, that Women’s Liberation is not a concerted effort to force women into jobs. Surveys in Germany, Britain, France and the US have indicated with tiresome repetition that most women with very small children prefer not to work, or certainly not to work at full-time jobs. They feel that child-rearing is a vital social occupation – which is not necessarily to say that it should be a full-time, 24-hours a day, preoccupation. If women were properly paid for their work bringing up children, the great majority of mothers who now work because they must, could have a real choice.
By the time our infant daughters are adults, the work week will be less than half what it now is. Automation will have made millions of workers, male and female, redundant. The jobs will be specialised, highly skilled and part-time.
The most conservative estimates suggest that family life will be greatly changed. Daddy will be at home most of the time; unless he is in the pub or at the football match, possibilities not to be dismissed too lightly. Mammy will have labour-saving devices and even the advertising wizards will have trouble inventing new gadgets to keep her occupied at home. Everyone will be much better educated.
Less conservative prophets say that family life will disappear, to be replaced by some version of the commune. Children will be considered too precious to be brought up, as they now are, in whatever haphazard fashion the amateurs who bred them hit upon. Those entrusted with the young will be well-trained and suited to the task, natural parents or otherwise.
This is the talk that curdles blood in a culture which upholds the family as the most sacred of all social institutions, but we are facing a social revolution that we can either contribute to now or ignore, ostrich-fashion.
However horrifying it may all sound, it is worth remembering that the family as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that evolved with property laws over the last few centuries. As recently as 100 years ago, children were reared in the large circle of the extended family, an amalgam of adult aunts, cousins and grandparents that was not unlike a small community . . .In the last two generations or so, the family has dwindled for the first time in history to the primary parent-children unit. It is the first time that women have been so isolated from other adults, restricted for eight or 10 hours daily to little children . . .
Is there anything so wonderful, after all, about this kind of society? The increase in crime, alcoholism, mental illness doesn’t suggest it. If Women’s Liberation is about anything, it is about women coming together to change those aspects of society that are relevant to them with an eye towards what’s going to become of their grand-daughters.
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