"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone."
These were the epoch-making words of Betty Friedan in the Great Year of Change, 1963, and her sentiments ring as true today as they did 34 years ago; but the buried and unspoken problem, that strange sense of stirring, has changed: the problem is no longer women being imprisoned by home, but women being imprisoned from home by the very financial necessity their economic liberation has brought about.
Betty Friedan altered the way that women thought of themselves, of their economic and sexual potential, and helped to precipitate a social revolution. It was an intellectual and political victory as stunning and as complete as that of Rommel's Seventh Panzers through Northern France in 1940, and those who even questioned it were ridiculed into silence as swiftly as the French army had been routed.
Quality of life
And now many women I know are questioning the quality of life that has resulted - not merely for them, but for their families too. Family life has been transformed beyond recognition since Friedan wrote her manifesto. The western world has experienced a demographic shift in work-practices as profound as anything that has happened since the industrial revolution. Economic parity made women in the workforce a social norm The net effect of this has been to shove up the cost of goods of which the supply is the most inelastic; and those goods are things we call homes.
Throughout the western world, the purchase or the renting of a home worth having is possible for most families only if both the man and the wife go out work. A second and almost simultaneous revolution in technology has, completely unexpectedly, actually increased the working hours of huge numbers of employees. The economy's demand for work compels more and more people, particularly the successful ones, to abandon their families for the workplace.
The working wife and the absent homemaker are no longer options people can take or leave. Feminism has created an economic model which is obligatory and inescapable for most people in virtually all western economies. Accordingly, many of the duties of post-obstetric motherhood have had to be surrendered to others, often to uneducated and economically underprivileged child-minders or to baby-farms called creches.
In other words, late 20th-century feminism has recreated the 19th-century nursery which once spared middle-class women the more tiresome maternal burdens; but, unlike their well-to-do forebears, most middle-class women today must work during the time made available in order to survive within this economic system, whether they like it or not.
House prices
This obligation to work becomes acute when the demand for the goods in limited supply rises along with growing "prosperity." London saw this in the Thatcher boom a decade ago; and now, disastrously, Dublin is seeing it as house prices spiral, forcing couples to work harder and earn more money simply to pay for the rudimentary tool of a home. The price women are paying in Ireland and all over the western world is in that part of their personality which feminism declared should be shared equally with males or with the state: the care and duties of child-rearing.
The inconvenient truth has been evident throughout history, but feminism, like all millennial movements, declined to see the inconvenient. Most men are not emotionally or temperamentally geared to child-minding, and no state is economically capable of taking on the spare maternal responsibilities of its working mothers.
Meanwhile, the ancient and irrepressible compulsions of motherhood still compel. Many who can abandon work do so. Brenda Barnes, chief executive of Pepsi Cola in North America, has left her $2 million-ayear job to spend time with her family. She follows the cola lead of Penny Hughes, the head of Coca Cola in Britain, who abandoned her £250,000-ayear job to start a family.
And for many other women, the notion of life as a homemaker, the minder of families, the baker of breads and the creator of the bewitching Sunday kitchen smells of their childhood, is the fantasy which besets them in bus and trafficjam, just as once the prospects of freedom from domestic begrudgery tantalised that earlier generation of women for whom the words of Friedan were words of freedom.
Coveted again
It did not work like that. Some of the happiest - and indeed most envied - women I know are those who opted for the once coveted, then reviled, and now coveted again job of home-maker, housekeeper and mother. We leapt from the frying pan into the fire; and some prefer the frying pan but are economically compelled to stay in the flames. Friedan began freedom begat fiefdom.
House prices soar beyond the reach of single people, and the double income becomes inescapably essential for home owners; yet, paradoxically, we are simultaneously generating an entire new class of state-assisted single mothers. Even to question the wisdom of that, or the re-engineering of society top to bottom to satisfy feminist demands is to be howled into silence by the shrieking lynchmob guardians of the new orthodoxy of intolerant liberalism. Yet we are creating an economic order which is changing the family for ever, and we cannot even begin to predict the consequence. It is unlikely to be greater happiness.