Sir, – I welcome the Government’s new campaign challenging manosphere and tradwife narratives (“‘Tradwife’ and ‘manosphere’ content’s influence growing in Ireland, says National Women’s Council”, August 6th). But if we are serious about inoculating young people against the idea that a woman’s place is in the home, we might start by taking a closer look at Irish society.
Let’s take our primary schools for example. Some 88 per cent operate under Catholic patronage – an institution that is not exactly a beacon of gender equality: campaigning against divorce, contraception and abortion rights at every turn, and effectively still treating women as second-class citizens. Perhaps the Government could simultaneously address this albatross, and remove the Catholic Church’s grip on our schools.
Then there is the Constitution. In 2024, voters were asked whether to broaden the definition of “the family” beyond marriage, and to strike out Article 41.2’s language about a woman’s “life within the home”.
Both proposals were resoundingly rejected, some by a two-to-one margin. The effect is that the capital F – family in Irish law – remains the married unit. For example, unmarried partners still face a less favourable position on inheritance and tax than their married counterparts, among other indignities.
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And consider parental leave: 26 weeks of paid maternity leave compared with two weeks of paid paternity leave. Long before any algorithm reaches a teenager, we have already engineered this outcome, those months at home cement the mother as the de facto contact for the GP, the creche, the WhatsApp group.
Small wonder so many women recognise something of their own lives in the tradwife story.
Of course, none of this is the same as telling young girls their place is in the home as these tradwife influencers are doing. But when Irish society (in law and norms) still assumes the same nuclear, married household as their baseline, we should ask how different that baseline really is from the fantasy the tradwife influencers are selling us. – Yours, etc,
MAEDBH KING,
Dún Laoghaire,
Dublin.
