Beware of tradwives, the enemy of equality

Lots of mothers would like to spend a few years at home with young children, but that choice is not being facilitated in any way by the powers that be

Beware of something called the “tradwife”. A new report from the Anti-Bullying Centre at Dublin City University defines this sinister creature as a “female anti-feminist influencer”. Typical of the breed, it informs us, is someone called Hannah Pearl Davis who doesn’t believe women should have the vote and that the history of slavery in the United States has been “embellished”.

You have probably never heard of Davis. I hadn’t until I read the report. But your teenage son might have, apparently. He could be looking at dreadful things online that are leading him into a horrible, misogynistic swamp that includes Jordan Peterson, the outspoken Canadian academic, giving him terrible advice such as to tidy his room.

The report does highlight some properly horrendous social media influencers like Andrew Tate, who is currently under a criminal investigation for trafficking and rape. But then it goes totally off the rails by associating anyone who questions certain tenets of feminism with him, including Peterson.

It does the same thing with “tradwives”. A “tradwife”, properly understood, is simply a married woman who would prefer to mind her children at home; perhaps someone like your own mother, come to think of it.

According to CSO data, there are still around 250,000 such women in the country and I would say you’d be hard-pressed to find a single one who wishes to deprive women of the vote.

The result of last month’s referendum on Article 41.2, the provision which says mothers should not be forced out of the home by “economic necessity”, shows that aside from the number of women who are actually “tradwives”, an awful lot more would like to be, for a few years at any rate.

The Government’s attempt to delete and replace that provision was defeated by a three-to-one margin and even if some of the vote was motivated by anti-government feeling, a lot of people, including many women, wanted to keep the reference to mothers in the Constitution and thought that maybe the home should be given a bit of protection after all.

An Amárach poll commissioned by Sudocrem in 2017 found that 62pc of mothers would stay at home with their children if they had the financial freedom to do so.

Since the referendum, what has the Government done to help mothers to stay at home with their children if that is what they want? The short answer is nothing. Has it promised to try and do something in the future? No. On the contrary, it is moving in the opposite direction.

Admittedly, an increase in child benefit of around €10 a month is being flagged, but both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are indicating that they want to further increase subsidies for childcare. Simon Harris said so in a speech upon becoming Taoiseach, as did Tánaiste Micheál Martin at the Fianna Fáil ard fheis last weekend.

That will certainly be music to the ears of some parents but it won’t help any mothers to spend a single extra second with their children at home.

The Government’s operating assumption seems to be that all parents long to put their children into childcare, but this isn’t true. A creche is the preferred choice of only about a fifth of parents, with the big majority wanting to mind children at home themselves or have another family member do so such as a grandparent. What would help mothers to stay at home with their children for a few years? Not childcare, which obviously has the opposite effect. A much with fairer option would be to give mothers children who are of pre-school age a direct payment which they could then use to either subsidise the cost of childcare, or else the choice to stay at home.

For a brief two-year period, there existed something called the “Early Childcare Supplement”. This was paid to mothers with children under the age of six and it was on top of child benefit. It amounted to €1,000 per annum when it was abolished in 2009 at the height of the property crash.

Based on the number of children who are five and under, restoring that would cost the State around €358m annually. But the State is already spending over €1bn on various forms of childcare, with that total set to climb.

In fact, if the State allocated all the public money currently being pumped into childcare into a revived Early Childcare Supplement instead, mothers would receive almost €3,000 per annum for every child they have under the age of six, in addition to child benefit. That would go a long way towards achieving the promise of the Constitution, now heavily backed by voters, to try and protect mothers from being forced out of the home by “economic necessity”. It would be wildly popular as well.

This being so, why doesn’t any major political party commit to such a policy? The answer is that none of them want mothers to stay at home. They want them all out working. They believe anything else gets in the way of the achievement of equality between men and women and that the tax coffers must be filled by as many people out working as possible.

Probably the most influential feminist of the last 100 years was the French writer Simone de Beauvoir. In an interview in 1975 with another leading feminist, Betty Friedan, the two women discussed the mother in the home. Friedan probably did more than almost anyone to free women from the domestic sphere but she still believed mothers should be allowed to stay at home if they wished.

De Beauvoir totally disagreed. She said they should not be offered the option “precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one”.

That’s rather remarkable, don’t you think? Isn’t feminism supposed to be pro-choice? Does that only extend to abortion? Simone de Beauvoir’s version of feminism wants to bar the door to the home. You are only allowed in at night to sleep. You must work during the day, like it or not, and your children must be in childcare.

This is the vision of society almost the entirety of the political establishment is pushing upon us. The “tradwife” is to be eliminated. She is the enemy of equality and of economic growth. Who cares if lots of mothers would prefer to spend a few years at home with their children? As De Beauvoir says, that choice cannot be allowed, no matter what ordinary people might think.

Those tax coffers need to be filled