Only A New Republic Can Deliver Gender Equality
The roots of International Women’s Day stretch back more than a century to the period preceding the First World War, when socialists in the United States and Europe organised stand-alone ‘women’s day’ on March 8th.
German poster advertising Women’s Day on March 8th, 1914.
The Soviet Union was the first country to recognise March 8th as ‘Women’s Day’, with an explicit focus on the role of women in a revolutionary socialist society. Half a century later, the feminist movement of the 1960s embraced International Women’s Day, with the United Nations recognising the day as a global celebration in 1977.
That same feminist movement of the 1960s kick-started major social and political change in Ireland. In the intervening fifty years many battles have been won in the fight for women’s rights and gender equality. Women now enjoy the same legal rights as men in key areas of society including property rights and the workplace. Women have also secured legal rights to sexual freedom, divorce, contraception and, more recently, abortion services.
While all of these advances are extremely important and have have improved the lives of millions of women, they have occurred without challenging the hegemony of Irish capitalism. The ruling system had simply adapted to the demands for equality by co-opting some women into the existing economic and political power structures.
The women who initiated International Women’s Day over one hundred years ago weren’t fighting for the right of some women to become bosses so that other women could remain as exploited workers. They didn’t battle for some women to become bankers so that other women could live in permanent debt. And the they didn’t give their all so that some women could be landlords and other women could pay them crippling rent.
Victories, such as the repeal of the 8th amendment, represent important stage-posts, not the final destination for women’s liberation and gender equality.
The lie that legal equality would deliver actual equality as well as higher incomes and a better quality of life is being incrementally exposed. Despite many years of nominal equality, Irish women still lag behind their male counterparts in the workforce and many other areas of life.
Equality in the Ireland of 2020 means that women are enduring the same low wages and insecurity of employment, housing and pensions as men - the same but more extreme.
The insatiable appetite of gombeen capitalism means that young women are now, on average, working longer hours, commuting longer distances and enduring higher levels of stress than when their mother’s entered the workforce a generation ago. This isn’t how it how it was meant to be.
The liberation of women, gender equality and meaningful material advancement for all cannot be achieved within the old order, within a construct that was designed by the Irish patriarchy to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a male religious, political and economic elite.
The fact that it they are now willing to allow an elite of women a share of the spoils had not changed the nature of their system. And getting a higher proportion of women into the upper echelons of that system won’t change it in the future.
Women’s freedom and gender equality can only be achieved through the complete replacement of the current social, political and economic system with a new one that is designed with a different purpose from the outset - a New Republic based on new democratic economic structures that serve the interests of the working women and men that actually generate wealth - a New Irish Republic with new political structures that ensure that women are at the heart of all decision-making at all levels of Irish society.