Equality Is A Two-Way Street

I am a feminist and make no apology for it. It’s easily forgotten that as late as 30 years ago, women were forced to ‘retire’ from the Civil Service when they got married. That this was so, is a simple measure of the brute collusion between the State and the dominant Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the purpose of which was to chain women to the cooker, the vacuum cleaner and the baby’s cot for as long, and as effectively, as possible.

Women were under-represented in every area of public life and of work, and when they were employed, they were almost inevitably dumped with the most menial and badly paying jobs. They were discriminated against in a thoroughly systematic way economically, educationally and socially and generally treated as second class citizens – if they were lucky.
And they were also frequently the victims of violence and aggression at the hands of men in the home. They were expected to put up with what amounted to a life of servitude, doing what they were told and, in the more extreme cases, getting a beating when they didn’t.
In the arena of sex and reproduction, they were designated the role of baby carriers, deprived of the means to control their fertility by the State, at the behest of the Catholic Church in particular, and expected to be ready to take it like a woman whenever the husband demanded his presumed conjugal entitlements.
Women, in other words, were treated like shit and expected to put up with it – for the children.
It was only because women refused to take it any more that things began to change for the better. It was only because the women’s movement agitated, protested and battled for equal rights, that concessions were made. The struggle for equality was a hard-fought one. There was resistance every step of the way. And it isn’t over yet. There are still bastions of business in particular where male privilege remains intact. Women are still under-represented in all walks of public life. And in Ireland, there are still criminal sanctions in relation to a woman’s right to control her own reproductive capabilities that I believe are thoroughly unacceptable.
In short, the struggle goes on…

I say all of this, because, in this issue of hotpress, we tell a different kind of story – one that also indisputably needs to be told. It is the story of Irish fathers, and their experiences of often outrageous discrimination at the hands of the legal system in Ireland.
I believe that it is important to be truthful about the relationships between men and women in Irish society, and especially so in the context of marital breakdown.
The first thing to say in relation to this is that the availability of divorce is categorically and without reservation a good thing. But that is not to say that the apparatus of State has created adequate mechanisms for dealing with the fall-out from either marital breakdown in the first instance or divorce in the second.
The curious fact is that, even though this remains a male dominated society in many ways, men have lacked a voice in relation to a problem that affects them in hugely adverse ways, in increasing numbers. What’s more, it may well indeed be that the women’s movement made its case in relation to the prevalence of abuse of women within the family so effectively that an underlying presumption has taken hold that in relation to matters of family, and issues concerning children in particular, men are inadequate, inferior and generally not to be trusted.
And when marital breakdown occurs, the way the system works, it seems that the onus of guilt is more likely to be loaded onto men.
This is a complex subject, but at the heart of it is the fact that the mechanism of the Family Law courts seems to be pre-disposed towards giving the benefit of the doubt to women. From a feminist perspective, there is a strange twist here: the working presumption undoubtedly is that, when an irretrievable breakdown occurs, the woman should automatically be left in charge of – or with responsibility for – the kids.
This, of course, is often wrong. There are women who are dysfunctional parents. There are women who are violent and abusive to their partners – and to their children. And, in truth there is no valid reason to assume that men, even if they may inflict more damage when things do go horribly wrong, are any more generally culpable than women in this respect.
There is more that needs to be said in relation to this. But for now, it is important to hear at least some of the stories that men who have been through the mincer can tell us.
This issue is not in fact about men against women at all. It is about trying to get to the level of understanding we need, to create a fair and just balance in a vital area of human feeling – and failing – in which emotions understandably run deep.
More specifically, it is about acknowledging that men are as entitled to be treated with respect and dignity in relation to family matters as women. And it is about acknowledging that they often make parents as good as, or better than, the mothers of the children to whom they are fathers.
And it is about realising that we need to legislate effectively so that these fundamental, obvious conclusions are carried through into how the aftermath of breakdown is managed by this society as a whole, in order to minimise the terrible extent of human suffering and trauma that results – for women, for men, and most of all for children.