Next Friday, 8th March is international Women’s Day, a global day for celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day is also flagged as “a call to action for accelerating women’s equality and gender parity.”

Whilst this may sound like a relatively recent initiative its roots actually reach back more than a century into the era of universal female suffrage, with the first internationally recognised “national Women’s Day” being held in New York city on 28th February 1909. This event was organised by the Socialist Party of America following a number of rolling ad-hoc protests by female garment workers over working conditions and pay.

Two years after that first “national Women’s Day” a catastrophic fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City on 25th March 1911 killed 146 young mainly immigrant workers, and the tragedy led labour activists across the world to call for an annual women’s day. This call was taken up by the Rusian Provisional Government in 1917 who designated 8th March as a national holiday, a move that was adopted by many other socialist and communist countries.

It wasn’t until the emergence of the globalist feminist movement in the 1960s that the day developed a broader meaning, becoming a global holiday following its adoption by the United Nations in 1977. Today the event is designed – in its own words – to inspire society towards “gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated.”

Noble aims, but as anyone who’s visited the IWD website can’t fail to notice, the glamourous stock imagery and underlying meritocratic messaging represents precisely most of things that the early adopters of the Women’s Day were campaigning against. At a theological level, many the central 2024IWD themes of ‘women and technology’, ‘women and sport’, ‘women at work’ etc also speak not to liberation, but to an additional degree of subservience and enslavement to cultural and economic values that have a strongly male-orientated foundation.

Whilst there is an urgent need in society to rectify the many areas where women are excluded, under-represented and under-rewarded compared to their male counterparts, it’s a dangerously flawed strategy to assume that the balance of life can be rectified simply by balancing these ‘opportunities’. As the feminist movement of the past half century has discovered to its cost, the drive towards equality of opportunity has merely delivered most women into the same kind of economic slavery that has gripped the majority of the male population by the throat since the Victorian era.

One only has to look at the changes in the socio-economic model of the family over the past 50 years to see that the increasing presence of women in the workplace has not created any degree of economic or social freedom for society, and it now takes often an entire family’s income to achieve what was once possible with just one salary. The few hard-won freedoms of feminism that society has allowed have been bought at the cost of plunging women into the same dreadful pattern of mundane, routine labour and diminishing family life that the man slumped on the 7.15 to Charing Cross has been enduring heroically for an entire lifetime.

It has often been said – mostly by feminists themselves – that this initial phase of mutual servitude is inevitable and necessary, but the promise is that women will transform and emeliorate the workplace once positions of power and influence have been achieved. Sadly it’s a very primordial human trait that once a person – whatever their gender – gains a position of power, wealth and influence, they rarely share it, and in particular they don’t tend towards amending the structure of the social order to benefit fundamentally those less fortunate than themselves. Hence the concern expressed by some feminists that the example and behaviour of many ‘empowered’ women is, by definition, a reiteration of male patterns of dominance rather than any manifestation of a genuinely transforming alternative.

In some respects the feminist movement of the 1960s onwards might have achieved far more if it had supported the liberation of men rather than the empowerment of women, but the desire to grab a slice of what their male counterparts seemed on the surface to be enjoying blinded the protagonists to the reality that concessions and liberties are rarely granted unless it primarily benefits the establishment.

This is thought that Irish voters might want to consider carefully in their upcoming referendums on Family and Care, which are aimed at changing fundamentally the definition of the role of women in Irish society. Ironically – though entirely intentionally – these changes are being voted on next Friday, International Women’s Day.

In many respects its hard for an outsider to comprehend fully the impact of the proposed changes (the Care Amendment) to Article 41.2.1-2 of the Irish Constitution, which states that “by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. It also asserts that mothers “shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

As early as 1937 drafting of the Constitution there were efforts to overturn what has been dubbed the “woman’s place is in the home” clause. Feminist and activist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington lamented even back then that the constitution was based on a “fascist model, in which women would be relegated to permanent inferiority”.

The proposal being voted on this coming Friday is whether or not to replace Article 41.2 with a new Article 42B, which says that the state “recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision”.

Modernists in Ireland will be delighted if the state removes prescriptive presumption that the primary function of women in Irish society was that of wife and mother, and that’s a sales pitch that frankly few in contemporary society are likely to disagree with.

Sadly, much of the frenetic campaigning to get the Irish nation to sign up to amendment has been framed in antagonism towards the Catholic Church, and the perceived insistence that the Church has taught that a woman’s place is exclusively in the home – something which it never has. For its part, the Catholic Church in Ireland hasn’t engaged particularly well with this issue, instead tending to focus on fears that other amendment being voted on (the Family Amendment) 41.1.1-3 is opening a door to other definitions of what constitutes a family.

In Article 41.1.1° the wording is currently: “The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”

The proposal is to amend this to read: “The State recognises the Family, whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships, as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.”

In Article 41.3.1° the Constitution declares that “The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”

And the amendment being proposed here is to strike out the reference to family, so the nex text will read: “The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”

In a statement released on last Sunday the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference expressed their concerns over the proposed changes, lamenting in particular, that they would have the effect “of abolishing all reference to motherhood in the Constitution.”

The bishops also warned that the proposed new text “diminishes the unique importance of the relationship between marriage and family in the eyes of Society and State and is likely to lead to a weakening of the incentive for young people to marry.”

In what has increasingly become a straight contest between modern Ireland and the historical power of the Catholic Church, few commentators or lobbyists have flagged the far greater threat to the balance of Irish society – that dropping Article 42.1 also puts paid to the phrase that a woman  “shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

Of course that’s really no surprise – one only has to ask ‘who is driving the desire for change?’ Is it those who not want women to stay at home, but to amend the law and the working of commerce to ensure than men can do the same, so that family life and the welfare of the nation is improved? Or is it those who have benefitted from a meritocracy and now rest in positions of power and wealth, who would be the sole beneficiaries of such policy changes?

To their credit the Irish bishops have pointed out that “Contrary to some recent commentary, the present constitutional provision emphatically does not state that ‘a woman’s place is in the home.’ Neither does it excuse men of their duties to the home and family … in contemporary society there now exists a welcome co-responsibility between women and men for every aspect of domestic life, including the provision of care in the home.”

If one looks closely at Catholic social teaching, and the many documents written by the popes of the past century or so, no-one can dispute that the Church’s view has been, and still is, that a woman’s primary function is the family, just as our fallen nature inherited from Adam is that we have all been consigned to recover our salvation through toil. What still lies in dispute is the nature of that work, and how we balance this destiny with care for our families and, as a consequence, our contribution to the wider social wellbeing of society.

In November 1986 St John Paul II was in the Diocese of Parramatta in Sydney, Australia, address a large crowd of workers gathered at the Transfield factory in Powers Road, Seven Hills. During his address to the crowd John Paul reflected on his early life as a quarry worker, saying: “These were important and useful years in my life. I am grateful for having had that opportunity to reflect deeply on the meaning and dignity of human work in its relationship to the individual, the family, the nation, and the whole social order.”

He added that his experience led him to his “own profound conviction” that “human work is a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question, if we try to see the question really from the point of view of man’s good.”

As he stated in his 1981 Encyclical Laborem Exercens: “however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is ‘for man’ and not man ‘for work’” (Laborem Exercens, 6)

As someone who’s been there, I can vouch for the fact that a relentless daily commute kills the human spirit, and the toll that it takes on family life is not something that society should be encouraging, even though it might delight those who rely the increased taxation derived from mass employment.

Sadly, such has been the Catholic Church’s historical fear of the threat of the advancement of Communism, that much of the centrality of its vitally important social teaching has either been ignored, or relegated to harmless platitudes. The really radical, transforming aspirations of encyclicals such as Rerum Novarum, Laborem Exercens, Centesimus Annus et al have unquestionably as much if not more relevance today than they did when they were written, but our reluctance to engage with the debate surrounding the nature of gender, work and the human condition, and our perceived exclusive preoccupation with sexual ethics has all but muted our wider social voice and contribution to the life/work debate, at exactly the moment when it is needed most.

Joseph Kelly is Catholic publisher and theologian