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The Irish papers are full of news that a referendum will be set this coming November on Article 41.2 in the Irish constitution. This contains a recognition that “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and that the State shall therefore “endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

The overwhelming consensus from Ireland’s liberal feminist public voices is that this framing is discriminatory against women, and that it’s in women’s interests for it to be amended.


From the perspective of women who have careers, this all sounds great. But it left me wondering: what about all the mothers who have jobs, rather than careers?

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Meanwhile, this elite feminist drive to abolish every cultural, political or legal recognition of sex asymmetry lands differently further down the socio-economic scale. Here, Article 41.2 reads more like sex-specific protection against the neoliberal understanding of people as sexless units of economic production: a profoundly humane provision for the unique nature of mothering, and now vanishingly rare in developed-world legislation.

This referendum proposes, in practice, to strip protections from less privileged mothers that serve, in however small a way, to shield them from the brutal, sex-indifferent exigencies of the market. Doing so may well serve the interests and priorities of elite women. But it should not be understood as ‘feminist’ save in the most class-blind sense.