The silence is deafening. If you hear women whooping or cheering it's just that echoes from the last century are still doing the rounds of your head. But it was announced on Thursday in this newspaper that Ireland was about to rescind one of many badges of shame: that for "Worst provider of paid maternity cover in the EU."
We get to keep the badge that goes with it - that for "Lowest level of breast-feeding in the EU"; but not for ever, perhaps, because it was also announced on Thursday that employers are going to have to provide breast-feeding facilities for women who go back to work less than four months after their children are born.
So what, you're saying. Paid maternity leave of 18 weeks is still minimal. The only countries in the EU with similarly niggardly allowances (Portugal, Spain, Luxembourg, Greece) give their women far more unpaid leave. In Germany, France and Finland, women get three years' paid maternity leave, and in Belgium, they get nearly five.
And as for the new breast-feeding facilities, the only women who can demand them for any length of time are those who have to dash back to work soon after their babies are born.
That's just defeatist talk. The addition of four paid weeks to the statutory leave is a huge gain. The allowance for unpaid leave has doubled, to eight weeks. And the breast-feeding directive is the first real signal from Government that breast-feeding is desirable.
The silence is not surprising, however. Irish women have staged no public, vocal campaign to change things. As a woman born in the 1960s and raised on 1970s feminism, who started her family late, I have been horror-struck at how bad things are for Irish mothers and how resolutely silent they are about it.
I remember wondering idly why the Government didn't run a campaign to promote breast-feeding, as the British government had, given its power as a tool in preventive healthcare. Then I realised Irish paid maternity leave wasn't nearly long enough to allow the 15 weeks of breast-feeding which health authorities recommend.
Surely the least women should be doing was uniting to campaign for the right not to compromise their babies' health by returning to work too soon?
The National Women's Council of Ireland helped negotiate the extension of maternity cover in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness; but it is fairly well accepted that the reason it got through was that employers are desperate to get mothers of young children into the workforce.
The message is coming through that you needn't be ashamed to present yourself for gainful employment, even if you have had a child. This magnaminous stance was summed up in a recent recruitment advertisement for the Bank of Ireland carried in this newspaper. Jackie Dunne was proudly pictured with two youngsters at her knee and a toddler glugging a bottle in her arms.
Her responsible job was described as "not unlike Jackie's busy home life with three children and a long commute; so planning and people management come second nature." I scanned the advertisement for some clue as to what Jackie was getting out of all this - a career break, a job-share, a childcare allowance? - but found nothing to persuade me that a week of Jackie's life wouldn't put me in the grave 10 years early.
Was a life like this the goal of Irish feminism? Is that as far as it goes? Judging from the silence of Irish feminism, it seems so. Returning to work after having a baby, the subliminal signals came thick and fast: work harder than you ever did, don't ever complain that maternity cover is too short in Ireland, don't ever mention breast-feeding. The worst thing is, these signals tend to come from women.
They seem dominated by fear. And there is another dominating emotion: envy. Older women resent younger women for their paid maternity leave and ability to return to work , because they had to choose between motherhood and a career. Childless women often resent mothers for their "paid holiday". The point is, of course, that maternity leave is not a self-development course for mothers. Its importance lies in its impact on the welfare of children.
The conspiracy of silence about the benefits of breast-feeding stays intact because women who have not breast-fed are so frightened they might not have given their babies the absolute best and are so envious of those mothers they think might have pipped them at that post...."
Such pointless angst, such needless division between women. And as working mothers squash their noses to the grindstone, or drift, silently and discreetly, out of paid employment, the lives of some young women are being ruined. Garret FitzGerald wonders in this newspaper, Saturday after Saturday, how it is that women in their 20s are opting out of having babies in their droves. Of course, the joys of a free life are a huge draw for these women. But I don't believe the instinct, as old as womankind, to have babies when you're so much more likely to be fertile and to have healthy ones can have been totally stamped out.
Adding up the cost of accommodation and the cost of childcare, many of these women can calculate easily that having a child would leave them little option but to go on social welfare, and lose them the very independence that a century of the women's movement gained them.
How can anyone say that Irish feminism, having delivered women the right to be like men, has no further use? Having given women the valuable right not to be mothers, its next task must be to give them the right to be mothers.
vwhite@irish-times.ie John Waters is on leave