International Women's Day has always given Breda O'Brien a slightly uneasy feeling. It was intensified yesterday when she opened two emails, one after the other.
The first was from the European Women's Lobby (EWL), commemorating International Women's Day by stating that women all over Europe were calling for an end to war against Iraq. The second email had the subject line "Battered husbands often afraid to speak out".
The first was firmly within the tradition of women as guardians of peace, as the morally superior half of the human race. The second email came from the small and almost-ignored lobby which points out that women can be violent, too. It highlighted an ABC news item which suggested that in our culture, it is socially sanctioned for women to hit men. Just think of all the face-slapping which goes on in comedies.
Women's groups often claim that women resort to violence as self-defence. However, research by Richard Gelles, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, shows women are seven times more likely than men to be injured in domestic violence, but women hit men without provocation as often as men hit women. Men are often fearful of reporting, both for fear of reprisals and because they think they would not be believed.
To return to the EWL press release, it represents an anti-war perspective with which I am broadly in agreement. But in what sense is this a view exclusive to women? No doubt women are calling for peace, but so are men. No doubt, too, as they claim, it is true that women and children suffer disproportionately from the fallout from war, but what about the fact that most ordinary soldiers are still men? It is they whom we ask to do our killing for us, and to risk being killed. This is no small burden which we expect men to shoulder almost as a natural part of being male.
It has always puzzled me about a certain brand of feminism, that in the one breath they can declare that differences based on sex are socially constructed, and in the next act as if women have clearly identifiable traits which separate them from men.
In this worldview, violence perpetrated by a spouse or a partner is almost exclusively a problem experienced by women, and the solution is to socialise men so that they behave like women. On the other hand, attributing innate differences to women, such as the fact that more of them want to be involved in the full-time rearing of their children, is decried as gender stereotyping based on an outdated vision of women. It seems to me that you cannot have it both ways. Either there are innate differences or there are not.
Funny, too, how certain differences between the sexes shown by research are highlighted, and others are not. For example, when did you last hear a feminist organisation trumpeting that statistics show consistently that more women than men oppose abortion in all circumstances?
On International Women's Day, perhaps it is time to call for an end not just to war, but to the battle of the sexes. What problems facing the world today can be solved by an almost exclusive focus on one sex?
There are still many parts of the world where women suffer abject poverty and discrimination, and are even subject to potentially lethal practices such as female genital mutilation. However, at times what Western eyes perceive as discrimination is not perceived as damaging by the women themselves. Take the development workers who decided to sink a well closer to a village, because women spent so much of their day drawing water. Women complained that an easy, companionable part of the day spent with women and children was no longer available to them, and they had to work much harder in the time which was spared from drawing water.
Similarly, Western women often see the clothing worn by Muslim women as oppressive, and are quite put out to discover that we are objects of pity in the eyes of our Muslim sisters, because we are judged so much by our appearance and sexual attractiveness. The Muslim woman is free from much of that pressure.
In our own country, it is true that the role of women has changed radically, and much of it is for the better. I am grateful for such basic rights as voting and the ability to work outside the home, which were won by the strenuous efforts of women who went before me. However, every change has its downside, and the increased independence of women has not always worked to the advantage of the next generation.
Women moving into the workplace has not been paralleled by an increase in men taking full-time parenting roles, and nor is it likely to do so. This has meant that what many of us took for granted, a parent at home when we came in from school, is less and less the experience of our children.
In Penelope Leach's new childcare book, she apparently presumes that the mother working outside the home is the norm. It is a die-hard feminist who would not acknowledge that some aspects of this change are less than desirable.
Children require quantity time as much as quality time. Increased opportunity has not led to less stress for women, but rather the opposite. In a rather acid letter to this paper, Monica Barber suggested that women who are experiencing difficulty juggling the many aspects of their lives, should drop some of the balls. In a society where mortgages are dependent on two incomes, this is less easy than it might at first sound. The idea of the family-friendly workplace has not moved much beyond a laudable idea, nice in theory, but too expensive to implement.
Perhaps the loudly ticking demographic time bomb will cause us to re-evaluate. There is great concern in Europe that the decline in births is going to completely over-burden the pensions system, and that the ratio of dependent elders to income earners is going to have catastrophic effects on our essential services. In Ireland, we have delayed the phenomenon of an ageing population, not evaded it. Given that, perhaps what we need in future is an International Day for Families, which concentrates on the connections between people, not on divisive gender struggles.