It surprises me that promoters of tradwife ideology seem to miss their best evidence. Ireland used to be tradwife central. And before the curse of second-wave feminism, Irish women were the happiest in the western world. They were overwhelmingly Catholic, they married young and stayed in the home to mind their large broods of kids. And they were contented with their lot.
If only Nell McCafferty and Mary Robinson and Mary Kenny and the other bold straps hadn’t come along and put bad thoughts in their heads, they would surely have remained so.
In May, 1968, the Irish Press ran a week-long series based on a survey of Irish women by the US-based Gallup polling organisation. It is, to my knowledge, the first such gender-specific study conducted here using modern scientific sampling.
At the end of the week, the Press had a British polling expert give his analysis of the findings. Here is his headline conclusion: “The poll shows that Irish women, considered collectively, are probably the happiest women in Europe and certainly far happier than the women of America.”
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This claim may seem startling but it was emphatically justified by the empirical evidence. The women were asked: “In general, how happy would you say you are: very happy, fairly happy or not happy?” Seventy-two per cent of respondents said very happy, 27 per cent said fairly happy and one per cent said they were not happy. If these were election results, we would assume we were in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Equally, asked whether they would rather be a woman or a man in contemporary Ireland, 67 per cent were happy to be female, 21 per cent said they would prefer to be a man and the rest didn’t mind either way.
What makes all of this even more astounding is that the women in the survey were clearly not naive about the gendered nature of power in Ireland. Asked “Do you agree or disagree that Ireland is a man’s country where women haven’t much say?”, two-thirds agreed and only a third disagreed.
The obvious implication is that most women were happy to live in a man’s world where they had little say in anything. Being quiet and obedient was good for them – exactly what the tradwife propagandists now want women to believe.
What, though, were the conditions of this bliss? The British polling expert crunched the numbers and produced a little book of Irish female calm. In order to achieve happiness, he wrote, an Irish woman should:
– Live in rural areas
– be married with at least four children
– make housework and minding the family her life’s career
– accept the husband as he is without complaining about his neglect of his wife, his drinking, his meanness with housekeeping money and the favouritism he shows to his sons over his daughters
– not aspire to greater education
– be unconcerned with the ambitions of women for greater representation in the political and economic life of Ireland.
It concluded that “those who achieve this state are the happiest of Irish women”.
So these were the terms and conditions for contentment. It is worth noting that at the heart of this contract was a bleak vision of marriage and of male behaviour. Sixty-one per cent of Irish women felt that Irish men drank too much. Forty-two per cent felt that Irish wives didn’t have enough money to run the home. Forty-seven per cent thought Irish wives had too much housework and 67 per cent felt that Irish wives had too few opportunities to pursue interests outside the home.
Conversely, 54 per cent felt that Irish husbands did not spend enough time at home. The typical Irish marriage as they saw it was one in which the husband spent too much time and money in the pub with his cronies and too little time with his wife who was, to use a contemporary English colloquialism, very much “her indoors”. This is what wedded bliss was like.
Leafing through the pages of the Irish Press that week, there were random stories that mapped the hinterland of this happiness. A doctor remarking on the high levels of illness and depression among young married women in Ireland. The Catholic Bishop of Clonfert noting sadly that “in too many homes the pattern has been established of the husband hastening to the conviviality of his comrades leaving the wife to the stoking of the fire and the mercy of television.”
The Press was simultaneously running a series from a legal expert explaining the division of property rights in Irish marriages: “All fair-minded people agree on the principle that he who pays the piper calls the tune . . . all moneys given by her husband to his wife in respect of housekeeping are deemed to be for that purpose only, and insofar as the moneys are not used for that purpose they belong to the husband and not to the wife. A thrifty housewife who ‘saves a bit’ from the housekeeping had better hand it back to her husband!”
It might therefore be more accurate to say that, rather than being happy, Irish women were well-adjusted. They had adjusted themselves to a system in which they could not expect to have much of a say in their own lives or in the life of the nation, to bearing as many children as God and Mother Church decreed they should have, to being largely confined to the domestic sphere, to husbands who preferred the company of their cronies in the pub, and to almost complete economic dependency in which the male piper called all the tradwife tunes.
And of course it’s true that surrendering to oppression can be a form of contentment. The fulfilment of low expectations can feel like satisfaction – especially when what is being satisfied is primarily the desire to survive in a world where others have almost total power over you. That is the tradwife deal: safety in return for surrender with a smile.
