Please note; Dinner will be late this evening.

Throw down your mops! On second thoughts pick them up and hold them high. Confused, you should be.  Nothing in life is ever black and white and that includes the perpetual genderised fight for freedom and equality.

Although the fight for equality often raises its’ ugly head in the workplace with all those sparkling glass ceilings, I believe the home is just as real a battlefield. 

This summer an American Corporation called Swiffer launched an ad campaign for its’ new steam mop using the feminist icon ‘Rosie the Riveter’ ( she had ditched her mop to build fighter planes during WW2). They was uproar, and the company removed the images offering apologies to the offended group (their female customers). Read the article from the Huffington post here, and a piece in the Washington Post here.

Although rejecting housework is so tempting in the fight for equality, it still has to be done, cause even if we win, we’ll still have to do half of it! So how about rejecting the sexist corporations their ad agencies, and taking the power back?

Housework and feminine past-times need not be seen as tools of oppression, but opportunities for dissent. I found this paper on the internet while avoiding said housework entitled; ‘Knitting as Dissent: Female Resistance in America Since the Revolutionary War‘. It starts with the following line;

‘Primarily a feminine duty or pastime with granny connotations, knitting actually has a deliciously rich history of political subversion‘.

It made me smile.

I’ve to go now and put the dinner on.

 

Women’s Representation

“Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government”
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797).

When I first read the above quote I couldn’t believe the date beneath it, it could well have come from an opinion piece on gender quotas in one of the National newspapers in 2012, rather than an 18th century feminist 250 years ago.

I discovered Mary while researching political dissenters and was instantly intrigued. She was an admirer of the French Revolution, and following Thomas Paine’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Men’ in 1790, she shed new light with her own publication, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman‘ in 1792. This is one of the earliest works on feminism and was written in just 6 weeks.

You can access the book here.

So while the Irish Constitutional Convention votes to alter ‘women in home’ clause, much to the jubilation and celebration of politicians and political commentators, after the State was found to be complicit in sending young girls to Magdalene Launderies, excuse me if I don’t get too excited.