Women and stress - Time to end lip service on equality

The generation of women approaching the end of their professional careers have seen changes in how society, the workplace and politics regard and facilitate women that their mothers could only have dreamt of.

Their grandmothers could hardly have imagined these sweeping and profound changes in how today’s women shape and drive society. Yet, as event after event, report after report and, most importantly, election after election prove, there is a long way to go before we can say we have reached a point that might be considered equitable, ideal, or even acceptable in how women are supported inside or outside of the home.

The Tuam revelations highlighted a legacy that did not celebrate women, rather the opposite, and any conversation about how women are to be better honoured and cherished by society cannot but be influenced by that story. Those horrors remind us that once dominant social mores were not so very far removed from a form of persecution. This horrible and shaming history should be harnessed to bring the kind of change that would make this society a far better place for everyone, especially women trying to do more than is expected of them — primarily by themselves.

Yesterday’s report from the British Department of Health that over 3,500 women — about 10 a day — travelled to Britain for abortions from the Republic last year points to another incendiary issue where women’s lives are almost secondary considerations.

However, today’s report, that more and more women are suffering from depression and dangerously high levels of stress because of the almost impossible challenge of career, running a home, and rearing children is an indictment of our times. It is an indictment of our inability to manage our affairs in a way that is feasible, respectful and has some prospect of real success. It may not be as spectacularly horrible as the Tuam story but it is another episode in that sorry, seemingly unending story of denial and inequity based on nothing more random than gender.

That this situation is made even more difficult when a woman becomes her family’s primary breadwinner describes a modern pincher movement of the most difficult and cruel kind. This seems an inordinate burden to place on any individual but it is the reality faced by scores of thousands of Irish women. It is at the root of a growing number of women developing an unhealthy relationship with the 9.15am bottle of wine.

The issues are well known: the cost of childcare; the structure of the working day; parental leave; and, unfortunately, the fact that too many men still do not accept their obligations in running a house or rearing children. It should not be rocket science to confront and resolve these destructive habits — as many other European societies have done — but that it seems so very difficult to do so, so very drawn out and begrudged suggests the misogyny so alive in the mother-and-baby homes echoes across the decades.

How can we honestly regret the horrors of the past if we do not resolve the horrors making so many lives intolerable today?