Jennifer Horgan: It is an injustice that women are still told what they should do

The notion that we should keep the reference to a woman’s ‘life within the home’, to reflect the work she continues to do, is idiotic

For decades, when a man was unemployed, a wife got welfare payments through him. Women, often left with nothing, were nonetheless expected to manage 'their duties in the home'. 

Yesterday, Ireland celebrated Imbolc, meaning ‘in the belly.’ It’s also the Feast day of Brigid, who is characterised as someone who broke norms. Brigid who was many things; who was Christian and pagan; who was poet, physician and silversmith; who was healer, leader, abbess, and prophet; who was born as her mother stood on the threshold of a house, one foot inside the door, the other outside it.

Ireland celebrates multiplicity in celebrating Brigid, and yet some push to retain an article in our Constitution that reads: “mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” How Brigid would weep. How we all should weep.