Gender Roles in Ireland

Three Decades of Attitude Change

Margret Fine-Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317629344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender Roles in Ireland: three decades of attitude change documents changing attitudes toward the role of women in Ireland from 1975 to 2005, a key period of social change in this society. The book presents replicated measures from four separate surveys carried out over three decades. These cover a wide range of gender role attitudes as well as key social issues concerning the role of women in Ireland, including equal pay, equal employment opportunity, maternal employment, contraception etc. Attitudes to abortion, divorce and moral issues are also presented and discussed in the context of people's voting behaviour in national referenda. Taken together, the data available in these studies paint a detailed and complex picture of the evolving role of women in Ireland during a period of rapid social change and key developments in social legislation. The book brings the results up to the present by including new data on current gender role issues from Margret Fine-Davis' latest research.

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

Changing gender roles constitute a major trend in our societies with vast social, political and economic implications and consequences. Inglehart and Norris (2003) have observed that “glacial shifts are taking place that move systematically away from traditional values and toward more egalitarian sex roles” (p. 9). These shifts in gender role roles have far-reaching implications. As Esping-Andersen asserts,

women constitute the revolutionary force behind contemporary social and economic transformation. It is in large part the changing role of women that explains the new household structure, our altered demographic behaviour … and, as a consequence, the new dilemmas that the advanced societies face

(2004, p. v)

Ireland has been unique among developed Western societies in terms of the relative speed with which it has come to terms with these issues. While these changes came somewhat later in Ireland, the process of change has been very rapid.

The influence of various factors, including Ireland’s economic development, the women’s movement both internationally and in Ireland itself, and the impact of EU membership, served as catalytic forces to affect gender role attitudes as well as a spate of administrative and legislative reforms which enhanced the role and status of women. These included the removal of the marriage bar – which had required women to give up their jobs upon marriage – legislation for equal pay, equal opportunity, contraception and taxation of married women. All of these changes profoundly affected the role and status of women in Ireland and facilitated their increasing participation in the labour market. As a result of this, new issues have come to the fore, including the need for flexible working, work–life balance and childcare. Other issues which have also been the focus of public debate in Ireland over more than three decades include divorce, abortion and the role of women in the Church. Of these, the issue of divorce was resolved with a national Referendum in 1995 and legalised in 1996; yet the issues of abortion and, to a lesser extent, women’s role in the Church are still sources of controversy. As of this writing, the issue of abortion was being debated in the houses of the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament) as the Government tried to legislate to introduce a limited form of abortion; this legislation was finally passed in December 2013. The book examines attitudes to all of these issues, many of them over a period of three decades.

1.2 Changing gender role attitudes – the international context

The decade from the late 1960s to the late 1970s witnessed a heightened international awareness of the role and status of women in society. This awareness led to a marked increase in research devoted to studying changes in gender role attitudes and behaviour. Gender role attitudes have been shifting in Western societies since the late 1960s. Social scientists have attempted to capture these shifts, along with related shifts in values, through longitudinal studies of attitudes. One of the earliest studies of attitude change was carried out in Finland (Haavio-Mannila, 1972), yet the vast majority of the research in the early period was carried out in the US. These earlier studies captured the initial effects of the women’s movement (e.g. Mason, Czajka and Arber, 1976; Thornton and Freedman, 1979). This train of research continued in the US through the 1980s and beyond and has continued to the present day (e.g. Thornton, Alwin and Camburn, 1983; Mason and Lu, 1988; Thornton and Young-DeMarco, 2001; Cotter, Hermsen and Vanneman, 2011). This train of research has also taken place in several European countries, including the Netherlands (e.g. van der Wal and Oudijk, 1985), the UK (e.g. Hinds and Jarvis, 2000; Scott, 2006, 2008), and Ireland (Fine-Davis, 1983a, 1988a; Fine-Davis, McCarthy, Edge and O’Dwyer, 2005) as well as in Australia (van Egmond, Baxter, Buchler and Western, 2010). Measures of gender role attitudes have been included in cross-national surveys, including the Eurobarometre, European Values and World Values surveys and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and trends in Ireland have been discussed by several authors (Wilcox, 1991; Banaszak and Plutzer, 1993; Whelan and Fahey, 1994; Hayes, McAllister and Studlar, 2000; Treas and Widmer, 2000; Inglehart and Norris, 2003; and O’Sullivan, 2007, 2012).

The vast majority of the research cited above has found gender role attitudes have become significantly less traditional over time. Most of these studies have found that attitudes to maternal employment have become more accepting (e.g. Mason and Lu, 1988; Fine-Davis, 1988a; Thornton and Young-DeMarco, 2001; O’Sullivan, 2007, 2012). Yet, several of the studies have shown that men continue to hold more traditional attitudes than women (e.g. Fine-Davis, 1988a; Fine-Davis et al., 2005; Treas and Widmer, 2000) and opposition to maternal employment tends to be expressed through concern about its effects on children (e.g. Mason and Lu, 1988; Treas and Widmer, 2000; Fine-Davis, 2011). Mason and Lu (1988) concluded that “for many men, support for equal family roles is highly qualified” (p. 46).

Thornton and Young-DeMarco (2001) and Cotter et al. (2011) both conclude that attitudes to gender roles in the US may have plateaued up to the mid 1990s. Van Egmond et al. (2010) also found that gender role attitudes in Australia became more egalitarian up to the 1990s, but then flattened and in some cases reversed after that period. These authors asked if it was “a stalled revolution?” (Ibid) explored reasons for the slowing down of change in gender role attitudes in the US, including the possibility of a “backlash effect”, a concept introduced earlier by Faludi, (1991). Braun and Scott (2009), writing from the UK and looking at cross-cultural data, also explored if the trend reversal was real, pointing to possible measurement issues in comparative research, and concluded that observed changes in gender role attitudes over time did not support “a story of revolutionary change and backlash”, though they did find some evidence of “egalitarianism reaching a peak and retreat” (pp. 365–366).

This book examines gender role attitudes in Ireland over a comparable period of time, covering three decades from the mid 1970s to 2005, with more recent data also included to bring the study up to the present day. While many of the issues examined here share common ground with the numerous international studies cited above, the present volume, reporting a series of studies, also includes measures of attitudes to social policy issues relevant to the status of women in Ireland and documents attitude change in the context of legislative and policy changes which took place during a period of rapid social change beginning in the early 1970s.

1.3 Socio-cultural and historical background to study

Prior to the first study presented here, which was carried out in 1975, essentially no research in this area had been conducted in Ireland. This was due in large part to the relatively recent emergence of pressure for change in the status of women. Such pressure for change was facilitated by Ireland’s relatively more recent economic and industrial development, together with its entrance in 1973 into the European Economic Community (EEC), now referred to as the European Union (EU). Because Ireland was just beginning to undergo transition in the area of gender role attitudes and behaviour at the time of the first data collection (1975), it offered an opportunity to collect baseline data at a unique period in its history.

While many other countries also experienced significant changes in gender role attitudes and behaviour during this period – coinciding with the Women’s Movement (Inglehart and Norris, 2003) – for a number of unique reasons, Ireland’s transformation began somewhat later and in many ways Ireland had much farther to go in order to catch up with developments in the status of women in most other developed Western societies. Part of the lag in Ireland’s transition in the gender role sphere may have been due to its island status and consequent geographic isolation from the rest of Europe. Ireland had also been primarily an agrarian society, and its economic and industrial development did not gain momentum until the early 1960s. The agrarian nature of the culture had a historical impact on the nature of gender roles in the society by virtue of economic considerations, as discussed by Lee (1978). A further important factor influencing the role and status of women in this country has been the strong influence of the Roman Catholic Church, to which 95% of the population belonged in the 1970s; this figure has slightly reduced over the past three decades.

1.3.1 The social context and influence of the Church

Ireland is unique among developed Western societies in relation to the constraints on women’s roles which continued well into the 1970s and 1980s (Commission on the Status of Women, 1972; Beale, 1986; Galligan, 1998; O’Connor, 1998; Kennedy, 2001) and which still remain concerning the issue of abortion (Smyth, 1992; Kingston, Whelan and Bacik, 1997). This was due in large part to the strong influence of the Catholic Church in promulgating and supporting a traditional role for women and in shaping attitudes to gender roles (Flanagan, 1975; Robinson, 1978; Inglis, 1998; Ferriter, 2009), as well as in contributing to the social conditions and legal framework in the country. While the influence of religion on the development of gender role attitudes and behaviour has been well documented (e.g. Reuther, 1974; Daly, 1975; Farley, 1976), the influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland was particularly strong (Garvin, 2004), surpassing that in other Catholic countries (Chubb, 1971) particularly concerning women’s roles (Flanagan, 1975; Robinson, 1978) and issues related to sexuality and relationships, such as contraception, divorce and abortion. The influence of Church teachings on the norms and values of the society have been complemented by laws of the State, and underpinned by passages in the Irish Constitution concerning the role of women (Constitution of Ireland, 1937, Article 41.2):

2.1 In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

2.2 The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to neglect of their duties in the home.

(Article 41.2, Constitution of Ireland, 1937)

Attitudes toward the role of women in Ireland are part of a larger belief system in which religiosity is a central component (Fine-Davis, 1979a, 1989) and which also has elements reminiscent of the authoritarian personality syndrome (ibid.; Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, 1950), a feature noted earlier by both Chubb (1971) and Whyte (1971).

1.3.2 Social change in Ireland

In spite of the fact that Ireland was a more traditional society relative to many other Western countries, the process of change from the mid 1970s was very rapid. The influence of various factors, including Ireland’s economic development, the women’s movement – both internationally and in Ireland itself – and the impact of Ireland’s membership of the European Community from 1973 onwards, served as catalytic forces to affect gender role attitudes. These were reinforced by a series of administrative and legislative changes which had implications for the role and status of women. These included the removal of the marriage bar (1973) – which had prevented married women from being employed in the public service – followed in rapid succession by legislation for equal pay (passed in 1974, implemented in 1975), employment equality (1977), contraception (1979) and taxation of married women (1980). Legislation concerning equal pay and equal employment were direct results of EU membership, as they followed EU directives. There was extensive public debate on contraception in the early 1970s and the 1973 McGee case – in which the Supreme Court ruled that contraceptives could be imported for personal use – helped to precipitate legislation in 1979 in this area. Further significant changes followed, including the legalisation of divorce (1995), following two national referenda in 1986 and 1995, the latter successful by a very small margin (O’Connor, 1998).

Many of these developments profoundly affected the role of women in Ireland and in many cases removed impediments to their freedom and labour force participation. Increasing numbers of married women entered the labour force from the 1970s onwards (Callan and Farrell, 1991) and this trend has continued to the present day. Married women’s labour force participation was almost negligible in 1971 at 7.5%. By 1977 this figure had doubled and in the 20 years from 1989 to 2009, a period of economic growth, the figure increased from 23.7% to 54%, with employment among married women in the childbearing age group much higher at 72.6% (CSO, 2009a).

Thus, for a number of reasons, progress toward the attainment of equal status for women has not been as rapid in Ireland as it has been in most other European countries or in the United States. However, while these factors may help to explain the reasons for Ireland’s relative traditionalism and lag in progress vis-à-vis other European countries and the US, they do not explain the context from which the attitudes toward women arose. In order to more fully understand attitudes toward the role and status of women today, it is important to try and understand where they came from historically. Thus, it may be useful to step back into Irish history – if however briefly and sketchily – in order to identify some of the socio-cultural and historical roots of more current attitudes toward the role of women in Ireland. In the following section we shall review some of the key facts and events which have been relevant to women’s status in Ireland over the centuries up to the present time. While many sources have been consulted, we have relied extensively on the excellent collection of articles edited by MacCurtain and Ó Corráin (1978). For a more comprehensive discussion of each topic touched on below, the reader is referred to the work of the individual Irish historians cited here.

1.3.3 The historical context – the role of women in Ireland through the ages

The earliest information about the role and status of women in early Irish society comes from mythology and folklore. Irish mythology began to be written down in the sixth century; howev...