The Irish Constitution (Bunreacht na hEireann) was ratified 70 years ago on July 1, 1937. You can peruse it online. The Irish Times had an editorial about it yesterday (sorry no link) celebrating Eamon de Valera's success in drafting and securing the document, citing it as his greatest achievement in his long tenure within Irish politics. The article reports that the referendum passed by 55% of votes, with 44% in opposition. The Times, however, overlooks the Constitution's great injustice to women

It's worth noting that one of the most significant dissenting groups consisted of Irish feminists who strongly objected to women's domestic roles as wife and mother being formally codified and inscribed into the Constitution. Margaret Ward, a brilliant historian, explains de Valera's limited understanding of women and his commitment to men's gender privilege in Irish civic affairs:

"The initial impetus behind the proposed constitution was the necessity of establishing the sovereign independence of Ireland, of tearing away the last remnant of the 1922 Treaty Constitution. But de Valera's new constitution was far removed from the liberal-democratic ethos of the 1922 document, being imbued with all the reactionary values of Catholic social teaching, particularly in its insistence upon the primacy of women's role within the family. It echoed many Papal encyclicals, all of which de Valera had studied in detail as he formulated what was to be the climax of his political career. He had refused to let women into Boland's Mill in 1916 and he had disregarded the contribution made by women during the Civil War, finding women activists an anomaly he preferred to ignore in favour of a vision of an Ireland 'whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose villages would be joyous with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens.' Now as President, he took the opportunity to ensure that women, whether they liked it or not, would give priority to their duties as wives and mothers. He had never wanted women in the public sphere and was going to enshrine these prejudices within the constitution. His attitudes were so well known that no one was taken in by his protestations of concern for women's well-being." Unmanageable Revolutionaries 237-8.

Feminist scholars herald Article 41 as deleterious to women's rights.

Article 41

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

Now, I'm anticipating that some readers will say: "hey, that sounds great to me. Mothers are important and the State should treat them as such. Hearth and home, social bedrock, blah, blah, blah."

The problem resides in the fact that the fundamental legal scaffolding of Irish society defines women as mothers, thereby limiting women to their role within social reproduction. The choice was made for them by a repressed man who should have been a priest instead of a politician, and most likely would have been if he could have proven his paternity. Ward points out that he refused to allow women any role under his command of Boland Mills during the Rising. The women gladly worked elsewhere during Easter Week. He was quoted as later saying that he regretted turning women away because his men had to take time out to do menial tasks such as cooking. But I digress.

Some women activists in 1937 had children and some did not. They wanted the ability to chart their own course in the new nation on the merits of their own agency as citizens, rather than conform to the "comely maidens"stereotype that the patriarchy attempted to romanticize while making pregnancy compulsory for women. Article 41 carried serious consequences for women by authorizing the "marriage ban," the social convention that required women's resignation upon marriage. For example, in Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Selected Essays" she discloses that her mother was a doctor who had to abandon her practice upon marriage and lived through a deep depression that lasted 15 years at the loss of her professional livelihood. Article 41 made discrimination against women the norm for most of the twentieth century.

Motherhood should be chosen, not enforced by the state.

Ward explains that women graduates from university issued a protest to de Valera's document. Women such as Mary Hayden, Agnes O' Farrelly, Mary Macken, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and Mary Kettle refused his backward and regressive description of womanhood along with Article 45 which stated that women and children should be kept from work which they were unsuited for, leading feminists to predict its utility as an instrument in discrimination.

de Valera ignored women, just as he always had.

Media outlets like the Irish Times should be attendant to the ways in which the Constitution did not benefit all Irish citizens, and in fact, offered a narrow scope for the lives of half of the population.