L-ozbricc, how progressive….
We tend to forget, don’t we, that the progressive Labour government of the 1980s thought that post il-mara mizzewga huwa d-dar and that married women who were brass-necked enough to WORK FOR MONEY were ‘stealing’ jobs from (male) breadwinners.
Married women were even banned from applying for work with the Dejma. That’s how bad it was.
From The Times, 6 January 1987
DEJMA RECRUITMENT
The call for applications for recruitment into the Dejma corps, which is open till Friday, is open to married males and young men and women, the Department of Information said yesterday.
And then we claim to be surprised when the Labour Party in its current incarnation bangs on about how all men should have a living wage so that their wives can stay home and not work.
They still think in terms of a woman’s natural place being in the home, and that married women who work would rather not do so. Sickening. I don’t know how anyone can even consider voting for such backwardness.
I am particularly keen to highlight the Labour Party’s raw and blatant discrimination against married women, as late as 1987, because I am UTTERLY SICK of people claiming how progressive that government was, just because it legislated for civil marriage and decriminalised sodomy (a law which, incidentally, protected women from unreasonable demands made by husbands at a time when they had no means of protecting themselves).
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You won’t convince Frans Ghirxi. You should have heard him on Inkontri. I just cannot listen to them any more, let alone think that we may have more of them come 2013. He prefers to do without a Mars bar and have all the many glorious projects that the savior was kind enough to concoct for us.
I can’t believe it was so recent!
Like thousands of other women, my wife had to give up her job with government when we married in 1983. The irony was that the minister responsible for this regulation was a woman.
I’m not sure I prefer the current mind-frame, where a married woman, who chooses to stay at home to raise her kids is continuously sneered at by other women, who dump their kids at day-care so they can follow their career.
[Daphne – I don’t see any of that happening here, Katrin. Only 30% of women between the ages of 25 and 61 work in Malta. It’s the women who work who are sneered at and regarded with contempt. I know that through experience.]
Ah, ok. In Germany it is the other way round!
[Daphne – Yes, and over here in Malta it is women who work who are disparaged and looked down upon. In fact, only yesterday I watched an episode of a soap opera on the Labour Party’s TV station Super One, and this woman was asked by her factory manager to go to Dubai (if she would) to run their new operation there, with provision made for her family – housing, schooling, etc. When she broke the news to her husband, he went nuts, played the martyr and drama queen, called her names, accused her of thinking only of herself, and when she stuck to her guns and said that she would go anyway, he told her that he would not allow her to take the children. She went, a nanny was organised, the nanny was a lovely mothery type not like the nasty mother who worked (but of course, the nanny was working too) and daddy fell in love with the nanny because she was SO much better at wifely and motherly duties than the nasty wife was. Moral of the story: women with careers lose their husbands to women without careers.]
Antoine Vella, I don’t think it was the minister’s fault. It was a rule in Estacode – the civil service work rules-. in fact it was a different situation in private companies.
That particular minister will be remembered for her diatribes against teachers at every prize day. Thanks to the MUT the minister stopped these harangues.
[Daphne – Of course it was the goverment’s fault! The government failed to repeal that rule. It was perfectly possible to do so but they never bothered because they really did think and apparently still do that women’s place is in the home. Women no longer have to resign from the civil service when they marry.]
“…a law which, incidentally, protected women from unreasonable demands made by husbands at a time when they had no means of protecting themselves”
Do you know how many indictments were instituted on the basis of complaints made by women against their husbands?
[Daphne – No, but I do know that it was grounds for divorce in England and the cause of a scandal that drove Lord Byron out of that country. It is irrelevant how many indictments were in fact made (though interesting). The relevant point is that women could use that law to fend off demands for sodomy, with which rather a lot of men appear to be fascinated and most women regard as a humilating and violent assault, at a time when women were absolutely powerless to refuse in other ways. Homosexual men forget that this particular law was not all about them.]