Comments on: The Labour Party didn’t give a damn about the rights of married women – or any women, for that matter

By: r Caruana

r Caruana — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 23:52:10 +0000

Just as a point of detail. Equal rights for women in Malta are still far from equal to date. Up to a couple of years ago I worked in a very affluent company here and know for a fact being in the know of the ins and outs of its HR dept, that male and female managers with the same qualifications etc for the same posts STILL didn’t get the same wages or perks obviously I mean to the detriment of the female parties concerned. The mentality here still leaves much to be desired. So don’t fool us Labour Party that you have become avant-garde and in line with Europe when the broad mentality is to let the women go to work in order to shut us up but still expect us to do double shift when we get home, so that you warm your seats at the end of the day and not lift a finger to contribute with house chores or rearing the kids. Few are the men I know that have equal responsibilities at home as the wife, albeit they both work.

By: rjc

rjc — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 19:43:29 +0000

In reply to David. It was the Colonial administration which granted the vote for women in the 1947 Constitution, so no Maltese party or government put a claim on it.

By: Foreign Equality?

Foreign Equality? — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 16:34:35 +0000

I married a beautiful Maltese woman in 1981. At one point in the 80s during a discussion with ‘authorities’ about purchase of our home or sorting some tax issue – I can’t exactly recall – we were informed that my Maltese (Bormla born) wife would require a “resident permit” to live here because of me being a foreigner.

I could not believe the absurdity of this but thankfully because of some enlightened people called Eddie Fenech Adami and the Nationalist government, this was rectified.

By: Burgensis

Burgensis — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 13:50:39 +0000

The 1973 law enacted by Malta’s Labour government legalised sexual relations between two consenting adults of the same sex. This legislation was no different from the UK’s 1967 Sexual Offences Act enacted by the UK’s Labour Government, except for the age of consent. In Malta the age of consent was set at 18, equal to that for heterosexual sex. In the UK it was set at 21 for homosexuals and was only equalised with that for heterosexuals (16) by Tony Blair’s Labour Government many decades later (in the face of staunch opposition from people of your mentality). These two pieces of legislation nullified sodomy laws that were intended to target homosexuals. Anyone falling for your garbage that such laws are intended to protect married women should just read the homophobic statements by opponents of decriminalisation at the time (prominent PN politicians and the clergy), or simply Wikipedia “sodomy law”. Such colonial sodomy laws are still in force in unenlightened parts of the Commonwealth where homophobic violence is rife. Cyprus had to remove its sodomy law relatively recently as a condition for EU membership.
You have to be mature enough to accept that, on very rare occasions, the Labour Party can get something right (that is, if you do believe it is right for homosexuals not to be criminalised).

By: Joe Fenech

Joe Fenech — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 12:13:47 +0000

Agatha Barbara president = women rights installed

Install free education = the country is educated

Install university courses (with a high percentage of professors as proficient as a rabbit dropping) = our university is a top institution

Build a road (don’t question its efficiency) = we have an excellent road network

Teach people to read Maltese crap = the nation is literate

Create employment (close and eye to cheap labour) = we have eradicated poverty

By: Philip Micallef

Philip Micallef — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 12:01:55 +0000

In 1955 when Dom Mintoff’s Labour Party was elected, my mother, a lecturer in pathology at the University of Malta, had her job terminated on the official grounds that she was female and married.

By: David

David — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 10:54:58 +0000

Besides, the criminal law on adultery, which discriminated against women, was also abolished around 1975.

[Daphne – Come off it, David. That was a dead letter and you know it, so much so that both Prime Minister Borg Olivier and his wife committed adultery openly in the 1960s while he was in office. So don’t be ridiculous.]

By: David

David — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 10:53:39 +0000

In fairness, one must also state that Labour favoured voting rights for women and appointed two women as president.

[Daphne – David, the vote for women came in in 1947: almost 70 years ago. I am talking about 1971 onwards. Both the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party were completely different animals in the 1940s and comparisons are useless and irrelevant. And do you honestly think that the vote for women was, in 1947, not a complete inevitability rather than conscious, ground-breaking policy? Or are you suggesting that had it not been for Boffa, Maltese women would have dragged on without the vote until the 1960s?

As for appointing two women as president, Agatha Barbara could hardly be described as a woman except technically. In fact in her later years, she even suffered male pattern baldness. You might as well clam that Labour was ultra-liberal and forward-looking because it appointed Malta’s first butch lesbian president, when in reality – and this is something I remember, not imagine – Labour and its supporters were hideously homophobic.

As a woman I absolutely resent your suggestion that tokenism – as in Mrs Preca’s appointment to the post – is any sign of liberalism or tolerance. It is actually the opposite. People who regard all as equal do not set about making an example of special appointments. Mrs Preca’s appointment to the presidency – ‘a woman’ – is the equivalent of trendy advertising agencies in New York in the 1960s employing black women as receptionists, to prove a point which in reality proved the opposite.]

As happened in all countries, equal rights for women were a long struggle. Al least until the early 70s, in Malta, female public servants were paid less than their male colleagues and had to resign their job when they got married.

[Daphne – Until the early 1970s? That went on long beyond that, David, and the chief/arch exponents of women having to give up their jobs to make way for ‘breadwinners’ were Agatha Barbara and Dom Mintoff, plus the rest of their dinosaur crowd. Their solution to rampant, growing unemployment was to press-gang women into the kitchen and nursery and leave the jobs ‘ghal irgiel’.

Unfortunately, David, it is always a bad mistake to try to teach people about something they actually lived through themselves. I lived through it. This was the Malta in which I grew up, at a huge disadvantage, as a girl to a woman.]

By: Calculator

Calculator — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 08:34:35 +0000

To add further to the perversion you outline above, the Labour Party have obtained the Equality Mark – based, so far, only on gender – awarded by the NCPE, but the PN have not.

Ħawwadni ħa nifhmek f’dal-pajjiż.

By: AG

AG — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 07:22:18 +0000

And then you hear that infamous argument that the PN had 25 years in which to give the right to gays to marry.

Right, because the PN inherited a democratically mature country back in 1987, that it would have been the obvious thing to do back then.