There are days when I wake up and I’m happy to be female and alive, and there are others when I find it hard not to start wringing my hands and looking to the sky for answers as to why things are the way they are.
Towards the end of December, just in time for Christmas, a Eurobarometer survey was published showing that 61% of the 507 Maltese respondents who took part felt that feminism had “gone too far”. As usually goes in these things, we were at the top of the list for this view, placing second only after Cyprus.
Also, despite the fact the female labour participation rate in this country is 73.6%, compared to the European average of 69.4%, a staggering 63% of participants in the study believe that women should prioritise family responsibilities, and 46% feel that a woman’s primary role is taking care of her home and family, which again puts us at 10% points higher than the EU average.
It would seem that despite the world turning many times over, everything remains calm, bright and 30 years behind everywhere else in sunny Malta. And to be honest, the older I get and the more invisible work I have to do, the more I fail to grasp why this should be the case at all. In a world where women have to work outside the house as much as their male counterparts, how is it okay that they’re literally expected to prioritise more than their partners once they get home? To be honest, if I were a man, I would almost be profoundly offended and ashamed of the fact that the society I live in doesn’t even conceive that I can take care of my family and keep things together as well as my wife does. While my wife is expected to bring home the bacon and fry it with a baby on her hip, I’m just meant to bring it home and do nothing else.
If nothing else, these kinds of surveys always serve to remind me what a long way we still have to go to shed the stereotypes that have held us in a chokehold for so long and how awful it is that 50% of the population keeps on being treated like the unpaid help.
No, Malta, feminism hasn’t “gone too far”; it’s barely even started the engine. Anyone who tells you any different has plenty to gain from you being quiet, subservient, and exhausted.