With her speech on Women’s Day, the Prime Minister’s wife Michelle Muscat unwittingly waded into the mummy wars. Fought with ever-increasing weariness by the stay-at-home mums and working mothers, the bone of contention is basically whether women should work outside the home or be exclusively home-makers and child carers.

Financial constraints and realities have a way of making this a bit of an academic discussion. If a family is not making ends meet on one pay packet, then both spouses are going to have to try to find a way of boosting their income by finding work.

No amount of moralising is going to put money in people’s pockets and that is one of the reasons why more women have been joining the workforce in recent years. More power to their elbow of course – if they can manage to keep the boat afloat after weeks of meetings, answering e-mails and juggling children’s pick-ups, who is anyone to judge?

But it is equally annoying to hear the implied put-downs of mothers who don’t take up paid work. The unspoken assumption is that because they aren’t swivelling around in an executive chair brandishing their Blackberries across a boardroom table and conducting a four-way conference call, they have dropped out of the human race.

At one point during her speech – speaking of what happens to women after their children are born – Muscat said that they “vanish into thin air”. Presumably, she meant that they were no longer working outside the home and not that they had fallen off the face of the earth.

Muscat also spoke of the “guilt” felt by working mothers – a feeling which she seemed to imply was propagated by the Catholic Church, which is apparently still involved in a fully blown indoctrination campaign to keep women tettered to hearth and home.

The only example given of this patronising stance is Muscat’s anecdote about a catechist asking if a child’s mother is going to attend one of a series of ongoing religious discussions.

The obstacles to mothers joining or remaining active in the working world are of a more practical nature

Much of the discussion following Muscat’s speech focused on her delivery but online commenters clashed about the content too. As far as I could see, Muscat’s supporters found her speech to be a brave one – a feminist fist waved at the conservative power structure that yokes women to their sinks and doesn’t allow them to fulfill themselves and to zoom up the career ladder.

If I hadn’t been so tired of the whole debate, I would have gently suggested that they put down their 1970s copies of Cosmopolitan and take a look at what’s really going on around them right now. Do they really think that women are giving up on the working world because of threats of hellfire and brimstone from the pulpit? Or that they send in their resignation letter after a chance remark from a well-meaning catechist?

The last generation of Maltese women to be racked with guilt over going out to work is probably that made up of grandmothers who are now seeing to a large part of their grandchildren’s care. And you can hardly blame the Church for the relatively low percentage of women in the workforce.

I can’t think of a single stay-at-home sermon in recent memory and in any case, many women ignore the Church’s teachings in other areas; it’s not like they’re going to have sleepless nights about employment.

The obstacles to mothers joining or remaining active in the working world are of a more practical nature. The most obvious ones are the difficulties in co-ordinating their working hours with their children’s free time. Not all mothers have the luxury of childcare provided free of charge by family members and it’s unlikely that their working hours coincide with school times.

At times, it’s a mad, slalom rush through traffic to pick up children. Now, the government is offering subsidised childcare for extended hours and that may alleviate the problem.

However, some women may still not earn enough to recoup the cost of childcare and other expenses to make the hassle of going out to work worth it. These are some of the realities which working mothers have to face and not the problems of meddling monsignors or the yoke of male chauvinism.

In a nutshell, working mothers are racked by weariness not by guilt. If some of them are in a position not to launch themselves fully into the rat race and spend time with their children, who are we to argue?

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt