Feminism, and the Lysenkoist push towards gender equality at all costs, is a very real hazard to stable relationships, happy families and the well-being of nations. Marthese Portelli unwittingly proves as much in an obtuse and dysfunctional article entitled Empowerment To All Women (February 15) .

Its principal theme is the almighty economy and every other consideration is forced to take a back seat to it. Portelli’s utilitarian and robotic appeal to “efficiency”, “economic output” and “employment opportunities” doesn’t bother discussing how woman’s enrolment in the rat race will dismantle or cheapen her role as nurturer, lover and mother.

Very disingenuously but not surprisingly so, given Portelli’s position as president of the PN’s executive council, the workplace is also painted as a land of milk and honey, where employers are fair, wise and just and employees honest, industrious and obedient. A mythical fairyland, of course, but reality is but an inconvenient afterthought for people living in ivory towers and busy drumming support for their parties.

Forgetting that life is all give and take, and fearful of “old fashioned views of ‘place’ on the basis of gender”, Portelli wants to have her cake and eat it too.

“This is what empowerment for women means: giving us a real unfettered choice. This Administration has endeavoured to ensure that female participation in the job market is not driven by social pressure.”

This is a misrepresentation and people who still have two brain cells to rub together understand that full employment is a threat and not a promise and that this much maligned social pressure is nothing more than a woman’s inherent biological longing to build a happy home for her mate and children. Co-opting this responsibility through entitlements for childcare facilities, longer maternity leave, tax breaks, tax credits and national insurance credits will absolve women of their duty and prerogative to invest in their family ahead of their job, making their victory in the workplace a Cadmean one and leaving them tragically unfulfilled and disenfranchised from their true purpose in the natural order of things.

Men’s long-coveted ‘privilege’ will now be their own; stress, stomach ulcers, workplace disability, survival sickness, workaholism, perhaps premature death. This is what government apparatchiks like Portelli do best: fix what is not broken and short-sell people on a heaven that was within their reach all along.