On March the 8th 2024, the Irish electorate voted to reject key changes in the Irish constitution, in the domain of personal relationships, family life and women’s role in society. The family, marriage and women were all afforded privileged mention and protection in the Irish Constitution of 1937. At the time, Ireland was a predominantly rural society with most of the population engaged in agriculture. Married women were expected to have large families and pregnancy outside marriage was stigmatized and concealed in religious run institutions. The constitution’s wording reflected the traditional assumption that women’s and men’s roles, abilities and positions in society were predefined by biology and ‘natural’ rather than socially constructed. In Article 41.1.1., the State recognises the family as the natural, primary and fundamental group in society, and as a moral institution possessing “inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.” Article 41.1.2. guarantees the State will protect the family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the nation and the State. Article 41.2.1 refers specifically to the role of women: “In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” The wording explicitly says woman (which means all women) by her “life” as opposed to “women by their work,” for instance, which is an important distinction. Women’s primary role (“her life”) in 1937 was defined as primarily in the home as a mother, based on a male breadwinner model and the economic dependency of women on men that was strongly supported by Catholic leaders but objected to by Irish feminists at the time and ever since. Article 41.2.2. further states: “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” The confinement of women to the domain of family caring for decades was bolstered by laws that formally and informally prevented women from continuing to work in certain sectors after marriage. A formal “marriage ban” for instance applied to women working in the civil service until the 1970s, who had to give up their jobs upon getting married. Few protections also existed for women subjected to financial, emotional or physical abuse in the protected “family” and many had no independent means of survival. In Article 41.3.1. the State also pledged “…to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.” The definition of what a family is, is explicitly tied to marriage to the exclusion of other family types, such as those headed by lone parents or cohabitees, increasingly in evidence in in Ireland today.