All the things I never knew
How my view on womanhood has altered while researching The Women of Ireland Project
Sign up to the Women of Ireland Project Reading Group (more details at end of this piece)
A not infrequent question that comes up in conversations with female friends is some chatty, casual, rambling, informal version of:
“How is it for you, this being a woman thing”?
It’s a loaded question, because it’s not each other’s individual experiences inside the body of a woman we are particularly interested in, it’s one another’s opinions on the politicised version of ‘being a woman’ we want to know about.
We are interested in knowing where each of us land in the current discourse (the zeitgeist) which tells us that being a woman is pretty crap (because of the rising misogyny, the patriarchy, the discrimination, the stagnation in gender equality progress, the violence, and on and on).
And we feel a weird mix of guilt, shame, anger, confusion, confrontation, and indignation when we repeatedly conclude that (bar the odd bit of crappiness we can attach to the fact we are women) most of the time we eye-roll at this discourse and say:
“It’s been grand, absolutely fine, this being a woman thing”.
Some might read this and take it’s contradiction of, and apparent apathy to, the ‘being a woman is pretty crap’ discourse and deduce that my friends and I (all being children of the 1990s) are classic products of the Postfeminism (typified by a decline in support for feminism, a disliking of the ‘feminist’ label due to it’s negative connotations, and a view that the feminist movement is outdated) that emerged among our generation of women (1990s to 2000s).
They’re probably right.
Or at least, it’s a convenient label to explain us.
Yet, perhaps that’s a part of why we eye-roll, why we question and debate the current discourse which says that ‘being a woman is pretty crap’ because we — my female friends and I — have a general aversion to labels.
We don’t like the pigeon-holing, the blanketing of experience, the diffusion of nuance that tends to accompany that kind of discourse.
We want and like our complexity. We want to discuss it and pull it apart, and watch how we each evolve and change. We see ourselves as individuals but know we have been shaped by who, what and where we come from and recognise that often it is that shaping (by our families, our early experiences, our places of growing, our classes, our economic realities, our educations) which has had a greater impact on who we are than our being women.
But, if I was to speak for just myself, I think what really lies at the heart of it — at the fact that I have so often dismissed the ‘being a woman is pretty crap’ version of womanhood, or expressed a general apathy towards it despite it’s proliferation in the zeitgeist — is that I was born at the right time, in the right place to the right people.
Luck and chance, for the most part, have saved me from the everyday ‘pretty crap’ reality that typified and backgrounded daily life for women of Ireland in the generations prior to the 1980s.
To express what I mean by ‘pretty crap’ a list is in order. Below are the various bits of legislation (and government directed reports) which the 26-county Irish Free State and later Republic of Ireland enacted which affected the lives of women throughout the 20th century (three pages to toggle through!) and the positive changes which Ireland’s membership of the EEC and the women’s movement began to achieve from the 1970s onwards.
Click table to open in full:
The historical narrative that accompanies women of the Republic of Ireland is very clear. The Irish state, following independence, made the traditional family unit the bedrock of the nation and, in doing so, defined women’s sole purpose in society to be that of wives and mothers. Because this was considered so central to nation-building and the development of an Irish national identity, ensuring women took up this role (mainly by making it extremely difficult for them to be involved in anything but the domestic sphere of society) was an important part of public policy for many a government and political party in Ireland throughout the 20th century.
Legislation (with the support of Ecclesiastical doctrine) was the preferred method for making women into the idealised ‘Mothers of the Nation’, hence I can write out a table like the one above detailing numerous pieces of legislation (not including the ones I left out or overlooked) whose purpose seems little more than to create, maintain or reinforce conservative ideals of womanhood.
As historian Maryann Gialenella Valiulus explains:
“These legislative acts interacted and interfaced with one another to generate a gender ideology of domesticity that reinforced a patriarchal society”1.
In this way, the Irish State made no bones about its attitude to women, and that, at least, leaves us women of (the Republic of) Ireland with a very clear legacy from which we can make sense of ourselves.
For the women of Northern Ireland there is no such clarity; it lacks a similar clear legislative trail or historical narrative to follow. It does not have the unabashed ‘Woman = Mother of the Nation’ story that fills the research agenda of countless Gender Studies’ scholars in ‘The South’.
Trying to figure out the societal system that women of Northern Ireland have experienced since it became it’s own separate polity has been intensely frustrating and, at times, felt nearly impossible. Simply put, there is nowhere near as much dedicated research into the issue of ‘being a woman’ in Northern Ireland as there has been for women in the Republic.
As Colin Coulter writes in a book chapter titled ‘The Status and Position of Women’ (in Northern Ireland):
“Women have been all but invisible within the enormous literature that has emerged to document the recent turbulent history of Northern Ireland”.2
When it comes to the ‘being a woman is pretty crap’ discourse there has been a general trend, within Ireland, to consider that women in the South have been more heavily discriminated against by state and society than women in the North. Measures of the various metrics commonly used to determine gender inequalities have tended to support this view:
“In a submission to the New Ireland Forum in 1983, Clara Clark and Eileen Evison compared women’s lot north and south of the border. They found that out of twenty-one points of difference only four favoured the south. In many areas including divorce, family planning, health care and family welfare, women were better off in the north”.3
However, when I compare the women I have interviewed for this project who hail from Northern Ireland with the women of the Republic I find more that connects than differentiates — I think we do a disservice to women of Northern Ireland if we believe that ‘their lot’ has been better just because they had divorce and access to contraception long before women south of the border. Availability of such things is one thing, cultural acceptance is another, and since its creation as a separate polity the pervasive culture in the North, just as in the South, has been that of Christian conservativism and its constituent traditional attitude to gender roles. Conflict, such as that experienced in Northern Ireland, is also known to magnify and contribute to the persistence of such ideals.
“Societies which have experienced violent conflict over ethnic differences or national identity have often been described as characterised by strongly traditional attitudes towards women’s roles. There has certainly been evidence of conservativism in attitudes to social and moral issues in Northern Ireland, attitudes which many women themselves hold”
Gráinne McCoy: Women, Community and Politics in Northern Ireland
Women in Northern Ireland, just like women in the Republic, have borne the brunt of such conservativism and its influence on everyday life.
In the domestic sphere they remain subject to the continued unequal distribution of labour with more of their time than men given to caring responsibilities and domestic tasks.
World-renowned as exceptional community organisers, many have noted that women of Northern Ireland have only recently began to turn to activism on issues relating to themselves as women. Prior to this, and perhaps in reflection of the traditional role of women as the safe-guarders of family and the de-prioritising of their own needs in the face of others, women have directed their organising and collective activism on issues that affect their local communities and are commonly overlooked by ‘Big-P politics’.
In the workplace, despite the long-standing prominence of women in the Northern Irish workforce, fewer women than men earn above the Real Living Wage (largely due to being in part-time employment)4 and, perhaps most shocking and telling of all, Northern Ireland has one of the highest femicide rates in Western Europe (per head of capita).
The thing is, until I began researching for the Women of Ireland Project, I never knew any this. Not a bit of it. I knew nothing of the astounding number of laws enacted by the Irish State to reinforce a traditional ideal of womanhood and gender roles. Had no idea that because of them only three women had ever served on a jury until 1973, or that women had to effectively choose between marriage and a career, or, if she somehow did manage to keep earning a wage would watch ‘the tax-man’ add it all up as her husbands. I had no idea of the statistics on the level of sexual, domestic and physical violence towards women, North and South, or how women of Ireland compared poorly to their counterparts in Europe on the division of labour in the domestic sphere.
None of this history (nor, indeed, the legacy it has on our present reality) was taught to me in school. None of it was known or mentioned amongst friends. Nor was it a topic of discussion at the dinner table at home. It is as though I have lived through a sort of amnesia, one which skipped over the recent ‘pretty crap for women’ past and mentioned only the strong, powerful female role models Ireland accepts enough to celebrate (like Mary Robinson, Countess Markievicz and ‘Pirate Queen’ Gráinne O’Malley).
But now that I have seen the former I cannot unsee it.
Friends have noted how my attitude toward the ‘being a woman is pretty crap’ discourse has changed in the years I have spent researching for the Women of Ireland Project. The previous views I held, based solely on my own overwhelmingly positive experiences as a woman, have been coloured — utterly altered — by what I have learned from other women and the information I have flooded myself with in research texts. And sometimes I do not know where I — I alone — sit in it all.
I no longer eye-roll at the ‘being a woman is pretty crap’ discourse because the place of pain and degradation from which it arises is now part of the knowledge base I work with every day. A knowledge base which has made me look back on my own life and see things differently to how I interpreted them at the time (and I wish I could have remained blind to some of them) or recognise the inequalities and gender-based expectations experienced by my mother and grandmothers which, quite frankly, went beyond the call of duty and did them harm.
I am more informed now, you could say. But what does all this information in-form in me?
I have, at times, gotten lost in the rage and the pain I see and feel in many of the women I have interviewed, and lost myself to the rage and pain all the research I’ve done has evoked in me. But I am fortunate to be able to remind myself that although I am a woman of Ireland who lives with the legacy of that rage and pain, I am also a woman of Ireland who has benefitted from the changes achieved by the generations before mine.
I no longer ‘eye-roll’ and outwardly dismiss the discourse which tells only the negatives of being a woman in an androcentric system, instead I recognise and know why it is there (and for good reason). But I also feel it’s important to say that my own (positive) experiences as a woman allow me the opportunity to provide a narrative of womanhood that counters that discourse too, and allows for more nuance and pluralism in that conversation. For I am one of the fortunate ones who can say:
I have spent much of my life finding little about ‘being a woman’ to be ‘pretty crap’ and if that is my story as a woman of Ireland then I hope it can be the story for many others too.
Pg. 167 in Valiulis, M. G. (2019). The making of inequality in the Irish Free State, 1922–37: Women, power and gender ideology. Four Courts Press.
Coulter, C. (1999). The Status and Position of Women. In Contemporary Northern Irish Society: An Introduction. Pluto Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=3386087
Pg. 18 in Beale, J. (1986). Women in Ireland: Voices of Change. Gill & Macmillan.
https://wrda.net/2024/04/24/gender-inequality-in-northern-ireland-where-are-we-in-2024/
Sign up to the Women of Ireland Project Reading Group
After such positive interest (thank you!) in a Women of Ireland Project Reading group I’ve decided to launch!
Sign up via the link below:
Each meeting will focus on a particular research paper / book chapter I will have shared with you to read in advance. Topics will be eclectic, ranging from things which have happened to women of Ireland in history, to folklore, to sociological studies of some of the systems and forces which have affected women. These will be ‘academic’ studies, but I’ll pick the most enjoyable and interesting to read.
By signing up you would be committing to reading papers (ranging in length from 14 to 35 pages) in advance and showing up online to discuss your thoughts and feelings about the topic with others.
There is no cost involved, but I would appreciate regular donations to help me cover the monthly fees for our online meeting space (e.g. Zoom).
If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch :)
I'm so looking forward to this reading group!