An 'extreme domesticity': living up to the ideals of Irish womanhood

Thoughts on the house-proud women I come from and how the Ireland they grew up in shaped them

I nearly didn’t write a post this week.

Because I was on my knees.

And I didn’t have the energy to get up.

With a kind of karmic irony, considering how often I talk, think and write about the archetypal ‘just get on with it’, ‘keep everything going’ ‘strong’ Woman of Ireland, the universe decided to test me on it. And I had to, with great reluctance, admit that I wasn’t up to it. That extra little reserve of energy I’ve always been able to find to ‘keep going’ that little bit more just wasn’t there.

I was shocked and humbled, and I crumbled.

I arrived in a reflexologist’s treatment room with a dripping, sniffly nose and an exhausted, frazzled mind hoping she’d put me back in gear. I could feel the crystalline ‘bubbles’ pop and move as she worked across my feet in sequence. I quizzed her intensely at the end on what she found in which part of each foot and what that signified for the rest of my body.

A thyroid under strain was the main verdict — “I can tell you’ve had loads of cortisol just pumping round your body” — and a right foot that ‘wouldn’t settle’. “In Chinese medicine”, she explained, “the right side can be to do with organisation in your life, so that’s interesting seeing as you have recently moved house”.

“Ah” I see

I come from, on both sides, a long-line of house-proud women. Not just house-proud, but women who were top-notch home managers. As a child, I nearly used to dread going into my (paternal) Nana’s house. It was intimidating. I was afraid to touch anything — to move beyond the stool children were given to sit on at the kitchen table. Everything had a place, and everything was immaculate. Even things worn and cracked from years of use were cared for as if they were brand new. It was her house, my Nana’s. You felt her in every part of it. It was her absolute pride and she hardly ever left it.

Few who visited escaped without the ‘grand tour’. “Come on with me now”, she’d say, rising up from her seat at the head of the kitchen table, beckoning you to follow. Passing out of the Aga-filled warmth of the kitchen into the cold hall always felt important. As a child, you didn’t get to enter that space often; only once you could be trusted around the precious objects that lay beyond. Heavy old sideboards covered in silver dining sets and crystal decanters, and photographs looked over by the painted portraits of the important ancestors that hung on the wall. With a thin finger made gnarly from years of physical work, she’d point and tell you the history of every object —where it came from and who gave it to her— everything had a story and she was its keeper.

But Nana was a rare woman of Ireland in that she had no problem telling you how ‘great’ she was. And ‘great’ was qualified by how hard she worked and the high standards of the domestic space she ruled over. She told you straight out how often she cleaned and polished ‘the silver’, how regularly everything was dusted and how well she looked after the ancestral objects left to her care. A key installation of every ‘grand tour’ was the prize she won for having the cleanest dairy (she washed and cleaned the dairy on the farm, where the milk was kept and stored, twice a day every day until she physically couldn’t do it anymore). You were left in no doubt that ‘Sure, wasn’t she only great’.

My (maternal) Granny’s house could not have been more different. Small and simple. Cluttered and overflowing with a life of living. It was always warm and welcoming. A porch that smelt of vegetables gave way to a busy kitchen. Granny sat at her pew; the seat right next to the cooker. There was always something baking she needed to keep an eye on. A steamy pot of potatoes or vegetables to be checked. It was a kitchen that told of her need to feed. Its finite surface area packed with food mixers, utensils, catering sized tubs of margarine and cooling racks. She was never not in the middle of ‘doing’ something. The kitchen table was an extension of her worktop and her office desk. Backs of envelopes with sums and lists scrawled across it, working out budgets or making notes to herself of the many things she’d be trying to keep track of — there was always some Church fundraiser she’d be planning for, or some ‘old dear’ she was bringing to an appointment somewhere. She was always giving.

You never left her kitchen empty-handed, and certainly never empty-stomached. Even now, years since I have had one of her ‘big feeds’, when I feel the pain of over-eating, my body remembers her double-helping roast dinners, followed by ‘pudding’ and ice-cream, rounded off by tea and a slice (or two or three) of cake, and a few biscuits for good measure. I’ve no idea how I managed to put away quantities an adult-male might struggle with, but you just did. You had no choice — it was how she showed her love. Her kitchen and the home and everything that went with it was her domain, and she was a true master of it.

I remember answering the house phone as a little girl, and the person on the line asking for my mum “She’s up the walls”, I said. They laughed. But she was up the walls. Literally. Painting them. But metaphorically speaking too, she was painting them because she probably was going ‘up the walls’. I’ve never known anyone change the colour and decor of rooms as often as my mum. A restless soul who couldn’t move (tethered to place, being married to a farmer) she moved about inside the house instead. Constantly remaking and repainting. Making things look nice so she could feel nice in it. ‘Spring-cleaning’ was a regular, not yearly, event. Walls were washed, cupboards mucked out and cleaned, attics and outdoor sheds reorganised and carpets shampooed. The Hoover was the soundtrack to my childhood, and I grew up in an ever-changing, ever-improving, immaculate house.

Nana (L) and Granny (Right with her sisters to her left)

These are the women I come from. Women who were always doing, always giving, always making, always doing battle with and mastering their domestic space. Strong women who ‘got on with it’ and ‘kept everything going’.

And as I’ve sat here, rocked back on my knees with a right foot that ‘won’t settle’ at the current disorganisation of its domestic, home space, I’ve thought of them.

I’ve thought of them — these giving, doing, baking, polishing, scrubbing ‘only great’ house-managers of women — as I’ve gone to battle with this big old house we moved into eight weeks ago.

I’ve thought of them; the standards they left me and the patterns of behaviours they gave me. They wouldn’t have turned a blind eye to the cobwebs making tumbleweeds of dog hair in the corners. Or the thirty-years of dust in the backs of old Victorian wallpapered cupboards. So neither can I — “I’m stressed just looking at it”.

But when you find yourself on your knees. You start to ask questions.

‘Why?’

Why did they care so much about the state of their home and do I, really, care enough to allow it to so my rule my current mental and physical existence. Do I (me alone, not me thinking ‘through my mothers’) really care if the house is not perfect?

I’ve traced the pattern, its lines etched into hands made old young by hard labour — by ‘women’s work’ — and I’ve arrived at the Ireland of my grandmothers’ time.

It’s hard now, in current times, really to fathom the extent to which Ireland historically viewed, constructed and judged women according to the ideals of domesticity. In the Irish state, there was really only one image of women —that of the homemaker— and those in power used it as the bedrock on which to build a nation.

“Women’s primary function in society — the one for which nature has admirably suited her — is that of wife and mother. The woman’s duties in this regard, especially that of bringing up the children, are of such far-reaching importance to the nation and the race, that the need of safeguarding them must outweigh every other consideration”

Edward Cahill ‘Notes on Christian Sociology’: The Irish Monthly (1925)

It’s taken me years of this Women of Ireland Project to really get my head around that. To really understand why something as abstract, and merely symbolic, as ensuring women took up their pre-defined (according to the ‘laws of nature’) roles as wives and mothers, and stayed within the domestic space, was made the basis on which a post-independence Irish state chose to build itself.

But I understand it when I see it as fear and anxiety. Following the War of Independence and the brutal Civil War, those in power were desperate for stability as the whole country seemed to teeter on the edge of implosion. And they used women’s bodies as ballast to steady the ship. As far as they were concerned, Ireland would not know social stability until the proper social order of women in the domestic space, and men in the public space, was firmly established.

In times of uncertainty and fear we all want to retreat into the safety of a home, to the warm comforts and care ‘Mammy’ has waiting. And I think there was something in the anxiety-riddled (and let’s face it, traumatised) men overseeing Ireland’s move from colonial subject to independent nation that was desperate for that too. As DeValera said in 1937:

”Everyone knows there is little chance of having a home… if there is no woman in it, the woman is really the home-maker”.

Through a regime of legislation, Church endorsement, and public judgement those men in power did their level best to make sure that women would be found in the domestic space ‘making home’ (and nowhere else).

Writing in 1924, Jesuit priest Edward Cahill set out the ideal Woman of Ireland, and in doing so, made clear what was expected of any ‘good Christian’ woman in Ireland:

“Modesty, piety, self-sacrifice, devotedness to the duties of the home, and to all works of charity are the main attributes that mark her off from all other types of womanhood…. Woman’s natural sphere is the home; and her primary social duties are those of wife and mother”.¹

My grandmothers were born as he (and many others) were writing this vision of Woman into the world. This was the story they were raised with and they both, in their own way, embodied this ideal.

My mum and I rarely begin a conversation about her mother, my Granny, without prefacing it with ‘Poor Granny’; an expression of our shared sympathy but also a guilt for how she gave so much to others and got so little back in return. Except maybe the cancer that ate her insides from a life lived carrying and swallowing down the worries of many; ‘saying nothing’ and ‘just getting on with it’. She was the quintessential self-sacrificing, giving, feeding, caring Woman of Ireland. And it was a tough life.

Nana then, she devoted herself — truly and entirely — to the ‘duties of the home’. To the extent that that was her identity. The ‘grand tour’ was not just about showing off a house and family she was proud of, it was ensuring that ‘the visitors’ could be in no doubt that she had a well-kept home. If that was what she — as a woman of her time — was to be judged by then she offered it up to you on a (highly polished) silver platter. But behind the scenes she lived a life of fussing and fretting. Worrying over objects and things being done in the right way, at the right time and in the right order. In her later years, when I would take my turn staying over to keep her company, I’d be woken by the gentle creak of the landing floor as she got up to do her nightly rounds and checks; she couldn’t sleep for the worry of the place.

I have no doubt that Granny really did enjoy giving and feeding people, and that Nana felt genuine pride in the tidiness and order of her farmhouse full of precious things, but there was a pressure and a burden to it. It was a life of their own making but it was shaped by the societal expectation to live up to the ‘ideal woman of Ireland’.

As the great storyteller and master of dry wit Peig Sawyers put it:

"Dá feabhas fear tí agus dá croíúla má bhíonn bean tighe dhoicheallach aige túrfaí sí dro-ainm air féin agus ar an dtig ach dá olcas é fear tí túrfaig bean mhaith tí dea-cháil air"

(However good and cheerful the man of the house is, if the woman of the house is churlish to him she will give him and the house a bad name, but however bad the man is, a good housewife will give him a good reputation)

A great weight of responsibility lay on women’s shoulders to present the ‘perfect home’ to the world, and to cover up all sorts of ills and chaos through its carefully curated veneer.

And I think there still is.

As women of Ireland, many of us have inherited an ‘extreme domesticity’ from our foremothers. And like anything ‘extreme’ it has come from an imbalanced place — that Ireland of the past that laid its burdens and worries on women and expected them to polish over it all and make everyone feel safe with a good feed and a clean and tidy home.

How often did the pressure of it put my foremothers on their knees too, I wonder?

1. Cahill, E. (1924). Notes on Christian Sociology. VI: The Social Status of Women. (A) the Christian Woman (Continued). The Irish Monthly, 52(617), 597–602.