Part Five: The hidden power of the challenging and questioning woman

Fifth of a five part series presenting key themes of the Women of Ireland Project Interviews

The final key theme: Challenging and Questioning

Are you a questioner or an acceptor?

The historian Rosemary Cullen Owens traced how women’s voice, status and role changed in Ireland between 1870 and 1970 (in this book) concluding that women across this epoch fell into one of two profiles: questioners and acceptors.

The ‘questioners’ questioned and actively challenged the dominant social order. An order which prescribed a particular ideal for women (that they be wives and mothers in a heterosexual marriage, eschew a public role for a life devoted to the private and domestic, and put the needs and welfare of those around her before all else).

And for their questioning, they are the most visible women in Ireland’s history.

Think of any (in)famous woman of Ireland and you invariably find a questioner and a challenger —Countess Markievicz, Maude Gonne, Kathleen Clarke, Jennie Wyse Power, Bernadette Devlin, Nell McCafferty, Mary Robinson, Ailbhe Smyth, Sinead O’Connor— for the questioners are the ones who left a mark in the recordings of public life. They are the activists, the revolutionists, the campaigners, the fighters.

But visible as they are they have been the minority:

“The accepting profile is, without a doubt, the majority. Spread across all classes of society, its members reflect the majority population as a whole, accepting of authority, of one’s place in society, of tradition”.

(Rosemary Cullen Owens)

The majority of women in Ireland’s history have been the acceptors, have accepted the roles defined for them by the social order and have got on with it.

I can’t help wondering to what extent that is a conscious or unconscious acceptance?

Is it like that David Foster Wallace parable which tells of one fish turning to the other and asking “What the hell is water?”. For much of Ireland’s history, strictly defined gender roles were part of the ether, simply the normal way of life — so how do you question something that didn’t enter the realm of the ‘questionable’?

That may be one explanation for the majority of acceptors, but I feel the harsher reality is that ‘questioning and challenging’ has always been deeply unsafe for women of Ireland.

The timeline Rosemary Cullen Owens chose to trace women in Ireland —1870 to 1970— is important. It marks (to my mind) a period typified by a sustained sense of threat and uncertainty (The Great Famine, The Revolutionary Years, The War of Independence, Partition, The Civil War, Political uncertainty, Economic Depression, Conflict). And this threat and uncertainty, and collective sense of anxiety, both resulted in and was assuaged by a ‘tightening’ of the culture, especially for women.

From 1870, well up until the women’s movement of the 1970s, women in Ireland were subject to a ‘Tight Culture’ — one which had strict ideals for how women should behave and next to no tolerance for those who did not conform to them. Anyone who challenged or questioned things was brutally disciplined and punished; those who deviated from the expected norm were shamed, cast out by family and community, pilloried, or contained and disciplined by state institutions. The reflections on Ireland’s not-so-distant past, which Sinead O’Connor’s recent passing has sparked, have reminded so many of us just how dangerous and unsafe it has been to be a challenging and questioning woman of Ireland.

It is no wonder then that Rosemary Cullen Owens found the questioners to be the minority.

And yet…..

And yet, as I continue working with and analysing the stories of the women interviewed for this project, I find myself writing ‘Challenging and Questioning’ in the margin next to many of the things they describe — ‘Challenging and Questioning’ has emerged as an important theme, a collective pattern, shared across the lives of women I’ve spoken with.

As one participant, Grainne described:

“I've realised that fighting is something maybe Irish women do and we're not going back to shields — minus the shield and swords — but I do think they're metaphorically still [there]…. in our heads. We've had to fight for quite a time. I think we're still fighting in fairness…. I just think it's a quieter fight”.

It’s the ‘quietness’ of the fight that so often defines the ‘challenging and questioning’ theme.

Many interviewed women share Maeve’s sentiment of:

“I never wanted to be like the burn your bra at every opportunity girl, because that girl bothers me still”.

In a country like Ireland, where it has long been so unsafe to be visibly seen as challenging the norm, that a ‘quieter fight’ — a not so visible ‘burn your bra’— is occurring is not surprising. But just because it’s quiet doesn’t mean it’s any less of a challenge.

Woven throughout so many of the life stories of the women I’ve interviewed is a moment, or several moments, of ‘stop, look, question’. A moment where they begin to question the externally prescribed ideals and expectations which have ruled and shaped the trajectory of much of their lives. Things like the expectation to be a ‘good girl’, the running around taking care of everyone else, the self-silencing required to conform to the ideals of the strong, stoic woman, and the behaviours they are required to display to be acceptable (to others), even if they feel inauthentic.

“I definitely had a realisation moment, quite late, probably in my late 20s early 30s, where I was like: I don't need to do everything my mother tells me to, I can do something different”

(Women of Ireland Project Participant)

And from the questioning comes the challenging.

Often, it’s not a visible challenge. It’s a quiet, inner shifting; a decision to ‘unlearn’ what they have been told it means, and what they have to do, to be a woman of Ireland; to unlearn the systems within which they have been raised.

“[I remember] finding it very hard to give it to myself [to give myself something, just for me]. That guilt that [comes] through our generations of women is so strong; [that you should only give to] your children or your parents. To give yourself something [feels so wrong]; it's powerful [and it’s] played a huge part of my life — the constant shame and guilt of not being able to give enough to others and to give something to myself [being] so difficult, to give something just for me. But what pushed me was the idea, well if I don't give it to me, how can I expect my girls [my daughters] to give to themselves, you know…. [so] we have to unlearn” (Women of Ireland Project participant)

This unlearning is a quiet, somewhat, invisible revolution. It is often a turning inward, rather than a turning outward. It’s an activ-ism based on an inner activation — looking at the ways in which they have been conditioned and making active decisions on how they want to be going forward.

And as quiet as this unlearning may be I cannot help but imagine the untold ripple effect a reconfiguring of women’s inner worlds —as they slowly unravel constraining threads that have long pulled at them like a puppeteer's strings and re-thread their own, more authentic ones— will have on the outer world.

I’m not surprised that Rosemary Cullen Owens found more acceptors than questioners in the historical records of Ireland. It has never been safe to be a questioner or a challenger.

But from what I have seen in the lives of the women I’ve interviewed —in the things they have questioned and challenged in their own lives and in the challenges they recount their mothers and grandmothers engaging in— I do not interpret Cullen Owens findings to mean that very few women actively questioned or challenged the world they lived in. Rather, I think they did it quietly and their inconspicuousness meant they didn’t leave such a visible mark in the historical records for us to find them.

But they’re there, I see them in the red connective thread that runs through all the women who have lived through some of Ireland’s most restrictive and culturally ‘tightest’ times, and they’re no less powerful for their hiddenness.