Clodagh Finn: Is Women’s Little Christmas really a day to celebrate?

There should be no such thing as women's issues, only human rights issues, writes Clodagh Finn

Marian Finucane and Nuala O'Faolain were   supremely talented women who fought to achieve social change in Ireland.

Happy Nollaig na mBan! I want to rejoice and be happy and embrace Women’s Little Christmas, which falls today, but something is holding me back.

Perhaps it’s the memory of the look on my late mother’s face when we suggested marking Wee Christmas, as it is also known. With an almost imperceptible curl of the lip, she said a polite ‘no, thank you’, that she would not be accepting the scraps of the festive season.

That’s how she saw the 12th day of Christmas when women were traditionally invited to take a rest after all the hard work that went before. It was the day when traditional roles were reversed and women were given the day off to visit other female friends.

Why, my mother reasoned, should a modern woman celebrate such a day; one that validated the idea that women did most of the work during the festive season and were rewarded with a cast-off Christmas at the end of it?

She was not wrong to think of Women’s Little Christmas as a stuck-on, lesser after-thought. If you go looking for the origins of the day, which was strongest in the southern counties, you might come across a poem that goes: “Nollaig na bhfear, Nollaig Mhor Maith, Nollaig na mBan, Nollaig gan Mhaith” (Men’s Christmas is a fine big Christmas, Women’s Christmas is a no-good Christmas).

Folklorist Kevin Danaher, in The Year in Ireland, Irish Calendar Customs, offers the explanation that Women’s Christmas was marked by “women’s dainties”, cake and tea, while Christmas Day was a day for “men’s fare”, whiskey and beef.

The origins of the tradition are hard to pinpoint, as is so often the case with a custom passed down orally, but in all versions you’ll find the idea of a big, male Christmas and a small, female one. That wouldn’t exactly make you want to break out the bubbly, would it?

But then something gloriously subversive happened. ‘Small Christmas’ was appropriated by strong modern women and turned into a day to honour women’s contribution to every single area of life, past and present.

In recent years, it’s become a day to cherish the beauty of deep and fierce female friendships; honour mothers and daughters; fundraise for a range of charities that touch women’s lives and highlight the contribution made by the women who went before us.

Even in the confinement of level 5 restrictions, a series of events will take place today to celebrate, honour and support women.

The rebranding of Women’s Little Christmas is an example of ‘détournement’, a tactic used by French Situationists in the 1950s and 60s which literally means to reroute or usurp. In the same way that political activists of the time turned expressions of capitalism against themselves, Irish women have taken an expression of heavy-handed patriarchy and turned it into something else.

That is certainly something to celebrate. And, today, here’s to women all over the country who will overcome pandemic strictures to do just that.

What rankles with me, however, is that some of the issues often highlighted on Women’s Little Christmas — lack of funding for domestic abuse against women for example — are ones that women should not have to highlight. They should be taken in hand by the State. There should be no such thing as women’s issues, only human rights issues

Yet, gender bias is alive and well, alas. In the last month, for instance, reports on three examples of it popped into my inbox. One of them, how male bias plays a detrimental role in medicine and medical trials, is a subject that deserves detailed study in the year ahead.

The winners of the 56th BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition,  Alan O'Sullivan and Cormac Harris, both aged 16, from Colaiste Choilm, Cork. Their project was entitled “A statistical investigation into the prevalence of gender stereotyping in 5-7 year olds and the development of an initiative to combat gender bias”. 

The second, a report on how gender bias starts at a very early age, was highlighted brilliantly by last year’s BT Young Scientists winners Cormac Harris and Alan O’Sullivan who showed that gender stereotyping is evident in very young children, particularly boys.

When asked to draw an engineer, for example, some 96% of boys drew a male engineer while over 50% of girls drew a woman. These two young scientists, then aged just 16, also developed strategies to address the imbalance, strategies that need to be considered, refined and shaped into national education policy.

The third report noted gender bias on radio, a point made forcefully in Monday’s almost unbearably poignant documentary on Marian Finucane. In a particularly inspiring segment, the much-missed broadcaster and journalist Nell McCafferty questioned the lack of female broadcasters during an item on The Late Late Show.

“Why aren’t women allowed to grow old on TV?” Marian asked, a question that might well be repeated today.

Nell, between puffs on her cigarette, wondered why there were so few women on air.

We can’t speak of Marian and Nell without mentioning the singular Nuala O’Faolain. All three were firm friends. As Marian’s husband, John Clarke, put it, there were always eight or nine children running around at the couple’s open house on a Westmeath farm, “plus two more, in the shape of Nell and Nuala (O’Faolain)”.

Today is a perfect day to recall and recognise how forcibly and effectively those three supremely talented women fought to achieve social change in Ireland. All three were involved in The Woman’s Programme which aired on RTE from 1983; Marian and Nell (viewers of a certain age will recall her wink as she said “Goodnight Sisters”) as presenters and Nuala as a producer.

Since then, things have changed, and for the better, but only because of the awkward questioned posed by these women and many others like them.

That is why we should continue to ask questions today. Here’s one: why are the issues that women will highlight today not on the top of the agenda every other day of the year? It is, of course, a positive thing to set aside one day to make particular points, but do we then risk allowing them to be forgotten on the other days?

In the same way that every day is Mother’s Day, every day is a day to shout about the blatant inequalities that continue to affect women’s lives.

Yes, so much has changed. It is heartening to think that women growing up in Ireland today simply can’t believe that contraception wasn’t freely available until the 1990s. In the same way, I found it unimaginable that my mother had to get her husband’s signature on an application to join the local library.

Irish women have succeeded in turning ‘Little’ Christmas into something much bigger, but there is still a way to go. There will be those who accuse me of banging on. Whingeing even. So be it, but it’s worth it if it means we continue striving to shape a world where gender does not define your passage through it.

Having said that, there is always room for fun and merriment, so for the day that’s in it, let’s raise a glass and say, Happy Nollaig na mBan, sisters!