Veteran feminist hopes younger women will keep up the struggle

THERE was a great sense of pride in the achievements of the historian and Dominican sister Margaret MacCurtain at the launch of her collected essays in Dublin a few weeks ago on International Women’s Day.

MacCurtain’s life and work (she is now 79) very much reflect the second wave of the feminist movement in Ireland that emerged in the late 1960s, a reminder that this year marks the 40th anniversary of the ad hoc committee that was formed by Irish women to press for women’s rights.

In response to their demands, in November 1969, Taoiseach Jack Lynch announced the establishment of a commission on the status of women at the annual dinner of the Soroptimists’s Club in Cork.

The commission’s report was published in 1972 and contained 49 recommendations, of which 17 related to equal pay and women’s working conditions. It outlined the need for training facilities, an end to sex discrimination in employment and the provision of 12 weeks maternity leave.

Inequities that existed for women under the social welfare system, the law, taxation and the educational system were also highlighted, while women’s role in political life, their right to sit on juries and family planning were also covered.

To oversee the commission’s findings, the Council for the Status of Women (CSW) was established and it became an umbrella group of more than 30 organisations.

Eventually, two statutory bodies grew out of the council: the Women’s Representative Committee in 1974 and the Employment Equality Agency in 1977.

As MacCurtain has noted, the report also expressed the aspiration that women would retrieve their own history, and she and others embraced this challenge with gusto, despite the fact that, as she recalls, “writing women into Irish history became a subversive activity for women historians in the 1970s. The universities were not ready for an innovation which, in the opinion of the historical establishment, possessed neither a sound methodology nor reliable sources”. Attitudes had shifted by the 1980s and centres for women’s studies became established but, as revealed by the controversy in NUI Galway this time last year, their survival as independent centres could not be guaranteed.

Despite university management’s claim that the women’s studies centre was merely being relocated, its “new affiliation” with the department of political science and sociology was interpreted by many as an indication that the centre would lose its independent and interdisciplinary status and cut off the potential for the centre to be a resource for women in the broader community. MacCurtain made the point at the launch of her book that the struggle for gender equality is far from over, and this has a particular relevance for a younger generation of women.

“I hope fervently that young women will understand the need for us not to lose the vision,” she said.

This is a point that has been echoed by another Irish feminist, Ivana Bacik, who has argued that a reinvigorated feminist campaign is needed to achieve more substantive change “to ensure that the roles aspired to by younger women today do not become ‘Celtic Tigers’ tomorrow: empty symbols of power and success that hide deep-rooted economic and social gender inequalities in Irish society”.

Many established feminists are understandably worried about the frequent use of phrases like “post-feminism” as if all the battles have been fought.

MacCurtain recalled the sense of optimism, subversion and concrete achievements of the 1970s, but it is also the case that there was still much resistance to equality, and the 1980s was a difficult decade for Irish feminists, with a succession of legal and political defeats.

One of the reasons female journalists wrote so powerfully and often angrily in the 1980s was because of the hostility that was continually directed towards women and their sexuality.

During that decade a number of groups emerged whose campaigns to halt the perceived tide of liberalisation involved invective and wild and unsubstantiated allegations being made against and about women.

Many of the tensions boiled to the surface during the referendums of the 1980s, partly because, as the late gynaecologist and family planning campaigner Dr Michael Solomons pointed out, “with the ability to control their fertility, women came out of the house and many men didn’t like losing their authority”.

Due to the bitterness and emotiveness associated with the 1980s debates about women, sex, reproduction and abortion, developments that were helping to improve the status and quality of life of many women tended to be overlooked.

In November 1993, the late feminist journalist Mary Cummins expressed her frustration with foreign female journalists coming to Ireland “with a mindset about Irish women. Irish women equals the ‘X’ case, condoms, abortion, the Kerry Babies, Granard and Mary Robinson in that

order... You could see their eyes glaze over when you told them that Irishwomen have acres more maternity leave than the paltry two weeks in the US. They gave you a headache when you tried to explain time and again that not all Irishwomen spend their weekends having abortions or burying their babies. You could tell them about the second Committee on the Status of Women. Did they want to know? Did they what! You could tell them about the phenomenon of the mushrooming women’s groups around the country doing anything from the Leaving Cert to setting up their own businesses. They fiddled, stifled yawns and went straight down the alphabet to ‘X’ again”.

ALL OF this was fair comment. No other European country had an organisation like the CSW, a coordinated organisation directed by paid, professional staff and funded by the State, and the years after 1990 witnessed legal gains for Irishwomen and economic and social progress.

But it would be dangerous to see feminism as irrelevant and outdated, particularly in view of the worrying attitudes to rape and sexuality that have recently been highlighted in this newspaper and the research soon to be published concerning young Irishmen’s readiness to label their female counterparts “sluts”.

Last year, Niall Crowley of the Equality Authority pointed out: “Despite 30 years of gender equality legislation, gender continues to be the second highest area of complaint. The issues relate to promotion, pregnancy-related discrimination, sexual harassment and equal pay. They reflect an undervaluing of women… Workplace culture is not only hostile to women who are having babies but also it’s quite clear that it’s hostile to men who take flexible working arrangements. Men who seek to be carers are supposedly showing disloyalty to the workplace.”

In 1977, the Women’s Political Association (WPA) sent a questionnaire on women’s issues to serving TDs. The reply of Fianna Fáil TD Tim O’Connor encapsulated a view that is still prevalent in this country: “In my own county the women are doing a great job of work in keeping their homes going and bringing up their families. This I think is just what Almighty God intended them to do.”