Suzanne Harrington: Housewife Of The Year was Irish women's day off from powerlessness

Film covering the Housewife of The Year contest finds interviewees looking back from a very different Ireland

Participants ‘were judged on their ability to make dinner, budget the family purse, look nice, be sincere, have a sense of humour, and be civic minded’. But the testimony of former contestants in the new film suggests the experience was liberating for many.

If the Rose of Tralee is the Lovely Girls competition, then Housewife of the Year was their Lovely Mammies.

Between 1969 and 1995, around a thousand Irish women — all married with children — gathered annually in regional heats to be whittled down to six or seven finalists. These women would then be whisked off to Dublin, to be judged on their ability to make dinner, budget the family purse, look nice, be sincere, have a sense of humour, and be civic-minded.

The final, televised from 1982, was presented by Gay Byrne, who held the contestants’ hands on stage like they were nervous children as he asked them about their husbands and got them to do a twirl to show off their dresses. The prize, as well as a modest sum of cash, was a cooker.

Former Housewife of the Year contestants Ena Howell from Grenagh, Margaret Carmody, Skibbereen, and Paula Gowan, Carrickmacross, at a preview of the new documentary at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. The film opens on Friday in selected cinemas. Picture: Andres Poveda

A documentary about this curious slice of Irish social history, titled Housewife of the Year, directed by Ciaran Cassidy, will be released on Friday, November 22. 

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In it, former participants talk about their experiences — not just participating in the contest, but the wider contexts of their lives.

Their older selves are interspersed with archive footage from the contests, their interviews from decades ago mixed with interviews from now.

“I think the thing that jumped out was that the archive allowed us to tell a really deep story of the social history of Ireland,” says Cassidy about what drew him to make the film. “That there was this archive of these people on the show from 1981 to 1995 was the first point we thought was really powerful.

The second thing was that we wanted to know if the women would tell us their stories. The very first woman we called said: ‘I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone before'

"She told us a story that’s in the film, so we just knew we had the archive and that people really wanted to tell their stories.”

Peering backward over your 21st century shoulder, we might initially approach such an anachronistic idea — a housewife competition — with trepidation. We might wonder, amid all the big hair and bad frocks, why any woman would have wanted to be part of something so infantilising, so fundamentally condescending and undermining. An event reinforcing where women belonged — at the kitchen sink.

The 1993 Calor Housewife of the Year winner Alison Neylon with host Gay Byrne.

Interspersed with grainy footage from the olden days, former participants say things like “we just went along with things”, how they were like “headless chickens”, how old Ireland was “like a dream world, where we just accepted all these things”.

The contestants inhabited a world where women “were the lesser people”, and where “our whole lives revolved around religious events”. Where mothers of large families, who were responsible for every aspect of domestic management while remaining economically and culturally powerless, participated in the housewife competition because it was “a day out from all of that”.

These women were not the bored bourgeoisie — back then ‘desperate housewives’ would have meant something rather more literal.

The winner of the 1969 competition, Ann McStay from Ballyfermot, was married at 20 and a mother of 13 — including four sets of twins — by the time she was 31. Contraception was banned by the Catholic Church, and talking about it was taboo.

The 1969 Housewife of the Year winner, Ann McStay, on the front cover of ‘Woman’s Way’ magazine with her family.

“It was hard,” says Ann, with heroic understatement. “Nothing was as hard as being a housewife.”

She remembers how “the more kids I had, the more [her husband] retreated to the pub”. Money was so tight she had to go to the equivalent of a food bank, and carry pots of free stew home on the bus; the aroma filled the bus, embarrassing her. She entered the Housewife of the Year contest “for the money”. The winning cheque was £300. When she won, she and her husband were on the cover of Woman’s Way, with their children.

Ann says was greatly empowered by winning the competition.

“I became more of a trouble-maker,” she recalls. The documentary also shows early 1970s footage of her on The Late Late Show, challenging a priest about the right to use contraception. You watch, open-mouthed, as he talks down to her.

“Life was laid down for women,” recalls a contestant. “You had to conform. The husband was the head of the family.”

Another wonders: “How did we just accept the way it was?”

The dignity and honesty with which these former participants share their stories is deeply moving.

“I think the strongest impact [of making the film] was getting to meet all the contestants,” says Cassidy.

“They all allowed us into their homes, they all really trusted us, and they all were really amazing people to get to know. It was a real privilege to be able to tell their stories, especially from the onset when they didn’t know how the film would look, but they were very trusting and honest and I think that comes across in the film.”

It really does. 

Contestant sent to a Magdalene laundry

The control under which women lived was all-encompassing. One 1984 contestant, Ellen Gowan, filmed against the idyllic coastal backdrop of Beara, recalls how her father had given her a camera as a teenager. On a summer outing with male and female friends, she snapped a series of photos of the teens larking about on a rowing boat.

The pharmacist developing the camera film decided the young woman in the pictures was having too much fun, and took her photos to the local priest, who recommended she be sent to a Magdalene laundry.

Her parents complied, and she spent the next 18 months of her life there, for the sin of having a laugh with friends.

It was very cruel,” she says. “To be mistrusted and not believed.”

Another contestant had been a nurse in London. There she lived “a great life”, free of the constraints of Ireland, and planned to carry on to Australia. She loved her job, loved working, was career-focused. But when her father fell ill, she was asked to come back to look after him. She ended up getting married, and that was the end of her career. She says: 

I just didn’t have a choice. You were expected to be tied to the kitchen sink, be dependent on your husband. 

So much wasted talent: “I was doing things that didn’t need doing at all [in the house] just to occupy my mind.”

One contestant’s husband left their marriage without telling her, went to Alaska, and didn’t contact her for months. She was left “destitute, without two shillings on the table”. Hers was, however, a positive outcome: “I had to create my own life. I was in control. I was happy. I was my own boss.”

But when the 1986 divorce referendum happened, more than half a million citizens voted against it, compared with a third of a million who voted yes; the right to formally leave your marriage remained illegal until 1997.

Footage shows an anti-divorce spokeswoman saying how “separated people and minority groups cannot be accommodated here”.

Perhaps she’s talking about LGBT+ people, for whom same-sex relationships remained an actual crime in Ireland until 1993.

As well as interviews, the film is intercut with relevant news items from the era. One shows broadcaster Olivia O’Leary reporting on the death of 15-year-old Ann Lovett in 1984, for whom there was never a public enquiry.

The 'unmarried mother' contestant 

One of the Housewife contestants, Bernie Kennedy, had also been a so-called unmarried mother. 

When she became pregnant at 16, she remembers how “the neighbours wouldn’t speak to my mother”. 

By the time she entered the contest, she was terrified of her past being discovered, imagining headlines outing her former “unmarried mother” status — despite by then being a married mother of six. 

Contestant born in Bessborough 

Another contestant had been born in the Bessborough institution in Cork, her own mother “excommunicated from the whole family.”

She was adopted, and later discovered her birth mother lived nearby, married with children: As an adult, she was rejected by her birth mother and half-siblings, her existence denied. You could have 13 babies in 11 years, but only if you were married.

Most of the contestants were mothers of large families; one pregnant contestant had Gay Byrne’s ear pressed against her belly on stage as the cameras rolled. Boundaries around the personal space of women’s bodies simply did not exist.

However, by 1995, Ireland was slowly beginning to change. The final winner, Philomena Delaney, one of 11 children, described herself as “a born housewife” and remembers how “I was famous overnight”. For her and many other contestants, the competition was a positive experience.

“Very positive,” is how Ellen Gowan remembers her participation.

“It had a huge impact on me and on my family. The children were all in their teens in 1984. 

The excitement of camera crews calling to our home, all of us going to the Burlington [in Dublin] and staying for a couple of days, was huge entertainment

By the mid-1990s, people were starting to reframe the contest as sexist and old-fashioned.

Feelgood editor's memories

Irish Examiner ‘Feelgood’ editor Irene Feighan was invited to judge the Cork heats of the final event in 1995, with Gay Byrne the evening’s MC. 

She remembers the event as having “huge interest, huge support”, adding how Gaybo’s star appeal added to the event’s “high entertainment value”, on par with the Rose of Tralee.

“There was a lot of good humour, people weren’t taking themselves too seriously,” says Ms Feighan.

Remember, there was no internet, no social media — we had landlines and television and newspapers, so there was far greater investment in the entertainment value 

She reminds us how the 1990s was a period of relative liberation for Irish women — that they were “better times than the 1970s and ’80s.”

Certainly there had been significant changes; in 1973, the marriage bar was lifted, meaning some married women could do paid work outside the home and, in 1979, the Family Planning Act meant contraception became available via prescription.

By 1995, women made up 38% of the workforce, compared with 28% in 1971, and 30% in 1978. (In 2023, it was 46%). From an economic perspective, Ms Feighan suggests women had more options in the ’90s than they do today.

In 1995, a mortgage cost 4.3 times the average income, which meant one parent could financially support the family while the other managed the childcare; today a mortgage is eight times the average income, which means both parents have to work full time. She says: 

I think there was greater latitude back then, more flexibility to accommodate parenting 

However, this greater economic ease was not matched with anything resembling gender equality: “Men controlled the purse strings, it was totally patriarchal.” Shared childcare was not a thing.

After 1995, Housewife of the Year was replaced by Homemaker of the Year, and was open to all, advising contestants “you don’t have to be a Cordon Bleu chef, or even a woman”. It fizzled out.

For many of the contestants, Housewife Of The Year was, as one entrant put it “one of the biggest moments of my life”, a source of pride, empowerment, and accomplishment, a pivotal experience. It was, says another, “nice for women to be recognised for what they do”. Yet you’d wonder if participating in the documentary was, at least for some of the former contestants, a reminder of how grim Ireland used to be for women. 

A flashback to an era they’d rather forget.

“Being reminded of some of the painful episodes in my very early years is still very upsetting,” Ellen tells me. Today, she is “blessed with my family, and to live among a most caring community here in Beara.”

Her mantra is: “Never be a prisoner to your past. It was a lesson, not a life sentence.”

• Housewife of the Year is in cinemas from November 22.