A founder of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement looks back at 100 years of feminism
BY MARY KENNY
BACKGROUND
In 1970s Ireland, women were denied numerous rights based on their gender. Women could not collect children’s allowance, keep their jobs for public service or for banks if they married, choose their official place of domicile or buy contraceptives. Divorce was illegal, and single mothers, widows and deserted wives faced poverty, while marital rape was not a crime. Women were normally not paid the same wages for the same work as men.
In response to this, the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) was formed, with Mary Kenny as a founding member. In 1971 the IWLM pulled a stunt famously known as the ‘condom train’, an attempt to challenge Ireland’s rigid anti-contraception laws. Kenny and 48 other members took a train from Dublin to Belfast, purchased condoms and spermicide, and returned to Dublin. While passing through customs, stocked with contraceptives, they challenged customs officers to arrest them.
A debate on Irish television followed, causing Garrett FitzGerald, later to become Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland, to leave his home and go on air to discuss the issues, provoked into coming on the show because Kenny made a statement on the show accusing Dail (lower house of Parliament) members of not caring about women’s issues.
Going against the constraints and decorum of Irish-Catholic society at the time was brave, and going on national television to defend smuggling condoms seriously so.
In England, Countess Constance Markievicz can sometimes be a ‘trick question’ in a pub quiz. As in “Who was the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons?” Contestants often respond “Nancy Astor,”: but the right answer is “Constance Markievicz”.
Lady Astor was the first woman to take her seat at Westminster, in 1919. But the first woman to be elected was Con Markievicz, elected in December 1918. The Countess – born in Sligo as Constance Gore-Booth, but married to a Polish nobleman, Casimir Markievicz – didn’t take her seat for two reasons: she was in Holloway prison at the time: and she was a Sinn Fein ‘abstentionist’ MP, then as now, refusing to sit at Westminster.
Markievicz was a feminist, but she was also an Irish rebel who participated in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. She was sentenced to death by firing squad, but excused the death penalty on grounds of being a woman. She is still celebrated as a feminist for the centenary of the vote and Theresa May has expressed her esteem for Markievicz’s feminism. But while Constance supported female suffrage, she gave her heart, primarily, to the cause of Irish nationalism.
Winning the vote was a feminist milestone, on which the Suffragettes, and their predecessors crusading for other rights in education and the professions, placed great emphasis. But the contribution that women made to the First World War – in war work, as ambulance drivers and motorcyclist riders, running buses and public transport – also made a crucial impact. Initially, the vote was only awarded to women of 30 and over – there was an anxiety that frivolous young girls obsessed with dancing and jazz, dubbed ‘the flapper vote’ – wouldn’t take democracy seriously. In 1928, full suffrage came in.
But once the vote was won, the women’s movement sort of petered out. And, as ever, a new generation reacted also against the previous one: young women in the 1920s and 30s began to think of feminism as ‘old hat’.
Vera Brittain (author of Testament of Youth, and mother of the politician Shirley Williams) wrote that by the 1930s feminists were perceived by younger women as “spectacled, embittered women, disappointed, childless, dowdy and generally unloved”.
There had been a kind of sexual revolution in the 1920s, when sexologists like Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes published more candid books about the physical aspects of marriage and sexual fulfillment – topics which had seldom been addressed frankly in respectable society previously. While in the literary world, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were exploring overtly sexual themes, in the popular world, books such as Stopes’s Married Love and The Sex Technique in Marriage by Isabel Hutton, were best-sellers.
Many of these books not only emphasised the joy of sex, but attacked women who seemed to be more cerebral and political than satisfactorily orgasmic. Feminism was eclipsed by other social developments such as the rise of cosmetics, marketed by Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, and the huge success of magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Womans Own, Woman and Home, which stressed fulfilment within the home, rather than involvement in political or career life.
And then came the 1939-45 war, which again called on womanpower to participate in the economy, in the forces, and in intelligence.
After 1945, there was a return, again, to domesticity. Some feminists interpret this as a male conspiracy to get women back into the kitchen, and allow men to take the job opportunities: but was it? The academic Clair Wills claims in her recent book about immigrants, Lovers and Other Strangers, that the British government begged married women to fill job vacancies, post-war, but the women were reluctant to do so. And thus recruitment from the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent was launched.
Feminism seemed to be in abeyance in the 1950s, and then sprang forth again with the liberation movements of the 1960s. Successive waves of feminism brought about advances in equality and education and the launch of the contraceptive Pill triggered enhanced demand for reproductive rights.
Yet Germaine Greer once warned that “the sexual revolution and the feminist revolution are not the same”, even though they both seemed to be aligned with personal liberation. And perhaps the #MeToo movement of our time is partly a reaction against the sexual revolution of the post-1960s years: many women have come to feel that such freedoms opened up channels for harassment, rape and what’s now called ‘transactional sex’ – when Hollywood producers offered young actresses movie roles in exchange for sexual favours.
A hundred years after the vote, feminism is highly successful, and yet, in flux: equality has always been in some conflict with the affirmation of difference. (Women demand, understandably, equal pay: but not many women yearn to do some of the more dangerous and less congenial male jobs, from sewage worker to lonely oil-rig driller.) There always has been – and perhaps always will be – a conflict for mothers, who are entitled to follow their careers, but who also feel the instinctive pull of the maternal urge to nurture their children.
Perhaps the most positive aspect of modern feminism is that people can define what it means for them, individually and form their own definition. After many years reflection, my definition of feminism is simply ‘independence of mind’. Think for yourself. Develop your own opinions. Constance Markievicz – and Nancy Astor, too – would, I believe, identify with that.
Mary Kenny was a founder-member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. Her most recent book is Am I A Feminist? Are You?
Twitter: @MaryKenny4
See also www.mary-kenny.com