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Catriona Crowe - Forty Years Of Feminism Notes

On August 13th, Catriona Crowe, former President of the Women's History Association of Ireland, spoke as part of our Forty Years Of Feminism event. Her talk, in particular, went down a storm with the people in attendance. She gave such a comprehensive run through of writers and works associated with the feminist movement that we found ourselves getting frequent requests to publish her speech from the event. Catriona Crowe has very kindly given us permission to publish the notes for her speech and you'll be able to find them below after the jump. I've also included a video from the event if you've not yet seen it. - John

 

 Catriona Crowe's Notes From Forty Years Of Feminism

The second wave of feminism was an international phenomenon originally sparked by Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, which I would regard as the most important philosophical treatise of the twentieth century.De Beauvoir designated gender as a cultural contruct, an idea with as much force as the theory of evolution. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”  The book was published in a deficient English translation in 1953, but the message shone through the misunderstandings of the translator, and 10 years later, Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique appeared, and the second wave was launched.

The first wave of feminism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had focused overwhelmingly on achieving the right to vote. In Ireland, that right was granted to women in 1898 for local government elections, and in 1918 for general elections. It seems unbelievable now that French women did not have the right to vote until 1944. In Ireland, the early feminist struggle was intertwined with the burgeoning struggle for national independence, perhaps best personified in the person of Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, who combined sufrragist and republican activities, and has left us one of the most comprehensive collections of personal papers, held in the National Library and fully exploited by her biographers, Leah Levinson, Margaret Ward and Maria Luddy.

The second wave had a large smorgasbord of issues to explore, some of them peculiarly Irish, some common to the feminist agenda internationally. They included the marriage bar, equal pay, childcare facilities, violence against women and a range of injustices broadly related to marriage and reproductive issues: contraception, divorce, single motherhood, deserted wives, same-sex rights and abortion (although this most contentious of issues was explored further in the 1980s, in the context of the daft and dangerous amendment to the constitution which has caused so much unnecessary suffering).

The people who played significant public roles in the second waves were, in the beginning, journalists like Nell McCafferty, Mary Maher, Mary Holland, Mary Kenny, Mary McCutcheon and June Levine, who has done the movement great service, by writing Sisters; The Personal Story of an Irish Feminist, first published in 1982, and reprinted last year near the first anniversary of her death. Sisters was not just the autobiography of a very interesting woman, but the biography of the first decade of the Irish Women’s Liberation movement.

Among June’s other contributions was her editorship of the section on 1970s Irish feminism in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Vol 5; Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, where she succinctly outlined the development of the parallel streams of the movement, on the one hand through the consciousness-raising activities of the IWLM, including the famous contraceptive train, and on the other through the work and reports of the Commission on the Status of Women. And of course, June, with Lyn Madden, gave us our first glimpse into the dangerous and squalid world of prostitution.

Mary Holland, another veteran feminist, is, like June, sadly no longer with us, but her courage (she was the first woman in Ireland to publicly admit to having had an abortion), her espousal of many women’s causes, and her beautifully lucid prose live on. Her collected columns, edited by Mary Maher and published in 2004, is an indispensible volume for anyone interested in Iriah feminism.

Rosita Sweetman’s On Our Backs; Sexual Attitudes in a Changing Ireland burst into our lives in 1979 and caused intense debate about Irish female sexuality, with its documentary style and frank interviews with women about matters which were not usually talked about. The broadcast media also played a large role in highlighting the hidden Ireland, with the tragic death of Ann Lovett in a grotto in Granard in 1984 unleashing a torrent of stories of suffering from women all over the country who had remained silent up to then. The work of Nuala O’Faolain, Betty Purcell and others in Irish radio and television played a huge part in placing women’s issues in the foreground. Nell McCafferty has operated for 40 years as a one-woman force of nature on feminist issues, and continues to be active, angry, analytical and hilarious to this day.

The history of second-wave feminsm is starting to be written, and it is an extraordinarilly rich seam for exploration. Young women today are amazed at the idea that less than forty years ago, women in the public sector and in many private companies had to resign their jobs on marriage; that women were regarded as dependents of their husbands for tax and social welfare purposes; that women were paid on average 57% less than their male counterparts; that contraception was banned; that divorce was banned; that there were no state supports for single parents or deserted spouses; that sex education was non-existent in Irish schools; that the idea of a female Irish President was so unlikely as to be laughable. We have a lot to be proud of, for a small country with a powerful patriarchal state and church, and proper reflective understanding of how all of this was achieved can only help to inspire and motivate young women today with the remaining hard work to be done.

My generation’s lives were changed by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and other writers and activists who challenged the patriarchy, but also by our own predecessors: Anna Haslam, Isabella Tod, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, Margaret Cousins, Constance Markievicz, Helena Molony, Louie Bennett, Hilda Tweedy, Nora Herlihy and Mamo McDonald. And Eileen Proctor, now almost forgotten, who wrote a letter to the Irish Times in 1966 which led to the formation of the powerful, supportive and effective National Widows’ Association.

History is one of the ways in which communities deepen their self-knowledge, learn to trust evidence rather than rumour, and get to study matters of importance in the present from the vantage point of past events. History teaches us to re-imagine the past, to attempt to understand what it might have been like to live in the time I’ve just described. Those of us who are old enough remember what it was like, and for us it was necessary to try to understand what previous generations of women suffered and achieved.

I am an advocate of women’s history; Margaret has talked to you about the history of a century of women’s activism, but with her characteristic modesty she has omitted mention of a splendid project in which she played a central and crucial role. I refer to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes 4 and 5, Women’s Writings and Traditions, published in 2002, containing 3250 pages packed with Irish women’s writings, oral traditions, songs, experiences and history from pre-Christian times up to the end of the last century. Margaret and her seven fellow Editors have created a resource which is unique in the world; no other country has produced such an expansive, inclusive, multidisciplinary, creative compendium of material by and about women.

You can read medieval spells, accounts of religious life in the fifteenth century, prose and poetry from women ranging from Lady Morgan to Ann Enright, letters from great houses in the eighteenth century, newspaper reports on the Curragh wrens, prostitutes who lived in holes in the ground next to the curragh camp in the nineteenth century, and acerbic comments on Irish society in the twentieth century. In scholarship terms, it is as important as the recently published Dictionary of Irish Biography, and a feminist achievement of incomparable worth.

Many historians of women have produced important work over the last 40 years, ranging from Margaret Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries on Irish nationalist women, to Mary Cullen’s Girls Don’t do Honours on biases in the educational systen, to Rosemary Cullen Owens’ Smashing Times on the female suffrage movement, to Carmel Quinlan’s biography of Anna Haslam, to Maria Luddy’s Prostitution and Irish Society, to Linda Connolly’s The Women’s Movement in Ireland, to Margaret’s own wonderful collection of essays, Ariadne’s Thread. And many others too numerous to mention. Irish women’s history is thriving, despite attacks on women’s history centres in some of our universities.

Interestingly, women’s history has now started to become mainstream, with Diarmaid Ferriter’s Transformation of Ireland, the first survey history of twentieth century Ireland to appear in some time, taking it for granted that women are a huge part of the narrative. Tom Bartlett’s newly published Ireland: A History also assumes the centrality of women’s experience. The magnificent Dictionary of Irish Biography, published last year, contains a commitment by its editors to include as many women as possible, and they were as good as their word. As well as the usual suspects, we get to read about Katty Barry, who ran a terrific shebeen in Cork city, Annie Moore, the first woman to land at Ellis Island, and Madge Davison, Belfast Communist and civil rights activist. This mainstreaming of women’s history is most welcome and long overdue; the idea that half the population could be largely excluded from accounts of our past is over.

But a great deal of work remains to be done. The Women’s History Project, directed by Maria Luddy and staffed by Leeann Lane, Catherine Cox and Diane Urquhart, carried out a survey of the contents of repositories of archives all over Ireland, and published the results in a database which is accessible through the national archives website. This survey and database reveal untold riches of material available for historical research, ranging from convent and school records to the material buried in major repositories like the National Library and the National Archives. Unfortunately, the project ceased to be funded 10 years ago, and the database is badly in need of updating. It was the first step in uncovering the hidden narratives of women’s lives which lie in our archives.

Having lived through the last 40 years as a adult woman, insofar as one ever grows up at all, and partaken in some of the struggles of the feminist movement, I am conflicted about where we are now. Not because the battles we fought for equal pay, control of our bodies and rights to autonomy were not essential; not because I am not intensely proud of Irish second-wave feminism – I think it produced some of the truly great women and men of my or any generation; not because I think these gains can be reversed – once the genie is out of the bottle it’s very hard to stuff it back in again.

I’m conflicted mainly because of things we did not foresee 40 years ago: the inexorable and astonishing rise of the internet, which on the one hand gives women access to information in a completely unprecedented way, but on the other contains vast amounts of  pornography.

The statistics are truly staggering. Every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography. Every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography. In that same second 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines. Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the U.S. It’s big business. The pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined.

Andrea Dworkin came in for a hard time when she pinpointed pornography as being overwhelmingly exploitative of women. Her position conflicted with cherished liberal beliefs about freedom of expression and speech. But there is now plenty of evidence that ease of access to pornography, some of it viciously degrading to women, creates unrealistic expectations of sexual behaviour in both women and men, and overwhelmingly reinforces the traditional stereotype of the woman ever-ready to please. There’s not a lot we can do about this, except not to let ourselves be fooled by shallow assertions of so-called empowerment for women from this type of stuff. If turkeys could vote, some of them would actually vote for Christmas.

Another thing we didn’t foresee 40 years ago was the celtic tiger and its attendant prosperity for some. There was a very large rise in expensive vulgar weddings, with dresses costing thousands, queues at Brown Thomas for handbags, of all things, boob jobs, nose jobs, tummy tucks and facelifts, not to mention lunchtime Botox, and not a lot of attention to one of the most disturbing side-effects of our little boom – sex trafficking, often of very young girls. It must have been Irish men who were paying for sex with these new, exotic, often terrified, often brutalised women. They’re still here, still being paid for, and still getting a tiny fraction of what’s paid for them.

A lot of the bad stuff is around sex. Can we combine freedom of sexual expression for women with opposition to blatant, brutal, fabulously lucrative exploitation of our bodies? I think we can. I think it’s time it got cool again to despise multinational corporations that make money out of people’s misery. I think it’s time it got cool again to refuse sex to anyone unless you actually want to do it. I think it’s time it got cool again to celebrate the female in her many manifestations, not just the horrible Barbie doll created by the porn industry. Let’s diversify, let’s resist, let’s have fun.

Catriona Crowe

13 August 2010

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