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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— village gender special December 2009 - January 2010
Women’s liberation
of which I was
a founder-member in was called the
Women’s Liberation Movement, and that
word ‘liberation’, being cognate with liberty,
was a key concept for me. Women’s Lib was of
course about ending certain forms of preju-
dice, and campaigned to bring down prohibi-
tions against women at work, in fi nance, and
in certain cases before the law, as well as abol-
ishing archaic legislation which forbade the
importation of ‘birth control artefacts’. The
contraceptive Pill was never banned in Ireland,
since it was a medication: but a law pro-
hibited barrier forms of birth control, mean-
ing, basically, the condom and the diaphragm
(known as the ‘Dutch cap’), and we took a cel-
ebrated train from Belfast to Dublin as a delib-
erate ploy to breach this act.
I am certainly glad to see how successful,
confi dent and ubiquitous younger women
are in public life today.And the removal of so
many of those old barriers - the ban on married
women working in civil service jobs (including
teaching), the disabilities women had in gain-
ing control of their fi nancial aff airs (a woman
could not, formerly, open a bank account with-
out the endorsement of a man), and the greater
availability of access to fertility control - has
empowered subsequent generations of women
to affi rm their choices and to fi nd greater ful-
fi lment in their professional lives.
‘Women’s Lib’ achieved a lot partly because
the time was right - and ripe. A successful revo-
lution has been defi ned as pushing open a door
which is already ajar. The women’s revolution
came in the slipstream of the s social rev-
olutions, globally perceived: the sex revolution
which entered its most fl amboyant phase after
the contraceptive Pill was launched in .
The contraceptive Pill - correctly nominated as
one of the three most world-changing inven-
tions of the th century - altered all social
mores everywhere, because it undid a previ-
ously draconian deterrent to permissive sex.
In the whole of human history, sexual congress
has always carried the possible consequence
that a pregnancy might follow. Most societies
stigmatised what they called bastardy: Jewish
law said that the birth of an illegitimate child
must be punished “unto the fourth generation”.
But in a trice, the Pill virtually abolished aeons
of sexual control - and stigma - because from
the moment you swallowed that anovulent, you
could be certain there would be no consequent
pregnancy. Discreet, personal, a medication
taken in the privacy of the bathroom, so that
not even a husband knew whether his wife was
contracepting or not - the contraceptive Pill
changed everything from family authority to
patriarchal mentalities.
Once the Pill was being used widely - and it
was used widely in Ireland during the s -
a social revolution demanding changes in the
status of women was bound to follow. From
’
They include responsibility; the
consequences for others; and,
perhaps, biology itself
m a r y k e n n y
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
“Now that motherhood is,
to a much greater degree,
voluntary, many women
cherish the mothering role
more”
the perspective of history, I see another angle
too: some of the other social changes in Ireland
were catch-ups from World War II. Most of
the aforementioned restrictions on women’s
lives applied to most countries in Europe until
(and France had an anti-contraception
law until ). But in the maelstrom of war,
women were needed in the workplace, and so
the countries at war dropped the prohibitions
against, for example, hiring married women as
teachers, or insisting that women resign from
their jobs on marriage. Ireland’s neutrality in
that war kept women behind.
So we had the Women’s Liberation move-
ment of the s, and the many social
changes after that: although women - or even
feminists - were not necessarily of one mind
on such matters as divorce, for example. Some
women felt that divorce would leave ex-wives
more exposed financially, and encourage men
to abandon their first marriages for younger
models. A study published in London in
November , by a famous firm of divorce
lawyers, claimed that a third of children in
divorces NEVER see their fathers (or, indeed,
the extended family, such as paternal grand-
parents) again; and many a man claims, now,
that he has been fleeced
by the divorce courts. It
may turn out that it is men,
and children, who pay the
price for this particular
liberation.
Because that’s the
nub. Liberation is fine
and dandy: but there
always will be a price.
For every social advance,
there are always disben-
efits. The sex revolu-
tion brought pleasure to
many: but some of us felt
pretty messed-up by the experience of pro-
miscuity. We wanted the right to have equal-
ity in our careers, and even in our home lives:
we got it, but many of us found that life was
simply exhausting, trying to juggle so many
demands, and that a stress-filled double-ca-
reer family didn’t always lead to harmony in
the home. As we rushed around being liber-
ated, we knew we were quite often neglecting
our children: dumping them on child-minders
at all hours of the day and night, leaving them
with unreliable Scandinavian au pairs who
were themselves more interested in smoking
dope and getting laid. (The likes of Virgina
Woolf affirmed women’s freedoms, but never
dreamed that the servants would demand lib-
eration too!)
And now ... that generation of Women’s
Lib are the grandmothers, and we see the
changes and developments with that longer
view that grandmothers historically have.
Of course most of us are pleased that young
women today have so many more opportu-
nities, although we also see that daughters
and daughters-in-laws have their own diffi-
culties. We differ, somewhat, as individuals
- as we always did - about the meaning of ‘lib-
eration’: there is always a tension between
equality and liberty and if you choose liberty,
then you must accept that men, too, should
have the liberty of, for example, belonging to
golf clubs which do not extend equal entitle-
ments to women. Forcing people to change
their habits of recreation is only done in dic-
tatorships, surely. Some women think ‘the
Government’ should do more. I personally
think “the Government” should meddle less
in private life. Indeed, that was my primary
objection to the archaic contraceptive laws
back in : the State had no place in the
citizen’s bedroom.
Overall there are many limits to liberation:
responsibility; the consequences for others;
and, perhaps, biology itself. The next most
significant phase of feminism, I believe, will
be the fight for the right to motherhood, for
motherhood to be respected as a choice, and
for mothers to be entitled to be with their
young children, and to raise them at home.
The whole focus on childcare has been about
getting women out of the home and putting
their children in external care (as earlier gen-
erations dispatched quite young children off
to boarding schools). But the seeds of the
contraceptive revolution have brought forth
something else: now that motherhood is,
to a much greater degree, voluntary, many
women cherish the mothering role more.
The child today is better valued because par-
enthood has become a much more conscien-
tious choice. The confidence that feminism
has bestowed is also empowering a younger
generation of women to choose to be mothers,
to do so confidently, and to affirm their plea-
sure in spending time with their children: an
omission which we in the grandmother gen-
eration most often regret.
MARY KENNY, doyenne of Irish feminism,
was born in Dublin in 1944; expelled from
a Loreto convent at 16; au-paired in France;
worked in London as a journalist on the
Evening Standard; was Women’s Editor of
the Irish Press from 1969; was then centrally
identified with the early phase of the wom-
en’s liberation movement in Ireland and a
famous 1960s lifestyle; organised the ‘Pill
Train’ to Belfast; returned to London as an
increasingly conservative journalist; and
wrote There’s Something About a Convent
Girl (1991, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland
(1997), expressing her revised views of
Irish Catholicism, and Germany Calling, a
critically acclaimed biography of William
Joyce (2004). In 2006 she wrote a play,
Allegiance, about the celebrated encounter
between Churchill and Michael Collins and
this year a book Crown and Shamrock: Love
and Hate between Ireland and the British
Monarchy which sets the context for the
anticipated first visit by Queen Elizabeth
II to Ireland.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
