The Oppression of Women in Ireland
Why Socialist Feminism is Our Way Out
Article originally published in Issue 3 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue
By Megan Dennis
There is a kind of resignation present in Ireland, that the long history of women’s oppression here is inherently Irish - just an inevitable part of our Catholic culture. The danger of this thinking is that we miss the cogs that are still turning when we don’t examine the machine more closely. Ireland was not always under the thumb of the Catholic Church: before the Great Famine, marriages were commonly based on love, and both husband and wife contributed their skills to the family’s income[1]; there were songs and poems celebrating female sexuality; there is evidence of plants being used to control fertility (and even a legend in which St. Brigid performs a miraculous abortion). Catholicism was present, the difference was that there was no institutional awe and dread. So what caused this shift? What led us to an oppression that ran so deep, it was long accepted as part of our very identity?
How the Church Gained Power
The change for the worse came not directly through Catholicism, but capitalism - capitalism paired with the Church, each strengthening each. The death and emigration caused by the Great Famine left huge numbers of small family farms empty, and they were promptly bought up by large tenant farmers. As this middle class got richer, more of these families could afford to send their sons to train as priests: in 1840 there was one priest for every 3,023 Catholics; by 1911 it was one per 210. The Church was rapidly gaining strength and was overwhelmingly made up of this middle class.
The poor, meanwhile, were left picking up the pieces after their collective trauma; a prime moment for the Church to insinuate itself into private family life. An entire class was desperate for a sense of meaning and purpose, and the Church provided them with it: offering a spiritual explanation for the tragedy they had been through, consoling the survivors, and, significantly, offering women a new role. Women had a chance at retrieving some of the status and respect that was lost with their economic function in the household, which was being taken over by factory industries - now they had the important task of raising children in the Catholic faith, teaching them, among other things, the centrality of family, and the evil of sex outside procreation.
Women socialists and workers in Ireland have always fought militantly for their rights. Since the beginning of the Irish suffragette movement in the late 1800s, the struggle for women’s liberation has been actively entwined with the liberation of all workers and poor people. The rights to vote and to work were seen as the first steps towards this goal, and as essential tools against capitalist bosses.
During the 1913 lockout, women featured majorly for two reasons: women workers were the last to remain locked out, and it was largely women who organised support for the families of those left without job or income for five months. Women activists, under the double oppression of being women under the thumb of the Church and State, as well as being Irish citizens under the thumb of Britain, fought hard in the battle for Home Rule - and smashed the windows of Dublin Castle, the Custom House, and the GPO when the Home Rule bill failed to include any section on women’s suffrage. Though they had little public support at the time, seem as unseemly and unfeminine in their politicisation, as the grasp of Catholic morality loosened, and women’s experiences and opportunities widened, more and more women stood up to demand their rights.
Women at the Bottom of the Pile
From this point on, women were expected to give up all life outside the home upon marrying, and content themselves with what was, in an age without any devices of modern convenience, “physically exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive”[1] domestic labour. Efforts at resistance, by the “inordinately high” numbers of women remaining single late into life, in order to work and remain independent of husbands, were pushed back by church and state: the Church accused women of ‘selfishness’ in not doing their duty to God, the state legislated for the limiting (and in some industries, outright banning) of the employment of women, to avoid paying for the services required if women were no longer performing these tasks at home for free.
Women who could not or would not follow this model had two main options: emigration, or a nunnery. Emigration allowed women to keep their independence, and escape the societal expectations imposed on them at home. Whilst the average number of women emigrating to the US between 1850 and 1950 from other European countries was about a third of all emigrants, mostly women travelling as part of a family, in Ireland it was significantly over half, most of these being young, single women, travelling alone. Of course, many of the poorest could not afford tickets to move abroad, and those that did often found themselves exploited and underpaid in their new lives. Those who wanted a chance at status and earning a living, without leaving their home country, often joined a convent - nuns made up one of the largest groups of workers as late as the 1970s. But here, again, we see working-class women falling to the bottom of the pile: those who could not afford the minimum dowry of £200 became ‘lay sisters’, a subclass of nuns, existing up until the ‘80s, who lived as servants for the other Sisters. They cooked, cleaned, took their meals apart, and even wore maid’s aprons as part of their habit.
And then there was the rest.
Notorious by now are Ireland’s mother and baby homes, and Magdalene laundries. These were places to punish girls and women for having sex outside marriage. They were physically and emotionally tortured, had their children taken away to be put up for adoption, were locked up with no trial and no release date, and forced into work, which was essentially slave labour. Families who refused to send their daughter, sister, or friend away to these places were left no choice. They would be ostracised by their community, and bullied and threatened by the parish priest for failing in their “Christian duty”. The attitude towards these women as being morally bankrupt was formed over decades of manipulation and persuasion. It was so prevalent that even James Connolly, who famously wanted to set women free from their plight as ‘the slave of the slave’, himself referred to them as “fallen women”. They were the lowest of the low, and they had no one on their side.
Contraception is an infamous example of Ireland’s historical sexual repression, but less often discussed is the classist dimension of this issue. All throughout the 20th century, contraception was easily available to the well off: they could bring condoms back from trips abroad, and afford expensive doctors who would provide them with diaphragms. Although thousands of women travelled abroad for an abortion every year throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, no organised anti-abortion movement was formed until women began demanding free abortion at home in Ireland, which would have made it available to those who could not afford flights to Britain. Even today, there is an undeniable layer of distinctly Catholic misogyny surrounding reproductive health: women still face a demeaning interview in order to access emergency contraception, where they are ushered into a private room and told that they must share personal and medical information with someone who is not their doctor, or they will be refused the medication. (Women living in poverty are the most affected, since they often cannot afford the cost of regular doctor’s visits to obtain a prescription for the contraceptive pill, and so favour condoms - which, being a less reliable form of contraception, lead more often to the need for the morning after pill). Our sexual education programme has not changed since the ‘90s, is only present in roughly half of secondary schools, and the contents are decided by each individual school, the vast majority of which are still church controlled. Our daughters need access to open, honest sexual education, to be raised knowing that they can own their sexuality and protect themselves from pregnancy and disease without being shamed.
Things Move Forward
As the economy grew from the 1960s onwards, Ireland had to allow women to work, to keep up production: ten times as many women as men joined the workforce from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, most of them mothers. This enriched many women’s lives, providing them with new independence and opportunities. However, in the absence of affordable services (childcare cost roughly 40% of the average industrial wage during the Celtic Tiger) it also ladened women with the double burden of a day’s work for their employer, followed by the unpaid domestic labour of home: the cooking, the cleaning, minding the children, the sick, and the old. This shift also reinforced the antagonism between women of different classes, as the well-off could afford to have poorer women perform these duties for them, often on very low wages. However, exploitation as a worker has the advantage of allowing a chance to organise and unite with other workers - this collective power, denied to those expected to live out their lives within the same four walls, is the first step towards real liberation. And women started moving towards it.
The X case during 1992 marked a turning- point for women’s rights, set as it was against the backdrop of a generation of Irish people who felt that they had gotten the short end of the straw. The 8th amendment, originally intended only to prevent abortions taking place in Ireland, was stretched to ban not only travel abroad to obtain abortions but even informing people about them. Women’s health books were pulled from library and shop shelves, clinics had no legal right to help and advise their patients, even Cosmopolitan magazine was printed with blank pages where it advertised family planning services. On top of this, the jobs in the US and UK drawing Irish people to emigrate in search of a better future were drying up; young people found themselves trapped in “a priest-ridden mire”, and refused to let themselves be “pushed back into the 1950s”[1]. There were demonstrations of up to 10,000 people around the country in protest at Ms X being prevented from travelling for an abortion, and under the pressure of potential rioting put on the government, the judgment was revoked. Just a few months later, stories began to appear of priests with secret families, and the floodgates opened. These stories of hypocrisy gave survivors of abuse at the hands of clergy the courage to speak up, and the Church’s moral authority began to evaporate. LGBTQ+ people, their relationships condemned for so long by a society which permits sexuality only within the context of procreation within a cis-hetero family unit, began to feel safe publicly living their identities. Pregnant teens no longer felt obliged to hurriedly marry to avoid the shame of bearing a child outside wedlock (four out of five pregnant teens in the ‘70s were married; despite teen pregnancy rates staying relatively stable, this had dropped to just one in five by the 2000s). Divorce passed in 1995, and as Ireland changed, women began to demand equal opportunities. As the grip of Catholicism slackened through social struggle, many groups felt freed.
Where Are We Now?
Ireland is undoubtedly far less repressed than it was 50 years ago. However, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that oppression here is over. Despite the huge strides forward made by various liberation movements, the fight is not over yet. Women remain the worst affected by major crises: in the case of the current health crisis, many women are expected to balance full-time jobs with 24-hour child care, as well as homeschooling, with little or no guidance or assistance from the State - or else take care of their children’s needs and education having lost their job, possibly for the third time in 12 months. In the immediate aftermath of financial crises, women are the first to be laid off, or else pushed out of the workforce in order to pick up the child care and other domestic tasks they can no longer afford to pay for. As unemployment rates rise, so does domestic violence, whilst funding for women’s shelters and other means of support for women plummets. The nurse’s strike of ‘99 ended in the government conceding many demands, and yet in 2019, they had to go on strike again to highlight the low pay leading to lack of retention and unsafe staffing levels.[2] This last year we have seen student nurses denied pay for their life-saving, and in the context of a global pandemic, life-threatening work. More LGBTQ+ people than ever feel safe in Ireland living their identities, and yet homophobia remains rife, and trans people suffer every day from an appalling lack of healthcare. All too recently, we have seen women in Ireland have their bodies used against them, with intimate images being shared without their consent. We have seen survivors of monstrous institutions gaslit and ignored. We have seen our national broadcasting company apologise over Catholic satire; the Church still has considerable influence over the State. Catholicism, all through Ireland’s history, has represented capitalist interests, and we ought to be very wary of the areas in which it still makes its influence known.
Conclusion
A capitalist system can never allow for true women’s liberation since its priority is profit, not people or communities - Ireland’s history is a striking testament to this fact. Whilst a small layer of women can “sidestep the worst oppression” by their relative privilege, this cannot be allowed to distract us from what the majority remain subjected to. The Celtic Tiger did not free us (and things are measurably worse since the financial crash) - it is naive to think that capitalism will. Real, full liberation of women necessitates the socialising of domestic labour and care work, the abolishing of gender divisions and hierarchy - in other words, real women’s liberation necessitates socialism, and thus leads to the truest freedom for all. There is no real liberation within the system, only outside of it. “The exploitation and oppression of the majority of working people are necessary for the survival of global capitalism”[1], and working-class women are still at the bottom of the pile. The anti-capitalist movement is the real hope for liberation and should be at the heart of all feminist struggle, especially in Ireland.
Whilst the advancement of women is often portrayed as a battle of the sexes, in reality, the majority of men suffered greatly due to Ireland’s misogyny. The lack of eligible young women for marriage, due to so many women emigrating, led to extremely high rates of lifetime bachelors, particularly in rural areas, who lived “empty, lonely lives and died alone”.
Those who were married were, in some ways, even more isolated, and often worse-off. Marriage in a time when women do not have the right to work means two people (and often six or more, as children come along) living on one wage. In order to provide for their families, many married men emigrated to Britain, to dig ditches, lay railroads, and build roads. This work entailed such long hours, that the average Irishman abroad would have little time to waste drinking, despite the stereotype. They would send almost all they earned home to the wife and children, themselves making do with life in “squalid bedsits for one with two or three other married men,”[1] where they would live until so physically worn out that they could no longer work - at which point they would return home to a family they hardly knew, and a life they no longer had any part in.
[1] Goretti Horgan 2001 ‘Changing women’s lives in Ireland’ in International Socialism 2:91 https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/2001/isj2-091/horgan.htm
[2] https://www.inmo.ie/Home/Index/217/13444