Irish Times women journalists in the 1970s: (from left) Maeve Donelan; Nell McCafferty; Mary Maher; Geraldine Kennedy; Renagh Holohan; Gabrielle Williams; Christina Murphy; Mary Cummins and Caroline Walsh. In the spring of 1968, the year of rebellion from marches to mini skirts, two men offered Irish women an incitement to insurrection. It wasn't exactly intentional. Donal Foley and Douglas Gageby were a pair of adventurous souls merely doing what they did best, innovating like fury, shaking up complacent journalism.
Donal, who enjoyed a subterranean boredom threshold, had decided the weekly page directed at women was staid, genteel and dull. In The Irish Times, as elsewhere in that era, such pages didn't wander far from the staples of fashion, food, and something that might now be described as lifestyle: craftwork, interior decorating, etc.
The page was under the jurisdiction of the features department, which didn't suit Donal either. He wanted a new section that highlighted news affecting women, kept the staples, and pulled in younger readers by challenging conventional mores and airing controversial opinions. The Editor, as we always called him, agreed. "Women First" was launched.
It was a Monday to Friday half page firmly in the news section, where Donal as News Editor could supervise and, let us be honest, direct the first editor, myself. The impact was immediate. In no time at all both the Irish Press and the Irish Independent followed suit, creating new women's pages staffed by restless young women yearning to startle the world.
Imitation was flattering, but true satisfaction was discovering that men were reading Women First . Excuses were frequently cited: "I was at the dentist's and there was nothing else to read". But it was clear we'd broken out of the ghetto.
My tenure ended upon marriage a few months later, as it wasn't deemed appropriate for a married woman to hold an executive position. I can only say it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I was delighted that I could not only go on working despite my changed status – many women couldn't – but working on "Women First", especially as the new Women's Editor was Maeve Binchy, than whom there was, and is, no better colleague or company.
All three women's pages flourished simply because they weren't before their time, they were right on it. We wrote about the issues that worried and angered women privately: the miserable treatment of widows and deserted wives, educational and job barriers, inequal pay, and constantly and indignantly, the ban on contraception.
But we leavened the polemics with a good deal of saucy and light-hearted personal comment. We are probably responsible for the new staple, women's confessional journalism. My defence is that we really did have something to write about that readers hadn't read before.
If "Women First" was the best of them (and it was) the credit is Maeve's. She was deft at balancing dark and light, and wrote with the wit and insight into ordinary human dilemmas that have distinguished her work ever since. Of all the daring articles printed over those years, the greatest response I can remember was to Maeve's competition offering a trip to France for the woman who could write the best letter as to why she deserved to win. The letters piled in, describing terrible marriages and dreary lives. Mountains of correspondence also followed her "Women Are Fools" series, case histories of women whose low self-regard had crippled their lives.
WOMEN IN THE IRISH TIMES
WOMEN newspaper journalists were a rare species indeed until well into the mid-20th century. In The Irish Times: A History Mark O'Brien identifies Annie Bethune Maguire as the first female staff reporter. She was hired in the early 1900s to cover social functions.
It seems to have taken some four decades to break the mould. Tony Gray says in Mr. Smyllie Sir that Barbara Dickson, appointed in 1939, was the first woman to cover "ordinary assignments", as opposed to social functions and garden parties.
But the forerunner of the modern generation of women journalists must be Mary Frances Keating, sister of the artist Sean Keating, whose downfall O'Brien gives in detail. The author of a weekly column titled "Report To Housewives", she abandoned sink and stove during the 1951 Mother and Child controversy to write a trenchant denunciation of the treatment of public hospital patients. Following outrage from powerful sources, her column was dropped.
The number of women journalists on the staff increased slowly from the mid-1950s. More women featured as regular contributors of columns and features: Theodora Fitzgibbon, Marian Fitzgerald, Ida Grehan, Terry Keane, Mary Leland, Maire Mullarney.
Avril Douglas and Irene ffrench Eager were in the newsroom, as was Eileen O'Brien, whose "Social Sort of Column" was a landmark weekly series on social issues.
In the Gageby/Foley era women were actively recruited. In the space of five or six years this writer, Maeve Binchy, Renagh Holohan, Gabrielle Williams, Nell McCafferty and Mary Cummins joined the paper. Mary Holland arrived as a visitor to the newsroom and became a permanent part of it though she remained a freelance.
Elgy Gillespie, Geraldine Kennedy, Maev Kennedy, Olivia O'Leary, Christina Murphy, Fionnuala O'Connor, Caroline Walsh, Maev Ann Wren followed, and Maeve Donelan became one of the first women to work in what was an all-male preserve – the news sub-editors' department.
But up until recently, the possibility of two women holding the chief posts, that of editor and managing director, was as remote as the possibility of a black man being elected to the White House.
By the time the Irish Women's Liberation Movement was founded in the autumn of 1970, the women's pages were an open forum for the campaign. No doubt this would have been the case even if there weren't freelance and staff journalists from all three national dailies in the IWLM founders' group. But it was certainly helpful to the cause that those of us organising the crusade had such prominent platforms.
It wouldn't be permitted now. But we were at least operating without guile, open and transparent about what we were up to, and loyal to our employers. Friendly as we were, no one would have leaked a scoop to the opposition.
I may as well admit to breaches of another fundamental precept, that a journalist who knows something newsworthy must tip off the editor. It was ignored in two notable instances. The first was the Contraceptive Train in May 1971. There was a journalist from every paper at the meeting that planned the famous trip to Belfast. The meeting decided we needed maximum effect on the day, and not a word was to be said to anyone before that. We had six days to wait, and no one broke ranks.
The second was a blanket silence on the abortion charter flights in the early 1980s. So many women were travelling to the UK for abortions that those referring them began to make advance bookings en bloc, knowing the seats would be filled by the departure date. It would have been a sensational story, and there can't have been many women journalists who didn't know about it. To my knowledge no story ever appeared.
Maeve moved to London in 1973, and Christina Murphy took over "Women First" with energy and enthusiasm. She pushed barriers fearlessly, especially by encouraging frank discussions on women's health issues.
This was probably braver than anything that had gone before because the men in the office who'd cheerfully debated other issues with us hated copy about body parts and fluid. "I feel I know her alimentary canal intimately," one senior editor remarked glumly of the contributor whose expertise was cystitis.
"Women First" ended suddenly in the mid-70s in the same way that it started. The same two men decided – despite our protests – that its day was over. Equal pay legislation was in place, there'd been a favourable Supreme Court judgment on contraception. The women's movement was well established, having splintered in a dozen directions.
There was a resurrection of sorts in 1985 with "Our Times" a weekly page devoted to the issues we knew nothing about in 1968: divorce, abortion, rape, battered wives, child sex abuse, single parents, gay rights. The women's movement and the women's pages had lifted the lid on a lot of hidden Ireland.
But the pages were often fractious with dissent among feminists, and the issues were no longer gender exclusive, at least for debating purposes. A new generation of women journalists – Geraldine Kennedy, Olivia O'Leary – were solid supporters but busy in the newsroom working shoulder to shoulder with their male colleagues.
This time when the editor called it a day, no one protested. We'd done our bit, and didn't we have a fine old time while we were at it?
Mary Maher retired from The Irish Times in 2001| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
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Happy birthday messages....
Clips courtesy of Gift Grub on the Ian Dempsey breakfast show
