Changing times A round-table discussion involving four generations gets to the heart of changes for Irish women over the past 40 years

Hosted by Irish Times editorGERALDINE KENNEDY

Geraldine Kennedy: What was life like for women in rural Ireland 40 or more years ago?

Mamo McDonald: For women like myself one didn’t go for a job without the imprimatur of one’s parents. I had the opportunity of going to Spain as an au pair, but my parents thought, after a couple of years I would come home with Spanish, and where would I be? And then, the opportunity of becoming an air hostess with Pan American Airways...and every plane that would fly over they would imagine it was going to fall out of the skies.

They thought the bank might be a nice job for me, and I finished up in the bank. As one did, and then I met the love of my life and when I talked of leaving to get married it was the done thing that one retired from one’s job. So I had to send in a letter of resignation after 14 months of a career.

I started on the career then of motherhood – very usual for its time – and I finished up with 11 children. My nephew, any time it was mentioned, would say “ah, but that’s nothing, the Cassidys have 17”.

GK: Mary Robinson, you worked in your early life on legal and constitutional matters. What was the position of women in the 1970s?

Mary Robinson: I was very conscious when I came back to Ireland, having studied law at Harvard following a law degree in Trinity and King’s Inns, that there were a lot of issues, and I was elected to the Senate in 1969 on a kind of platform. Part of it was to change the law on family planning, and I introduced a Bill, with the support of men like John Horgan, but we didn’t even get a first reading and I was denounced from pulpits.

There were so many other laws: women couldn’t serve on juries, we had no equality legislation . . .

Eavan Boland, my good friend the poet, was a member of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and she rang me up one day and said, “Mary, could you give me seven laws that discriminate against women”. And I said, “why seven, Eavan, I can give you nine or even 10?” She said “no, no, no, seven’s a good number, and I want to go in today and we will try and fight these seven points”. I didn’t have difficulty identifying seven laws . . .

GK: Patricia King, what about the position of women in the workforce at that time?

Patricia King: I joined the workforce in the mid-70s. I’d grown up, gone to school in the 1960s, and, from my background, third level education was never going to be available.

I was going to secondary school – free education was introduced around that time. The girls and boys that I went to national school with, their destiny mostly was to leave school after primary and go into a local factory. I was from a small village in Wicklow and the nearest one was Bray, so you either worked in Industrial Yarns or Solas . . .

My parents took the view that education was going to be the key to your independence, and would do whatever they could do to try to put you through education and some of my siblings took that very seriously. I was, I suppose, a little bit more resistant and I took a summer job and stayed in it, much to their grief. I went into the car industry which was very male-dominated. In the mid 1970s it was going through huge turmoil and that was my first introduction to trade unionism. I took to it like a duck to water. At that time Ireland had just gone into the EU, and we were starting to develop things like the anti-discrimination act. You had the first maternity leave in 1981, so this stuff was at its infancy.

You had the Commission on the Status of Women first report in 1972, but even the Discrimination Act didn’t mention pregnancy . . . you could be sacked up to 1977 for being pregnant. Then you had the Unfair Dismissals Act, and so on. And the difference in hourly rates of pay at that time in Ireland was about 56 per cent. But if you looked at France, 72 per cent was the difference.

It is a relatively short period when you look back, and my own girls would say, “I can’t conceive of that being for real.”

GK: Linda, a lot of change has happened in 40 years. Would you be conscious of it?

Linda Kelly: I think I am now, given that I’ve worked with USI for two years and have got quite involved in women’s issues, but before that I would never have said I was a feminist or would never really have been conscious of these social issues facing women because I went to an all-girls primary school and an all-girls secondary school. And my college course was all-girls. And not once in my four years of college did we ever have a discussion as a class about feminism or women’s rights. And that’s a female-only space where you would think it might have happened.

GK: It that because you feel you have women’s rights?

LK: I think it is. People on a very personal level, young women when they are succeeding, don’t see the level of discrimination and sexism. And if somebody were to say “you have to give up your job because you are getting married”, well I would say I am not getting married. It would be as simple as that. When you actually delve into it and discuss the issues with people, then it’s like a lightbulb goes off and you see the discrimination everywhere.

GK: What invention changed any of your lives most?

MMcD: The washing machine.

GK: With 11 children? You would have had lots of nappies going.

MMcD: I had three children before I had a washing machine.

MR: One of the things I used a lot was a small dictating machine... I was lucky enough to have a secretary always there to do notes. And now the world has changed and we have all become more self-sufficient in that regard. I think that’s something that I used every day to do the notes, prepare for court...

PK: In my house, until I was 16, there wasn’t a television, a washing machine, or a telephone. Maybe some of my siblings would be appalled at me saying this but I remember the water to the house was in a tap out in the yard. And that was regarded as normal. I well recall my mother – we lived on the side of the Sugarloaf – describing many times having to walk up there with buckets to get water.

But when I then make the comparison with my two teenagers...you will see one of them any night in my husband’s office at home and she has the landline going, she has a mobile phone going, she is texting, she is telephoning, she’s MSMing, she’s emailing, all at the one time. This is all part of how she communicates.

MMcD: On the water question, you can thank the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA), because they carried out a campaign for water in the home and urged rural women not to marry a farmer unless he installed water in his house as well as his byre. He thought it a fine idea to put it into his byre, but “why would you be bothered putting it into the kitchen, wasn’t she well fit to carry a few buckets”, sort of attitude.

They were the kinds of issues we tackled at that time and still we are not regarded as part of the women’s movement. It is something that irks me because I feel that in all the countries where women are coming to the fore and beginning to work for women’s rights, the first thing they tackle are those ordinary domestic things that make life easier. And that’s exactly what the United Irishwomen did, and followed by the Irish Countrywomen.

MR: I agree very much with that, and I think the ICA did a fantastic job all over the country with incredible organisation. I made a specific reference [on the night of the presidential

count], in thanking Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland, and that was precisely to address the fact that that was a kind of pejorative term. You know, "ah they are only Mná na hÉireann", and they are only dealing, as you say, with domestic issues.

PK: I would agree with you, my mother was a member of the ICA. It was the one evening that broke the isolation, whether they went to do embroidery or compare the making of cakes, or whatever . . .

On the trade union side too. In the earlier days, in the 1960s and 70s, when women walked into branch meetings full of men who had higher pay, and who saw women trying to achieve some form of equality as a threat, they were talked down to.

Conferences could have 258 delegates, 16 of them would be women. That's a big task for anybody to get up against the tide and argue.

When you look back on it, I think we underestimate what those women in the women's movement did and what they had to take on. We take a lot of that for granted now.

MR: You describe yourself as a feminist, Linda. What triggered it and, in your generation do you think they say, "I am a feminist" or do they say, "no I don't need to do that any more?"

LK: I know both. My very, very best friend always starts with, "I believe in equality for women but I'm not a feminist". I think it's such a paradox, but then I equally know people who would shout out from the rooftops, "I'm a feminist, so what!"

GK: What are the feminist issues today for your generation?

LK: I don't necessarily think they are all that different. I work in a very male-dominated office - there hasn't been a female president of USI in 16 years. That's an issue and a lot of people would argue that there isn't a problem with female representation in the union, and I am, like, "two full-time female officers out of 10!"

But even getting people to acknowledge there is a problem, and I think that's probably the biggest issue we are facing.

PK: In the workplace there are still issues. It has moved on, and work-life balance is very prominent in people's heads. And those who go on job-sharing are automatically seen as saying something about their careers.

GK: I would think that the changes in attitude to sexuality and the Catholic Church played a major role over the last four decades. Would any of you agree?

MR: Certainly I learned, I think, an important lesson from the contraceptive debate because it was a very logical thing to amend the law in 1970-71 when we introduced the first Bill. Because the law was an ass. Married women could only have the contraceptive pill if they had cycle regulation problems, and it must have been the weather or something, but there were an awful lot of women with cycle regulation problems.

And it wasn't against the criminal law to use a condom but it was against criminal law to either buy or sell a condom. We drafted a fairly simple Bill to amend the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935 and tabled it. And I was completely unprepared for the depth of the revulsion against the idea of talking about contraceptives. There were terrible jokes, I got garden gloves sent to me in the post and letters condemning me as evil.

PK: But also, a lot of what you could call the "hidden Ireland" was going on in those decades as well. When you read some of the stuff that has come out in the Ryan report. To go to school in those days and be verbally abused, physically abused... I witnessed it many, many times in national school and indeed I can still see the face in secondary school, in quite a prominent school in Ballsbridge, of a nun berating people beyond any acceptability, a room full of young girls who were at a stage in their lives, 13, 14, 15 years of age, where their confidence is supposed to be boosted rather than put down...

I think one of the things too that is noticeable now is that younger people growing up - and I think it is a very good thing - have a great demonstration of love from their parents. Parents are not afraid to say...a mother is not afraid to openly say to her child, "I love you". They are not unhappy or uncomfortable about hugging their children. My children, I hope, would never have experienced anything like that sort of coldness.

MMcD: The change in living that I most welcome, and which has created such an enormous change, is the presence of men at the birth of their children. I think that has been a wonderful change because it has created a bond between father and child and it has given fathers a realisation of what women go through in giving birth.

GK: Would you have seen a great change in the attitude to the Catholic Church by women?

MMcD: Oh yes, I think that most of my generation of women feel horribly let down. They believed the Church was the great rock that they clung to, and now they find that there were such horrible things going on that it was a sham.

LK: The church is just so oblivious of women because it's run by men. I would have been raised Catholic and would have gone to Mass until I was 19/20, but fundamentally I don't think it's an organisation that mirrors anything I believe in. I don't see how they can guide me when at every step they hinder an openness about talking about something. I think what is interesting about the sexuality and contraceptive debate is that I know my generation is extremely grateful for the legislation you put through.

GK: Women's attitudes to themselves have changed an awful lot.

MMcD: Yes, absolutely. I think it is wonderful. I take great pleasure in seeing the confidence of the young women we have nowadays. I have 32 grandchildren, 16 of them granddaughters, and they are such a bunch, so confident, compared with our lack of it.

MR: I think it was all those elements that we were talking about. It was a kind of puritanical, very male-dominated church with the priest in a very special position in the community and unquestioned. So whatever was happening, nobody questioned, and there were not just harsh words but also caning. I remember the school I went to in Ballina, the teacher caned the legs, and my mother would bring in boxes of chocolates in the hope that we might be skipped.

PK: The social partnership model that we had for 20 years comes in for a lot of criticism, in some cases rightly, but when you look back now, in the 1990s and the decade we are just coming out of, a lot of hard work was done by groups of women in the trade union movement, employer groups and in government, in terms of amending pieces of legislation to bring about implementation of good stuff in the workplace and socially.

I know it honed in mainly on the workplace but the evidence is there that men did have to, and have made (willingly or unwillingly) changes. Even in our own lives, even for me in the work I do, I wouldn't have been able to do that without a partner/husband who had to make fairly seismic decisions about his own career. It was not going to be possible to rear two children and do that with two full-blown careers working at full speed. So, in our case, he made the decision and took the foot off the pedal careerwise - but he was happy to do it.

GK: Have women's attitudes to men changed? Do men take a different place in liberated women's lives?

MR: Men have also been adapting and changing. There are a lot of supportive men, including my own long-suffering supportive spouse. We are in our 40th year together actually. We don't have as many grandchildren yet, we won't have a hope, but we have some.

MMcD: I started from a broad base.

MR: The situation, as Linda was saying, is much more subtle now. Women have many more opportunities and yet still the main responsibilities for child-rearing, for homemaking, do fall on women and the work-life balance is more difficult unless you have understanding men. And I often feel that women are role models for their sons as well as their daughters.

PK: The role model issue is going to become a very important point into the future. I know my two children are going to have a very different view based on the role model they have had from their father rather than their mother. And they don't have or don't see any issue about their father cooking the dinner or doing the most basic things.

I have to say, we are still, in my judgment, in the territory in the workplace where men still see it as their prerogative to decide. They are more conscious, for instance, about appointments to boards of companies, but still only 8 per cent in public companies are women. They might say things like "well, we better put a woman on it", but we are still in that territory rather than women commanding that space on their own.

GK: I wouldn't agree entirely. I would see a lot of women here in their 30s who, unlike in my time, make quite a conscious decision that, "I am not going to the next rung of the ladder on the career path. I want the work-life balance, I want to know I am working in day time and have time with my children". Whereas, I had to rush ahead, and you'd be afraid to say you were staying at home to mind a sick child, or you'd be rushing back after you were pregnant in case it was held against you. But now women are much more confident about what sort of life they are choosing for themselves.

LK: I think that women shouldn't have to choose "I want this work-life balance" over "I want a career". And the problem is that we are trying to fit everything into a system and the system fundamentally doesn't work.

GK: Is life for women better today than it was 40 years ago?

MMcD: I think so, in general. I am involved a lot with older women nowadays, and they find life is good.

They can do things that they never would have dreamed of doing, nor their mothers or grandmothers. That is, unless they get caught in the tender trap of having to rear another generation.

I find that there is a high proportion of grandmothers now bringing up their grandchildren, many of them beyond their physical capacity to do so. It is for economic reasons, and because it is expected of them by their daughters, sometimes to give them the freedom to go to work. And it holds the women back from enjoying the fruit of their labours at this stage.

GK: Mamo, maybe you'd like the last word?

MMcD: Well I think it's like the government slogan, "a lot done, a lot more to do".

The panel: who they are

Mamo McDonald (80), honorary president of Age and Opportunity and former president of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, as well as being the driving force behind the Older Women’s Network.

Mary Robinson (66), the first woman President of Ireland (1990 to 1997) and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997 to 2002).

Patricia King (50) is regional secretary of the country’s biggest trade union, Siptu, and vice-president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

Linda Kelly (24) is equality officer of the Union of Students in Ireland.From Cork, she qualified as a speech and language therapist at University College Cork before taking up her position.