Irish feminism didn't spring from nowhere in 1970. Margaret MacCurtain, who pioneered the study of Irish women's history, recalls the struggles of the past

The Irish Women's Worker's Union in 1910. Photograph: National Archive

EVERY SO often, when I look across the River Liffey at Liberty Hall, Rosie Hackett comes into my mind. Born in 1892 she became a messenger in Jacob's biscuit factory in Dublin. She joined the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union when it was founded in 1909 and less than a year later she was one of 3,000 women in the factory who went on strike and won a pay rise. An activist, she encouraged the women yet again to join in the epic labour struggle - the 1913 Dublin Lockout which lasted more than four months - and saw some 20,000 workers on strike. When she was dismissed from Jacob's factory she trained as a printer.

She was one of the small group who endeavoured to print the 1916 Proclamation on a faulty printing press and brought the first copy, still damp, to James Connolly.

She was a member of the Irish Citizen Army and served with Constance Markievicz and Michael Mallin when they occupied the Royal College of Surgeons in the Easter Rebellion and was sent to Kilmainham Jail. On her release she re-founded the Irish Women Workers' Union with Louie Bennett and Helen Chenevix and for years she served as clerk in the union which, at its peak, organised about 70,000 women, including bookbinders, contract cleaners, laundry, print and electronic workers. Later she took charge of the ITGWU's newspaper shop on Eden Quay. In 1970 Hackett received a gold medal in recognition of her 60 years' service to the Irish trade union movement yet she is almost forgotten in today's world.

Practitioners of women's history tend to look back nostalgically on the 19th-century origins of Irish feminism as a narrative that closed triumphantly with the winning of the vote for Irish women in the 1918 general election. But, as Hilda Tweedy reminded her listeners when the archives of the Irish Housewives' Association were given to the National Archives, there was no break in the development of Irish feminism. Each period was "a link in the chain", the title of her history of the Irish Housewives' Association. This effective pressure group persuaded the Irish government to introduce food and fuel rationing, free milk to schools during the 1940s, and the first consumer watchdog in the mid-20th century.

By then women had disappeared from the canon of Irish history. No amount of writing about heroines, or filling gaps with anecdotes about women, compensated for the absence of women's role in the mainstream history of the Irish state.

No wonder 19th-century feminism was regarded as a time when achievable goals were obtained. The passing of the Intermediate Act 1878 opened up educational opportunities for young girls and led to the possibility of admittance into university lecture halls and of taking degrees in medicine, science and arts before the end of the century.

The invention of the typewriter offered alternative opportunities. An incredible number of obstacles was overcome within 20 years. The growing demand for female suffrage brought the presence of women into Poor Law Guardianship, saw them exercising their rights in the married women's property legislation, voicing their criticism about the contagious diseases acts, and running the Ladies Land League while CS Parnell was in prison. The 1898 Local Government Act gave women the right of election to local and county councils.

Behind these achievements was a group of determined women and men. Mainly Protestant, they came from Quaker, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Church of Ireland backgrounds. In Britain, Mary Wollstonecraft set the agenda for a rights-based feminism with her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and for Irish readers Anna Wheeler - a friend of Daniel O'Connell - and William Thompson collaborated in a publication that became a blueprint for gender equality, Appeal of one Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825).

It was a slow fuse. Anna and Thomas Haslam founded the Irish Suffrage Society in 1879, some 20 years after Anna signed the first women's suffrage petition presented to the British House of Commons by John Stuart Mill in 1866, and it took another 20 years before women got a voice in local government and began to campaign for parliamentary representation.

Nineteenth-century feminism was a middle-class ideology but the concern for equality was genuine. "We no more covet the name of "ladies", we are all women," declared Josephine Butler at one of Anna Haslam's meetings for the repeal of the contagious diseases acts, legislation heavily weighted against disadvantaged women.

What was the legacy of 19th-century Irish feminism? Hanna and Frank Sheehy-Skeffington used the "votes for women" campaign to develop the ideology of equal citizenship which was spelt out in their weekly paper, The Irish Citizen. But with the setting up of the Free State and the

separate jurisdiction of Northern Ireland, implementation of equal citizenship proved elusive. Second-wave feminism in the 1970s still awaits in-depth analysis. It emerged as the Republic joined the European Economic Community and conflict in Northern Ireland erupted. Initially dubbed the Women's Liberation Movement it was rights based and demanded greater opportunities for women in the workplace, unemployment and sick benefits for all, State child care support and freedom of choice in lifestyles.

After two decades it was engulfed in the two "isms" - post-modernism and post-feminism. The speed with which Irish society succumbed to the attraction of unregulated wealth, accompanied by a celebrity and "hyper-sexualised" culture that targeted young people, demands explanation. The gains in equality legislation of the two previous decades withered and, with the sudden onset of recession, all but died.

A few weeks ago in an UCD auditorium in Belfield, actor Rosaleen Linehan, in light-hearted conversation with broadcaster Olivia O'Leary, suggested that our hope for the future lies in the upbringing of children under 10 years of age.

There was a sudden silence. How shall we, a generation who enjoyed the benefits of second-wave feminism, restore our belief that we can raise another generation willing to make our society a more equal one than it now is?