On October 8th, 1970, four Irish Times writers gave their perspectives on the struggle for women's liberation

No Excuses by Maeve Binchy

WHAT WAS REALLY wrong with the women of the last generation was the extraordinary way they were obsessed with "what people were thinking". The terrible truth is that nobody was ever thinking anything, and lives were hopelessly restricted and dulled because of this myth. Women who are now in their 50s were nearly always afraid to "get involved" because it wasn't nice, it wasn't feminine, it wasn't worth the effort. They would fool themselves that by standing on a sideline they were being balanced and objective, and never saw life as something to jump into recklessly. The 1920s were probably roaring enough for a small section of the flapper community, but they must have been pretty restricting for the rest. We gather that the 1930s were a bit depressed and depressing and so the women who were young then might have had an excuse for their lethargy.

BUT FOR ANYONE born in the 1940s there is no excuse at all for lacklustre and indifference. We were born in an age when equal education for women was something to which at least an adequate lip service was paid. We have not grown up in a society that stopped women working or opposed women's individualism, and if we have achieved nothing in 20-odd years it's our own fault. If we are afraid to stand up and say that women get a rotten deal in the 1970s it's our own fault. Let's examine our consciences, why don't we care, why do we stand outside and pretend it's someone else's problem. Probably because we are nervous of allying ourselves with what our grandmothers and our mothers would have called "undesirables". We are fearful that the voice of protest has become so shrill we will all be dubbed screech owls and unheeded in everything we say again. But this is odd reasoning in the reasonably liberated 1970s, it is a kind of cowardice that the next generation will blame us for as bitterly as we blame our mothers' friends for caring about what people might have thought. I want a better deal for working girls.

I don't want someone to come up and say that it is so brave of me to carve a career in a man's world, I never think of it that way, it is a human's world. Anyway their admiration is usually in inverse ratio to the sincerity of their feelings. The more they profess to admire what they dub courage the gladder they are to have no part of it. I want a more interesting deal for wives, financially, socially and, indeed, in every way. I don't think it's good enough for a woman to be educated and introduced to all aspects of this varied life we can lead, and then suddenly be expected to abandon it all except the homemaking side. I don't think married women who don't work are cabbages, but I do feel that those who feel they want to work should have the facility to do so, without every-one thinking that their husbands are poor providers or that their marriages are on the rocks. There must be day nurseries soon on an organised basis, in every area where women are likely to work, so that they can call in and see the kids a few times during the working day without anyone feeling deprived and neglected.

I want all the kids I taught in my long teaching career to look forward to a happy life, both single and married, and not to feel that one is in direct opposition to another. I saw too many bird brains opting out of Latin and maths to do domestic science under the extraordinary notion that the former qualified you for a life as a female executive and the latter made you a prize for some man.

I hate the fact that some of my married friends think that a single woman can't possibly like children or be interested in how three-year-olds are coming along. Anyone who is not interested in children is not a human and to divide the world into married and single, men and women seems a very arbitrary decision when you are talking about affection for young human beings.

I WISH THAT we could get everyone to realise that women, even career women, even hard-up working wives, even extremely hard-up widows or well-heeled young marrieds in the suburbs are people, and could treat them as such. If women's liberation comes anywhere near establishing this and destroying the notions that females have intuition, have no business-sense, are liable to dissolve into tears...then I am all for it.

Born of Small Memories by Nell McCafferty

WOMEN'S LIBERATION is born of small memories. Every Sunday, after dinner, when I was young and bursting to get out to play, I had to plunge my arms up to the elbow in greasy water and wash the dishes. My brothers raced on ahead, because they were men and this was women's work. Every time things got on top of her, my mother would threaten to get a job and earn her own living. This was usually towards midnight, when she was settling down to read the morning paper, and we would be demanding supper. Every time we went away to the seaside and waved goodbye to my father "because he had to work an extra day to cover the fare for us"; and things would get better, they said, when my eldest sister got a job, but of course her job, at women's wages, barely bought her nylons and make-up. And every time a woman took a job in Derry, she was depriving a man of one but then women were cheaper and made more profit for the bosses.

WOMEN'S LIBERATION is seeing the dread on another woman's face when she finds she's going to have another, or a first, baby and she still hasn't got a house and someone says, "God's will", and if you find an exceptional priest he'll tell you "for God's sake" to go on the Pill. Women's liberation is being turned away from an all-night cafe at Kelly's Corner, Rathmines, Dublin, because I am an unescorted female, and presumably therefore out to make a pound or two. Can't we have tea alone after dark? Women's liberation is the day factory girls in Derry marched in and out of the walled city like yo-yos, in defiance of [ William] Craig's ban on marching; but no woman was ever elected onto the Citizens' Action Committee, or its aftermath, the Citizens Defence Committee. And yet Bernadette Devlin went to jail on all their behalves.

WOMEN'S LIBERATION is not standing on one side of a dance-hall waiting for men to pick you off, or up, without having any first choice in the matter. Women's Liberation is saying you can't have children unless men and women come together, and what is born of them both is the responsibility of them both and don't tie me to the kitchen sink, or the empty suburban house all day, every day, in their name. Women's liberation is me opening my own door, and lighting my own cigarettes, and taking anyone out for a meal.

WOMEN'S LIBERATION is not asking for a better deal. That is a concession. Women's Liberation is me saying I am half the human species, and I am now taking my rights, as a human, not a sub-species. Women's Liberation is the participation of women in the liberation of all people. Women's liberation is finding it very hard to explain the difference, when you come down to it, except in terms of physical make-up. And men are as different as women, which no-one holds against them. It's the system which divides. Break the system, unite the people.

The Most Difficult Civil Rights Struggle by Mary Maher

WOMEN'S LIBERATION would have a much more sympathetic reception if only it weren't so much a matter of sex. Imagine the reaction these sentiments would raise in the civil-rights-conscious 1970s: "All the vast majority of blacks want is to work as unpaid domestics, raising children for a nice, kind white. There are some blacks who insist on having full equal rights with whites, despite their obvious natural, anatomical differences; and there's nothing stopping these blacks from fighting for what they want, except of course they're going to find it much harder to find a white to take care of them, because whites don't like liberated blacks."

THE WOMEN'S liberation movement coined the term "sexist" to cover theories that in the context of the colour problem would be called "racist". But the thorniest problem women fighting sexism have to face is that, unlike blacks, who will do without a white to look after them, women do not want to be without men. For this reason, women's liberation is one of the most difficult civil rights battles to be fought. The civil injustices and economic inequities women face every day of their lives are so blatant that only the strongest psychology in creation could have kept the 52 per cent of the population so oppressed from rising in revolt.

Unfortunately, the psychology is there: anything that questions sexuality is too powerful for most people to ignore. If the capitalist magnates of the last century had been able to convince the masses of working men that the strike was an effeminate weapon, that cast doubts on their virility, the trade union movement would never have materialised. So it has always been with women battling for their rights, who have been lampooned as viragoes, man-eaters, Amazons. "What do women want?" ask the irate and bemused. They do not want sex role and sexuality confused any longer. If they are to stay home and care for children, they want this important work recognised with more than some token piety in the Constitution. If they are to go out and work, they want the work recognised with equal pay, equal opportunity as that afforded men.

THE CRITICS STILL squirm. Fair enough, right the wrongs, they say, but why resort to this flamboyant, faintly embarrassing word, "liberation"? The answer is that until we can free ourselves from thinking in sexual stereotypes no piecemeal reform will be enough. The people who stand most to gain by women's liberation are, of course, men - men who have been burdened with such dreadful stereotypes for so long.

There are countless boys afraid to study poetry or music because it isn't manly; numerous fathers who feel lonely in their own homes because they have left the child-rearing to their wives; plenty of sad old men and sad young men who can't look after themselves because they learned to think of cooking, sewing, washing as women's work. If we can liberate ourselves from vague, unfounded ideas of what "femininity" and "masculinity" are, we might, both sexes, learn to be a great deal more human.

What It Means by Mary Cummins

A COUPLE OF weeks ago a man told me that I was "special. Oh yes, all women are special." Easy, reassuring nod of the head. How? Well, he said, you have your intuition and your sentimentality...and your little...hm...peculiarities. Ha Ha. With acid tones, I said, you could have fooled me. After all I've been a woman for 25 years and I haven't noticed these things. Ah well, he smiled pityingly, waving away my outraged snortings. He knew better. You see he had been a man for 43 years, thereby knowing all about being a woman.

BEING A WOMAN meant thinking that you would either have to be a nun or marry a guard to get to heaven; through these channels the celibate single role of the Good Irishwoman could be realised. It meant doing domestic science instead of natural sciences at school. It meant being taught by black-garbed women instead of black-garbed men. It meant taking your turn to wash the dishes instead of having another five minutes to play on the street. It meant wearing your vest plus your knickers at the seaside when your brother got away with knickers.

IT MEANT FANTASISING about men from Elvis Presley to the obscure Austrian count out of Barbara Cartland who would somehow give life some sort of meaning. It meant being hopelessly jealous of women, like Gladys Aylward and Marie Curie who did something on their own. It meant wishing you were beautiful because at school the nuns forgave the ones who were beautiful and said to you that you could do better. They inferred that without the physical attributes you would have to do better. Being a woman means having physical description tagging along after your name. It is looking around the country and having a "fellow black" feeling with the women who can't see any further than men's noses; they plot and hypocritically prostitute themselves in order to arrive at Mrs instead of Miss; in order that they won't be pitied; in order that they will have a place somewhere or, no kidding, a duplicate plot to be buried in. It means standing and waiting at the walls of dance halls for someone who you don't like at all to arrive out of the crowd while the one you wanted stands alone and you couldn't ask him. It means listening to one's friends saying, what does he do? The more be did the better you are.

IT MEANS WONDERING with regret where Cumman na mBan disappeared into middle class imported suburbia, and loving your grandmother who could shoot a gun and milk a cow as good as any man, and still could braid her hair and be seductive and understanding even in old age.

You acted out the part until you learnt enough not to be fooled any more. You realised eventually that you are on the winning side because people need people, not dressed-up biologically opposite shadows.