‘I thought I was a feminist, then I got a job on a building site and became one’

Most children born pre-1980s developed similar notions about the male and female role. It was as clear as the sex we were born with. Men worked on building sites, they were stronger, they earned more money, and they were bosses and doctors and managers. Up until the 1980s, generally Mammy stayed home and minded us. Most women didn’t question the unfairness of unequal pay and discrimination. What woman would dare to question women’s roles when it was so deeply ingrained in our history? 100 years have passed since Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell accompanied Padraig Pearse when he surrendered after the 1916 Rising. Later she was airbrushed from the iconic picture. Not only that but O’Farrell’s heroic act of taking a white rag onto Moore Street, the epicentre of the battlefield, was removed. It was one of many manipulations to put us women in our box.

During Ireland’s most perilous hours Ireland’s women did more than serve men and wash the corpses of their dead. The wives, mothers, sisters and daughters fought silently, gallantly, their subversive roles were as extreme as their men’s. In the 1920s, the women did not consider equality or feminism, and when the men depended on women as a vital cog in their struggle, they too did not consider equality. When the English left Ireland, and the Civil War ended, only then did our leaders consciously consider the future for women. Looking back we see that the oppressive British were replaced with another tyrannical form of oppression. A combination of political and religious leaders constructed a wall of inequality that is being dismantled slowly since the ’30s.

As recently as the ’70s there was very little difference from the 1930s when Ireland was blacklisted by the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. In 1935, Ireland’s Minister for Industry prohibited women working in industry as a way of reducing male unemployment. Two years later when the Irish Constitution was written it prioritised a woman’s domestic role over work outside the home. It reads: “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Thus began the controlling hand of our leaders to place women in the home as her natural environment. Letters of objection fell on deaf ears. The Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship and the Six Point Group in London wrote “these clauses are based on a fascist and slave conception of woman as being a non-adult person who is very weak and whose place is in the home. Ireland’s fight for freedom would not have been so successful if Irish women had obeyed these clauses.”

Our political and Catholic misogynists were a law unto themselves. We’ve all seen the Facebook post on “What women could not do in the 70s”. For those who haven’t, it’s glaringly obvious that a woman was a mixture of second-class citizen and a half-wit incapable of managing her own affairs. There have been vast changes that came after much furore, a lot of it from men, but also from women who continue to appoint themselves our moral guardians. There are women still alive who believe that men work on construction sites and married women can divide their time between home and work. It has taken decades to make progress, thanks to brave women who are not content to remain cornered in their kitchens and who would struggle with the inequality gap until it is no longer an issue.

In my early twenties I lived in Israel for a year. After much trekking and partying in every crevice of the country, I found myself penniless in Tel Aviv. My Scottish friend, who had worked in Israel for years, suggested I work on the building sites. That old conditioned thinking resurfaced. Men work on buildings, women work in nice comfortable environments. I was appalled at his suggestion yet I couldn’t express it.

In the 1990s Irish women were only beginning to be heard. I thought of myself as a feminist. I was brought up to believe that women could do as much as men, but in theory it was a different ball game. My young feminist rants had not been put to the test. To work on a construction site I would need to see the difference between men and women utterly dissolve. I’d never met a woman who worked on a building site, in fact in the ’90s, gender issues in Ireland were still in their infancy. My Scottish friend couldn’t understand my reluctance. In the hostels in Tel Aviv, men and women sat around the phone waiting for calls for work that day. My friend manned the phone. I told her to tell the next caller there were no available men but there was a strong woman.

I began my first job as a construction worker that morning. A man took me to a two-roomed flat up a flights of stairs. The flat had not been inhabited for years, there were clumps of missing plaster from the walls and the paint was peeling. My boss began by mixing cement and stone, “This is how we do it in Israel,” he said. Then he scooped up the mix and flung it at the holes in the wall. Some of it bounced off and stuck in my hair. I took the trowel from him. “This is also how we do it in Ireland,” I said and did the same flinging-at-the-wall action. He gave me the job. For two weeks I filled in the holes, sanded them and painted. The world was my oyster; my sex no longer limited me.

The Memory of Music by Olive Collins is published by Poolbeg