Born: May 29th, 1939
Died: April 20th, 2021
Mary Sheerin, who has died aged 81, was arguably one of the unsung heroines of the history of Irish feminism. A founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM), she proved to be vital administrative and publicity support to the more vocal and better-known leaders of the movement, such as journalists and authors Nell McCafferty, Mary Kenny, Máirín Johnston and Rosita Sweetman.
“ She wasn’t a prominent public player in the IWLM, but she was a steady and continuous one,” said Kenny, who at the time was editor of the first-ever women’s page of the Irish Press. “We were a pretty performative, not to say exhibitionist bunch, and that kind of group really needs steady personalities as a counterpoint and a stabilising force. She was quite self-effacing, but she knew a lot about job conditions, employment law and other important issues. As time went on, such reliable and kind people are often better appreciated than the show-off egos. She seemed to balance constructive reform with respect for all points of view.
These steady, and steadying, qualities proved crucial at a critical time for the movement, the early months of 1971, when three defining moments brought it, and the issues the women were trying to find an audience for, to prominence among the general public.
The first, in February, was the publication of Chains or Change, a 40-page pamphlet detailing under eight headings the ways in which Irish society of the time discriminated in profound ways against women: the situation in law; employment; education; the relationship of jobs to marriage; of women in distress, including the lack of divorce; women and their property in marriage; the lack of legal contraception, and the position of women in the Catholic Church; and women and taxation.
Publicity coup
Sheerin was “very involved” in producing Chains or Change, according to Sweetman. In pre-internet days this involved Sheerin going around to newspaper offices, trade union offices and printers to collect facts, publicise the document and get it printed.
In her memoir Feminism Backwards, Sweetman points out that the pamphlet was the first time these issues had ever been put together in a publication aimed at a public audience. Publication was followed by an appearance on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show in March, which proved to be an immensely successful publicity coup after an unscheduled intervention by Garret FitzGerald, who arrived unannounced; and then, finally, the IWLM’s first public meeting in the Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin, which Sheerin organised and for which she also ensured a mobile microphone system, so that members of the audience could tell their stories. This was much more problematic than it might seem today, for Sheerin had no idea how many people would turn up. In the event, more than 1,000 did.
The famous “contraceptive train” event at Connolly Station in Dublin, in which members of the movement brought back contraceptives bought in Northern Ireland to Dublin, illegally, followed on May 22nd, 1971, 50 years ago today.
Rosita Sweetman believes the fact that Sheerin was, and remained, unmarried, was an important factor. Long before it became acceptable or even fashionable, Sheerin “didn’t have that expectation that she was going to marry and depend on a man for her income; she wanted to have agency in her own life.”
Absurd Austenomics
Sheerin’s radicalism was very much born of personal experience. In the time before free secondary education, she had had to get a scholarship to attend secondary school, at the Holy Faith convent in Glasnevin, and later in Dominick Street, which, she noted later to Anne Stopper, amounted to just £15 a year, whereas boys’ scholarships were worth at least £100 per annum. Later, while working for a publishing company in Dublin, she discovered, to her chagrin, that a man doing exactly the same job as her was earning significantly more money, and that teenage boys working for the company as couriers could join its pension scheme at 16, whereas female employees had to wait until they were 25, by which time, it was implied, they might not need a pension because they would be married.
Sheerin told Stopper for her book Mondays at Gaj’s that she felt the situation was “absurd,” and that “there was this thing of marriage as an economic venture as much as anything … I mean, you might as well be back with Jane Austen”.
Sheerin grew up in Cabra, north Dublin, the daughter of Hugh Sheerin, a bus driver, and Mollie (nee McClelland), a homemaker, and joined the civil service after finishing school. What was probably a pivotal moment was an opportunity to be seconded for five years to the OECD in Paris in the 1960s, where she became aquainted with the works of French feminist writers. Later, back in Dublin, she became a freelance journalist, working for the Gaiety Theatre as a publicist, something that proved useful when contacting Dublin Corporation to book the Round Room. Later she rejoined the civil service, working as a press officer in the Department of Transport and the Department of the Taoiseach.
After retirement, she took a BA in English with the Open University and, as an accomplished pianist, produced two CDs, the second of which was completed only months before she passed away.
Mary Sheerin is survived by her sisters Josephine, Eithne and Una. Her sister Eileen predeceased her.