Women and Irish History edited by Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O'Dowd Wolfhound Press 351pp, £17.99
Women and Irish Society: A Sociological Reader edited by Anne Byrne and Madeleine Leonard Beyond the Pale Publications 573pp, £16.95
Reading these two books together brings home the realisation that today's sociology is tomorrow's history, especially history as it is now defined - less of major events and "great" leaders, and more of social movements and everyday life.
The fact that this is so owes much to the discipline of women's history, pioneered by women historians, most of whom also saw themselves as feminists, committed to retrieving from obscurity the half of the human race which has helped create society as we know it today. Women and Irish History is a collection of essays produced as a tribute to the pioneer of that work in Ireland, Sister Margaret MacCurtain, the recently retired, much-loved lecturer in history to generations of students in UCD.
Many of the contributors to this book were introduced to women's history by Margaret MacCurtain, who brought nuns in Irish history out of the clouds of obscuring sanctity in which they were swathed and revealed the remarkable contribution they made to health, education and social policy in Ireland. The editors and contributors deserve great credit for ensuring that this collection was published as a monument to her while she is so very much alive, still working and able to enjoy it, rather than waiting to do so as a memorial gesture after her death.
The range of the collection is very wide - from the evolution and theoretical underpinnings of women's history as a discipline to specific research on areas as diverse as domestic violence, women in jury service and the development of rural water schemes.
Their common theme is the place of women in society and its institutions, but the different contributors are not united in their methodology or theoretical affiliation. This is all to the good, as there is something for both the scholar and the general reader to enjoy.
So, in her history of the development of women's history, we can read the robust assault on post-structuralism from Joan Hoff, who writes: ". . . contemporary intellectual culture has irretrievably lost faith in objective, knowable reality. They tell us to concentrate on `how' we know what we know, rather than `what' needs to be known and `why', in the name of academic trendiness."
For those interested in history per se there are essays like Maria Luddy's excellent exploration of the participation of women in politics in 19th-century Ireland, where she charts women's involvement in riots, agrarian outrages and election campaigns. She points out: "Such women were not involved in any way in developing a feminist agenda for action. But, in terms of the assertion of a female presence and its display in demonstrations and riots, these women offered more of a challenge to assumptions about the female role and female behaviour than did the first women voters of the twentieth century."
In their introduction the editors of Women and Irish Society list the varied sources used by their contributors: Census and statistical data, archival material, case study material, published and unpublished documents, recorded interviews and existing research. The same list, while not comprehensive, could be applied to Women and Irish History. The same themes recur in both books: redefining politics to look at women's role in them; redefining work to include that done within the family or voluntary organisations; women's involvement in the work of the community; assessing the balance of roles and power between the sexes within relationships and institutions.
A comparison between the two books is probably unfair, but it is invited by the proximity of their publication dates and subject-matter. One is a monument to the achievements of women's history, the other, which describes itself as "a sociological reader", is more of a statement of work-in-progress, a photograph of the research being done at the moment, and is therefore inevitably uneven.
Nonetheless it contains a number of useful snapshots of aspects of contemporary society. We learn from Ethel Crowley, for example, that we owe two-thirds of the industrial employment of women to multinationals rather than to indigenous industry; from Patricia O'Hara that the roles of rural women have changed much less in Northern Ireland than the Republic; and from Madeleine Leonard that in a working-class housing estate in Belfast, 78 per cent of those questioned were related to other households in the estate, with all that would imply for political and social solidarity.
But it is hard to escape the conclusion that in sociology a lot of work goes into finding reasons to state the obvious, or to re-state in an Irish context what has become obvious from research elsewhere. Thus we learn that women spend a lot of time on the telephone and that, like their counterparts elsewhere, young Irish women do not get pregnant in order to obtain housing and social welfare benefit.
However, the editors have helpfully divided it into sections, each with its separate and useful introduction, and overall this book is a welcome addition to the, as yet, small body of research on women's place in Irish society.
Carol Coulter is an Irish times staff journalist