by Dermot Keogh
Christus Rex, the Catholic Bulletin and the Irish Monthly were not widecirculation publications it is true (the Messenger, on the other hand, was), but neither were many of the writings which are usually taken as examples of the public attitudes of the period. How many women were aware of article 41.2 in the 1937 constitution?14It is simply not true to claim as one historian does, that ‘by 1937 women’s political, economic and reproductive rights had been so seriously curtailed that women were explicitly barred from claiming for themselves a public identity’.15
Leaving aside, for the moment, the ban on contraception, as far as public identity was concerned, women politicians were quite vocal in their support of women’s issues, and women’s organisations flourished in these two decades.16The Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers, an amalgam of women’s organisations of all denominations that were oriented towards social or philanthropic work, comprised 28,000 members in 1940. It was not afraid to call itself ‘feminist’, nor was the Catholic Federation of Secondary School Unions (past-pupil), which had a few thousand members. Older, smaller organisations like the National Council of Women in Ireland kept a watchdog role and could count on the support of the larger organisations on issues to do with protection of young girls, protection of the rights of women workers, and a public voice for women in the house. The Irish Countrywomen’s Association had some 2,000 members in 1940 and kept growing. While it did not call itself ‘feminist’, it stated clearly that one of its aims was to prepare women for public life, and it was loudly lobbying for better working conditions for women on farms as early as 1938.17The Irish Housewives Association, set up in Dublin in 1942 on a wave of awareness of the poor living conditions of urban women in particular, drew attention to poor housing, health, quality of foodstuffs (especially milk) and childcare provisions. It was a direct successor of the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association and self-consciously, proudly feminist.18Government commissions in these years invariably had two or three female members – women like Lucy Franks of the ICA, Maire MacGeehin, Brigid Stafford of the Department of Labour, Louie Bennett – who commented on issues relating to women, and were not slow to issue reservations and minority reports when they disagreed with the main report.19These women could of course be called ‘token women’, but it is significant that even token women were seen to be necessary.
There were substantial infringements on women’s rights in the years 1932–48; no attempt is being made to gloss over these injustices. But these injustices did not come about as a result of a prevailing ideology of domesticity, however much de Valera might have given the impression that they did. The marriage bar against women national teachers was introduced in a cynical attempt to make jobs available for young, single women and men.20The same is true of the marriage bar against women in the public service. Had these bars been introduced because of a coherent and consistent commitment to domesticity, married women would surely have been statutorily barred from industry and non-public service employment also, which they were not. The ban on women doing certain kinds of industrial work in the mid-1930s was a pragmatic attempt to prevent new industries from hiring female labour (by definition cheap) in preference to paying breadwinner wages to men, rather than an explicit attempt to limit women to the home, though this might have been a by-product of such a policy.21Furthermore, women’s organisations did not come out strongly against the marriage bar; perhaps in these hard times there was popular resentment, from women and men, at two-income households – Alice Kessler-Harris tells us that in the USA in the Depression years, wives of unemployed men and single unemployed women were often among the loudest clamouring for married women to give up their jobs.22
Hostility to married women workers was a cause of tension among the rank and file and the leadership of the Irish Women Workers’ Union in the early 1930s.23The Conditions of Employment Act 1935–6 aroused concerted opposition from organised women but also from representatives of social-work organisations, who argued that women needed this work to survive. There was always a philanthropic element in feminist activism, in Ireland no more so than anywhere else; concern for working-class women was voiced by middle-class women, who either did not want or did not dare to take up the cudgels against issues like the marriage bar which affected them in particular.24It is likely that Eamon de Valera intended article 41.2 in the constitution as retrospective justification of the marriage bar against women in the public service, and the Conditions of Employment Act; the women’s organisations that objected to the constitution feared that the implications of article 41.2 in particular would be wide-ranging and oppressive.
However, de Valera did not succeed in omitting ‘without distinction of sex’ in article 16 and according to Clancy and Scannell, this was a significant achievement for the women objectors.25And, indeed, article 41.2 was never used to discriminate further against women in the workplace in this period (e.g., no statutory marriage bar was introduced against women in industry or non-public service employment); to curb their mobility (no restrictions were introduced on female emigration); or to curtail their citizenship (taking the vote from already enfranchised women was by no means unheard of in the Europe of the 1930s).26Article 41.2 was mentioned in 1953 by the Department of Education as one justification for the continuation of the marriage bar, but the bar was beginning to be dismantled at this stage, and was eventually done away with by the end of that decade.27We have to see the fact that article 41.2 was not used against women in the ways suggested above, as a significant if invisible victory for women’s activism in Ireland.
It is inaccurate – to say the least – to depict de Valera’s Ireland as a graveyard of women’s rights. It was an intensive care unit, maybe, but dedicated attention ensured that the patient survived. The very fact that women’s rights were constantly being debated, defined and defended indicates that they were very much alive.
Whose domestic sphere?
The women’s organisations when they defended women’s rights and women’s work did not always get it right. One of the areas they, in common with nearly all public figures in the period, got completely wrong was that of domestic service. In 1940 there was a cartoon in Dublin Opinion that showed the father of a family, his wife and three children grouped behind, offering a domestic servant a silver service to thank her for the completion of six months’ service with them. Such jokes would become more common as time went on, as Dublin Opinion loved to mock the pretensions and preoccupations of the upper-middle-class to which its editor belonged.28
One of the biggest changes in Irish women’s lives in this period was their rejection of domestic service as an occupation, particularly after 1940. As early as 1936, a Fr McCarthy in rural Cork was complaining that girls were rejecting ‘good situations’ and going to England.29By 1950 advertisements for domestics take on a note of desperation, such as the following extract from the Irish Independent in 1950: ‘Young girl wanted to train as Mother’s Help: good wages and outings; card stamped, uniform supplied, treated as one of family, help given, present girl four years.’30The very fact that such ‘advantages’ are specified indicates that they were not standard.
Complaints about the ‘servant problem’ surfaced. ‘I am a Model Mistress but where are the Model Maids?’ said an anonymous journalist in 1947, complaining of ignorance, laziness and surliness in her rapid-turnover of household help.31The Irish Housewives Association, the veteran feminist Louie Bennett, the Commission on Youth Unemployment (1951) and the Commission on Emigration (1956) all proposed reform – that domestic service be developed as ‘a vocation and a social service’ (Bennett’s phrase) with proper hours, pay scales, training, and time off; that what was needed was government regulation and better mistress-servant relationships (the IHA); and the Commission on Emigration proposing that ‘middle-class families’ be subsidised to employ servants.32Ruaidhri Roberts pointed out in a reservation
to the report that if any families were to be subsidised in this way these should be hard-pressed working-class mothers.33
The speed with which females deserted domestic service in the 1940s is an indication of their loathing of it. The rationing, privation and even physical danger, of wartime and post-war Britain was preferable to domestic service in Ireland. Those well-meaning reformers who suggested calling domestic servants ‘houseworkers’ and giving them status, good pay rates, a recognisable uniform and good time off,34had gone into denial on this subject. Women just did not want to work long hours ‘on call’ in other peoples’ houses anymore. So if we are talking about women being more confined to the ‘domestic sphere’ in de Valera’s Ireland, we have to be very specific about what women and whose domestic sphere we are talking about. It is conceivable that the inability to hire paid help caused some middle-class women to curtail their activities outside the house – paid work or voluntary work or even political campaigning. If these women were being confined more to their domestic sphere as a result, other women were foregoing the domestic sphere as a site of unpopular work, in favour of other kinds of work which gave them more independence, and, perhaps, greater opportunity to acquire a domestic sphere under their own authority eventually.
The changing farm family
Contested authority over the workspace that was the house/home was also a factor in women’s leaving of the land in these years. The sharp decline in the number of females assisting relatives on farms, evident in the census figures, happened mainly between 1936 and 1951, though some decline was already underway since 1926 and Joanna Bourke’s research would indicate that the leaving of the land by females in the twentieth century was the culmination of a process which began with the agricultural modernisation of the 1890s.35The destination of most of these assisting relatives was either England or education (depending on the size of the farm); more girls were being kept on at secondary school from the mid-1940s, particularly girls from farms.36These would then get jobs in the civil service or other white-collar work, or shop service.
Looking at census figures and at emigration statistics early on in my research, I was tempted to believe that the departure of sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters and other relatives, must have been a tragedy for the women in rural Ireland left behind, bereft of help and company. However, personal testimony and other sources like the Limerick Rural Survey, Commission on Emigration, and writings in, for example, the Irish Countrywoman, rapidly disabused me of that notion.37There seems to have been fierce resistance on the part of the woman of the house to the presence of another woman in the house, particularly among those who married from the mid-1940s. A mother-in-law was bad enough, but a sister-in-law (or even one’s own sister) was not to be tolerated: the nuclear or at least only vertically extended farm family became the desired norm and the uninheriting daughter or sister (or son/brother) had, in most cases, to go in search of paid work, in Britain or in towns and cities.
Can female emigration or migration, be seen as an improvement for the individual woman? Again, it depends on what women we are talking about. What seems to have been a growing insistence of women (in general) on marital privacy, has to be seen as one of the reasons extra women were not wanted on the farm – and very often it was the ‘extra woman’s’ own adherence to an ideal of a higher standard of living, her aspirations to a well-paid job and financial independence, and perhaps eventually, a companionate ‘private’ marriage for herself, which gave her the final push out. At least, this is what all the evidence from the period suggests.
Safer motherhood
It was not just that the single females were choosing – or being forced to choose – paid work and eventually, companionate marriage or fulfilled singlehood above assisting subsistence, but that there was less need for single girls and women in the household economy (urban and rural) as time went on. The gradual decline in maternal mortality and general improvement in women’s health was one reason for this. One of the forgotten casualties of maternal mortality was the oldest daughter or youngest sister/sister-in-law of the woman who died, often had to give up any career or marital plans she might have had, to rear her siblings/nieces and nephews. An examination of the ages of single females ‘engaged in home duties’ over these years shows a marked decline in those who were in their teens or early twenties.
Article 41.2 conflated the terms ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ which might lead one to conclude that single women had a very low status in these years but again, we must beware of taking constitutional recommendations as reflections of reality, and there is an argument for seeing these two decades as ones of dawning freedom and improved status for single women. Late marriage age meant that many women who eventually married would spend between a third and a half of their lives single.
When all the risks of older childbearing are taken into account it might seem at first surprising that in this era of later marriage the numbers of women dying in childbirth fell significantly. In 1932, 256 women died in childbirth; in 1948, 104.38Death in childbirth was an agonising death for the woman and a tragedy for husband and children. If the fact that all these changes, agonies, sacrifices, miseries and disruptions became considerably less probable for married and single women during the years 1932–48 cannot be seen as an improvement in women’s lives, then it is hard to know what can. Up to the mid-1930s, between a quarter and a third of women who died in childbirth died of puerperal sepsis, or puerperal fever, as it was also called. This was a fatal infection which could set in hours or days after a perfectly normal delivery. Medical historian Irvine Loudon remarks that it dogged the footsteps of the cleanest and most careful birth attendants.39
The year 1936 saw a revolution (in the parts of the world touched by western medicine) in the treatment of puerperal sepsis, with the introduction of sulphanomide drugs, and the numbers began to fall quite dramatically. That was the first improvement. The third was the introduction of a comprehensive, free countrywide maternity scheme in 1953.40However there was also a second improvement – a fall, particularly in ‘other maternal mortality ‘ from about 1942 (see Appendix 1). The average maternal deaths per year between 1933–41 were 209; between 1942– 51, 140. Most deaths in childbirth other than those from puerperal sepsis, happened as a result of toxaemia, or from haemorrhage (see Appendix 2).41Toxaemia is associated with either poor nutrition and/or stress. Haemorrhage is much more likely to be fatal in a woman who is under-nourished or deficient in iron, and a survey carried out by two Dublin obstetricians, Drs Fearon and Dockeray, in 1939, of a number of pregnant wives of unemployed men, found that all were anaemic and the majority did not get enough protein.42
What happened in the early 1940s to bring down maternal mortality? A simple comparison of the maternal mortality figures for 1936 with those of 1950 shows that an almost identical proportion of maternal deaths at either date took place in hospital, so greater hospitalisation was not the reason for this decline in maternal mortality.43Hospitals, apart from specialised maternity hospitals – the three in Dublin, the Erinville in Cork, Lourdes in Drogheda, Bedford Row in Limerick – were not necessarily equipped for midwifery in any case, often having simply a ward of the hospital devoted to maternity cases, good nursing care but not necessarily enough midwives or doctors skilled in midwifery.44In the 1940s many people still harboured what was, given these conditions, quite a reasonable fear of hospitals, from Mary Healy in Kilkenny to the Dublin artisans’ wives interviewed by Alexander Humphreys in the late 1940s.45
Even though sulphanomide drugs had been developed to combat puerperal sepsis, women very often did not have access to these drugs, the problem of wartime shortages of the drug being compounded with the fact that many women still gave birth without midwives, or doctors. There was a shortage of midwives in Ireland in the early 1940s, as many were attracted to better pay and conditions in Britain by newspaper advertisements.46From 1933 it was illegal
for untrained persons to assist at childbirth, but a handywoman or relative was often the only attendant available right into the 1940s.47
Something else must have been happening to reduce maternal mortality. Certainly, more women were attending ante-natal clinics from one year to the next, where such facilities existed,48but they were not universal – this implies growing awareness of the need for some kind of care. As late as 1956, however, 28% of the women who delivered in Holles Street hospital in Dublin had received no ante-natal care whatsoever.49So the perceptible, if small, decline in maternal mortality in the 1940s must be due to factors other than those to do with midwifery facilities. An improvement in nutrition, offering women greater protection from maternal death, would seem to be the only possible reason, however unlikely this might seem in the desperate Emergency years. The free pint of milk for pregnant women introduced by the government during the Emergency might have had some effect on mothers’ health,50and two other important sources of financial aid would have been remittances from Britain, and the introduction of children’s allowances in 1944. Children’s allowances were conceived of as a subsidy to breadwinner incomes, and payable to the head of the household, usually, except in the case of a widow, the father.51However, the father could sign for the mother to collect this payment, and this seems to have been what happened in many cases.52