Writing women back into history

Women got the vote in 1918, but how much has changed for women and girls in Ireland in the 100 years since then? Quite a bit. We have had two female presidents, and it is no longer surprising to see women at the Cabinet table or taking leading roles in political parties. Slightly more women than men are graduating today from our universities, which only grudgingly admitted very small numbers of women 100 years ago, and women now have career options that would have been unthinkable a century ago. Today’s Irish girls find it hard to imagine an Ireland in which they would be required to give up their jobs when they marry, but it is not even 50 years since that legislation changed. Social attitudes as well as legal structures have changed profoundly in recent decades with regard to marriage and the family, changes that affect women in particular.

The feminist project is, however, far from achieved. We are a very long way from the ideal of a gender-balanced society: only 22 per cent of political representatives are female, and only 2 per cent of stay-at-home parents are male, and in general men continue to earn more than women and to hold more senior positions in business and public life.

Continued struggle

Things may be moving in the right direction, but there is nothing inexorable about progress towards equality. There is a new struggle to achieve gender equality, along with other equalities, in every generation. It is essential that each generation knows that history, so that they understand the necessity of continued struggle and, as they grow up, become democratically engaged, choose paths of study and work that suit and fulfil them, and form partnerships and families of their own.

Today's enlightened parents have taken enthusiastically to books like Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls to encourage their daughters to be strong, confident and perhaps even rebellious. Irish publishers have jumped right in there too with projects like Sarah Webb's recently published Blazing a Trail (from the O'Brien Press) for young children and my own book for older children, Rocking the System (from Little Island Books).

Evening in Paradise and Welcome Home review

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A Long Homecoming: a new poem by Igor Klikovac

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In praise of older books: Couples by John Updike (1968)

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It is essential each generation knows the history of that struggle, so they understand the necessity of continued struggle

Publications such as these are generally thought to be about showing positive role models for girls, but role modelling is only the start of it. Certainly the thinking behind my own book was more about challenging, and to some extent correcting the male-centred view of history, and writing fearless and amazing Irish women back into the history they did so much to change.

Retrospective gender-balancing

You might think of it as a kind of retrospective gender-balancing. The idea is not just to hold up certain exceptional women to this generation of girls and young women as examples of excellence in their own fields, but to reveal to them how insidious has been the occlusion of women in the conventional story of how this country developed has been. Rocking the System invites girls to consider why they have heard, for example, of Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell but not of their high-achieving relations, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and Anna Parnell; how come they have had no inkling of the pioneering work in public health of Dorothy Stopford Price and her female contemporaries in the medical field, while the work of male scientists, doctors and other professionals is acknowledged; and how on earth has the brave and stalwart Anne Devlin, who helped to plan Robert Emmett's rebellion and endured torture and imprisonment for her participation in it, been grudgingly described in the history books as merely Emmett's housekeeper?

Women have not only had to struggle to be educated and to take part in professional, artistic and social affairs, but when they have achieved great things, their achievements have been denied, belittled or overlooked.

When women have achieved great things, their achievements have been denied, belittled or overlooked

The exceptional achievements of exceptional women are to be acknowledged and celebrated, but these amazing women are more than particular role models. Collectively, they represent the suppression, occlusion and overlooking of women’s participation in history, in social affairs and in public life, and that is more important than their individual achievements. It is only through a realisation of how systematically women have been excluded and dismissed with faint praise that this generation of girls can hope to understand the nature of the struggle for equality that is their legacy.

Mary Robinson’s disruption of the patriarchal and belittling notion that “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” is a powerful call from her generation to today’s young women to get out there and rock the system – and today’s system is just as much in need of rocking as it was when we elected our first woman to Áras an Uachtaráin almost 30 years ago.

Rocking the System by Siobhán Parkinson is published by Little Island. For age 11+