The level of discrimination against women in Ireland in 1971 was raised with the Taoiseach of the day by one of the founders of the contemporary movement for women's rights who wrote directly to Mr Lynch on March 8th, International Women's Day.
Irish Press journalist and feminist activist Mary Kenny was writing to Mr Lynch on behalf of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. She enclosed a pamphlet entitled Irish Women: Chains or Change.
"As you will perceive," Ms Kenny wrote, "it is a model of serious documentation and facts and really quite removed from the hysteria that people have been persuaded to associate with Women's Lib elsewhere and I feel sure that the government should be fascinated by its contents."
She expressed the belief "that the inequities and discriminations which operate against women in Ireland is an issue which is beginning to touch people in an involved way".
Welcoming Mr Lynch's gesture in setting up a Commission on the Status of Women, she added: "It is the active and real changes that interest us most and one doesn't need to wait for the commission's report to start removing some of the more glaring points of discrimination - starting, possibly, with the position of women in your very own Civil Service, would you believe?"
She also encloses her own list of legal provisions and practices discriminating against women, such as "the Civil Service and all State bodies, including Radio Telef∅s ╔ireann, sack women upon marriage"; "a mother is not permitted to sign a children's allowance receipt without her husband's permission"; "a man is not legally bound to reveal his earnings to his wife, though she is bound to reveal hers to him".