This is surely the year of the housewife. As the good life, and the goods that go with it – the house, the car, the perfect children – moves out of reach, the fantasy of the happy housewife has regained force as a place holder for women’s desires, for what we want, whatever that might be.
Hannah Neeleman – @Ballerinafarm on Instagram – is a former dancer, “mothering 8 littles” and running a raw-milk empire. Tradwife accounts like Neeleman’s are full of luxury and ease. And yet, this is a job. In the sense that the tradwife industry shills the myth of the happy housewife, it’s a fantasy of a fantasy; nostalgia for a past that never existed. Many housewives were unhappy in their roles as wives and mothers. Many “housewives” worked outside the home. It wasn’t luxurious, or easy.
Womanly achievements might today include sponsorship deals and internet followers. But from 1967 to 1995, 1,000 Irish women competed annually for the accolade of Housewife of the Year and the prize of £300 plus a cooker. The final was broadcast from 1982, with Gay Byrne presiding. An unmissable documentary, directed by Ciaran Cassidy, draws together archival footage with contemporary interviews from former contestants.
Ann from Ballyfermot had 13 children by the age of 31 and used food banks to provide for her family. “You brought your own pots and you’d smell it on the bus home. I’d be mortified.” Her entry was economically motivated. Ena, meanwhile, who was raised in the Bessborough institution in Cork and rejected by her birth mother’s family, felt the competition gave her the legitimacy she craved.
Contestants were assessed on their ability to budget and prepare a simple meal, on appearance, personality and civic mindedness. The interview was the endurance portion, a test of just how much guff an Irish woman can take from a man in notional authority. Byrne holds the women’s hands like they are wayward toddlers on the Toy Show who might wander offset and get tangled in the television cables.
They are quizzed on their families: “So your children are aged 14, 13, 12, eight, six and seven months. What happened to 11, 10 and nine?” Their politics: “Tell me Margaret, Are you a ‘women’s libber’?” And their sexual orientation: “Why were you dancing with a woman at that ceilí?” (Just kidding. Lesbianism wasn’t an acknowledged reality in 1980s RTÉ).
In other parts of Europe women demanded Wages for Housework. In Ireland Byrne presses his ear to the stomach of a pregnant woman who smiles indulgently. Footage of the contest is interspersed with that of key events – the death of teenage Ann Lovett and her child in a grotto, divorce referendums, the X case.
[ Ireland, 1984: A year of fierce debates and ‘mounting evils’Opens in new window ]
Women list their accomplishments: “Fourteen bonny children, happy and living down in Longford. Would you go again Angela? You would of course!” The audience laughs. Watching the exchange is tense, even painful, the way it can be painful to see bad feelings hidden under outward signs of joy. “You look back and you think ‘How did we just accept the way it was?’” Patricia asks.
This question is best answered by Ellen from Castletownbere. When Ellen was 16 her father bought her a camera. That summer she went out on a boat with some friends. The boys were splashing, messing the girls’ hair and dresses. Ellen took photos. The pharmacist who developed these “took the law into his own hands”. He brought them straight to the parish priest, who instructed that Ellen be sent to the Magdalenes in Waterford. She remained there for 18 months.
In a country where a woman’s place in the home was constitutionally enshrined, the State made women financially dependent on men. Miriam, a former nurse, puts it succinctly: “Those in pensionable jobs weren’t allowed to work. Either I got married and gave up the job or didn’t get married and stayed working.” Today these women are unable to draw pensions. “The Government decided, but we have to take the consequences.”
But many of the “housewives” in Cassidy’s fascinating film had providers who became sick or simply left. These women had to find their own means. Patricia delivered post and bred turkeys: “I was making halves of myself.” Ellen found independence when her husband, a fisherman, made for Alaska. “T’was my money [then]. There was nobody going to drink it. There was nobody going to smoke it.”
In my childhood home there’s an apron with the slogan “Calor Housewife of the Year 1985.” This was the year my mother qualified for regionals. (With eight children including six-month-old twins, she could probably have mistaken her pavlova for a pineapple upside-down-cake and still qualified.) The competition, judged by Byrne, was in the Ard Rí hotel in Waterford. She made lemon chicken.
She had a diploma in home-economics, but by the time my brother and I were born, my mother was working in my father’s business, “just answering the phone really – no, wait – by that stage I was doing the accounts, because I insisted he brought me the books when I was in hospital having you two”.
By the 1990s she was, by necessity, the primary earner. I long ago stopped asking if she liked it or if it was what she wanted. She bats these queries away like they’re adolescent. “Life was laid down for women” of this generation, as Ann, the mother of 13, says.
To be a happy housewife in Ireland was to give up having wants of your own. If you can do that, and do it with a smile, you might just be housewife of the year.
Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and lecturer in digital cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin
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