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Linda Connolly and Tina O’Toole, "Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave" (Arlen House, 2022)
00:57:13
An interview with Linda Connolly and Tina O’Toole
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Linda Connolly
May apply welcome to the New Books.
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Aidan Beatty
Network hello and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. My name is Aidan Beatty. I'm one of the co hosts of this channel. Today we're joined by Tino o' Toole and Linda Connolly, two very well known people within Irish Studies. Tino o' Toole teaches at the University of Limerick in Literary Studies and is also a founder of Link in Cork, the community resource center for lesbians, bisexual women and their families in both Cork City and beyond. Linda Connolly is a professor of sociology at Maynooth University. And both Professor Connolly and Dr. O' Toole really work at the intersection of gender studies and women's studies and Irish studies. And that's probably what we're going to talk a lot about today because we're talking about a book that was initially published in 2005 and has now recently been republished, entitled Documenting Irish Feminism's the Second Wave, published by Harlan House with distribution by Syracuse University Press in the us. So this book originated in a project on the Irish women's movement at UCC's sociology department. And I was wondering if you could both or both or one of you could start by talking about that project and what it sought to achieve.
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Tina O'Toole
I think, Linda, this is going to be your call because it's really that was your project that began that. So I can come in then if you like.
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Linda Connolly
Okay. Well, so I moved to UCC 1997 just after I finished my PhD and I was in the Sociology department, obviously. But as you said at the beginning, Aidan, both Tila and I, we work a lot across different disciplines and I suppose across different questions in the wider community. Over the last. I'm looking at the date 2005 and realizing how such a long time ago it was. But at that time, I suppose so, first of all, when I moved to ucc, I started working quite closely with colleagues both in women's studies and also with colleagues in the field of literature, Professor Pat Coughlin in particular, Ava Walsh and others, but also in the whole field of applied social studies with Liz Kiley and Maureen. And we started to have conversations about the position and place of feminism, both in our own university in a scholarly sense, but also in the broader sense of Irish studies. And, you know, today it has become, you know, much more acceptable to write PhDs on gender and feminism and sexuality and intersectionality and all these terms that we use. But I think at that stage, you know, there was less currency for feminist analysis and research. And the starting point really for this project was I had written a PhD, of course, on the Irish women's movement and published another book. But that was really a very theoretical scholarly exploration. And I think we decided that, you know, we were. We were sort of sick of other colleagues saying to us, ah, there's. The problem is there's no evidence. You know, there's nothing there. You know, there were no. I'm exaggerating, but, you know, there weren't many women writers. For instance, in Munster was one of the things, I think that was said. And I remember others saying to me, gender. And that's. That's not really a problem in the academy, et cetera, et cetera. So the kinds of assumptions, I suppose we wanted to challenge those, first of all, Aidan. And then secondly, it was very much embedded in that project that began in the 1980s, particularly around pioneering women's historians such as Margaret McCurtain and Mary Cullen. Margaret had taught Tina, I think, hadn't she? Or you certainly knew her in ucd, and Mary Cullen had taught me. So we had wonderful mentors and exemplars in that sense. And that project and others, indeed, who were writing at the time, Margaret ward, Louise Ryan, etc. Had started a project of recovery work. So this particular book documenting Irish feminism and the project, the Irish Women's Movement Project, was less about sort of our grand theoretical publications, which we were doing anyway. It was more about recovering the sources that we knew were there but weren't accessible. And then secondly, about publishing those in an accessible way. Roisin Conroy, who set up Attic Press, which is a feminist publishing house in Dublin, and who was an activist herself in Irish Women United, one of the organisations we talk about, a trade unionist, a feminist activist, she had developed an archive. And so one of the things we did was we accessed that archive. And the ambition was to publish some of the content of that archive in this book so that the future generations would have access to the archive of the Irish women's movement. So I hope that explains, I suppose, the origin of the project. It was really a coming together of scholars who were very active in terms of our own research, theoretical publications, wanting to bring together, pool our resources to make accessible and available sources that would lead to further scholarship. So it was very much about developing the field as much for others as for her own work.
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Tina O'Toole
I mean, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think that's. That really lays it out very clearly. But I suppose, I mean, my background, because I had done the MA in Women's Studies in the very early days in ucd, so I was one of the first cohorts of students to take that MA was brand new. And it is, I mean, Linda, you're absolutely right. It is funny to kind of think it really is nearly 20 years ago when we're thinking about this project, you know, which is kind of scary, but in terms of how much things have changed in the meantime, Women's studies, you know, it really was a very new thing in Ireland when I was doing it in the 1990s, and it was, it was met with quite a bit of resistance. So being taught by people like Margaret McCurtain, who taught the history modules on that program, was certainly part of my, you know, formative period, let's say, coming into this project. But also, I think the important thing maybe to underline here is that kind of maybe multimodal approach to feminist analysis that was coming through from women's studies at the time. So you had a very multidisciplinary approach where literature, social science, history and, you know, a variety of other, you know, visual arts, other subjects were being taught altogether. And so when you then, as certainly I did, went on to do the PhD, when you then go on and you to some extent go back into what were then very traditional disciplinary silos, you begin to realize that maybe there isn't so much space in the academy in that period for that kind of cross cutting, for the kind of, you know, intersectional, if you like, approach, but also that multimodal approach that Linda's talking about and certainly working on this project. So I came into the project as. As a researcher, as someone who was, you know, at the time that the Munster Women Writers Project, which was a sister project to this began, was just completing my PhD. There hadn't really been too many opportunities to work in. In that sort of way with a group of scholars who are coming from, as Linda says, sociology, applied social studies and literature on the. On the wider project. So that was a huge opportunity. And I think we. I think the book that Linda and I produced in particular, you know, I think espouses a lot of that. That kind of attitude of that approach.
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Aidan Beatty
So the book itself then has this really interesting structure that actually makes it quite fun to read, that it's both a secondary analysis and then this collection of primary documents running through that. So is that structured in that way because of that desire to recover certain archival sources, or is it this kind of more multimodal thing, like a methodology that you're talking about, Dino, or both.
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Tina O'Toole
If I can come in there. I mean, I think there's a bit of both going on because I think certainly the documents, I mean, from the very beginning of this project, Linda and I were both really clear that the documents were central. And in fact, I mean, and Linda might say a little bit more about that in the beginning, actually just getting our hands on the documents. Having the documents cataloged was the first part of the project even before, long before a book was sort of ever thought of. But for me, I suppose, because at the time I was very involved in Lingq in Cork and I was involved as a co editor of the Lingq magazine and working with a really brilliant graphic designer there, Petra Stoke. And the Lingq magazine at the time had, you know, a kind of an uncannily similar format to our book. You know, so putting together photographs and different kinds of movement documents, but also interviews with. With activists and. And, you know, kind of current events at the time. So I suppose it really was in so many ways, I only really realized this looking back on it, an organic project that sort of grew out of all of these different experiences. So that the kind of. The look that Petra was producing in. In her graphic design for the magazine, we quite happily imported into the book project. But one of the. One of the other, I suppose, elements of this that we haven't really thought about or mentioned yet is the kind of pedagogical side of it. So as you know, pedagogues as people who kind of who were very clear about the, if you like, mission of women's studies to educate as an educational project. We were really clear that we wanted a book that wouldn't be a kind of dusty monograph that would be of use in the classroom. And even today, colleagues, I mean, even in the recent conference that I ran at ul, colleagues are still coming up and talking about how useful this book is as a source, as a resource for the classroom. So there are various different things I think coming into the making of it.
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Linda Connolly
Yeah, I think in a way as well, if you think about the equipment at that stage, and I should say, of course we acquired funding for this, that was the other impetus. The government of Ireland had just launched the Program for Research in third Level Institutions, which was a government funded research project. Those were the good old days when that started. That's since all been scrapped. So these were kind of university wide applications. And in a way, I think, Tina, you probably agree with me, we were very strongly supported by the librarian at the time, John Fitzgerald, and it showed the importance of having allies in the management structure as well and in the funding structures. And he was very keen to deposit the Attic press archive and to make that also available in the library in ucc, which it still is by the way, to this day. I'm always telling everybody, researchers, PhDs, to have a look at the Attic press archive because it covers so many questions and, and issues from the period. So the funding was important. And in a way, you know, I'm on the management team of the digital repository of Ireland today. And I think in a way, Tina, I like to think of us as pioneers yet again of the kind of digital humanities in a way, because Petra, who you mentioned, who did wonderful work and then obviously we had the support of photographers as well, Clotaboid, Derek Speer, etc. Yeah. So who were there when these events happened? Firsthand photographic accounts, you know. So a lot of the photographs are from those two photographers in particular. But this was Petra with a scanner. It wasn't the kind of technology. I'm looking at the digital repository today again if you look at their website, incredible resources, Huge advances in technology in terms of digital humanities. So in a way this was very much, as you said, it was a work in progress approach. We were learning and it was amazing what we could do with a scanner, scanning documents and then uploading them in this way. So I think that's quite important. I suppose it was just as much as we wanted to preserve the documents, we wanted to make them accessible in a book, but we also wanted to tackle the questions that had Both, I suppose, driven Irish feminisms, remember, as in the title, we don't have a, you know, we weren't interested, I suppose we have our own interests, don't we, Tina? But we weren't interested in pushing one particular agenda. We wanted to look at the different questions and divisions and aspects of Irish feminism in as much as we could, again with the documents as the centre. So we were very interested in class. You know, we did our best. It was more difficult in some areas. There was a lot of material, obviously on reproductive rights, because there had been sort of at that stage, how many years? 20 years now. We've had nearly 40 years of activism around reproductive rights, contraception in the 70s, in particular, abortion then in the 90s, and we've had a lot of abortion activism since. So there were some fields where there was a lot more information, but others, I think you'd agree, Tina, where there was less information. So, for instance, we were located in Cork, neither of us had grown up in Northern Ireland. And again, it was difficult, I think, to access materials, even though we had some materials. But a lot of work has been done since, thankfully, on some of these questions. Class was very important as well. I think it ran through all of the chapters. A lot of the organizations, contrary to the view that of women's lib, as Margaret McCurley used to call it, as being a kind of a group of up to middle class women. There was a lot of class politics in the women's movement, which I think has been lost along the way somewhere. Sexualities, you know, all these issues that perhaps were harder to talk about at the time in the 70s, I suppose we were trying to again recover some of those narratives.
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Aidan Beatty
So I might go back to something Tina talked about of like this as an organic project. And reading your book, I would have assumed that there was a certain amount of negotiation you had to engage in, since you're both academics and in many cases also writing about groups that you, you yourselves were involved with. And yet it sounds like that wasn't a problem, or am I misinterpreting it or misunderstanding it, I think it was.
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Tina O'Toole
Well, it's kind of hard to remember all the kind of various ins and outs, but I know that, like, certainly in terms of. Because I, you know, as Linda has said, the material on LBT rights was quite hard to access. And in fact some of the material that we used, you know, wasn't in the attic archive at all. So I was using the Gay Community News archive, which is now the Queering the Queer Ireland Archive. Which is available now in the National Library. But again, it wasn't at the time, it was just the archive of a small community newspaper in Dublin. So finding documentary evidence of, at the time, you know, quite marginalized and fairly invisible group in Irish society wasn't all that easy. And, and I suppose to kind of directly answer your question on that, a lot of the people that I was talking to about using that material were very uncomfortable with some of the material going into the public domain because, you know, you know, this, this. It wasn't that long after decriminalization of male homosexuality. So the gay men's community in particular had been criminalized. But, you know, women were no more accepted in the mainstream community either. And there are various different ways of criminalizing a community, as we all know, apart from legislative things. So, so people were quite. Some people, I, I mean, to be fair, some people were quite anxious about how the material would be used, what, what, where it would be, what, you know, what, what would happen to it afterwards. And some people were quite happy. So, I mean, frankly, personal friends of mine were happy to give me material on the basis that I would use it for the book and then give it back to them. So that's a lot of that material is still in private hands. It's never been made available in any kind of accessible way. In terms of negotiating between activism and the academy, that's always, that's still complicated. That's not. I don't think that's an issue that any of us have really resolved. So there would have always been a kind of, I mean, to go back to what Linda was saying about class, that sense of, you know, middle class women coming in here, taking our, taking our documents, telling our story kind of thing, you know, and no amount of talking up your own working class background is ever going to fix that, because you're seen as a representative of the bourgeoisie if you're coming from the academy or a big institution like that. So, yeah, I don't think it was that straightforward. I do think there were, there were issues, certainly. I mean, the class one is maybe one that Linda might talk to more than I can, but certainly just the kind of that sense of communities feeling anxious about material, anxious about how they'll be represented, about how much material will be made available. And what kind of a story are you going to tell? Is this going to be another, you know, oh, I don't know, negative depiction of a community?
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Linda Connolly
Yeah, I would agree with all of that very much. And I mean, I think in terms of the Attic press aspect of the project, which was a lot of the documents, really, as I said, on certain topics. So the reproductive rights. Absolutely. There's a huge archive on that question, and rightly so, but certainly I had been. Look, I also, in my previous research had conducted maybe around 50 interviews with feminist activists. So there's a whole other background and qualitative dimension to my work of the women's movement. And this was, I suppose, another aspect of that kind of work I've been doing for a long time now at different. Different stages. So. But I was very fortunate. Again, you know, all it takes is, as Tina said there, that, you know, people have boxes of material. Some people are very good at keeping stuff. And Roisin Conroy, who, as I said, was in Irish Women United, which I should explain for the listeners, was one of the main radical Irish feminist groups in the 1970s. There's quite a bit in our book on that organization. And it was very much a group that was tackling questions, as we said earlier, about reproductive rights was crucially important because if women didn't, you know, have, you know, first of all, high birth rates was still an issue in the 1970s. But secondly, you know, women couldn't control their own fertility, you know, that had all kinds of repercussions in terms of women's rights to participate fully in the structures of society. And you have to remember, I suppose, in the 1970s and 1980s, we talk about direct discrimination and indirect discrimination in the workplace, for instance, particularly around maternity status. And there is a whole caseload of studies on these questions. So we have to remember that all of these groups were tackling discrimination in whatever form. And some of them, such as the Irish Women's liberation movement leading on to then the Council for the Status of Women in the early 1970s, focused on many issues, but quite a lot on women's right to work outside of the home. Whereas other groups were more concerned with other kinds of discriminations and inequalities in society. So to give you an example, Irish Women United was probably one of the first groups to address sexuality, but also, you know, in advocating for reproductive rights. This is the intersectionality piece Tina has just done, a wonderful conference on intersectionality, which I've been watching from afar, precariously looking at everything. I thought it looked amazing. But Irish Women United weren't just advocating for a woman's right to access contraception, which is the universal argument. A woman has a right to, you know, fertility control was the term used at the time. We wouldn't use that today. But also that it should be free. And that's the intersectional piece. So it's one thing to argue for a universal right for women, because contraception affects many, many women, but also that it should be free. And that's the class aspect, the intersectionality piece.
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Aidan Beatty
So I wonder if I could ask you to kind of continue talking about that question of groups active in the 1970s. I think maybe for people outside of a gender studies field, when they think of things like second wave feminism, they think of people like Betty Frieden or Shulamith Firestone. So this. This movement or set of movements that you're talking about, obviously, is happening at a kind of a global moment. So what makes this similar to what's going on in the US or the UK and what makes it different?
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Tina O'Toole
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think one of the things that makes it a little different is it's a little later. So these things happen a little later in Ireland. So we're talking really about the 1980s in Ireland when we talk about second wave feminism. Yeah, some of these groups begin at the end of the 1970s, but it's really the 1980s before they begin to gain traction. And I suppose a lot of that, and this is really Linda's area much more than mine, but a lot of that kind of, you know, coalesces around that 1983 referendum. And we see that as the big kind of flashpoint moment of feminism in Ireland. I think one of the. I mean, it's an obvious point perhaps, but it's worth making. It's one that I find myself making more and more to my students is that point about Catholicism, because the church is a much more powerful force in Irish society in the, you know, certainly in my childhood in the 70s and early 80s than it is now. And so I think that creates a very different cultural context for feminism than perhaps in, you know, we'll say in Britain where the NHS is available to women, or in the United States or in other, we'll say in Germany at the time. I think there are cultural differences. For women of my mother's generation who were born in the 1940s or even into the 1950s, they had grown up in a theocratic stage. So to talk openly about their lives, to talk openly about matters of sexuality or matters of fertility really wasn't. I mean, it wouldn't have been countenanced. I mean, you know, I mean, even in a very simple way, I think for most of our parents generation, and it may be a generalization, I think the Idea of putting your head above the parapet at all to talk about anything in public was seen as perhaps the worst thing you could do. Bringing shame on the family in one way or the other. I think my mother's main concern when I started marching in pride marches and things like that, was that I would somehow accidentally end up in the media, that I would be on tv. Like, every time I would leave the house, I'd be told, please don't appear on the six o' clock news. That was actually her main concern. Whatever I was actually doing in terms of radical politics was one thing, but, you know, bringing a program on the family by doing it in any kind of a public way was worse. Again, you know, so I. I think that to. To be in a. To be in Chicago or to be in, you know, New York or to be in. Even in Birmingham or in. In. In Liverpool in the period, and to. To be involved in any kind of social activism was one thing where you were to some extent an autonomous being in a kind of a, you know, in a big city. But to be in Ireland, which is a small place where everybody knows everybody else and where there's only one national media channel, you're doing it very much in the glare of all of your family and neighbors. So I do think that imposes its own constraints.
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Linda Connolly
Yeah, yeah. I think the international context was really important in three ways, I think. So. First of all, as you say, quite rightly, the writings of the women's movement, particularly in the United States. States, where they were being read and in a way, and also the methods, if you like, of radical feminism in particular, which was, you know, I suppose we might say, broadly speaking, theoretically, that, you know, the liberal feminist framework is that you change society by changing the existing structures of power. And what's interesting is, you know, we do need more women in the academy. We need more women doctors, we need more women, you know, we certainly did at that stage in all areas of public life, politicians, etc. So that argument is well taken. But I suppose the radical feminist approach was that it's not just enough to get the women in. You need to change the structures, not just of the institutional structures of society, but we need to change society as a whole. For instance, the family, the idea of the family, such as sacred institution in Ireland, the idea of questioning that, the nuclear family based on marriage. So all of these ideas internationally were. Sounds a bit crude, but they were sort of being imported into Irish society in a way. But what was really important, not just those ideas and texts and books Also, the methods of the radical social movements of the 1960s were also being mobilized in Ireland at this time. And what was very important again, in terms of the radical questioning, the sort of throwing out of the ideas of the nuclear family of what we later called heteronormativity. We must remember, the language of the time was quite different in the early days of second wave feminism, you know, all of these issues that, you know, you know, women have autonomous bodies, they can make autonomous choices about their bodies. All of these kind of liberal ideas, but also the radical ideas around that were being, you know, as I said, discussed through the medium of texts of literature, all of these things. But the methods of the social movements, such as the radical feminist groups of consciousness raising, which were. Which were set up in different parts of the country. And literally, I mean, you think about why would this be so radical? Well, for exactly the reason Tina said it wasn't the case that women came together and talked about an unmarried mother, for instance. These were all kind of taboo, stigmatized questions shrouded in silence. And so that idea of women only groups. And again, we've had this in the academy debates about women's studies versus gender studies. But at that time that was very, very powerful in terms of challenging the patriarchal norms of society. And some of these women were also very active in the labour movement. They were active in, you know, all kinds of socialist groups. Some were very active in republican groups, some were very anti republican. So, you know, you had that, I suppose, confluence of ideas, perspectives, politics, very much of not just what was happening in Ireland, but the international social movements, I suppose, questing all the structures, aiming to liberate different groups in Western societies and indeed beyond Western societies at that time. So the third thing that. So you had the literature, the writings, questioning women's role in society and offering an alternative vision of the kind of role and future our next generations of women could have in society. The second, as I said, being the radical social movements of the late 60s onwards, an international phenomenon. But then thirdly, again, some of the key activists in the Irish women's movement came from the States. Mary Marr, for instance, one of the founders of the Irish women's liberation movement, and were critical in arguing that the same kinds of ideas should be implemented in Ireland. And then, of course, the European, the EEC, as it was called then joining the European Economic Community again proved to be very important. You mentioned the decriminal, decriminalization of homosexuality, Tina. And that again was very much, I suppose, fought through European institutions. So by wearing my sociological hat. There were a number of factors, I think sociological factors at this time which, broadly speaking, were to do with the opening up of Irish society to external outside influences. And feminism was one of those. And I think, I suppose what we've always tried to do is to ensure that feminism isn't erased or airbrushed from the meta narrative of Irish studies as a kind of a footnote or this was absolutely crucial in changing Irish society beyond recognition over a number of decades. But if that movement had not happened, we would be living, you know, you mentioned the theocratic version of Irish life. We would probably still be living in that kind of society. And so that's sort of solidarity with women in other parts of the world who are grappling with patriarchal religious structures, et cetera, is still very much to the fore.
- [30:29]
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- [31:29]
Aidan Beatty
So a lot of what you're saying there is kind of gesturing to something I wanted to talk about also, that this is obviously not a history that's happening in isolation. It's happening in parallel to all these big changes that happened in Ireland at the end of the, at the end of the 20th century into the 21st. And it's also really a kind of a motor behind a lot of those changes. So if you were to write this book today, or if you were to write like a sequel looking at the 2000s, what has changed in Irish feminism? And I wonder if you could particularly talk about the fact that Ireland doesn't Just go from being a very Catholic society to a nominally non Catholic society. It also goes from being an almost exclusively white society to a much more racially diverse society. How does that change the nature of feminism in Ireland?
- [32:15]
Tina O'Toole
Well, I suppose intersectionality is really where. Where, you know, is. I mean, this wasn't a word in our vocabulary certainly in the late 90s, early 2000s. I mean, you know, migration, I suppose, in both directions is something that I think would be a much bigger part of anything that I would write now if I'm not really sure if you can recreate a project in that kind of way. But, you know, migration, I suppose, even though it's funny, it's not something that we ever spoke about, it's not something that there is a chapter in the book on, say, as a thematic topic, and yet it kind of. It underpins almost all of the chapters in the book, because even what Linda's just been talking about in terms of those influences overseas and people coming from overseas who are part of the movement here, emigration was such an enormous part of anyone's life growing up in Ireland in the 1930s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and not just then, but, I mean, in the period that we're thinking about. And so for all of the women who were involved in the Women's Live movement in those years, the vast majority of their friends and comrades were living overseas and communicating with them at the time. So books and pamphlets and ideas were, you know, there was all sorts of transatlantic exchange going on there and kind of trans European exchange as well.
- [33:36]
Linda Connolly
And.
- [33:37]
Tina O'Toole
And yet that's not something that we addressed in a kind of formal way, which is sort of interesting, you know. And it was really only in subsequent work that I did on queer migration that I began to think about the importance of that in terms of just, you know, how. How do ideas emerge? How do social movements begin to emerge in a culture? Like, how does that happen and what prompts that? And as you say, Aidan, I think very much that the. In migration of peoples from all over the world has completely changed the landscape that we're working in now. And importantly, Anwal Hall's recent work on the Massey Journal that's just been launched at IMA in the last week really highlights and kind of enlivens that whole. That whole intersectional approach to feminist scholarly work that that's in tandem with migrant rights in Ireland. And in some ways, you know, I think I. I think even, you know, to think about updating, let's say, or reproducing a second edition or Something like that of, of documenting Irish feminisms now, I think would be to hand it over to some of the newer migrants and ask them to kind of to. To say what they have to say about the culture that they are inheriting now, those second generation migrants growing up in the culture, perhaps, you know.
- [35:00]
Linda Connolly
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think again, Ireland up until the early 1990s really was a sending country in terms of migration, you know. And I know in my first project, a lot of the women I interviewed said that they left Ireland in the 1980s because they just couldn't stay. The atmosphere had changed significantly. So again, to give the broader societal context, you know, you had again, the return of very high rates of emigration. The Ryanair generation, as they were called you, had a series of referenda, you know, underpinned by the quite successful, I would say, I hate to say it, in some ways, organization of a kind of a counter right movement that was always there in terms of, you know, opposition to, you know, advances in reproductive rights, in particular women's, anything to do with bodily autonomy, sexuality. And we now know, you know, I suppose it's easy now to look back and say the other thing we didn't really focus on because again, it just didn't really come up in this context was the mother and baby homes. Tina, I was thinking just as you were talking, and it's not to say that, you know, funny, in my teaching, in every other area of my work, you know, I taught a course on the sociology of the family and I had a huge section on unmarried mothers, you know, Trip. But I suppose in terms of the documents of Irish feminism, I don't recall one document, one anything. Now, there was an organization set up called Cherish, and actually there's a brilliant new paper just out in Women's History Review by Lorraine Grimes on that group. And. But again, I suppose in the way today that we know about, I suppose the sheer societal organization of mother and baby homes, you know, it took, I suppose, another 20 years for those kinds of issues to emerge. Adrian, does that make sense in a way that, you know, I suppose the resources and the knowledge and the openness were not there on that question at the time. And yet I suppose it was. It should have been, you know, it should have been really being honest. So that's one thing I would easy to say now, but I would have integrated more of my own work on these questions maybe, and maybe looked a bit more closely at Cherish or some of those groups, and that's part of the emigration as well. Isn't it the. What's the diplomatic word? The expulsion? I don't know, the sending of these problems to the uk Again, we're having so many different conversations today about the UK in terms of Brexit. But if you think about it, I suppose the exporting is the word of some of those problems to the United Kingdom in particular. So the women who went there to either have terminations, and we know there were thousands of women having terminations over the years, but doing it quietly, secretly, the women who also went to have babies there, who were then adopted, all of that. And then the women who left, as I said, in the 1980s because of, as was that dark period of organized opposition. And again, we write a lot about that in the book, about how really the single issue, again, a successful tactic in terms of social movements, focus on a single issue to, I suppose, try to undo or certainly stymie what was called the liberal tide of the previous decade. And you see this playing out in the United States today. You see it's all cyclical, isn't it? You know, we, you know, you think, you know, Ireland is such a liberal society now. You know, the referenda on marriage, on abortion in recent years, etcetera, you know, they suggest Ireland is a liberal society, but nothing can be taken for granted. So I think in the last 20 years, absolutely, that question of the institutional abuses. But thankfully an awful lot of work has been done that and is being done. And it is really not just a women's rights issue, a human rights issue. There's a lot of publications coming out and a lot of research, wonderful projects, survivor centered, which is very, very important now. We did have the Mother and Baby Homes Commission. That's a whole other discussion. So there is a need still for the kind of analysis we're talking about, which is less about the institutional supporting the institutional norms and more about questioning and putting lived experience at the centre of the analysis. And then in terms of migration, then absolutely, you know, again, we did have some, we did some work on what was called, again, very much the terminology of the time, the community groups, the women's community activism, which was, I suppose, more of a working class movement, which, you know, came after the 1970s in a way. And there's tremendous growth, growth in local groups centered on, really on education as much as political activism. And of course, certainly the most liberating thing in my life as a feminist was education, no question about it, you know, particularly in context of my background and everything else and the opportunities my own female relatives had Some of them were very limited. So. So I can see how that is both a class and a gender question that was very powerful. And the women's studies departments were quite important to going into those communities. And they weren't just. It wasn't kind of preaching the feminist activism. This was education looking at invisible questions, you know, women writers who had never been looked at before, all these kinds of issues we're talking about. So we see that growth in terms of. In the last 20 years of education, the expansion of education, which was sort of happening anyway, but very much centered on class coming out of communities themselves. And again, that's, I suppose, another form of feminism that we certainly captured, but again, has probably become very important in recent decades and again in Northern Ireland as well. So there's a lot. There's a lot there, you know, but thankfully, there is a lot of work being done on all these issues. So I don't know if we need to write another book, maybe we could.
- [41:35]
Tina O'Toole
I think it's worth mentioning that I'm actually sitting in one of those community projects at the moment like that. That's where I am. I'm in Ballyfihan and Cork in the Community Development Project here, which is, you know, one of those projects that came from a grassroots organization for educating working class people and so on and so forth. And, you know, some of the initiatives that have come out here include link, you know, so that kind of cross community activism, sometimes with a very small number of people who all know one another and who are kind of willing to work in solidarity, has really been, you know, to go back to what Linda said earlier about the importance of the women's movement in changing the culture. I think a lot of those grassroots movements, they really need to kind of, I think, be put on the record as well.
- [42:19]
Linda Connolly
Of course, we were too young to be around in the 70s, I should say, except as.
- [42:24]
Tina O'Toole
Yeah, of course, obviously, having been born in 1990. Obviously, yes.
- [42:32]
Linda Connolly
I must say as well, in terms of that consciousness raising, you know, so we probably missed out on the fun decade. Tina, in terms of the seven. It's the other side of it, I suppose. A lot of the women I interviewed, a lot of the actors, they described what they were doing as a lot of fun. I mean, there was a lot of conflict, indifference as well, no doubt, but because there are different perspectives within Irish feminism, no doubt about it. But in the 80s, certainly when we were in secondary school, you know, there was a lot. So that 1983 referendum just looms in our heads. There's no question about it. The Carrie babies case, the death of Anne Lovett in Granard. A young pregnant girl. She and her baby were found dead at a grotto. You know, these are all iconic events that we lived through as well. So there's very much a kind of a strong biographical dimension, I think, that we're bringing to our academic work, which was really questioned for many decades by the sort of, you know, the canon of Irish studies and Irish history, you know, who were emphasizing objectivity at all costs. And it's very difficult to, you know, to adopt that kind of positivist framework coming out of those experience of the 70s and 80s and theory is very important. Developing very strong theoretical frameworks and methodologies that ensure that the scholarship is very sound, but also doesn't deny, quite frankly, that we lived through those years as well.
- [44:05]
Aidan Beatty
So I wonder if I could ask maybe a little bit about that problem that you're obviously trying to address with the book or were trying to address in 2005 about basically securing recognition for gender studies and women's studies as legitimate fields. I started my undergraduate degree in 2005, and I don't think women's history was even a thing. And that doesn't seem like that long ago to me. And then I was shocked. I think Tina used the word 17 years, and that was how long ago was.
- [44:34]
Tina O'Toole
You suddenly begin to realize your age? Yeah, yeah.
- [44:37]
Aidan Beatty
So how's this project been successful? Have you succeeded in securing that place?
- [44:43]
Tina O'Toole
I think it's much more. I mean, certainly in terms of. So I've been teaching at ul for 16 years, and certainly the number of people coming to me looking for supervision for PhDs, for MAs, and even finally a project at undergraduate level on feminist projects, on gender projects, on queer theory and so on and so forth, has changed enormously in that, like, across that period. I could almost track that. And I think the book is part of that change. You know, I'm not sure that I would claim it as a, you know, as a landmark text as such, but it's certainly part of that kind of bigger picture. I mean, I think that people like Margaret McCurtain, working away quietly in the background, teaching women's history in UCD in the nineteen, late 1980s, in the 1990s and so on. You can see the number of people who come through, like Sinead McCool, who've come through those classrooms subsequently, you know, working, working their way through a sort of a women's history agenda, if you like. And I suppose, I mean, you know, I'm, you know, as I'm constantly saying, I'm not a historian. You know, I'm a literature scholar. So for me, it's a lot of this is about that kind of multidisciplinary work that we can all do together. So in some ways, I see the book as a landmark scholarly project in that sense, almost more than in terms of what it can do for women's history, you know, in kind of showing. In showcasing what can be done when a group of scholars coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, including, by the way, graphic design, can come together and create something that is a lasting resource.
- [46:23]
Linda Connolly
Yeah, I would use that word resource. I see the book primarily as a resource and deliberately designed. As I said, we didn't go down our sort of post structuralist, whatever it was at the time, whatever the theoretical trends at the time. You know, clearly it's very informed by our theoretical positions of frameworks. And we write a lot of theory. Tina and I in our. In our other publications, and have worked on a lot of empirical projects as well. You know, qualitative research, interviews, documents. I work a lot with documents as well, still. I'm working with documents in a different period, in a different time now. But I think I saw this book, certainly from my perspective, as something that would lead to other pathways in the future. And it captures. It captures available documents, it records the key events, it provides an analysis. But I think, if anything, it has. You know, it's difficult to say if, you know, if it's had an impact, but I think it is. So I know it is used quite a bit, and I know one of the achievements was we were able to use the project as leverage to get the Attic press archive catalogued and made available with that strong support of the librarian at the time. So, to me, you know, most of the projects I work on have an output like that. You know, there's. You know, we have. I recently digitized interviews or, you know, there's some kind of. I recently worked with the military archives to get a file released with a family that. A very important file, one of the most important files of the Irish Civil War, but trying to get things, you know, I suppose not having that. I'm trying to say, again, be diplomatic yet again, not saying that I want those resources for me and my work, you know, that actually we want to make these resources available as part of that work. So, again, that's kind of. Maybe it might be activism with a small a. But it is important we understand the importance of resources of materials that can, I suppose, empower other researchers And I'm not just talking about researchers of women's studies because, you know, as I said earlier, this is very important, that when you're looking at, I suppose, the political landscape in the 1980s, that these questions are included alongside the troubles, alongside the terrible recession, the high unemployment. And so it's about, I suppose, claiming that space in knowledge, but also creating a space for further research. So I do think there has been, you know, when you look then at the subsequent, you know, the Field Day anthology that the, you know, the women. What year was that? I can't remember at this stage. What year did the Field Day come out? It was just after. It was around the same time, actually. I remember getting it as part of the project. You know, there were a number of these projects were happening at the same time. And also, I have to say, they were partly a reaction as well to, I suppose, the exclusion of women and the exclusion of feminism from very key canonical projects, texts. You know, we were working. When I started as an undergrad in sociology, in the sociology department, there were no female lecturers. The first female lecturer came in, I think, second year or third year, and then became my PhD supervisor. God knows what happened if she hadn't come, you know, again in my department in Cork, again, you know, promotion, promotion in our universities for women was a huge issue. I mean, Margaret McCurtain was never promoted beyond national level. Alva Smith, incredible scholar, you know, hugely important actor in the Irish women's movement, in Irish academia and more recently in so many campaigns, the same thing had had to go to court with UCD and lost. And, you know, I was the first woman promoted to senior lecturer ever in my department in Cork, you know, so all the women were. They just had the presumption they would never progress. So we have come a long way, you know, I'm a professor now, so to be your senior lecture, we're still hanging in there in terms of, you know.
- [50:49]
Tina O'Toole
But I mean, to go back to. Sorry, to go back to what Aidan was saying about that kind of 2000 experience of history. I mean, just to give an example of this, and this is totally narcissistic, but I won an entrance scholarship to UCD because I came first in history in Ireland in the matric. So you would have thought that I would have done history, which I did do in first year, but at the end of first year, I gave up history because I just saw there was no place for me there. I was. It was very masculinist. It was a very particular narrative. And I. I mean, at the time time, Margaret McCurtain unfortunately wasn't teaching first years. I didn't encounter her again until I did the MA in Women's Studies and I did what was then called pure English. So I went into an old Middle English and Modern English Literature degree, which is what I did. And arguably, I mean, you know, from a literary point of view, have ended up being a historian anyway, because I mostly work on literary history. But I think, I think what's interesting about that is that so in that period, so that's. I'm talking 1988, 1989 would have been my first year in college. Just the idea that, you know, a young working class woman going to UCD on a, on a history scholarship sees no place for herself in that, in that sphere and leaves it, you know, so I think that if nothing else.
- [52:06]
Linda Connolly
I mean, to go back to the.
- [52:07]
Tina O'Toole
Biographical, that kind of, that kind of tells its own story really, you know.
- [52:11]
Linda Connolly
But now I think that that is not the case. There is a lot of work being done and, you know, a lot of PhDs, you know, it's. And then I suppose the whole, you know, the questioning gender binaries is also in there. You know, your conference, I think, demonstrated that so well, Tina, as well, from afar, you know, but, you know, all the different kind of trans activism and, you know, it's just, it's just amazing to think how far, how much has changed so quickly. Yeah, but I mean, it is, it.
- [52:43]
Tina O'Toole
Is a rapid change in so many ways when you like, in terms of a lifespan, you know.
- [52:48]
Linda Connolly
Yeah. I suppose the big question though has always been to what extent has that transformed the canon or what we used to call the mainstream? And I would be a bit less perhaps positive about that in terms of, you know, I suppose there was always this, you know, certainly you mentioned silos, Tina. You know, on the other hand, you know, the whole, I suppose, movement within Irish academia around questioning authority, epistemic authority, hasn't just come from feminism. You mentioned migration studies, race, gender, class. You know, all of the hugely important work being done in Galway, for instance, in the Centre for the Study of Labour, Gender and Class, you know, that John Cunningham and Sarah Anne Buckley are heading up there. You know, I think there's still a sense that that's what those people over there do. Whereas the, you know, the real centre of Irish Studies, for instance, which I've also written quite a lot about, is something else. And, you know, I think that relationship between the canon and these other kinds of perspectives that have come from very marginal positions as We've described just there, even in our conversation. That might be news to younger people, you know. You know, we didn't just arrive to these positions, you know, hey, presto, you know, that there's a whole context, I think, to biographical, structural, around the kind of work we do. Structural in terms of Irish universities, all those things we touched on there class. And then I wonder then about, I suppose, the broader structures and, you know, about whether there's an openness within what was called a canon. I mean, you might even challenge us, Adrian, say the canon doesn't exist anymore, and that's fine, but, you know, like so. But those kind of questions still interest me quite a lot about the positioning, where we position ourselves theoretically, I think, in relation to the different disciplines in Irish studies. And when we wrote this book, it was quite easy because, you know, it was more marginal, I suppose, whereas now there's an awful lot of work as we've outlined. So they're interesting questions. I'm interested to see how epistemic authority plays out. Important positions, all those kind of structural questions. And the important books. What are the important books, so to speak?
- [55:24]
Aidan Beatty
Well, I mean, I know one of you started, I think it was you, Linda, by saying that one of the purposes of this book was to start debates rather than kind of close it off. And if this conversation is anything to go by, obviously it's been a quite successful book in that regard, and I think it's clearly a really wonderful archival resource. As a book. This might be a slightly insulting thing to say, but it's perhaps also a historic document in its own right. If I'm kind of aging you a little bit there.
- [55:51]
Linda Connolly
Absolutely.
- [55:53]
Aidan Beatty
And obviously, as well as just being a very useful pedagogical text, it's also just a very readable and enjoyable text to read. This has been a really wonderful conversation, and I want to end before we go on too long, but thank you so much for this great conversation and for writing a great book.
- [56:11]
Linda Connolly
Thank you.
- [56:11]
Tina O'Toole
Thanks, Aidan.