The back cover blurb says that this book will appeal to students and lecturers of Irish social and women’s history. No doubt it is also invaluable to anyone struggling to understand the role that media plays today, to realise that social media may be a new technology, but that it has a context and a history in which women’s magazines played an essential part. Ciara Meehan’s research on the representation of women in specific influential magazines of the 1960s, reveals the mild resistance to norms, attitudes and values formulated by powerful forces since the foundation of the state, particularly by the Irish Catholic Church, and which prevailed at all levels of Irish society.
I remember the 1960s very well. I was too young to read those magazines, but I loved comics like Bunty and Judy with their stories of heroic girls on their valiant adventures, unencumbered by expectations heaped on adult women. Meehan develops her research into chapters on dating, marriage, home, sex, pregnancy, families, motherhood, singlehood, widowhood.
Meehan argues that the magazines of the 1960s pushed the boundaries, and that, for example, Seán O’Sullivan, editor of Women’s Way, set out to engage women as equal and active citizens. One of the drawbacks of this approach was that many of those ‘equal and active citizens’ were wedded to the traditional roles of women, as dictated by the patriarchal and social forces which dominated the state, on the back of the religious nationalism that characterised Irish society. Nevertheless, real life is more complicated than the ideal, and real life became part of the agenda of the magazines, through the editorial position and the interaction of the columnists, including experts on medical, psychological and skills that pertained to women’s lives.
Irish women’s place in media.
Meehan’s eminently readable historical research emphasises that the times in late1960s were changing, with journalists of the calibre of Mary Maher, June Lavine, Rosita Sweetman, the late, legendary Nell McCafferty and so many others committed to women’s rights, keeping women’s issues to the fore, beyond the traditional pages focused on cooking, cleaning, clothes and charm. This book concentrates on the analysis of the representation of women in Women’s Way, Woman’s Choice, Women’s View and The Young Woman, reflecting the editorial stances that remained constant. Letters to the editors and letters to advice columnists provide a measure of triangulation to contextualise readers’ perspectives.
The book is organised into chapters dealing with stages of development of women’s lives, from dating to marriage, motherhood and housework, with particular critical attention on singlehood, single parenthood, with a particular interest in the sex lives of women.
Further aspects are explored in the chapter with a telling question mark: Happy Families? In this chapter, Meehan explores the differences between the depiction of the ideal families, that is. married motherhood, and the reality as articulated by uncertain or even desperate mothers. The realities included health and well-being of babies, but also of mothers. One woman, in a letter to Women’s Choice in 1969, felt she was going crazy. We know now it may have been post-partum depression, but at least the magazine Nurse recommended that she go to her doctor, rather than the usual advice ‘you just got on with it’, whether it was depression, miscarriage, loss of a pregnancy or the loss of a child.
As recounted in the section ‘Challenging’ Children, (pp 205-208), thissection is breathtaking in the language that was commonplace to categorise children with physical and/or intellectual difficulties, terminology long discarded. The author alerts the reader with a note, but it shows clearly that such language emanated from a perspective that sought to Other the populations to which it applied. Most distressing, a belief that these children would disrupt the ‘normal’ ideal family, meant that mothers (and fathers) were encouraged and/or persuaded to part with their children for the sake of their families, except for remarkable cases like Christy Brown, who grew up to be an artist and writer, with the support and encouragement of his mother, especially, but also his entire family. But children with intellectual difficulties or disabilities filled specialist institutions, like St Raphael’s in Celbridge, or Stewarts Hospital in Palmerstown and people with physical conditions like Christy Brown, or deaf or blind children were also institutionalised and isolated. That is, the family as the basic unit in Irish society according to the constitution, covered a multitude of specifics, as if, in Tolstoy’s words, ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ with little recognition for the complexity of the reality.
Meehan ends with the discussion on the agenda for change that emerged om profound legal and attitudinal changes, as feminism spread to Ireland from the social movements nurtured in Europe and North America. The magazines straddle the divide between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Irelands, hankering after the old comforts of women’s mostly taken-for-granted housework, against the process and progress of women’s emancipation, economically, culturally, politically and personally. This social progress challenged the old order fundamentally, and magazines took up a middle ground that appeased the unease of the traditional reader, while introducing them to newer ideas with gentle nudges.
Conclusion
As I write this review, I’ve just seen Stolen, a film by Margo Harkin, (RTE One, 26th August 2024), recounting the stories of women’s and men’s experiences of mother and baby homes, operating in the Irish state, and in the north of Ireland, from 1922 to 1998. It’s salutary to reflect that Meehan’s research on women’s magazines in the 1960s sat in the middle of that timeline, magazines which were, in the main, blithely blind to the parallel universe where 80,000 women were incarcerated and 9,000 babies died, many without a death certificate, at least five times the national rate.
The Scoping Inquiry report has also been published, with a horrifying account of the abuse suffered by children in schools and other institutions in living memory, including the sexual, physical and psychological abuse in those institutions for people with intellectual and physical disabilities in which people like Christy Brown would have been incarcerated if the beliefs about ‘normal’ happy families had prevailed in his family.
Meehan asks if magazines could be an additional source for research on women’s lives, along with legal and other documents, arguing that women’s voices may not be heard in more official outlets. I think this is a vital question. She contends that attitudes languished behind the vision of the feminist movements, for example, the image of the good mother propounded by religious, social and economic forces, was equally effective, if not more so, than the model of marriage as breadwinner and housewife. Indeed, housewife and mother were conflated in many ways, with husbands being looked after in much the same way as the children, with all their cooking, cleaning, clothing, washing, caring, health, illness – indeed all the aspects of housework, visible and invisible – taken care of by unpaid labour of the ‘housewife’.
One fun activity that readers might undertake to get a deep insight into 1960s Housewives of the Year expectations, on page 165, with the Women’s Choice quiz of 1969: Are you an ideal wife?
Answer Our Questions Honestly
1. List the following in order of importance to YOU: Home, children, career, husband.
Answer: 1: The list should read: Husband, children, home, career.
There you have it, what that ideal woman SHOULD be two years before the 1971 Contraceptives Train.
Sources:
Angela McNamara
Contraceptives Train
Ms History
Report on the Scoping Inquiry (2024)
Stolen (2024)
Women's History Association of Ireland 