Clodagh Finn: Lessons to save us from reinventing the wheel in the fight for equality

Here is a little-known fact about the setting up of the Rape Crisis Centre in Ireland. When asked, Charlie Haughey, then a TD, happily and speedily went about obtaining a telephone service – and “a new-fangled answering machine” – for the nascent helpline.

“I will be glad to assist you,” he wrote in a letter to founder member Evelyn Conlon in September 1978, “and if you let me have the address of the centre I will get in touch with the Minister of State at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs on your behalf.”

Then, Evelyn Conlon, Anne O’Donnell, the centre’s first administrator, and a group of 19 volunteers went about, first, learning how to use the answering machine and, once they got “the amazed hang of it”, opening the lines. It was February 19, 1979.

“We learned, ferociously, and on their feet, Everything from listening, advocating, accompanying to Garda stations, attending court,” Conlon writes in After the Train (UCD Press), a gloriously affirming collection of essays that sets out not only what was wrong in Irish society 50 years ago but, more importantly, how it was righted.

Charlie Haughey’s contribution is mentioned in the book as an aside, but it somehow jumped out at this reader as a vivid example of what can happen when someone identifies an issue, speaks up and then goes about doing something to change it.

The power and effectiveness of that three-step dance is evident on every page of this account of what happened after the famous contraceptive train from Dublin to Belfast jolted a Catholic country into a conversation about contraception and bodily autonomy.

I like to think that momentous outing in 1971 by the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement to illegally import contraceptives to Dublin is universally remembered (please tell me that it is), but what has certainly fallen below the radar is the fearless work carried out by the members of Irishwomen United (IWU) in the years that followed.

Hands up, now. Which of you can outline the work done by this group of women – “wailers broadcasting the death of the old regime” – who plotted volcanic change during their Sunday afternoon meetings in an upper room in 12 Pembroke Street in Dublin?

You won’t find it in the history books, apart from a dismissive paragraph here or there; examples of the kind of “stalwart myopia” that inflamed writer Evelyn Conlon to join forces with academic Rebecca Pelan to gather the voices of the women who were there.

In 20 essays, they recall the crackling energy, the excitement and the considerable trepidation of coming together to tease out the issues of the day – “the taboos, restrictions, inequalities, discriminations, exclusions, violence and coercion that dogged our lives”, to quote Ger Moane’s illustrative and profoundly dispiriting list.

One of those restrictions, banal and accepted at the time, was the widespread refusal to serve women pints in pubs. Here, from Gaye Cunningham, is a wonderful description of how the women who went before us, including the late, great Nell McCafferty, went about changing that: 

[Nell] went into one of the pubs that refused to serve women pints and, accompanied by a group of 30 or so women, ordered brandies. When the drinks were served, she ordered a pint of Guinness; when the barman refused to serve, they refused to pay.

It was, writes Cunningham, one of the lighter, more madcap moments in the history of the women’s movement, although there was certainly something madcap and magnificent about the day – July 24, 1974 – a band of IWU members “invaded” the all-male bathing spot, the Forty Foot, in south county Dublin.

They invaded the ‘men-only’ Fitzwilliam Tennis Club too and, in 1976, they burst into the Federated Union of Employers headquarters to campaign for equal pay.

Looking back, Mary Doran writes: “I am amazed at our confidence and how we felt that the end justified the means.” And what fearlessness. 

In 1973, Maura O’Dea, a single mother, wrote a letter to a newspaper in an attempt to get in touch with other “unmarried mothers”, to use the phrase of the time, who had kept their babies as well as those who had been forced to give them up for adoption.

It was the start of Cherish, now One Family, an organisation that not only showed there was such a thing as lone parenting but advocated to improve their rights.

The IWU took a stand on a wide range of issues, campaigning for access to free contraception, LGBT+ rights, bodily autonomy and equal pay.

As Mary Dorcey writes: “We women’s liberationists and gay activists, passionate but inexperienced, transformed our country from the ground up… We were the first generation to refuse to emigrate, or to be silenced, or banished. We insisted on making noise and making our presence felt.”

They made space for the new, or rather the shock of the new. For the first time, publishing houses (Attic Press and Arlen House) laid open the “untravelled terrain” of writing about the body and female experience. 

Another Mary (O’Donnell, poet and author of the excellent, just out Walking Ghosts, Mercier Press) recalls the influence of norm-breaking poet Eavan Boland: “Until then, the body had not been permitted space in poetry or literature. So those of us who included aspects of feminine experience in our writing were really like frontier women heading into the unknown.”

Those frontier women carved out new pathways and set up a number of organisations that still exist today – the aforementioned Rape Crisis Centre and the Well Woman Centre to mention two.

In acknowledging, remembering and celebrating that fevered time, After the Train also makes it clear that feminism did not start with them. It quotes the incomparable Hilda Tweedy, founder member of the Irish Housewives Association and author of A Link in the Chain: 

So many people think that the women’s movement was born on some mystical date in 1970, when it had actually been a long continuous battle… each generation adding something to the last.

That is really important to remember in a week when Women’s Aid reported the highest level of disclosure of domestic abuse in its 50-year history. It, like so many other feminist organisations, has its roots in those mould-breaking days of the 1970s. (Indeed, Women’s Aid gave the fledgling Rape Crisis Centre a room in its building in Harcourt Terrace.)

At a time when it seems we have made no progress, particularly when it comes to the epidemic of violence against women, it’s important to remember what went before. As Evelyn Conlon so eloquently puts it: “… “We always need to keep our eyes on the history books, because every time we take our eye off the true telling of what happened, we create the necessity to begin inventing the wheel all over again.”

The wheel, though it might not feel like it, is indeed turning. Take this single example. When the Well Woman centre opened its doors in 1978, it “elicited zero media coverage”, writes founder Anne Connolly. Not a line. 

News of it made the papers only when four anti-abortionists picketed the clinic, a backfiring protest if ever there was one as it gave the centre the kind of publicity it could never afford.

Now, at least, the issues ignored in the 1970s are mainstream news. On the same day that Women’s Aid CEO Sarah Benson was invited to speak at length on the flagship Six One News, a documentary about Natasha O’Brien, the woman randomly and brutally attacked on the street by ex-soldier Cathal Crotty, aired on RTÉ.

“Don’t bite your tongue,” she said, a mantra needed as much now as it ever was. Just remember, though, that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We are links in a very long and interconnected chain.