Introduction: Emergent Strands or Theory on Edge?

Abstract

The manifestation of feminism in Ireland, north and south, has followed some very specific pathways that reflect a history that is quite unlike that of its nearest neighbor, the United Kingdom; and even though the north is politically aligned with Britain, and is in some ways socioculturally distinct from the republic, there is still an overall sense of otherness. Ireland as a whole has been disregarded and romanticized in turn, a place of abjection and dreams according to the context. For feminists, there has always been the example of some very strong women to look back on, but also a sense in which the repressions that have assailed Ireland over many centuries have taken their toll on the social and political promotion of women in particular. That is not to say that women have been silenced—and the myth of Irish “backwardness” that outsiders have used as a lazy explanatory model has been comprehensively critiqued, not least by Linda Connelly (2002) in her exposition of the Irish Women’s Movement— but that, as elsewhere, women’s specific concerns have been deemed less important than other more “gender-neutral” matters. The priorities of the state in Ireland, whether represented by Dublin or London, are rarely directed toward women in any liberatory sense, while the enduring strength of the Church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, throughout the twentieth century, has actively blocked the development of a social agenda that would redress historical inequities.