Yesterday President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins signed into law the Thirty-Sixth Amendment of the Constitution Bill, repealing what have been some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. A historic moment for Ireland, this is also a moment to acknowledge how things have changed for women over the past 50 years – at work, at home, in the bedroom, and even in the pub.

In the late 1960’s, I was a little girl concerned mostly with riding my bike and making daisy chains. I was often oblivious to The Troubles that dominated the news and even more so to the double-standards that affected the women in my life, most of whom were stay-at-home mothers. Most of them didn’t drive, a few worked outside the home, and I don’t remember ever seeing any of them go to the pub by themselves. I know now that this wasn’t because they were too busy doing other things; it was because it was considered unladylike for women to drink beer in pubs – and out of pint glasses. In fact, some pubs wouldn’t even admit a woman unless they were chaperoned by a man, and legally they could refuse to serve pints of beer. It wasn’t until the Equal Status Act of 2002 that this practice was outlawed, thanks in no small measure to women like Nell McCafferty who led a group of thirty women into a Dublin pub, where they bellied up to the bar and each of them ordered a brandy.  After the drinks were set up on the bar, the group ordered a single pint of the black stuff. Upon being refused a Guinness by the bartender, the women drank their brandy and walked out –  without paying.

The double-standards and the discrimination didn’t stop there.  Women working in civil service had to resign from their jobs when they got married, the rationale being that they were taking a job that would otherwise go to a man. It wasn’t until 1977, when I was a teenager, that the Employment Equality Act removed the “marriage bar” for women. 

Because of Ireland’s family laws, women had few rights at home.The law did not permit them to seek restraining orders against abusive husbands.  Because a woman could not own a home, her husband could sell it without her consent. If she was being abused, therefore, her only option was to leave her home or return to her abusive spouse. Domestic violence in Ireland wasn’t recognized in Irish statute until the Family Law (Maintenance of Spouses and Children) Act, 1976 with the introduction of the first civil remedy for domestic violence, enabling women to seek a a restraining order. That same law also granted Irish women the right to share ownership of he family home.  And it wasn’t until 1985, around the time I graduated from university that Irish women could legally ‘choose’ their official “place of residence.” Previously, it was wherever her husband lived. And, until 1974 with the passage of the Social Welfare Act, only fathers could collect the payment of state subsidized children’s benefits.

This notion that a married woman was considered neither legally or economically distinct from her husband was deeply embedded in Irish law. Thus social and legal inequality flourished – in the boardroom, the courtroom, the bedroom. Women couldn’t sit on juries until 1976, they couldn’t get divorced until 1997, and they couldn’t refuse sex with their husband. It wasn’t until 1990 that marital rape was deemed a crime, and they couldn’t  buy contraceptives. The 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act criminalized the import, sale, and distribution of contraceptives illegal.  AIDS was now a fact of life – globally –  yet the sale of condoms was illegal in Ireland except under very limited stipulations. In 1985 the law was amended to permit the sale of contraceptives to anyone over 18 but only in the pharmacy. I remember finding out that Dublin’s Virgin Megastore was prosecuted for selling condoms in 1991, an illegal practice, until later that same year when the sale of contraceptives was liberalized. By that time, I was far away in America and married. I’m ashamed to say I was unaware of the decades of struggle for all I was taking for granted – contraception, divorce, jury duty, property ownership, pints of Guinness in a sports bar. That struggle was happening in America too.

Fifty years ago, American women were fighting hard for many of the same rights that eventually came to their Irish counterparts. In 1968, there were no federal laws to stop employers from firing a woman if she became pregnant.  Most women could not apply for a credit-card without having their husbands co-sign.  signature.  President Lyndon B. Johnson would eventually sign an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by government contractors and requiring affirmative action plans for hiring women, and a year later, California adopted the country’s first “no fault” divorce law, allowing divorce by mutual consent. In 1969, the woman who would almost five decades later become the first female presidential candidate nominated by a major political party, Hillary Clinton,  was the first student to address the graduation class of Wellesley College at commencement.  At the top of the charts in 1968 was Jeannie C. Riley with “Harper Valley PTA,” a catchy cross-over tune that made Riley the first female artist to land at No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot Country Singles and Hot 100 charts with the same song. Written by Tom T. Hall,  “Harper Valley P.T.A.” was an enormous hit, exposing the small minds of a small town that is no match for a teenage girl’s widowed mother who’s accused of scandalous behavior because she wears mini-skirts and, in response, shows up at the PTA meeting to call out – by name – every member’s hypocrisy.

Coincidentally, no other female artist would top the charts until Dolly Parton in 1981 with an equally catchy “9 to 5,” an anthem of sorts for millions of middle-class white women who entered the workforce at the same moment when many of those same women were exiting marriages they had entered in the 1950s. And, in the movie of the same name, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda sock it to their boss, showing him and the rest of us that they will no longer be controlled by “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”

From where I sit today in 2018 America, with a known misogynist at its helm and too many folks clamoring to defend Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the wake of allegations of sexual assault against him, I’m angry. We’ve come too far to be controlled by “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.”  Let’s sock it to ’em.

 “This is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.”

 

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