'What Would I Be Doing at Home All Day?': oral narratives of Irish ...

Women’s History Review, Volume 13, Number 3, 2004

‘What Would I Be Doing at Home All Day?’: oral narratives of Irish married women’s working lives 1936–1960 ELIZABETH KIELY & MÁIRE LEANE University College Cork, Republic of Ireland

ABSTRACT This article examines the preliminary findings of an oral history project on women’s working lives in three Irish counties in the period 1936-1960. By employing a feminist analysis of the narratives, the authors endeavour to investigate the extent to which the reality of married women’s working lives corresponded with the rhetoric of Irish womanhood generated by political and religious discourses of the day. The analysis reveals that while the women did accept the home-based motherhood role prescribed for them, in many cases financial necessity dictated that they combine this role with that of part-time and in some cases, full-time participation in the labour market.

Introduction There has been a virtual absence of academic concentration on women’s experiences of waged work in the Irish free state of the 1940s and 1950s.[1] In an attempt to address this deficit, the authors sought to conduct an investigation into women’s experiences of work in this period using an oral history methodological approach. This project, which commenced in 2000, has resulted in the collection of forty-two oral history interviews with women who responded to a public call for participants and who were residing in the counties of Cork, Limerick and Kerry.[2] The narratives do not reflect a random or representative sample of women who worked in this period; however, they do provide rich-textured ethnographic accounts of women’s experiences of diverse kinds of waged work and associated issues. For the purpose of this article, the authors have analysed these oral history narratives to reveal the patterns of employment for women after marriage. In the early decades of the new Irish state, Catholic ideology and statutory developments combined to create a range of formal and informal barriers to the participation of married women in the workforce. The role of

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motherhood was socially and legally sanctioned as the ‘natural’ role for Irish women and this was clearly evidenced by the 1937 constitution. Article 41.2:1 stated, ‘By their life within the home, women give to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’. Article 41.2:2 indicated the state’s active support of this role for women, asserting that ‘the State, shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home’. The interchange of the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ in these articles indicates the strength of the ideology of motherhood in Irish society.[3] This ideology has traditionally been buttressed by legislation and policy which hindered women’s equal participation in the labour force.[4] Legislative measures employed in the early decades of the new state limited the public role of women and copper-fastened their dependent status as guardians of the home. The 1925 Civil Service Act restricted certain jobs for women and legislation enacted in 1933 required female teachers to resign on marriage.[5] Furthermore, a marriage bar introduced in the civil service in 1933 operated until 1958 for primary school teachers and until 1973 for all other categories.[6] A similar bar applied in many semi-state and private organisations like Aer Lingus and the banks, until 1974. The labour market participation of working-class women was also restricted in 1935 following the introduction of the Conditions of Employment Act.[7] The Act provided ministerial power for the prohibition or limitation of the number of women employed in any form of industrial work. These barriers to women’s participation in the labour force were compounded by the discriminatory conditions of work they experienced. The practice of paying women lower wages for work similar to that being carried out by men continued until the enactment of equal pay legislation in 1975. Pregnant workers were not accorded any rights until the passing of the Maternity Protection of Employees Act in 1981.[8] Furthermore, the tax and welfare system was based on a male breadwinner model and was intrinsically biased against females and, in particular, married female workers.[9] The official statistics demonstrate married women’s low participation rates in the Irish labour force over the decades and are frequently cited to indicate the success of the legal and other initiatives taken to relegate married women to the private sphere of family and home. Examination of Principal Economic Status (PES) data from 1926 to 1985 suggests that during this period, women’s overall participation in gainful occupations in Ireland remained relatively stable at around 30%.[10] Married women’s participation was low and remained static at around 5% from the 1920s to the 1960s. Some 90.3% of all married women described themselves as being engaged in home duties in 1926 and this figure had risen to 93.7% in 1961.[11] During the 1960s and 1970s married women’s participation rates began to rise and by 1985, married women’s participation rate in gainful

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occupations reached just over 20%.[12] Commentators have, however, noted the deficiencies of such statistical data in interpreting women’s economic activity.[13] The PES approach to labour supply measurement categorises each adult according to his or her principal occupation. Where the measurement of married women’s labour activity is concerned, a number of drawbacks of this particular approach have been highlighted.[14] For example, women’s dual roles would have posed problems for classification. Thus, it is generally accepted that women’s labour activities have been underestimated in Irish labour statistics, and hence, analyses derived from such statistics present an incomplete picture of women’s economic activity in Irish society. In this article, the value of oral history enquiry, in facilitating a more penetrative and nuanced exploration of the complexity of women’s working lives, is demonstrated. The oral history methodological approach allows us to disentangle the messy threads of married women’s labour activity for the purpose of achieving a fuller understanding of how women have been economically active during their marriages. Given the legal and social climate of the time and the statistical data presented, it is interesting to note that for the majority of married participants in this study, marriage did not represent the end of their employment biographies. Of the forty-two women who told their stories, thirty-eight women were married, three were single and one woman was in religious life. Ten of the married women did not engage in any kind of paid work after marriage while the majority, twenty-eight women, did. Of these women, two were employed on a continuous basis as teachers. Two others worked continuously in family businesses and one woman worked continuously for farmers, in lieu of her family’s accommodation on their land. The remaining twenty-three women worked at some stage of their married lives. The composition of the study group contrasts sharply with the homogeneous home-based, economically inactive group presented in statistical sources and sociological commentaries. The following sections of the article focus particularly on perceptions of appropriate roles for married women, the narrators’ own experiences of employment after marriage, their status as workers and the challenges they encountered in reconciling their work with family responsibilities. Perceptions of Married Women’s Roles The perception of a married woman’s role as one very much confined to home and childcare was a recurring theme in the women’s testimonies, yet the notion of the married woman worker created a certain dissonance, as identified by some of the women interviewed. The importance of the homemaker role and the personal fulfilment it brought was highlighted in many narratives. Other accounts romanticised married life, while a few

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transcripts revealed how some women feared the role and the limitations they believed were associated with it. Elizabeth Shorten, who worked as a nurse in hospitals in England and in the Irish army from 1947 until her marriage in 1955, described a married woman’s role as ‘homemaker and mother’. Kathleen Fitzgibbon, who worked in a factory in the same time period, described women’s place as ‘in the house, the home. You were just a woman’. Pauline Lee, who married and worked in England and Wales in the early 1940s, recalled that it was expected that women would ‘get married and have babies’. Catherine O’Driscoll, a dispatcher in a sweet factory, gave up her work when she got married in 1940. She explained: I mean when you married you married for good …. And you married for … if you were blessed with children well you were to stay at home and mind them till they were you know adults … It was an unheard [of] thing, women going back to work in those days.

Nora* [15], who resigned from her secretarial job when she married in 1949, noted that: Well women weren’t really educated to a high standard in those days because it always … . You always assumed a woman would get married, stay at home, have children, and that was the end, become a housewife.

Maura Canty resigned from her secure, pensionable job as a telephonist when she married in 1951, despite being in the unusual position of earning more than her husband at the time. Many of the women interviewed reiterated the prevailing view that mothers were at the heart of the home and the family and that they had special qualities for this role that men did not possess. Kathleen Fitzgibbon made this point: the women have the children and the women are geared for children, I think. I mean there is a difference. … But in family life, I think, the mother has a more important role than the man.

Maureen O’Mahoney, who married in 1942 and resigned from her job as an office worker, voiced a similar opinion: ‘and a mother had something. She mightn’t have thought so herself but I mean she was the focus, the pivot of the home really’. These views reflect the prevailing construction of a married woman’s role and for many women the prospect of leaving work for marriage was taken for granted and was not distressing. Indeed, some women viewed the prospect very positively. Joan Griffin, a civil servant who resigned from her employment when she married in 1966, expressed her acceptance of this situation in the following way: ‘I didn’t think any more about it because we were conditioned into that. That when you married you

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gave it [work] up’. Mary O’Sullivan Greene, who resigned from her office job very soon after marriage, acknowledged that she did miss work but that: they were the times and … you accepted the way of life … I wouldn’t have had to leave but it was the done thing. I actually went back for a while for a month or two because the girl who replaced me didn’t stay and they asked me to come back. I’m sure if I wanted to I could have stayed on but I was pregnant then. People generally minded their own children.

Clare Ring, who finished her job as a writing assistant in the civil service when she married in 1957, recalled that she was ‘quite happy’ about leaving her job and she believed that for her, motherhood and work were not compatible: ‘I wouldn’t have continued anyway. Certainly having a family would have decided me straight away to give it up’. Maura Canty, a telephonist who married in 1951, viewed married life very positively, perceiving it to be liberating, freeing her from the routine associated with her work. She claims she was ‘thrilled. I was going to a new life altogether and I could stay up as late as I liked’. Similarly, Catherine Walshe, who left her job as a civil engineer when she married in 1953, recalled having a romantic view of what married life would entail: I was delighted … . Oh God, I remember walking up the aisle and the thought of never … babies, I was going to have loads of them and of course they didn’t need any work. I knew nothing about anything and I floated up the church. That I’d be with him for the rest of my life and no going back to work.

Mary Taaffe, who left her job as a poultry instructress when she married in 1953, had a contrasting perception of what marriage would mean. Talking about the independence her job and her single life had afforded her, she commented: there was one big snag in it. I would have to give it up when I got married. I mean I was looking for a man alright but not to marry ... I thought God how can they do that, they [women] give their whole time talking about feeding babies and changing them and that sort of thing. I thought dear God, protect me from that.

Given the pervasiveness of the view that a woman’s role should be predominantly home based and economically inactive, the notion of the married woman worker met with a certain amount of resistance. Clare Ring described what she believed to be the general attitude to married women workers during the 1940s and 1950s: I think that the attitude then was – don’t forget that this was a time of severe unemployment – and the attitude was, and it was certainly my

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Elizabeth Kiely & Máire Leane attitude, and I’d say it was generally held, that it would be unfair to have one household with two people working and another household with neither working, that it was fairer all round to have one breadwinner.

Kathleen Fitzgibbon, speaking of the 1940s and the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding women’s role, noted: ‘Tis like keep them young getting married, keep them young, keep them pregnant, keep them tied to the sink’. Other women explained men’s resistance to women’s employment in terms of men’s fear of losing power and control over women. Mary Taaffe, a poultry instructress, commented that farming men tended to resent the intrusion of poultry instructresses because very often they became confidantes of their wives and they ‘were going in there and helping [them], perhaps to become more independent’. She claimed that farming men feared a ‘loss of control’ as their wives gained greater financial independence due to the income they received from poultry management. Joan Griffin also noted men’s resistance to the notion of the married woman worker and she recalled her husband’s initial response to her plans to return to work: Oh, they didn’t want married women working. No man wanted, no. You see, they had the power, like … and this man [husband] didn’t believe, you know, that I could be liberated. I wanted some liberation, you know … I had my own, what would I say, my own union here! So that I had to stand up for myself.

Doireann Humphreys had a similar experience when she made the decision to return to part-time work. ‘He [husband] didn’t accept it at all. He thought ’twas unbelievable. I said I’m doing it. … I was probably one of the militant women, I really was’. Experiences of Married Life The interviews give insights into the positive and negative aspects of the domestic situations in which women found themselves, when married and working in the home. Some women’s narratives highlight their satisfaction with their role as homemakers. For many, their dependence on their husbands as the breadwinners is acutely highlighted. Key themes were women’s limited control over the family wage, their lesser role than men in family decision making and their endurance of restrictions imposed by their role as primary childcarers. Some women lamented the loss of the social and intellectual stimulation afforded to them by employment outside the home. Mary O’Mahoney recalled her life as a full-time mother with fondness and provided the following description of a typical Sunday in her home:

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But in my day, it was mass and then you got the dinner and you baked and you kind of … and they all trouped in and there was a high tea then. You maybe baked again in the afternoon. It sounds like drudgery but it wasn’t. It was home.

Joan Fitzgerald, who resigned from her post as an office worker when she married in 1956, believed that a woman should take primary responsibility for children and acknowledged that she felt personally fulfilled by motherhood: ‘But the women stayed at home. I did anyway and my children were my life. I was quite happy actually’. Joan Harold happily gave up her job in the civil service when she married in 1947, remarking that ‘[her husband] was alright, he’d throw his pay packet up on the table’. Mary O’Sullivan Greene was positive about her role as a full-time homemaker, but was keenly aware that some of her contemporaries had less favourable domestic situations: My husband was very good to me always and I always had plenty … but as I said … for women who didn’t … life was extremely hard, a lot of them couldn’t work and married women wouldn’t be taken on and as well they didn’t have people to mind children. So I do think life was harder on women than on men that time.

Kathleen Fitzgibbon remembered the hardship associated with rearing eight children on her husband’s limited income over which he maintained the control: ’twas a man’s world that time. It definitely was like. The husband handed up a certain amount and he could go off, pinting and you know … All the men I knew at that time, they all did it like. You very seldom got a husband that put his wife first … you know. You just got the wages that was your job. Manage that like and manage the children.

Bridie Dunne, who generated her own income from home-based farm work, made a similar comment about men’s dominant role within families: Oh men were the bosses. And they were looked up to. Women didn’t have much of a say at all like now …. They weren’t treated as the head of the household, we’ll say. It was the man, whether he was wrong or right, or whether he drank, or what he done, he was still head of the house and his say went.

Alice Delea presented the same picture of the power differentials she observed among married couples: [Women were] very servile to their husbands as well. You know the husbands could go for a drink, the women went nowhere. He was a good father, but like I’m the wife and I’m here to look after him

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Elizabeth Kiely & Máire Leane [laughing]. But a lot of women like, the husband was the boss and they couldn’t do anything without asking him.

For some women, assuming a full-time homemaker role led to feelings of social isolation, as described by Joan Griffin, who resigned from her position as a typist with Kerry County Council when she married in 1966: Like, the house, the four walls closed in on me, because I was, what will you say, when you worked with people and you have company and you’re out and about … isolation … I couldn’t have stayed living here if I hadn’t been out and doing something.

Nora* recalled similar feelings about giving up her secretarial post when she married in 1949: ‘I felt I had missed out on life and I felt I had missed out on the company of other people’. Returning to Work When Married Women returned to work at different stages of their married lives and for different reasons. Some women returned to work when their children were young, while others re-entered the workforce when their child-rearing responsibilities had decreased. For many women, the return to work was dictated by financial need, very often due to the death or ill health of a breadwinning spouse. Other women worked to supplement the family income, and a few women identified their need for the social contact and the stimulation provided by work outside the home as the reason for their return. A common feature of some of the narratives was that the women did not actively seek opportunities for employment; rather, in many cases, their return to work resulted from an unsolicited offer of employment made to them. Some women who did return to work did so on a part-time basis as this enabled them to combine paid work with their family lives. Indeed, the women who did home-based work which generated an income usually chose this type of work arrangement precisely because it allowed them to combine work with other family responsibilities such as looking after children or elderly relatives. After many years of marriage, Maura Canty was obliged to return to work as a telephonist as her husband had become ill and was not able to work: I was out for twenty two years and then I went back. And I only went back on a temporary basis. I’d say I was the first [of the married women] to go back, when my husband was still alive … he had leukaemia.

When Mary Taaffe’s youngest son was ten weeks old her husband died unexpectedly and she had no choice but to return to work as a temporary 434


poultry technician: ‘I tried to get back the job then. Only then they didn’t want to know you. Oh there’s no way did they want to know you’. Catherine Walshe’s return to work as a civil engineer with the Office of Public Works was also precipitated by the untimely death of her husband and the subsequent financial turmoil she experienced. I had four kids and then Nick died suddenly on the 27th of March 1961, a brain haemorrhage. I was a month pregnant and at that time you didn’t have insurance on your mortgage. We were only a year in the house, so there was repayments, but the big thing was, he had started his own business about four years before that with another man … and at this stage it was going well … He hadn’t signed an agreement with the other man about the business and neither had he made a will. So when he died everything was frozen and I couldn’t touch his money in the bank. There was nothing, you know. I had no claim on the business. I had to go to work.

For other women, a return to employment generated a much-needed supplement to the family income. Doireann Humphreys, who returned to work on a part-time basis in the early 1970s when she had four children, recalled that she accepted the offer of work from her former employer because she wanted to provide more opportunities for her family: my husband was a fabulous worker and all that but his wages weren’t high and my kids were coming up and I wanted them to go to leaving cert [final school examination] that time … well I wanted something better for them and there was no way he could do it. He was working hard enough. He couldn’t work any more.

Alice Delea resumed work outside the home when her youngest child started school. She noted that she did so only to supplement the family income and that she would have preferred ‘to have stayed at home with my children’. She did, however, generate some income from home-based work, knitting Aran sweaters, when her children were very young. Maura Duffy and her husband discontinued working in a family-run chip shop in 1960, but she had a plan to enable her to generate a home-based income. She explained as follows: But when I gave up the chipper [take away restaurant] in 1960, I had only six girls and two boys. We had time on our hands …. I couldn’t stay idle. So I made him [husband] get enough together to get a chicken hatch and I bought chickens. I sold eggs for one and three. I baked, I done a lot of things and reared two pigs.

Bridie Dunne also generated an income from home-based work, which largely involved selling eggs, rearing cows and pigs and subsequently selling

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them at fair days. She explained that this work, which also allowed her to take care of her children and her elderly mother-in-law, was necessary ‘to make ends meet and to keep the children going to school’. Mary Taaffe, who worked as a poultry instructress, provided a very insightful account of the significance of home-based activity. It generated an income for many women living in rural Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s: That was the only money they had … And most of them educated their children with their poultry money. It was very important, financially it was a very important industry for them … actual money they could get into their hands … They could improve things in their houses … They got in cookers and certain things. The poultry money helped to do all that.

Other home-based work for which married women earned money included dressmaking and bookkeeping. Sheila O’Leary, a dressmaker who married in 1958, gave up her job a year later due to her first pregnancy. However, she noted that she continued to work from home. Similarly, Maureen O’Mahony accepted an offer of home-based bookkeeping from her former employer in the mid-1940s, when her eldest child was a year and a half. The job involved the calculation of sales dockets from a drapery store to track stock levels. Maureen noted that the payment she received was limited and that her husband was also obliged to assist her by collecting the dockets from the shop and by taking two days’ holidays from his own job to do an annual stocktake with her. A desire for an independent income, social isolation, a love of their profession and the need for stimulation were identified by other women as the primary reasons for their re-entry to the labour force. Joan Griffin, who re-entered the workforce on a part-time basis in 1972, having left her job as a typist in the civil service when she married in 1966, explained that her work provided her with ‘pin-money’. Elizabeth Shorten, who returned to work as a nurse in 1972 after her husband became ill and was unable to work, described her enjoyment of work: ‘I loved it. And I still love working. I love working. I think it’s a wonderful thing. And I love nursing of course, above all’. Similarly, Noreen O’Connell, who began working in her husband’s family drapery shop after she married in 1944, explained that she did the work because she enjoyed it: ‘I just, I liked it … And it was absolutely lovely’. Mary Kelleher, a Junior Assistant Mistress, who continued to work after her marriage in 1963, recalled that many married teachers welcomed the opportunity to return to work following the removal of the marriage bar in 1958, which had prohibited female primary school teachers from continuing work following marriage: The ban was there and we even thought that a lot of the teachers, just at that particular time, would not continue teaching. Little did we know

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that they were absolutely delighted that the opportunity had come for them. … They returned to teaching…

Of the married women interviewed, it is interesting to note that teachers experienced the least disruption in their careers. The teaching day was more easily reconciled with childcare responsibilities and teachers had the financial resources to pay for domestic and childcare provision. The need for the company of adults and for greater stimulation were cited by Nora* as her reasons for returning to work as a sales assistant in 1969 when her youngest child was seven years old: but when my youngest was seven, I felt I had missed out on life, and I felt I had missed out on the company of other people, uhm, and I said, you know, ‘am I going to spend the rest of my life just at home?’ My youngest was at school and I took up a job again … I was meeting people all the time … and I was working with other women, which was great … and that was a whole new life to me.

Status of and Reactions to Married Women Workers The narratives of the women indicate that married women who did return to work in the 1940s and 1950s were often accorded low status and poor conditions relative to married male and indeed, single female colleagues. Furthermore, the absence of statutory provision for maternity leave militated against married women remaining in the workforce. Rose*, a single woman who worked in the Sunbeam factory, explained that married women had few rights in the workplace, in comparison to other categories of workers: If you got married you had to give up your job. But if they [employers] were very busy, they would send for you …. You were so happy to get a bit of work. You know, you had no rights [in the workplace] if you were married. … you were not going to rock the boat and I don’t think you would join the union, or have any rights of any description. They’d [married women] have been the first to be laid off.

Alice Delea recalled that after she got married, she was treated differently in her workplace. Alice, the employee with longest service in her workplace, would usually have first choice of dates for summer holidays. However, when she married, her employers treated her as a new employee and denied her this particular privilege. She described this particular experience: he [employer] says ‘when you got married you broke your time’. I said ‘all I did was change my name’. …. I said ‘I think I’m the same person like. I think I do the same work. I come in here at the same time every day …’ That was the start of my new service with a different name.

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Mary Taaffe believed that it was her status as a widow with children which militated against her obtaining a permanent position as a poultry instructress. She was compelled to accept temporary positions in different parts of the country, at a huge personal cost both to herself and her family. Similarly, Catherine Walshe, who was also a widow, described a similar experience, when she returned to work as an engineer in the Office of Public Works in 1961: I was plunged into discrimination myself salary wise. Widows and single women got 80% of the married man’s scale. … Even though the differentiation was single and married, they again discriminated against a widow, a mother with children, in that she hadn’t the same entitlements.

Catherine believed that her status as a woman and indeed a widow with young children influenced the way she was perceived and treated by her employers. She recalled that all of the other male engineers working in the office with her were obliged to go to various parts of the country between April and October to survey rivers. However, she was not requested to do this. Catherine believes this concession was granted in recognition of her childcare responsibilities but had a cost in that it may have resulted in her not receiving a pay increment for experience, which was given to the rest of her male colleagues. Catherine’s narrative also revealed how her responsibilities as a woman parenting alone impacted on decisions she made about career progression. She rejected the offer of a job, which was significantly better paid because it would entail regular foreign travel. For some of the women, the part-time nature of their work, which suited their childcare responsibilities, resulted in their being accorded poor working conditions. Doireann Humphreys, who returned to work as a parttime sales assistant in a large drapery store in the 1970s, described the limited nature of the rights afforded to the part-time workers, who were predominantly married women: ‘when I went back I got no holiday money. If I was out sick, too bad! That was your problem. No sick pay, holiday money, no concessions whatsoever’. Doireann also recalled that the union objected to her appointment on the grounds that as a temporary worker she was blocking the possibility of a full-time post for someone else. However, she explained that ‘there was a new law after coming in’ and that the union had to accept the employment of part-time workers. The absence of statutory maternity leave created a further obstacle for married women workers. Catherine Walshe described the difficulties she had arranging time off for the birth of her baby: you had four weeks’ annual leave or was it a fortnight? And you had six weeks, six weeks’ sick leave and I had to apply for sick leave then …. And I applied for that and then I had the baby on 29th November and

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then I got a letter Christmas week saying that if I didn’t report for work on 24th Christmas Eve, I wouldn’t be paid for the holidays. Now remember that they had to do it. Those were the regulations because my six weeks were up.

Pressures of Reconciling Work with Family The difficulties that resulted from combining work with home duties and childcare was an issue that featured very frequently in the women’s stories. Some of the women participated in employment only when their children were at school and hence did not require supervision. Others drew on the support of family members, including spouses, older children and female relatives, and a few women paid for childcare provision. It is clear from the narratives, however, that professional women were in a better position to surmount some of the barriers that confronted married female workers. Joan Griffin, who held a variety of part-time posts when her children were young, only worked during school hours and recalled that ‘I went in for a couple of hours, like, you know. I’d go in at half past nine to half past two’. Similarly, Nora Smith*, who also worked part-time, described how she and her colleagues, who were also married women with children, supported each other in reconciling their family responsibilities with their working lives: we were all married, we all had children and we would swap around with one another if … today didn’t suit me and you wanted to do something else, well the other person would take on my hours and I would … repay them in kind, working some hours for them then.

Another strategy employed by some of the women to facilitate their home and work lives was working by night when their children were in bed. Maureen O’Mahony also described doing bookkeeping work in the evening: ‘I’d do it at night when the children were gone to bed … It would take two or three hours maybe. And if you wanted to go out, you had to make it up the next night’. Alice Delea acknowledged how she shared household duties with her husband but she was also conscious of how the dual role involving work inside and outside the home proved very demanding: I always remember a young lad in work said ‘How do you manage to work Alice and run a home and all?’ Well says I the cooker is never cleaned, only once a year and the cupboard is never cleaned out only when I can get down to it. There was never a cupboard cleaned or a wardrobe in my house. You’d be stuffing things back in saying you must get around to that, but you can’t …

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Alice and other women employees in the dry cleaning outlet where she worked managed one of their household chores by doing their own laundry when left unsupervised. Doireann Humphreys and Nora Smith*, both of whom worked part time when their children were young, acknowledged that it would not have been possible for them to take employment if their husbands had not supported them by assuming childcare responsibilities in their absence. Doireann recalled, however, that despite the support of her husband, managing household responsibilities and paid employment was demanding: ‘Boy, was it tough going for a couple of years. … It was really, like, with your job here at home and your job then inside [in the workplace]’. For Joan Noonan, attending to her responsibilities on her employer’s farm, while also bearing and rearing fifteen children, required extraordinary resourcefulness: I’d have to be up at five o clock in the morning and I’d run in to look at times … and you’d get up and milk your cows and feed the calves, come in home then and look after the children and put them out to school and get a barrel of beet and pulp it … You had everything to do. And then when the milk was gone out from the yard to the creamery, you’d go in and I had to go in before that because I’d have to see that they were gone to school and look after the ones that weren’t going to school. You’d go in and do your own work and wash up your ware and clean your house and do a few beds … And have a dinner ready for them in the evening when they came in from school. Not one hour could I sit down … Joan was born a Monday night, I came home a Tuesday night and I was above milking my cows a Wednesday morning, but I milked the cows that evening after Connie being born. And that was our life that time. … go out that time and one [child] would mind the other like.

For women who were parenting alone, the challenge of reconciling work and family life was particularly acute and acquiring childcare became a priority. Mary Taaffe recounted the trouble she experienced obtaining permanent work as a widow with children. Finding only temporary positions in different places presented her with extraordinary difficulties as a woman heading a household on her own: I got a job then as a temporary poultry technician, which was going around testing these birds. It didn’t suit at all because you see I had three small children. … rearing a family and working at that particular time was no joke. … I moved around so often … and most places I went to, I had to move twice because I used to pick the first housing I got. You know, when men are transferred they generally go some place and the wife stays put, until they’ve got a house. That wasn’t so in my case … we were in various houses. Would you believe I sent my three

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children to boarding school on a single woman’s salary. I did because, you know, it was easier on them I think.

Catherine Walshe described the difficulties she experienced finding a childminder for four children whose ages ranged from eighteen months to seven years: Well in the early years it was horrific because they were all so tiny. ... And you just put an ad in the paper, and this woman came out so I took her and I had her for about a month before I went back to work and she was a bit wild. … at the time I didn’t realize that she wasn’t suitable but there was no choice and then I started work on the 8th of June and the following week … I came home off the bus and she … when I opened the hall door, she was standing there and she said ‘I have to go home, my sister isn’t well’ and I said ‘please, just wait until tomorrow … and she said ‘No I have to go to Galway’. So I paid her and she went.

Margaret Smith*, who returned to work as a domestic following the sudden death of her husband, when her youngest child was only two weeks old, solved her childcare problem by taking her baby to work with her. Some women expressed concern about the impact their return to work had on their children. Alice Delea, in her narrative, voiced her unease about her youngest child, who she felt was deprived of her presence when she returned to work: Well I rejoined the workforce when James was five and poor James, I feel had no mother. I used to say to the other four, when they came in, they’d be arguing …. I used say ‘c’mon c’mon c’mon. When ye came home from school with a runny nose I was there to wipe it. When he came home from school he had to look after himself’.

Catherine Walshe felt her return to work within weeks of her husband’s death represented a double loss for her children and in particular she remembered one of her children’s distress: And then I went back to work and I will never forget it, because getting the bus every morning, but walking down the road to the bus stop, and Richard standing at the door screaming ‘you will come back mummy’ and he screaming and roaring and I’d be in tears walking down that road. I had to go in. I had to work. That was heartbreaking especially with him. It was with all of them.

Professional women workers were in a more advantageous position than their working-class contemporaries, who did not have the financial means to secure help with childcare. Mary Taaffe paid tribute to ‘some great women who worked temporary with me [as childcarers]’. Kathleen Cranitch, who worked throughout her married life, paid for childcare provision after an 441


initial period when her sister-in-law cared for her first child. She pointed out that the woman who minded her children ‘was with us for all the family’. Catherine Walshe recalled the ease she felt when, after a series of problems with childminders, she finally found a childminder who she described as ‘a wonderful woman, a wonderful friend’. Conclusion The oral histories analysed for this article revealed that the majority of the women interviewed had returned to some form of paid work after their marriages. This finding contrasts markedly with statistical data for the period, which indicates miniscule levels of economic activity among married women. Two possible explanations for this disparity can be offered. Firstly, the women who participated in the research were self-selected in that they responded to calls for women to be interviewed about their working lives. It is possible that women who had greater rates of labour market participation were more interested in becoming involved in the research and as such the women in this study may have work histories which were atypical. More expansive research is necessary to determine whether the patterns of employment among married women documented in this research were commonplace in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. A second possible explanation for the disparity between the data on married women’s working lives provided by our oral history work and that provided by statistical inquiry relates to the research methods used to gather such data. Oral history facilitates the uncovering of information, which is not easily extracted by other methods, as it allows informants to record the lived realities of their lives in all their complexity. It acknowledges the multiple, overlapping and indeed at times conflicting trajectories of individual lives and does not oblige research participants to locate themselves in a predetermined research category. As such it facilitates the compilation of a more nuanced account of women’s working lives than that permitted by the quantitative data collected in large-scale census surveys. The analysis of oral testimonies undertaken in this article also throws light on the question of married women’s adherence to the religious and social roles prescribed for them in the 1940s and 1950s. Our reading of the testimonies reveals that among the women interviewed, there existed a keen awareness and acceptance of a culturally prescribed female role which emphasised marriage and motherhood and which circumscribed opportunities for paid employment after marriage. Few of the women reported having any career aspirations at the beginning of their working lives and most commenced work when the financial needs of their family of origin dictated that they do so. It is therefore not surprising that when the majority of the married participants in the study terminated their

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employment upon marriage or first pregnancy, they did so in most cases without regret for their jobs, which were, in the main, a means of financial survival as distinct from active career choices. The transcripts also show that for the majority of women who returned to paid employment after marriage, financial necessity, as distinct from career or personal fulfilment, was their primary motivation. Furthermore, their re-entry into the labour market was in most cases a consequence of their acceptance of unsolicited offers of employment as distinct from their active decision to seek work. This work was often temporary, part-time or home based and characterised by low pay and poor conditions. The exceptions to this pattern of workplace re-entry were those women who had qualifications in nursing, teaching, poultry instructing etc., which allowed them to actively seek professional positions when financial necessity required that they do so and to subsequently engage in structured career progression. As such, it would appear that for the married women involved in our research, resuming employment did not constitute any conscious resistance to prevailing ideology regarding women’s roles; rather, it represented the resourcefulness of women who, driven by economic necessity, struggled to combine family responsibilities with paid employment. This balancing of dual roles entailed physical and emotional strain for some women, particularly working-class women whose narratives graphically emphasised the hardship of their lives. The strain was particularly severe for women who were parenting alone or who were primary breadwinners and was compounded by the workplace discrimination that punctuated married women’s working lives. Thus, it would appear that the idealisation of home-based motherhood in the political, legal and religious discourses of the newly independent Ireland occurred against a background of financial hardship, which did in fact oblige women to engage in paid labour while also attending to their duties in the home. Notes [1] Women and Paid Work in Ireland 1500-1930, ed. Bernadette Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000) focuses on the work experiences of women, though in an earlier period. Caitriona Clear’s book, Women of the House: women’s household work in Ireland, 1926-1961: discourses, experiences and memories (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000) is focused on women’s household work as opposed to women’s paid work outside the home. [2] The Higher Education Authority funded oral history project on women’s work has resulted in a collection of interview recordings and transcripts, which will be publicly accessible in the very near future. For further information about the project, visit the website at: www.ucc.ie/wisp/ohp [3] Rosemary Rowley (1989) Women and the Constitution, Administration, 37(1), pp. 42–62. 443

Elizabeth Kiely & Máire Leane [4] Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (1995) Power, Gender and Identity in the Irish Free State, in Joan Hoff & Moureen Coulter (Eds) Journal of Women’s History, Winter/Spring 1995, 6(4) & 7(1), pp. 117-136. [5] Liam O’Dowd (1987) Church, State and Women: the aftermath of partition, in Chris Curtin, Pauline Jackson & Barbara O’Connor (Eds) Gender in Irish Society, pp. 3-36 (Galway: Galway University Press). [6] Eoin O’Leary (1987) The Irish National Teachers’ Organisation and the Marriage Bar for Women National Teachers, 1933-1958, Saothar, 12, pp. 47-52. [7] O’Dowd, ‘Church, State and Women’. [8] Jenny Beale (1986) Women in Ireland: voices of change (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan). [9] Evelyn Mahon (1994) Ireland: a private patriarchy? Environment and Planning, 26, pp. 1277-1296. [10] Tony Fahey (1990) Measuring the Female Labour Supply: conceptual and procedural problems in Irish official statistics, The Economic and Social Review, 21(2), pp. 163-191. [11] Clear, Women of the House, p. 21. [12] Fahey, ‘Measuring the Female Labour Supply’, p. 174. [13] Clear, Women of the House; Fahey, ‘Measuring the Female Labour Supply’; Mary E. Daly (1981) Women in the Irish Workforce from Pre-Industrial To Modern Times, Saothar, 7, pp. 74-82. [14] Fahey, ‘Measuring the Female Labour Supply’. [15] The * is used to denote interviewee participants who requested that their real names not be used in publications.

ELIZABETH KIELY is a Lecturer in Social Policy in the Department of Applied Social Studies, National University of Ireland, College Road, Cork, Republic of Ireland ([email protected]). She holds an MA and a PhD in Social Policy and is currently completing her PhD in social policy. Her publications include research reports, articles and one book on a variety of social policy topics including gender, drug policy and youth policy. She is currently working on an oral history project of women and work and has published articles relating to this project. MÁIRE LEANE is a Lecturer in Social Policy in the Department of Applied Social Studies, National University of Ireland, College Road, Cork, Republic of Ireland ([email protected]). She holds an MA in Women’s Studies and a PhD in Social Policy. Her publications include research reports and articles on a variety of gender and social policy topics. She is currently working on an oral history project of women and work, and publications related to this

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project include: ‘A Union in Those Days Was Husband and Wife: women’s narratives on trade unions in Munster, 1936-60’ (M. Elders, E. Kiely, M. Leane & C. O’Driscoll, in Saothar, 27 [2002], pp. 121-129) and ‘Feminist Research Practice: learning from older women’ (M. Leane, H. Duggan & P. Chambers, in Education and Ageing, 17 [2002], pp. 35-53).

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