'Women’s Studies Review, Volume 6, published by the Women’s Studies Centre of the National University of Ireland, Galway' has two main themes: Minorities in Ireland: theory and experience and the Literature of Otherness and Identity. The final papers are concerned with ‘First World’ exploitation of ‘Third World’ economies , the role of film and publishing in feminist movements, and the changes in women’s status in Rome two millennia ago. There is also a poetry section, where several of the poets echo the themes of displacement, marginalisation and shifting cultural identity evident in the other sections.
Among the themes running strongly through all of the sections of this volume is that of the silence, or rather the silencing, of oppressed groups. Another powerful, recurring theme throughout the volume is that of memory: lost or stolen memory, the rescuing of memory, the right to a past and the memories of one’s people.
In "Racializing (our) Dark Rosaleen: Feminism, Citizenship, Racism, Antisemitism", Ronit Lentin, starting from the ‘intellectual auto/biography’ of an Israeli-Jewish woman residing in Ireland since 1969, seeks to interrogate the homogeneous notion of ‘Irish womanhood’. While racism in today’s Ireland is primarily anti-Traveller, anti-Black and anti-refugee, Jews, she argues, are the archetypical Others of Ireland’s national Catholicism.
In "At Home from Abroad: The Experiences of Some Migrant Women in Ireland", Marian Tannam’s main focus is to examine the ‘everyday lived experiences’ of some migrant women in Ireland with reference to the wider frameworks of migrancy and racism.
In "Studying racism within Women’s Studies in Ireland", Shalini Sinha states that "first, racism is commonly, albeit falsely, understood as relating to specific individuals and isolated events. The impact this misconception has on our study of racism is examined. Second, when studying racism, attention is usually turned to the experience of the ‘oppressed’. It will be argued that not only does this tendency arise from racism, but it distracts us from confronting the oppression".
Philomena Mullen, raised as a typical Irish girl with very conservative traditional values, gives a brief but personal appraisal of some of the factors that go into the make-up of a Black Irish woman, in "On being Black, Irish and a Woman".
Mary Gallagher asks the question "When is French literature not French literature?" in "Revisiting the ‘Others’ Others’, or the Bankruptcy of Otherness as a Value in Literature in French". She explores the question of whether women belonging to that heterogeneous Franchophone territory outside or beyond France interact with France and with French differently than do men writers from the same territories.
Christine O’Dowd-Smyth gives an analysis of the twin themes of silence and exile in the works of Nina Bouraoui, Soraya Nini and Lakika Mokedden, three women writers of Algerian nationality or origin, living in France and writing in French in "Silence and Exile in the works of Three Algerian Women Writers: Nine Bouraoui, Soraya Nini and Lakika Moreddem".
Ana Paula Leal Nabais Nunes explores the ways in which African-American history conditions the identities of twentieth-century Black American females in "Marked at Birth: History and Identity in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora".
The editors, Jane Conroy and Rosaleen O’Neill state, "While there is a strong focus on problems of internal and global relationships, the volume as a whole reflects the multidisciplinary nature and eclectic subject-matter of Women’s Studies, as is now customary in this Review." At a time of increasing ethnic diversity in Ireland, the various papers are a welcome contribution to our understanding and knowledge in this area. The Review also features a detailed book review section.
The traditional family unit has been a particular focus of attention for feminists and this second ‘special’ issue of the Journal looks at relations within the family and between family and state from a range of disciplines.
In "The Irish Family Since the Famine: Continuity and Change" Mary E. Daly gives a historical context with a discussion of Irish marital fertility since the famine, addressing the question of why Irish parents were ‘apparently less likely to want smaller families than parents in other countries at similar stages of economic development’.
Ruth Barton draws our attention to the portrayal of family life in modern Irish film-making in "Family Narratives and Irish Cinema". The cinematic family, she argues, ‘can be considered as a microcosm of Irish society at any one given point in time’, and this is shown in the response of film-makers to the social changes of post-1960s Ireland.
In "Changing Families of the Irish Travellers: The Experiences of Women", Jocelyne Rigal points out that while family life has undergone significant changes in recent times, that change does not impact on all women in the same way. Focusing on the experiences of two groups of young traveller women in Dublin, she shows how the negotiation of fertility control can be oppressive rather than liberating for these minority women.
Eithne McLaughlin and Nicola Yeates examine the importance of the family within social policy and welfare restructuring. In "The Biopolitics of Welfare in Ireland" they examine the relationship between the social politics of gender, sexuality and social policy in Ireland. The Irish social security system, it appears, acknowledges, legitimizes and maintains only certain types of relationship and family unit, thus leaving no scope for ‘alternative’ (specifically gay and lesbian) ones. By concentrating on the family, McLaughlin and Yeates are able to introduce an alternative criterion upon which welfare regimes in different countries can be compared.
Irish political culture, Valerie Bresnihan contends, is organised around certain key symbolic structures, one of which she terms ‘pro-family’. The importance of this pro-family perspective is revealed through a discussion of the views of representatives of the Pro-life movement, of the Anti-divorce movement and of Mothers in the Home, gathered in a series of interviews in 1995. It is the emphasis on the need for, and desirability of social stability that produces the metaphor in the title of this paper “The ‘Family’ in the Politics of Nitro-glycerine containment: The Lurking Logic in the Discourses of the ‘Pro-Family’ Movement”.
In "The Impact of Dear Daughter", Ruth Torode and Eoin O’Sullivan take as their starting-point this drama-documentary about the abuse of children at the Goldenbridge Orphanage (an industrial school operated by the Sisters of Mercy) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They reveal how the type of personal testimony used in this film, together with an understanding of the provision of childcare services at that time, reveals important information not only about how women and children were treated at the time, but also about the vulnerability of children in care today.
The Irish Journal of Feminist Studies is edited by Myrtle Hill and Moya Lloyd and published by Cork University Press. The articles in this issue make an important contribution to our understanding of the diverse nature of family life in Ireland today. In addition there is also an excellent review of recently published literature.