A research initiative on ‘Women and Irish Society: Understanding the Past and Present Through Archives and Social Research’ has received funding of £186,000 from the Higher Education Authority. The Women and Irish Society project represents a collaborative venture between staff from the Departments of Applied Social Studies, English and Sociology. The project was successfully launched on Friday, the 18th of February in UCC and it was attended by a number of academics from Ireland, England and Canada who constitute the panel of experts, providing support and guidance to the project.
One strand of the project, (directed by Dr. Maire Leane and Elizabeth Kiely) seeks to document the working lives of Munster women during the period of the 1940s and 50s, through the collection of oral histories. Narrative oral history methods are active and rapidly developing areas of social enquiry and are particularly useful for chronicling the lives and perspectives of women, which have been largely excluded from official historical accounts. Ms. Augusta McDermott has been appointed as a research assistant on the project and Dr. Marie Annick Desplanques from Bealoideas / Folklore, is providing consultative advice.
The project aims to examine if and how, Munster women resisted the prevailing social, cultural and legal definition of females as homebased and unpaid workers. The researchers believe that the focus on Munster is important, in facilitating investigation into the extent of organised, female labour activity in this part of the country. Much of what is already known about women’s involvement in the labour movement focuses on events which occurred in Dublin. A commitment to contextualise the womens’ accounts with locally available oral, textual and visual sources, should result in a rich and vibrant insight into Munster womens’ working lives, in this under-researched period of Irish history.
The researchers envisage that the development of an archival resource of tapes, transcripts and visual materials will provide a data base stimulating further research on this topic. It is intended that findings generated by the research will be disseminated through publications and the staging of an exhibition of selected oral, visual and textual materials emanating from the project. The findings will also be presented at an interdisciplinary international conference on the subject of ‘Women and Irish Society.’ This conference will showcase the work produced by all the three strands of the HEA Women and Irish Society project.