Marriage bans and motherhood in twentieth-century Ireland

8 Apr 2024

Happening On 11/04/2024

Thursday 11 April 2024, 16:00 (4 PM) - Dr Jennifer Redmond (Maynooth) and Dr Deirdre Foley (TCD)

School of History, UCC

Dr Jennifer Redmond (Maynooth) and Dr Deirdre Foley (TCD)

Thursday 11 April 2024, 16:00 (4 PM)

The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History UCC, to obtain a Teams link: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie

Paper Marriage bans, or the compulsory retirement of women upon marriage from employment, were common across the globe in the twentieth century as gains women made in accessing higher education were countered with barriers to their professional employment. This was intimately linked to motherhood which was regarded as the primary role for married women that should take precedence over paid employment. Working outside and inside the home was deemed incompatible. This paper uses the oral history testimonies of women subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland to convey its personal impact on them, providing us with an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered, and the ways in which they negotiated their own individual consciousness within a specific cultural framework. Such limitations on women’s work took no account of economic need, personal desire or ambition, or fertility. The examination of this history also speaks to the use of policy to deepen women’s social and economic subordination and is intertwined with the 1937 Constitution which marks out women’s ‘life within the home’ as having special value to society, a tenet unchanged by the recent referendum. Finally, the financial impact of the ban is considered as women who had to accept gaps in service or lower pay and conditions to circumvent the ban were confronted by a gendered financial penalty in retirement.

Dr Jennifer Redmond is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Irish History at the Department of History, Maynooth University. She is a former President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland and researches in the field of women and gender history in modern Ireland. Her book, Moving Histories: Irish Women’s Emigration from Independence to Republic (Liverpool University Press, 2018) was long listed for the 2020 Michel Déon Prize. She is the Chair of the EU funded COST Action HIDDEN: History of Identity Documentation in European Nations (2022–26) which examines issues of identity documentation, migration and citizenship from the twentieth century to the present day.

Dr Deirdre Foley is a historian of modern Ireland with a particular interest in birth control, maternity care, and the legal status of women in twentieth-century Ireland. She is currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin and was previously Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford.