School of History, UCC
Dr Deirdre Foley, Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UCC
Thursday 30 March 2023, 16:00 (4 PM)
The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC, j.aandewiel@ucc.ie, to obtain a Teams link. Or see Teams link below.
Paper This paper will survey a new project which aims to produce the first comprehensive history of women’s paid work and its relationship to broader socio-cultural changes in Ireland between 1965-1990. The current occlusion of women’s paid labour from Irish economic history limits our capacity to understand the impact of women’s enormous transition from the home to the labour market. Joan Scott (1989) argues: ‘a sex-segregated labour market is part of the process of gender construction’. The project aims to establish the outcome of an increasing female presence in the Irish workforce, and the impact of employment equality legislation introduced from the 1970s. While these legislative developments signalled change, there was hesitancy to move away from a long-established gender order which gave preferential treatment to male breadwinners. This research will establish the impact of new legislation on the experiences of women and men in the labour market and will explore the extent to which social and economic forces relied on the subordination of women’s paid labour. In doing so, the project tracks women’s changing lived experience and role in the diverse workforce, as well as the wider consequent impacts on Irish society and its economy. This paper explores some initial findings, taking Guinness and Williams Group as case studies.
Dr Deirdre Foley is a historian of modern Ireland with a particular interest in the legal status of women in twentieth-century Ireland. She has a PhD in History from Dublin City University, and previously studied at Trinity College Dublin (MPhil) and University College Dublin (BA). To date her research has been published in Irish Economic History and Social History. Previously Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford, she is currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Cork, where her current project is an exploration of Irish women’s working lives from the 1960s to the 1990s.