De Valera's Irelands (21 page)

One of the biggest changes in Irish women's lives in this period was their rejection of domestic service as an occupation, particularly after 1940. As early as 1936, a Fr McCarthy in rural Cork was complaining that girls were rejecting ‘good situations' and going to England.
29
By 1950 advertise­­ments for domestics take on a note of desperation, such as the following extract from the
Irish Independent
in 1950: ‘Young girl wanted to train as Mother's Help: good wages and outings; card stamped, uni­form sup­plied, treated as one of family, help given, present girl four years.'
30
The very fact that such ‘advantages' are specified indicates that they were not standard.

Complaints about the ‘servant problem' surfaced. ‘I am a Model Mistress but where are the Model Maids?' said an anonymous journalist in 1947, complaining of ignorance, laziness and surliness in her rapid-turnover of household help.
31
The Irish Housewives Association, the vet­eran feminist Louie Bennett, the Commission on Youth Unemployment (1951) and the Commission on Emigration (1956) all proposed reform – that domestic service be developed as ‘a vocation and a social service' (Bennett's phrase) with proper hours, pay scales, training, and time off; that what was needed was government regulation and better mistress-servant relationships (the IHA); and the Commission on Emigration pro­posing that ‘middle-class families' be subsidised to employ serv­ants.
32
Ruaidhri Roberts pointed out in a reservation to the report that if any families were to be subsidised in this way these should be hard-pressed working-class mothers.
33

The speed with which females deserted domestic service in the 1940s is an indication of their loathing of it. The rationing, privation and even physical danger, of wartime and post-war Britain was preferable to do­mes­tic service in Ireland. Those well-meaning reformers who suggest­ed calling domestic servants ‘houseworkers' and giving them status, good pay rates, a recognisable uniform and good time off,
34
had gone into de­nial on this subject. Women just did not want to work long hours ‘on call' in other peoples' houses anymore. So if we are talking about women be­ing more confined to the ‘domestic sphere' in de Valera's Ireland, we have to be very specific about what women and whose domestic sphere we are talking about. It is conceivable that the inability to hire paid help caused some middle-class women to curtail their activ­ities outside the house – paid work or voluntary work or even political campaigning. If these women were being confined more to their domes­tic sphere as a re­sult, other women were foregoing the domestic sphere as a site of un­popular work, in favour of other kinds of work which gave them more independence, and, perhaps, greater opportunity to acquire a domestic sphere under their own authority eventually.

The changing farm family

Contested authority over the workspace that was the house/home was also a factor in women's leaving of the land in these years. The sharp de­cline in the number of females assisting relatives on farms, evident in the census figures, happened mainly between 1936 and 1951, though some decline was already underway since 1926 and Joanna Bourke's research would indicate that the leaving of the land by females in the twentieth century was the culmination of a process which began with the agricul­tural modernisation of the 1890s.
35
The destination of most of these assis­ting relatives was either England or education (depending on the size of the farm); more girls were being kept on at secondary school from the mid-1940s, particularly girls from farms.
36
These would then get jobs in the civil service or other white-collar work, or shop service.

Looking at census figures and at emigration statistics early on in my research, I was tempted to believe that the departure of sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters and other relatives, must have been a tragedy for the wom­en in rural Ireland left behind, bereft of help and company. How­ever, per­sonal testimony and other sources like the Limerick Rural Sur­vey, Com­mis­­sion on Emigration, and writings in, for example, the
Irish Country­woman
, rapidly disabused me of that notion.
37
There seems to have been fierce resistance on the part of the woman of the house to the presence of another woman in the house, particularly among those who married from the mid-1940s. A mother-in-law was bad enough, but a sister-in-law (or even one's own sister) was not to be tolerated: the nuclear or at least only vertically extended farm family became the desir­ed norm and the unin­heriting daughter or sister (or son/brother) had, in most cases, to go in search of paid work, in Britain or in towns and cities.

Can female emigration or migration, be seen as an improvement for the individual woman? Again, it depends on what women we are talk­ing about. What seems to have been a growing insistence of women (in general) on marital privacy, has to be seen as one of the reasons extra wom­en were not wanted on the farm – and very often it was the ‘extra woman's' own adherence to an ideal of a higher standard of living, her aspirations to a well-paid job and financial independence, and perhaps eventually, a companionate ‘private' marriage for herself, which gave her the final push out. At least, this is what all the evidence from the period suggests.

Safer motherhood

It was not just that the single females were choosing – or being forced to choose – paid work and eventually, companionate marriage or fulfilled singlehood above assisting subsistence, but that there was less need for single girls and women in the household economy (urban and rural) as time went on. The gradual decline in maternal mortality and general im­provement in women's health was one reason for this. One of the forgot­ten casualties of maternal mortality was the oldest daughter or youngest sister/sister-in-law of the woman who died, often had to give up any career or marital plans she might have had, to rear her siblings/nieces and nephews. An examination of the ages of single females ‘engaged in home duties' over these years shows a marked decline in those who were in their teens or early twenties.

Article 41.2 conflated the terms ‘woman' and ‘mother' which might lead one to conclude that single women had a very low status in these years but again, we must beware of taking constitutional recommend­ations as reflections of reality, and there is an argument for seeing these two decades as ones of dawning freedom and improved status for single women. Late marriage age meant that many women who eventually mar­ried would spend between a third and a half of their lives single.

When all the risks of older childbearing are taken into account it might seem at first surprising that in this era of later marriage the num­bers of women dying in childbirth fell significantly. In 1932, 256 women died in childbirth; in 1948, 104.
38
Death in childbirth was an agonising death for the woman and a tragedy for husband and children. If the fact that all these changes, agonies, sacrifices, miseries and disruptions be­came con­siderably less probable for married and single women during the years 1932–48 cannot be seen as an improvement in women's lives, then it is hard to know what can. Up to the mid-1930s, between a quarter and a third of women who died in childbirth died of puerperal sepsis, or puer­peral fever, as it was also called. This was a fatal infection which could set in hours or days after a perfectly normal delivery. Medical hist­orian Irvine Loudon remarks that it dogged the footsteps of the cleanest and most careful birth attendants.
39

The year 1936 saw a revolution (in the parts of the world touched by western medicine) in the treatment of puerperal sepsis, with the intro­duction of sulphanomide drugs, and the numbers began to fall quite dra­matically. That was the first improvement. The third was the introduc­tion of a comprehensive, free countrywide maternity scheme in 1953.
40
However there was also a second improvement – a fall, particularly in ‘other maternal mortality ‘ from about 1942 (see Appendix 1). The aver­age maternal deaths per year between 1933–41 were 209; between 1942– 51, 140. Most deaths in childbirth other than those from puerperal sepsis, happened as a result of toxaemia, or from haemorrhage (see Appendix 2).
41
Toxaemia is associated with either poor nutrition and/or stress. Hae­morrhage is much more likely to be fatal in a woman who is under-nourished or deficient in iron, and a survey carried out by two Dublin obstetricians, Drs Fearon and Dockeray, in 1939, of a number of pregnant wives of unemployed men, found that all were anaemic and the major­ity did not get enough protein.
42

What happened in the early 1940s to bring down maternal mortal­ity? A simple comparison of the maternal mortality figures for 1936 with those of 1950 shows that an almost identical proportion of maternal deaths at either date took place in hospital, so greater hospitalisation was not the reason for this decline in maternal mortality.
43
Hospitals, apart from specialised maternity hospitals – the three in Dublin, the Erinville in Cork, Lourdes in Drogheda, Bedford Row in Limerick – were not necessarily equipped for midwifery in any case, often having simply a ward of the hospital devoted to maternity cases, good nursing care but not necessari­ly enough midwives or doctors skilled in midwifery.
44
In the 1940s many people still harboured what was, given these conditions, quite a reason­able fear of hospitals, from Mary Healy in Kilkenny to the Dublin artisans' wives interviewed by Alexander Humphreys in the late 1940s.
45

Even though sulphanomide drugs had been developed to combat puerperal sepsis, women very often did not have access to these drugs, the problem of wartime shortages of the drug being compounded with the fact that many women still gave birth without midwives, or doctors. There was a shortage of midwives in Ireland in the early 1940s, as many were attracted to better pay and conditions in Britain by newspaper ad­vertisements.
46
From 1933 it was illegal for untrained persons to assist at childbirth, but a handywoman or relative was often the only attendant available right into the 1940s.
47

Something else must have been happening to reduce maternal mor­tality. Certainly, more women were attending ante-natal clinics from one year to the next, where such facilities existed,
48
but they were not univer­sal – this implies growing awareness of the need for some kind of care. As late as 1956, however, 28% of the women who delivered in Holles Street hospital in Dublin had received no ante-natal care whatsoever.
49
So the perceptible, if small, decline in maternal mortality in the 1940s must be due to factors other than those to do with midwifery facilities. An improve­­ment in nutrition, offering women greater protection from mat­ernal death, would seem to be the only possible reason, however unlike­ly this might seem in the desperate Emergency years. The free pint of milk for preg­nant women introduced by the government during the Emergency might have had some effect on mothers' health,
50
and two other important sources of financial aid would have been remittances from Britain, and the intro­duction of children's allowances in 1944. Children's allowances were con­­ceived of as a subsidy to breadwinner incomes, and payable to the head of the household, usually, except in the case of a widow, the father.
51
How­­ever, the father could sign for the mother to collect this payment, and this seems to have been what happ­ened in many cases.
52

In any case, this extra income seems to have had an almost immed­iate effect on women's health and nutrition. Money sent home from Eng­land, from about 1940, is remembered by people as far apart as John Healy in Mayo and Frank McCourt in Limerick city as having brought about a big change in the spending power of the small farming/working-classes. Emigration of some family members would also have eased pressure on slender resources at home.
53
The improvement in mothers' health was not dramatic and according to the National Nutrition Survey carried out in the 1940s and published in the early 1950s, the more child­ren in a family, the poorer a mother's nutrition.
54
Still, the maternal mor­tality rate went from 4.98 in 1932 to 1.88 in 1948; a decline which, accord­ing to Loudon, compares well with other countries. If poverty and want are the major maternal killers,
55
a significant step was already being tak­en towards the reduction of maternal mortality before 1953.

I haven't discussed the ban on contraception in 1935 because this was not an issue taken on by women's organisations in these years, and this discussion is focused on the relationship between the public issues and what was actually happening. ‘Reproductive rights' as defined to­day were an unknown concept in the western world in general of the 1930s and 1940s, when the flip side of the reproductive freedom of the rich and powerful was often the coercive sterilisation of the poor, powerless and ‘racially unfit' – and not just in fascist countries.
56
Support for birth con­trol or ‘voluntary motherhood' in Europe in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was sometimes clouded by association with eugenicism.
57
One of the ad­denda to the Emigration Report which dissented from the main report's encouragement of large families, did so on chillingly eugenic grounds.
58

However, the main report and Dr Cornelius Lucey's Minority Re­port, also chillingly dismissed the discomforts, dangers and chronic bad health (well-documented at this stage) risked by ‘grande multi­paras' – women with large numbers of children – without even discuss­ing them.
59
Cormac Ó Gráda has uncovered some Irish correspondence to Marie Stopes, which prompts many questions about women's own attitudes to the issue of pregnancy prevention.
60
I did not, in the personal testimony I sought, find any sense of grievance at constant pregnancy but plenty of complaints about conditions surrounding childbirth and childrearing. Mary Healy, an ex-domestic servant married to a county council worker who had six children in the 1940s, states: ‘I never consid­ered the rearing of my family a burden' but confesses she found it a great financial strain.
61
This is not to say that others shared her opinion. This entire area needs its own very sensitive and thorough historian. We must never forget that many married women in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s did not have any choice about pregnancy, that this lack of choice some­times cost them their lives or their health.