In conversation with... Nuala O'Faolain

In August of 2007, I had the privilege to speak with Irish writer and journalist, Nuala O’Faolain. The topic was feminism, and in particular her upcoming symposium on that subject with Marianne Finucane and Anne Enright at the Merriman Summer School. An unknown neighbour - I grew up just a mile from her Bartra home in Clare - I had only recently became aware of her written work and her memoirs. Unbeknownst to all, four months after our chat she was was diagnosed with cancer and she passed away on May 8, 2008. Ten years after her death, with the referendum on the Eight Amendment on the horizon, we can only wonder what O'Faolain would have added to the conversation.

The feminist struggle. It’s a fight that many in mainstream western society have consigned to a box of forgotten things, filed safely in the dusty recesses under the title ‘Old News – For The Archive’.

Conflict and division in western nations is now, after all, driven by more 'contemporary' masters. These days religion, race and, above all, wealth are the factors which mark where a person stands when the line is drawn in the sand.
Mary Robinson and Sex in the City surely put an end to gender inequality, didn’t they?

“I think that this [the feminist struggle] has barely begun. The position of women in Irish public life as late as the 1960s was so unjust, they were so unfairly treated, that there was bound, by the late 20th century, to be an effective protest against this,” says O’Faolain.

“In regard to women and children I don’t have anything good to say about old fashioned values, the pre-contemporary world was incredibly hard on the powerless of every kind. There were poor men, but the poor women and children were even more powerless than the most powerless men. I don’t regard the values of that era as worth keeping at all. Class differences and economic differences survive, great differences over Northern Ireland mattered greatly and held back a unified woman’s movement [in Ireland].

“On the whole, I think that every single woman in the western world has benefited from what happen in America in the 1960’s. Spinning off from the anti-Vietnam protests was about the forth wave of feminism since the French revolution, which brought about the notion of equality for the first time.

“Attitudinal change lag far far behind civil change. I assume, as time goes on, attitudes will move. I think that gradually, attitudes will shift, the status of women will change in advance of attitudes towards women. It’s a waiting game, but a long long waiting game.
“I am more interested in the personal side of woman’s liberation. I am impressed by the fact that we know so little about our grandmothers and great grandmothers and even often about our own mothers.

“They were not invited to leave a record of their existence. I am impressed that these generations, in my lifetime, were the first to find voices. One of the seminal moments for me was the publication of the first version of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature, which left out Irish woman’s history.

“There was such an outcry that the publishers had to ask female academics to put together a volume of women’s history and literature, which had been there but it hadn’t seemed as equal weight as the male history.

"Even though it was a negative event, the reaction to that and the outcry was positive and changed peoples attitudes. I am interested in things like love and loyalty, babies and jealousy – the things that undermine or qualify the naïve ideas we had in the 1970’s, when we though that men and women could share child raring and that there was a way that women could have a solidarity besides men.”

As a journalist, writer and commentator, O'Faolain is often classes as a feminist. While this is a comfortable tag for her, it is not something which she claims any great authority or dominion over.

“We [writers] have a facility with the words for these concepts, it is how we make our living, but I would deny any element of authority," she said.

“This is not like giving a history lecture, where you up there on the platform, know something that the audience does not know. In respect of the personal side of the new life for women, their experience and their views are as good as mine. There are no authoritative conclusions to be drawn. I will be speaking with question marks.”

But what of men in this new feminist debate?

“I think it has been very hard on the men of the first decades of this new world. I think that, on the whole, things are far better than they were," she said.
“I only wish that I could assume that there will be a lot of men there [at the debate], but I assume no such thing. I think men of my generation have found it difficult indeed to be at ease about it. They were reared by women in a different culture.

“But I think that young men are a different kettle of fish. But on the other hand, I think that there is an irrefutable difference between male and female experiences of the world.

“I’m not an important activist, I never was – not along the lines of Nell [McCafferty] say – but if I have contributed at all, it is through my memoirs and again through the discussion of the personal life. I don’t know whether my own life has mattered.”

This article first appeared in The Clare People Newspaper in August 14, 2007.