Maeve Binchy (14 page)

When the
Irish Times
initially took the decision to introduce a women’s page it was still predominantly a male preserve and introducing a page specifically for women readers set a precedent in Ireland. Within a few weeks its competitor, the
Irish Press
, followed suit and appointed Mary Kenny as Women’s Editor; and the
Irish Independent
soon appointed its own women’s editors too.

Mary Maher, an Irish-American journalist from Chicago and an early member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, founded in 1970, had begun working at the offices of the
Irish Times
in D’Olier Street in 1965, just before Maeve began to contribute articles about her travels. In 1967, Foley asked Maher to become the first Women’s Editor of the paper. She started with a half-page five days a week called ‘Women First’, with Maeve a regular contributor.

But then Mary announced that she was to be married, ‘and it was assumed I couldn’t continue as editor’, she said. The idea of leaving didn’t come from her, then. There was no law to the effect that married women shouldn’t work. In the 1940s and even in the 1950s, when women got married they might be expected to leave their jobs, because there were relatively few jobs to go round. But by the late 1960s this was very rare. Mary Maher has said that the paper was being ‘very progressive’ even allowing a freelance married woman to write for it. This may have been regarded as progressive in Ireland in 1968, but not in England. It is particularly surprising that a paper which was supposedly leading the way in women’s rights by introducing a women’s page was letting a senior female staffer go because she was getting married, and replacing her with someone with no experience of editing at all.

In any event, Donal Foley got the woman he wanted and in due course Mary began to write for Maeve’s page. They literally swapped roles, which might have made for a difficult situation had not Maeve smoothed waters with her mischievous charm, telling Maher that she knew they’d be friends because they hated the same people.

Subsequently they became the closest of friends. Mary said that she saw from the start that Maeve had all the qualities needed to be a journalist, except typing, which she learned over a weekend using two fingers. Before that, as a freelance, she had had her articles typed by a woman in Dalkey.

For five years Maeve ran the
Irish Times
women’s page and loved every minute of it. She wasn’t interested in the cookery
and knitting, and fashion and style were anathema to her, but she commissioned very good people to write about these things, while she wrote about women, their feelings and their changing world.

There never was a more exciting time to enter upon women’s journalism than the late 1960s, when the world was waking up to the potential of women and there were new opportunities and pressures facing them. Imagine how the Catholic culture of Ireland, with marriage a sacred institution, family the principal unit since Celtic times, and contraception and abortion illegal, woke up to the news that love and marriage didn’t necessarily have to go together, even that ‘babies aren’t always fulfilling. Children can be adorable but that doesn’t stop most mothers wanting a life of their own outside their husband and children…’ as British writer and feminist Shirley Conran exclaimed in the very year Maeve was offered the position of Women’s Editor on the
Irish Times
. ‘Three point five million women are working and 70 per cent would like to be out working. Half the mothers I met had been advised to get out and meet people as therapy for chronic depression. Eighty per cent of mothers would like to send their children to nursery school.’

Betty Friedan had set the feminist fuse alight in 1963 after attending a college reunion at Smith, a women’s college in America. She’d handed out a questionnaire to 200 of her fellow alumnae. The results confirmed what she had already suspected – many women were unhappy and did not know why. After three women’s magazines refused to publish Friedan’s findings, because they contradicted conventional views, she spent five years researching and writing
The Feminine Mystique
.

Then, in 1970, came
The Female Eunuch
, Germaine Greer’s bitter landmark examination of women’s oppression, along with Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
. Five years later Susan Brownmiller published
Against Our Will
and in 1977 came Marilyn French’s
The Women’s Room
, a novel about a woman who revolted against the constraints of domesticity. These were milestones in the development of feminism.

When the Women’s Liberation movement was launched in Ireland there was no small degree of militancy, which kicked off with Gay Byrne’s
Late Late Show
. Byrne’s interview with the movement’s leaders generated such heated argument that while it was being transmitted Garret FitzGerald (some years before he became Taoiseach) travelled to the studio to engage them. The meeting ended in a shouting match.

As Women’s Editor, Maeve commissioned writers, civil rights campaigners and feminists such as Mary Cummins, Nell McCafferty and Elgy Gillespie. She had a strong sense of social revolution. But was she a feminist? ‘I was not carrying a flag,’ she said, ‘but I am proud to have been there when something was happening.’
47

In her articles she gave her readers the benefit of her own experience. For a start, she promoted feminism by example. In those days, young Irish girls didn’t travel around the world, nor did many forge a career in journalism. Maeve had done both.

In many respects she typified ‘the new woman’: unmarried, career focused and engaging in maximising herself as a person. But her rise had been emotionally and psychologically
motivated
, not politically so. Her life over the previous decade had
been a courageous existential strip-down to the point where she could stand alone and be secure in herself. Part of this had involved distancing herself from institutions that told her how to think, and she was now wary of waving a flag for
any
institution, feminism included. The only ‘ism’ she had ever countenanced of her own free will was existentialism, which passed the matter of how to live back to her, told her to be her own person and not to cede control of her thinking or to campaign for an
institution
, an ideology or a dogma ever again.

She now applied this to her advice to women. Because of the work she’d done on her own psyche, the angle she followed in her journalism wasn’t something she even needed to think about. Each article served to reinforce the woman she had become. Editorially – and even in the design of the page – she was as instinctual as she now was in every other aspect of her life.

Being an existentialist made her wary of feminist extremists. The surprising thing about extreme feminism was its kinship to the repressive views of the nuns, which Maeve had taken pains to discard. Marilyn French, for example:

Contrast that with the existentialist route to feminism. ‘I think for too long women believed that somebody was going to come in and look after us. It’s degrading for half the human race to have to behave like that,’ said Maeve. ‘So, in a sense, I think that women are much more interesting when they stop pretending to try to be nice for the sake of it … We must not allow ourselves to be lazy, we could do anything if we set out the time to do it.’
48

On the issue of ‘jobs for women’ she might have invoked the 1916 Proclamation, in which ‘equal rights and equal
opportunities
to all its citizens’ had been included in the Constitution, long before Britain had achieved women’s suffrage. For Maeve believed the opportunities for women were already there. She wrote that Irish women ‘should, like Brutus, look not to their stars but to themselves that they are underlings’. This was
absolutely
in line with her philosophy, but sailed against feminism’s dictum that women must hit out at the
status quo
and at men in particular.

Unlike others, Maeve shone the light not on male chauvinism but on the pity of women failing to seize the moment. What really hobbled women of the last generation, she said, was the way they were obsessed with ‘what people were thinking’, when in fact most of the time no one was thinking about them at all.

In this she was not only following the lessons of her own life but, as Mary Maher wrote, ‘she was touching [on] exactly what women’s fears were’ and getting women to ask, ‘Is it our own fault?’ This was much more positive and useful than most other sentiments of the time.

By the mid-1970s pressure was mounting on the ‘housewife’. The dreaded question at a dinner party was, ‘What do you do?’ The answer: ‘Nothing. I’m a housewife.’ You had to ‘do’ something and traditional housewifery was no longer a
justifiable
occupation.

The feminist Ann Oakley actually called for the housewife role to be abolished, even for the family to be abolished. More recently, with hindsight, she admitted that she had gone too far. ‘There was quite a bit of suspicion of the family. I couldn’t see that family was something I wanted to buy into. The trouble was we didn’t think through it. How else do you bring up children?’

Maeve might have suggested ‘in a kibbutz’, but she didn’t. She sensed a movement running away with itself, drunk on its own power, and she envisaged some potentially very unhappy women indeed. She was appalled that women should apologise for being ‘only’ a housewife. It sent her into a rage that anyone should be so controlling as to suggest that a woman should apologise for herself on
any
count. She did not intend to marginalise anyone who had decided to live their life in their own way.

There was no right or wrong about whether to work; it was down to the individual woman to maximise herself as a person, a wife, a mother, a career girl, whatever it may be; above all, to take control of her own life.

At the same time, she warned stay-at-home women to be aware of what was happening out there in a fast-changing world. For as women changed, so men’s view of women was also changing. If you opt to be a housewife, fine, but be aware that your man will be more likely now to meet women at work
and after work in the pub – women who have made a
different
decision about how they intend to live their lives. In this new environment, she warned, it was more likely that husbands would stray.

The increase in the number of women in careers meant that they did join the after-hours drinking crowd in every city in the world, a development that was bound to increase the
opportunity
for a married man to have an affair. And Maeve was in fact writing from personal experience. She, herself a new woman, admitted that after her mother’s death, freed from the pressure to find a husband, she strayed in exactly this direction. ‘I fell in love with unsuitable people that nobody would marry, even supposing they were free to marry, which they rarely were.’
49

These articles in no way promoted Maeve herself as
exemplary
. She never mentioned her own story. What writing from her own experience depended on, however, was that
her
feelings were everyone’s feelings – that all women actually did feel the same as she.

The first hint of a special connection with her readers came in their response to an article which had nothing to do with feminism, its subject chosen hastily after another writer had let her down. This time she wrote about her first stay at a hotel at the age of eighteen. In the morning she didn’t know whether she should make the bed or not. If she didn’t make the bed, when she came back to the hotel they’d think she was a slut. But if she did make it, and she wasn’t meant to, they’d think she wasn’t middle class enough to stay in a hotel, and think just as badly of her. In the end she pulled the bedclothes up a bit and folded them back.

She was amazed to get hundreds of letters in response to such an apparently trivial matter. But it wasn’t so much the subject that got people writing in, it was the intimacy of the contract she’d entered into with her readers. With touching honesty she had appeared to lower her guard and had opened up her box of feelings about class, prejudice, and women always worrying about what people thought. She brought out the old Maeve, the pre-existential edition, and found a rapport with her readers that all writers long for.

Maeve was not a political feminist, any more than she was a utopian communist or a militant Irish Catholic. She wanted women to be themselves and have more fun. She wanted them to enjoy the same lovely, busy world of relationships that she now did, to stop worrying about what other people were thinking and to be aware of the great opportunities that were opening up.

In Ireland, this meant coming to grips with the
secularisation
of a God-fearing society. There were serious political issues emerging which called into question religious tradition as the basis of everyday life. Modernity was meeting Catholicism head on over such matters as sex before marriage, contraception, divorce and abortion. These were women’s issues and she would have to deal with them publicly and not allow the Church to have the last word.

She sensed that she was not alone in her feelings about the Church. She wrote that organised religion was ‘losing its grip’ on the people. Travel and education were taking her paper’s young readers to places where the Angelus didn’t ring but where
the values of local communities were as true as they were in old Ireland. She cited, too, the disappearance of censorship on books, films and theatre as a measure of change, as well as legal provisions for contraception and divorce.

But she also sensed that no revolution would succeed unless it was grafted onto what went before. The success of the feminist movement would lie not in its originality but in its ability to embrace and assimilate all that was true for women before it came along. She was not interested in promoting a new style of life that everyone could sign up for. She was interested in women’s feelings.