Silences: Irish Women and Abortion

This article considers the forces which act to prevent women in Ireland from speaking about their experiences of abortion. It considers the various forms such silencing can take and the complexity of feelings and circumstance which women who have had abortions are subject to. In so doing it raises important questions about the way public debate about abortion between pro-choice and pro-life arguments - couched in terms of rights - acts to further silence women. Finally, the article calls for the creation of a new public and intellectual space in which the complexities of the issues can be realized. A new public space such as this could then facilitate the enactment of permissive legislation which in turn could enable women to decide the best pregnancy option available for them at any particular moment in their lives.     

Silences: Irish women and abortion.

Notably absent from the public debate on abortion in Ireland have been the voices of women who have experienced induced abortion. Interviews with six acquaintances of the author who underwent abortion identified four themes underlying women's post-abortion silence. First, women fear public condemnation and personal rejection. Second, women are concerned that any emotional ambivalence they express about the abortion experience will be misconstrued as anti-abortion sentiment. Third, women worry that speaking out about their experience would be upsetting to friends and family. Fourth, women report frustration about the lack of a suitable public forum for voicing the complexities inherent in the abortion issue. The women's perception that their experience did not fit neatly with the rhetoric of either pro- or anti-abortion groups caused them to feel alienated from a political discourse that tends to depersonalize abortion. Although none of the women regretted the abortion decision, they continued to struggle with unresolved conflicts over taking responsibility for ending some form of life. A cycle has been created in which women do not feel safe to discuss their personal experiences until a more favorable political climate exists, yet the public perception of abortion is unlikely to change until more women's voices are heard. Feminist leaders are urged to address this dilemma.     

Deconstructing Whiteness: Irish Women in Britain

The Irish are largely invisible as an ethnic group in Britain but continue to be racialized as inferior and alien Others. Invisibility has been reinforced by academic treatment. Most historians have assumed that a framework of assimilation is appropriate and this outcome is uncritically accepted as desirable. Sociologists on the other hand have excluded the Irish from consideration, providing tacit support for the ‘myth of homogeneity’ of white people in Britain against the supposedly new phenomenon of threatening (Black) ‘immigrants’.Focus on the paradigm of ‘colour’ has limited the range of racist ideologies examined and led to denial of anti-Irish racism. But an analysis of nineteenth-century attitudes shows that the ‘Irish Catholic’ was a significant Other in the construction of the British nationalist myth. Despite contemporary forgetting, hostility towards the Irish continues, over and above immediate reactions to recent IRA campaigns. Verbal abuse and racial harassment are documented in London and elsewhere, but unacknowledged.The masculine imagery of ‘Paddy’ hides the existence of Irish women in Britain, although they have outnumbered men since the 1920s. In America, by contrast, there is a strong stereotype of ‘Bridget’ and her central contribution to Irish upward mobility is recognized. But invisibility does not protect Irish women in Britain from racism. Indeed, they are often more exposed since their productive and reproductive roles connect more firmly to British society. Moreover, women have played a key role in maintaining Catholic adherence, which continues to resonate closely with Irishness and difference.     

Contemporary Irish youth work policy and practice: A Governmental analysis

This article analyzes the governmental rationalities informing youth work policy in the contemporary Irish context. Since 2008, the implementation of neoliberalized austerity in Ireland has been destructive in terms of the number of young people's services closing and disruptions to youth work provision. Adopting a governmentality perspective, we argue that recent youth work policy developments are also undermining the integrity of youth work as youth work. Against current governmental rationalities, which privilege evidence-based practice, value for money approaches and the delivery of prescribed outcomes, we argue for a re-imagining of youth work for a postneoliberal, postevidence-based practice world.     

Leona helmsley: The construction of a woman tax evader

Conclusion To paraphrase marjorie Kornhauser’s famed observation, a taxcollection system for revenue only is a chimera. If, for the American woman, tax collection were only, and only ever, about revenue, then they would have constantly and consitently collect it from us. When we did not have what they say we should have, then they would penalise us. The fact of the matter is, that when they do collect it from us, it is, more often than not, because they have been successful in their efforts to help us sustain ourselves in an image which they have created. One problem with self-assessment is that exemplary penalties are allowed; indeed, arede rigeur. The latest example of a feminine image which spurrerd the American tax collector to action is the Leona Helmsley equation of consumption—plus—feminine equals “ off with her head”. If only for this reason, self assessment demands to be, as Handelman and Green might argue, politicised with the feminine voice. With thanks to Peter Alldridge.     

Frances Wright: The other woman of early American feminism

This paper focuses on Frances Wright, the first woman to lecture publicly in the U.S. to “promiscuous” audiences, those audiences composed of both sexes united in a public place. Despite her achievement, Wright has been ignored in historical analyses of nineteenth‐century feminist rhetoric, I argue that historians have avoided Wright because she differs radically from those feminists who directly succeed her. As the Other Woman of the women's movement, Wright practiced a rhetoric imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment and Owenite socialism. She publicly interrogated the cult of domesticity and demanded equal rights for women at a time when gender anxiety was Intense. Wright caused a furor and provided a negative example for later nineteenth‐century feminists, most of whom developed “womanly” strategies of accommodation. I conclude that it is precisely because of her otherness that Wright is important, historically significant because she was marginalized and silenced within the feminist movement.     

sexual regimes and migration controls: reproducing the Irish nation-state in transnational contexts

This article examines the ways that state sexual regimes intersect with migration controls to re-make exclusionary nation-states and geopolitical hierarchies among women. I focus on two important Irish Supreme Court rulings: the X case (1992) and the O case (2002), respectively. X was a raped, pregnant, 14-year-old who sought an abortion in Britain. While the Supreme Court ultimately permitted her to procure an abortion, women's right to travel across international borders without government inquiry into their reproductive status came into question. The O case concerned a Nigerian asylum seeker who invoked the fact that she was pregnant in an effort to avoid deportation. The Supreme Court, however, affirmed that she could be deported, despite the Irish Constitution's pledge to protect the ‘right to life of the unborn.’ Considered together, these cases reveal how overlapping sexual/migration control regimes both reinscribe hierarchies among women based on geopolitical location, and rebound the exclusionary nation-state despite growing transnationalism.     

New woman meets Shakespeare woman: the struggle over the figure of Portia in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

Approaching the material from the perspective of cultural history, this essay explores the ways in which England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, witnessed considerable debate about the character of Portia from Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice. Feminists seized upon her appearance as a lawyer to argue for Shakespeare's advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation. Anti-feminists stressed the character's acquiescence to male control of her affections and her estate. Thus for many readers and viewers of the play concern about the status of the New Woman, civic maternalism, married women's property rights, and women in the professions, overrode their interest in the play as a text about Christians and Jews.     

A cross-cultural study of self-image: Indian,American, Australian,and Irish adolescents

Planning for research and youth welfare programs in every developed and developing country is essential if man envisages the normalization of sick adolescents. Adolescent unit programs are needed in India, as in all parts of the United States, and should be an integral part of medical institutes in every university. Actually, the problem of generation gap, ego identity, and subcultures (i.e., peer group pressure) creating negative attitudes in youth is one of the most explosive problems that behavioral scientists face in the modern era. The present project is an attempt to study the self-image, ego strength, self-esteem, or level of psychological well-being of a normal adolescent group of Indians and to compare this with youth of three other nationalities-American, Irish, and Australian. To measure the self-esteem of an individual, 11 areas of conflict including impulse control, emotional tone, body and self-image, social attitudes, morals, sexual attitudes, family relations, external mastery, vocational and educational goals, psychopathology, and superior adjustment have been examined. The Hindi version of the Offer Self-image Questionnaire has been used. The sample consists of 400 boys and 400 girls, ages 14 to 18, of middle class socioeconomic status; the educational level is high school/intermediate. It is concluded that American and Australian adolescents, in general, have higher self-esteem or ego strength than do Indian and Irish adolescents, respectively.Received her Ph.D. in psychology from the Banaras Hindu University in India. Since 1974 she has been Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Banaras Hindu University. In 1972, she was selected, under the Social Science Exchange program, to spend one year at the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute and the Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute of Michael Reese Hospital. Her interests are clinical, social, and psychological aspects of crime and delinquency, and cross-cultural studies of adolescents.