A new award-winning documentary, ‘Housewife of the Year’, reaches local cinemas later this month.
It tells the story of how Ireland saw women through the unique lens of a televised competition, once described as “The Rose of Tralee for mammies”.
Between 1969 and 1995, women all over Ireland competed for the coveted title sponsored by Calor Gas and the show was broadcast on RTÉ from 1982, hosted by Gay Byrne.
They were judged on “cookery, nurturing and basic household management skills”.
Some of the stories of the women who took part relate a common experience – the narrowness of a society that expected them to have only one role: motherhood.
With a marriage bar, that meant they had to give up employment in many areas as soon as they wed, and with no access to contraception, they were trapped.
Many of the women, needless to say, had exceptionally big families. The first contest winner had 13 children by the age of 31, including four sets of twins.
It’s an Ireland that’s unrecognisable to us now – thank God. But it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t that long ago.
Another film, ‘Small Things Like These’, starring Cillian Murphy, has been criticised for putting the Catholic Church in a negative spotlight, yet again, with its portrayal of the cruelty of the Magdalen laundries.
Set in New Ross, Co Wexford, around Christmas 1985, Murphy plays a coalman, Bill Furlong, himself the son of an unmarried mother.
He carries with him a melancholic sense of shame, which is challenged when he comes across a young pregnant girl, hiding in the coal-shed of the local Magdalene laundry, beside the convent school.
He takes her back inside, facing the cold hostility of the mother superior (Emily Watson), who reminds him that his daughters’ education is in her hands.
But the next time he stands up to Church authority, despite the opposition from his own wife and other townspeople, in an act of redemption that’s both personal and collective.
Cue eye-rolling among some Catholics who complain that this shameful episode is constantly being cast up in books and films to put the boot into the Church, when there were plenty of other institutions equally guilty of turning a blind eye to abuse.
There were indeed, as Justin Welby, who was forced to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury over his failure to halt the abuse of boys and young men by paedophile John Smyth, has discovered.
The Anglican Church and top public school Winchester College were complicit in allowing the sadistic Smyth to continue his cruelty for decades, and, like many paedophile priests, he was enabled to escape justice and inflict his abuse on pupils elsewhere.
Society enabled these criminals to use their roles as educators or people of status in the community to access their victims and it looked the other way.
There is a telling interview in the Housewife documentary when a Cork regional winner recalled her teenage years.
A lively and energetic girl, she once went out with friends, including boys, on a day trip and innocently took pictures of their antics, which included play-fighting.
She took the film for development at the local chemist’s. But when the pharmacist looked at the negatives, he decided she was at risk of moral harm and immediately showed the photos to the local priest.
The priest visited her parents and it was decided the best course of action was to send her to a Magdalene laundry in Co Waterford.
She recalled that she cried every day for the months she was there, and when she returned home, no-one ever spoke of it, because of the shame.
But Ireland was not alone in this cruelty. Between 1949 and 1976, in England and Wales, an estimated 185,000 children were taken from unmarried mothers and given up for adoption.
The Irish, Scots and Welsh governments have apologised, but the British government has so far refused.
Shame on them.
It’s an Ireland that’s unrecognisable to us now – thank God. But it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t that long ago