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The past twenty-five years have been a period of rapid change for women in Ireland. As Irish society has industrialised and urbanised, and as traditional values and ways have been challenged and questioned, every aspect of women’s lives has been subject to scrutiny and change. Previous chapters have outlined the main developments. We have seen how women’s roles in the countryside were transformed by the decline in farming as a way of life and its replacement by an urban-based culture. As housing improved and living standards rose, the worst aspects of poverty were alleviated but an increase in material possessions meant more housework for women at home. The farmer’s wife became a housewife, and women’s lives in the countryside became more like those in the towns. Another effect of the economic changes in rural areas was the replacement of arranged marriages with modern marriage, based on a love-relationship. Also, family size began to fall, so that the average number of years women spent as full-time mothers decreased steadily. One result of this, coupled with the growth of new industries, was that the number of married women going out to work tripled between the early 1960s and 1980. Women no longer had to leave their jobs on marriage, and the advent of maternity leave made it possible for some women to combine a job with motherhood, though there were still many problems about doing this, especially while the children were small.

In his famous speech of 1943, de Valera described the romantic view of Irish rural life. It was an ideal which had inspired ‘poets and patriots’, but which bore little resemblance to the harsh reality of most country people’s lives. For the majority, living on the land was a matter of survival at a low standard of living. Half the farms in the country were less than 30 acres, and in many counties much of the land was poor — boggy, rocky or mountainous. It was hard work producing enough food for the family to eat, and diets were simple. The standard rural home was a three-roomed cottage, except in areas where farms were larger and families could afford better housing. In western counties such as Mayo, Donegal and Kerry, at least one in three families lived in grossly overcrowded conditions, with more than two persons per room. For those in Dublin too, conditions were notoriously bad, especially in the tenements of North Dublin city. Over 62 000 families in Dublin were over-crowded in one and two-roomed dwellings.2

The system of marriage and family life which had dominated the post-famine countryside was transformed by changes in the rural economy. Rural life changed significantly as a result of the decline in traditional farming throughout the 1940s and 1950s and the policies of economic development initiated by the government in the early 1960s. When Damien Hannon and Louise Katsiaouni interviewed 400 farming families in the 1970s they found a great mixture of family ‘styles’. One household might consist of a traditionally patriarchal family in which the father made all the decisions and was never seen cooking or putting the children to bed. Next door might be a farm of the same size where the husband and wife had a mutually supportive relationship and made decisions together. Overall they found that only one in three families conformed to the traditional model of the rural family. Between a quarter and a third of the families had a more ‘modern’ pattern of joint decision-making, some sharing of household and child-care tasks and a more open emotional relationship. The remaining families showed a variety of intermediate patterns. A particularly interesting finding of the study was a large variation in the wives’ satisfaction with their husband’s role. The results were a big ‘thumbs down’ to traditional marriage. Half the wives in this situation were dissatisfied, compared with only one in eight of the ‘modern’ wives.1