some areas, but this authority created an enabling effect and was replicated in many others. Marriage bars were the default in many workplaces in the private as well as the public sector, and subtly but profoundly limited women’s own sense of their horizons. However, the impact of the removal of marriage bars from Irish workplaces has not been explored extensively by historians. Ireland’s accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) meant that employment equality legislation was a new requirement from 1973 when the civil service marriage bar was removed. Legislation introducing the concept of equal pay was applied in 1976, and marriage bars in the private sector were not outlawed until the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation in 1977. While these legislative developments signalled change, there was hesitancy to move away from a long-established gender order which gave preferential treatment to male breadwinners. Public backlash against equal pay measures in Ireland advanced the idea that such proposals neutralised the financial advantages of EEC membership, namely the Common Agricultural Policy, and undermined the long-established role of the male breadwinner in Irish society. A single-income household was seen as the ideal, with female workers often viewed by a patriarchal government and religious hierarchy as a threat to male breadwinners. The ‘family wage’ model of employment, although idealised from Irish independence, did not fit with economic reality and the lived experience of many women, and lower wages and limited employment opportunities narrowed their ability to contribute to the family economy. A 1971 ESRI survey found that 34% of ‘non-farm husbands’ disapproved or would disapprove of their wives engaging in paid work. The ‘non-farm’ distinction is interesting, as it is a reminder that many farmers’ wives were certainly engaged in full-time labour. Despite this fact, many married farming women were enumerated for decades on census returns as ‘engaged in home duties’, a gendered category which itself is indicative of the belief that women were best suited to the domestic sphere. However, substantial change was underway even before new legislation was enacted. While the overall labour force participation rate for Irish women remained static between 1971 and 1977, the participation rate for married women almost doubled – rising from 7.5 to 14.4%. The overall percentage of working women (out of all women of eligible working age) rose from 28.3% in 1966 to 35.8% in 1991. Little research has been conducted on the impact of new legislation on the experiences of women and men in the Irish labour market. I am using oral history to draw out the personal dimensions of these enormous shifts. This research has led to many interesting conversations with wage earners, business owners, personnel managers, activists, and trade unionists. My project maps changes in women’s paid formal and informal labour and considers how perceptions of women’s work changed as their visibility in the official labour market increased. It elucidates the socio-cultural context within which women made their choices concerning work, an aspect which has been overlooked in the purely economic approach to this period of history. What messages were women getting about paid work, and from where? How did those messages change between the 1960s and 1990s? I aim to track, disentangle, and analyse public debates concerning gender and labour, revealing the degree to which the male breadwinner model persisted and/or was modified. The project also explores the extent to which social and economic forces relied on the subordination of women’s paid labour. Click here if you are interested in participating in Dr Foley’s oral history project, and are a woman who worked in Ireland between 1965 and 1990.
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