Table of Contents
Preface vii
Contributors viii
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 'History women and history men': The politics of women's history 1
Chapter 2 Marriage in medieval Ireland 12
Chapter 3 Career wives or wicked stepmothers? Marriage and divorce in the Pale 21
Chapter 4 Women and patriotism in eighteenth-century Ireland 29
Chapter 5 'Better without the ladies': The Royal Irish Academy and the admission of women members 39
Chapter 6 'Women of the pave': Prostitution in Ireland 44
Chapter 7 A sexual revolution in the west of Ireland? Workhouses and illegitimacy in post-Famine Ireland 52
Chapter 8 'Most vicious and refractory girls': The reformatories at Ballinasloe and Monaghan 59
Chapter 9 Casement's 'Black diaries': Closed books reopened 65
Chapter 10 Roger Casement and the history question 77
Chapter 11 Dancing, depravity and all that jazz: The Public Dance Halls Act of 1935 84
Chapter 12 Internal tamponage, hockey parturition and mixed athletics 93
Chapter 13 'No worse and no better: Irishwomen and backstreet abortions 99
Chapter 14 'Sisters sentenced to death: Infanticide in independent Ireland 104
Chapter 15 'Unrelenting deference'? Official resistance to Catholic moral panic in the mid-twentieth century 112
Chapter 16 Ask Angela: Reappraising the Irish 'sexual repression' narrative 119
Chapter 17 'Spreading VD all over Connacht': Reproductive rights and wrongs in 1970s Galway 126
Chapter 18 Recollections of the Irish women's liberation movement 134
Chapter 19 Breaking the silence on abortion: The 1983 referendum campaign 141
Further reading 148
