Grá Mná

I was 12 in 1990. A precocious young woman all set on a career as a ballerina or an actress or Enid Blyton. My world was still pretty small then but everywhere I looked were women in charge. All the really important people in my life (apart from my dad) were women. My ballet teacher was a woman, Eva and Kathryn ran my drama school, my Superquinn was run by a woman so powerful that she was the person to throw sausages off the St Patrick’s Day float on O’Connell Street. I had just started in an all-girls secondary school run by crazy, scary, hilarious, bonkers nuns. Our family doctor was Pam, women ran both Ballyroan library and the amazingly magical library bus that parked in the car park at the shops and even though all our priests were men everyone knew it was Phil that really ran the church.

I knew my dad was a boss of something but I also knew that there were two women in the office that basically ran his life and from what I understood they were more crucial to the operation than he was. And there was my mam. There were five of us. When I was 12 that ran 18, 12, 10, 9 and 6. That’s pretty busy. She made our clothes, did the shopping, cleaned the house, made the best birthday cakes in all of Knocklyon, figured out all our maths homework and was (and still is) the Queen of all our lives.

1990 was the first year I remember an election. There were posters from a man named Brian everywhere, he was definitely going to win until, for some reason that completely went over my head, he wasn’t. Then some of our teachers started talking about a woman called Mary. She was gaining momentum and we suddenly seemed to be on the cusp of something really important. Really monumental. We were 12, we didn’t really understand what was happening but we were making ‘Up Mary’ posters to beat the band and having precocious debates with ancient male teachers about how brilliant she was. Those ancient men were probably 40.

I remember too, hearing that she was a dangerous woman. That she wanted the end of Irish families. She was pro-divorce, pro-gay rights, pro (and it was always whispered) abortion and she would surely drag our wonderful country into the depths of hell, or worse, turn it into England. The idea that a woman like this was better than a cute hoor, a dedicated brother to Charlie Haughey with his Charvet shirts and money skimming ways was laughable. Impossible.

It’s interesting now, the dangerous woman rhetoric isn’t it? We hear it so much from the Orange one across the water. He uses it against the women who stand up to him and the party trying desperately to hold onto to power, the women who try to stop America becoming Gilead. Here it was used against a woman trying to liberate us from our proverbial red hoods.

In the end, it came down to the women, as it often does. Padraig Flynn was interviewed on radio and attacked Mary saying that she had a new look, new clothes and “the new interest in family, being a mother and all that kind of thing. But none of us who knew Mary Robinson very well in previous incarnations ever heard her claiming to be a great wife and mother”.

Enraged women abandoned Fianna Fáil and Brian Lenihan in their droves and voted for Ireland’s first female president. Cries of ‘Mná na hEireann’ were heard across the land.

By the time I finished secondary school, there had been the X Case and women at risk of death were allowed to travel for an abortion. 2020 teens will think that’s archaic with all their freedoms now but to us, it was a monumental and heartbreaking fight. She was our age. Raped and suicidal fighting to live. Then there was a second divorce referendum that passed and suddenly women were a little freer than they were before, even if they did have to wait four years to get there. And by the time I was 18, there were rumblings that the president to follow our Mary may be another woman, another Mary.

I sat my Leaving Cert with no idea what I wanted to do. My knees were never going let me be that ballerina and I had come to the conclusion the summer before, possibly to the great relief of my parents, that I wouldn’t be an actor either. I still thought Enid Blyton was a career option but how did you do that? I wasn’t worried though, it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t all work out some way or another. That was in part because of my immense south Dublin, white girl privilege. Part because my parents, who had grown up with little in the 40s and 50s in inner-city Dublin, had achieved so much and partly because I had no idea that a woman couldn’t do exactly what she wanted, because when I was 12 a woman called Mary had beaten all the men to the highest job in the land.

In 2016 I was heartbroken when Hillary Clinton wasn’t elected. Far more invested in the results of an election of a country I didn’t live in than was perhaps necessary. This year I see Kamala Harris being attacked on every front. They attack her public service record, her personal life, her looks. But I know that Biden/Harris will win, this year there is no option but for their victory. And I know that there will be 12-year-old girls who will watch her take her oath of office as the Vice President of the United States who will grow up, like me, to think that there is nothing a woman can’t do.

Mary Robinson made me a tiny feminist. You need to see it to be it and in 1990 all I saw was a woman winning.

Jennifer Stevens, September 2020.

What are your memories of great women? Share your stories in the comments below…