When Fine Gael entered a coalition government with Fianna Fáil in 2020 the party did what would have been unthinkable for its forefathers, who had fought and won a bitter civil war to establish the institutions of an independent Irish state almost a century earlier. Saving the State is the remarkable story of Fine Gael from its origins in the fraught days of civil war to the political convulsions of 2020. Written by political journalist Stephen Collins and historian Ciara Meehan, Saving th...

This book explores representations of the domestic in Irish women’s magazines. Published in 1960s Ireland, during a period of transformation, they served as modern manuals for navigating everyday life. Traditional themes – dating, marriage, and motherhood – dominated. But editors also introduced conflicting voices to complicate the narrative. Readers were prompted to reimagine their home life, and traditional values were carefully subverted. The domestic was shown to be a negotiable concep...

This multi-disciplinary collection brings together work by scholars from Britain, America and Canada on the popular, personal and institutional histories of pregnancy. It follows the process of reproduction from conception and contraception, to birth and parenthood. The contributors explore several key themes: narratives of pregnancy and birth, the patient-consumer, and literary representations of childbearing. This book explores how these issues have been constructed, represented and expe...

Cross-dressing convicts, effeminate bushrangers and women-shortage woes – here is the first ever history of sex in Australia, from Botany Bay to the present-day.In this fascinating social history, Frank Bongiorno uses striking examples to chart the changing sex lives of Australians. Tracing the story up to the present, Bongiorno shows how the quest for respectability always has another side to it.Along the way he deals with some intriguing questions – What did it mean to be...

THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE FEMALE EUNUCH, GERMAINE GREER RETURNS TO THE SUBJECT OF FEMINISM, WITH THE BOOK SHE VOWED SHE WOULD NEVER WRITE.Germaine Greer proclaims that the time has come to get angry again! Modern feminism has become the victim of unenlightened complacency, and what started out in the Sixties as a movement for liberation has become one that has sought and settled for equality.With fiery rhetoric, authoritative insight, outrageous humour...

For over two thousand years, attitudes to the menopause have created dread, shame and confusion. This meticulously researched and always entertaining book traces the history of 'the change of life' from its appearance in classical texts, via the medical literature of the eighteenth century, to up-to-the-minute contemporary clinical approaches. Its progression from natural phenomenon to full-blown pathological condition from the 1700s led to bizarre treatments and often dangerous surgery, a...

A provocative and debate-inspiring book which explores the pressure, politics, philosophy and culture of motherhood in today’s society.Motherhood has changed. For several decades there has been tension between traditional ideas and modern values of mothering. For years the trend was away from the constraints which bound down our own mothers and towards liberating women. But in the 1980s and 1990s the momentum has shifted into sharp reverse.Mother of All Myths documents the ...

In Victorian England, the perception of girlhood arose not in isolation, but as one manifestation of the prevailing conception of femininity. Examining the assumptions that underlay the education and upbringing of middle-class girls, this book is also a study of the learning of gender roles in theory and reality. It was originally published in 1982.The first two sections examine the image of women in the Victorian family, and the advice offered in printed sources on the rearing of ...

In 1872, a woman known only as "An Earnest Englishwoman" published a letter titled "Are Women Animals?" in which she protested against the fact that women were not treated as fully human. In fact, their status was worse than that of animals: regulations prohibiting cruelty against dogs, horses, and cattle were significantly more punitive than laws against cruelty to women. The Earnest Englishwoman's heartfelt cry was for women to "become–animal" in order to gain the status that they were d...

Love has a history. It has meant different things to different people at different moments and has served different purposes. This book tells the story of love at a crucial point, a moment when the emotional landscape changed dramatically for large numbers of people. It is a story based in England, but informed by America, and covers the period from the end of the First World War until the break-up of The Beatles. To the casual observer, this era was a golden age of marriage. More people m...

What did sex mean for ordinary people before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, who were often pitied by later generations as repressed, unfulfilled and full of moral anxiety? This book provides the first rounded, first-hand account of sexuality in marriage in the early and mid-twentieth century. These award-winning authors look beyond conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition. Based on vivid, compelling and frank ...

Within the last ten years there has been a renaissance in Irish drama from both sides of the border, including award-winning work which has transfered to London and New York, and has toured Britain as well as Europe and Australia. This book explores the dynamics of the relationship between these representations of Ireland and the fluid nature of cultural identity, especially during a period of economic and political change. Although the book establishes the historical context for contempor...