L-R: Photographed at Poetry Reading on theme of HOME hosted by Seamus Heaney Centre are Shonagh Hill (QUB, Housewife of the Year {HOTY} research team); Jane Kelly (winner, HOTY 1972);
Gemma Carney (QUB, HOTY research team); Trish McTighe (QUB, HOTY research team) and Rachel Fallon (artist & speaker at HOTY symposium).
Many people will have memories of watching Ireland’s Housewife of the Year competition which began in 1968 and was televised from 1982 to 1995. Post-Celtic Tiger, if remarked upon at all, it is framed as a reminder of a retrograde and best forgotten Ireland, most famously in the ‘Lovely Girls’ competition in an episode of Father Ted.
But a wholesale dismissal of the competition from today’s vantage point ignores the otherwise unmarked lives of Irish women in those decades. Following the establishment of the Irish Free State, opportunities for women to engage in the public sphere were curtailed by a raft of legislation including the ‘marriage bar’. Woman’s ‘life within the home’ was enshrined in Article 41.2 of the Constitution. Yet the reality of many women’s lives meant that they did not conform to this idealised femininity.
The lived experiences of the women who participated in Housewife of the Year form a vital archive of this period of Irish history and the competition – somewhat unwittingly – documents the underacknowledged realm of the domestic. At a recent symposium at Queen’s University Belfast, the winner of the 1972 competition, Jane Kelly, discussed how her experiences did not fit the simplistic image of the oppressed housewife.
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Article originally appeared on RTE Brainstorm.
