“Everybody had a story about a resilient woman”, says Conor Murphy, a PhD researcher at Trinity’s School of Histories and Humanities who together with a group of early career historians have founded the Network for the Study of Resilient Women.
Although the women appear coincidentally in many of these research projects, their stories were so remarkable that these researchers decided to return to these “micro-histories” or forgotten women. “We all have women in our research and they could be brave women, they could be downtrodden women, they could be scrubbing-in-the-dirt women, or they could be flying high women but they are women who stick with us; their stories just stay there in the back of your head, and you just can't let them go”, says Dr Susan Byrne whose own research looks at women prisoners in the early Free State.
Members of the Network for the Study of Resilient Women speaking at the Trinity Arts and Humanities Research Festival
Through their original research, the network represents a century of women, “survivors” and “thrivers”, whose stories have not been told until now. Due to the long timeline, this network affords the researchers the opportunity to cover major historical moments but it also brings them up to more modern Irish history marked by punitive institutions such as the Magdalene laundries. But for them it’s more about how their women are interacting or coinciding with what’s happening: “we have to integrate the histories”, Susan says, of the women surviving on the margins and the other more well-known histories we’ve become familiar with, particularly around events such as the 1916 Easter Rising.
This research is unique in the way that it focuses on women who may not be objectively “outstanding” but the team of researchers feel strongly that these women’s stories deserve to be highlighted because of their overlooked resilience. “We’re looking at women who were different, women who were struggling, women who you wouldn't normally call ‘resilient’,” said Susan. These women may not have been viewed positively in the societies that they lived through, but they showed great strength in their daily struggles.
Although each of the women under consideration faced different challenges and obstacles in their lives, Conor has come to the conclusion that they share one common denominator: “underlying all the stories is the same kind of institutional misogyny that's affected all these women. It just depends on how it manifests in their particular lives.”
Susan’s research follows the case of Muriel Mahony, a prolific thief who spends overall about 13 years in Mountjoy Prison (out of the 14 years that Susan was able to track her in the records from 1922). “She’s in and out and in and out [of prison]. She cannot see any other way of surviving. But she’s always caught because she's known.”
These women may seem unrelatable to a contemporary audience because so much has changed in our society but many of the same problems remain, the researchers argue. “With the prisoners, you could transpose them to today and it would still be the same. The problems are still the same”, says Susan. “It may not be only alcohol these days, but it is still alcohol, drugs and poverty at the heart of what’s going on.”
In the case of Conor’s resilient women, he looks at the long-term impacts the Magdalene laundries had on the women who spent time in these institutions and the lasting legacy it had on them when they left. Through his analysis of the Magdalene Oral History Project, it was very clear says Conor that “these women dealt with their time in the Magdalene laundries for the rest of their lives.” Noting that some of them were forced to emigrate, Conor highlights the case of one woman who after 45 years of living in England and getting on with her life, still said that leaving Ireland was the toughest thing she had to do.
“It's quite easy to compartmentalise Magdalene women as being in the laundry, it finished in 1996 and that's it. And now we can memorialise it. But there's still people living with that [reality], and they're still resilient women.”
The network continues to go from strength to strength with researchers speaking as part of the recent Trinity Arts and Humanities Research Festival and the Dublin Festival of History, both held at the Trinity Long Room Hub.
The categorising of women into “thriving” and “surviving” has meant a range of research and women’s stories can come together under the network. Conor and Susan mention their colleagues, some of whom are looking at businesswomen and other women in society who tried to break a glass ceiling, whether in the civil services, in academia or business.
One of the things that stuck with Conor is the sense of lost potential of his mother’s generation particularly due to the marriage bar and other obstacles for women entering and staying in the workplace: “I'm very aware of my mother having to leave her job when she had me and, and she brought me up and so on for the rest of her life. There’s a whole generation of lost potential for our country.”
What can we learn from the resilience of these women today? “The most basic meaning [of resilience] is to bounce back, so they’re ‘bouncing back’ but it’s more about what they are going back to”, Susan says of the women in her research. In the case of one of the prisoners she looks at as part of her research, a stint in the former Central Mental Hospital as part of her sentence ended up helping her stay out of prison. Through its research, the network aims to complicate our understanding of resilience – it can be both negative and positive. Susan notes the tendency to use the term ‘resilience’ where people survive a dysfunctional system that lacks the adequate services to support them. Here she references a recent article from The Guardian about female ambition where it is noted, “society praises resilience, because then it doesn’t have to change.”
The network will continue to hold events and post news updates. Please visit resilientwomen.ie to find out more.
A full list of its members and researchers is also available here.
Written by Eilís Killeen and Aoife King