Caitriona Clear. Women’s Voices in Ireland: Women’s Magazines in the 1950s and 60s.

Abstract

Caitriona Clear contributes another book to the historiography on the life of women in twentieth-century Ireland. Having already covered women as nuns, farmers, and housekeepers, she now examines women who were troubled enough about certain aspects of their private lives to bring their worries to the pages of Irish magazines. Set in a later period than her insightful Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland, 1850–1922 (2007), Women’s Voices in Ireland: Women’s Magazines in the 1950s and 60s analyzes the letter pages, problem columns, advertisements, and other contents of two Irish women’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s. Without Clear or, perhaps, another curious researcher, the voices in question would otherwise be hidden in the pages of these magazines from half a century ago, their particular problems forgotten. However, with this volume, these voices become part of the larger published narrative on twentieth-century Irish women, joining the nationalists, the suffragists, the trades-unionists, the religious, and others more visible in public life. Clear already used some of these magazines in her Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland, 1922–1961; Discourses, Experiences, and Memories (2000), and in her 2001 article in Women’s Studies on the writer Maura Laverty, who sometimes wrote for these magazines and also answered readers’ problems.