Understanding partitions through older women’s everyday activism

In ‘Understanding Partitions Through Older Women’s Everyday Activism’, Paula Flanagan and Gemma Carney address women’s changing relationship with work in and outside the home against the backdrop of the 1937 Constitution of the Republic of Ireland which codified women’s role as mothers and home-makers, in particular Article 41.2. They focus on older women, those born after the foundation of the Irish Republic but still alive today, for two reasons. Firstly, older women can share lived experience of seismic changes in gender and sexuality in Ireland since 1922. Second, we want to expand on Flanagan’s (2022) doctoral work which raised important questions about the potential of older women to articulate a feminist constitution through their ‘everyday activisms’ (Flanagan, 2022: 25). Through connecting older women’s activism in contemporary Ireland, with Ireland’s socio-political past, we can chart responses to and reactions against such partitions, where women’s everyday responses in the private sphere provide the foundations not only for women’s activisms today, but valuable insights into Ireland’s constitutional future.