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| At FringeLab Studio, beginning again. |
It's been over a year since In My Bed was first performed at ABSOLUT Fringe 2011, in the little shed at the back of the car park off Cope Street, where my Granny Vera used to work, the remnants of the Norman Typewriter Manufacturing Company. She worked there before she was married, before they found out that she had gotten married and had to let her go then because the Irish Marriage Ban was still in effect.
The Marriage Ban precluded women from working outside of the home after they were married. Not the men now, just the women. She loved her job, her financial independence, the atmosphere in the factory, the people she worked with, but once they found out she was married they had no choice but to let her go. It was the law. It still shocks me, that this was Irish law, until 1973, that's only four years before I was born, up to 39 years ago in Ireland women were forced to give up their jobs once they got married.
I suppose its not that shocking considering that last Saturday I marched in solidarity and remembrance for Savita, a women who was refused an abortion in Ireland, and for legislation on X, 20 years after I first marched for The X Case, my first protest, 'No internment for the 14 year old, let her go now!'
Twenty years later, women are still being denied their fundamental human rights in Ireland, the right to choose. There are 50 years between Granny Vera born 1927, and me, Veronica born 1977, and yes there have been massive changes and advances for the cause of equality in Ireland, I have an amazingly free life comparatively with Granny Vera who had no right to choose even to stay in her job, but somehow this week, it doesn't fully resonate, we're not there yet, it feels like we are very far from equality right now, and its sad and its shocking and its frustrating to be marching for effectively the same thing, 20 years on.
Why am I writing about this now, here in relation to In My Bed? Because that was part of the motivation, women in Ireland, the journey of two, me and my Granny Vera, 50 years apart and the similarities and differences and connection between the two lives. That was the starting point.
Looking at the situations that my Grandmother, actually both Grandmothers lived through in Ireland, in holy Catholic Ireland.
How they both navigated that situation, in their diverse ways, and lived through it, not only surviving but contributing, by making the best of their situation and rising above it, passing things on to us, the younger women in the family, teaching us the differences between what they had and what we had, access to education, access to financial independence, access to potential to change our lives, to construct our lives as we chose to.
Being made aware of the gift of that first, in comparison to what they had to live their lives, then learning that it was and is actually a right, and finding a means to articulate that right, finding a means to take action to ensure that right here and now and for the future generations is part of their legacy, its part of acknowledging and remembering their struggle, their constant hard work to live the lives they wanted to live.
We've come a long way, I, as a women in Ireland in 2012, live a comparatively free life, but it's still far from equality, my choices are still limited, my status as an Irish woman still confined, enshrined within a constitution that was dictated by a church that never embraced women as equal to men, that never recognized our ability, our potential, our fundamental human right to live as we choose. This is the time to change that, this is the time to recognize the struggles that went before and to emulate the courage of our Grandmothers.
