Becoming and Being a Feminist

By Jeanne Rathbone

Coming from a family of six women in a Catholic Ireland is a good start. In 1965 I failed at university, studying science in Galway, so I came to London as a teenager joining one of my sisters. I could not see myself continuing to live in Ireland, as choices for women seemed limited and I had not even begun to think what I was going to do with myself after university as a woman. Besides working in a shop, bank or office, nursing, teaching or getting married seemed to be the options. My mother had worked in a solicitor’s office and many of my aunts became nurses. I was already aware of sexism and attitudes towards women.

I was the third daughter and the first to go to university and was pushed into taking science by my father. I had already worked in London during school/university vacations. I came to live in London in 1965, staying with one of my married sisters initially. She had come to London and got married at nineteen like our mother.

I ended up working in a laboratory in Battersea, which was very alienating and isolated. As it happened, I met my future husband through my brother-in-law and we got married when I was twenty, in 1967. He was a teacher nine years older than me. He knew that I wasn’t settled in work/career and therefore WAS ready to start a family, which I did.

I got involved in the Labour Party. I became a school governor and I also got involved with running a playgroup. As my Irish qualifications were not recognized here, I studied at home for A levels, which would qualify me to apply for university. After I had the second of my three children, I went back to studying Philosophy and attended Bedford College from 1974-77. By then, I had become aware of feminism and had begun reading feminist literature, starting with The Female Eunuch, The Feminine Mystique, The Second Sex, Sexual Politics, Our Bodies Ourselves, The Church and the Second Sex, etc. I still have the books.

I was acutely aware by then of the need for nursery provision and childcare if women were to have a working life. I also got involved in local community fight-back campaigns – Battersea Arts Centre, Nightingale Nursery, Battersea Power Station, etc.

I had my third child but also got ill with ME, which made me rethink what work I could do part-time besides child-minding, which I did initially in the early 80s. I was also beginning to become aware of being an Irishwoman as the unrest in Northern Ireland developed. I had eschewed the traditional church and pub-dominated Irish community until then. After being on a hunger-strike march, our phone was tapped and I had a hoax bomb in my garden. I also had shit through our letterbox by Column 88 after I had written something in a local community paper about an encounter with National Front men. The police were not interested once they heard my accent. This was when I, like many Irish people, began to experience overt anti-Irish racism alongside the patronizing attitudes, stereotyping and ubiquitous ‘Irish jokes’.

I became convenor of our local LP Women’s Section and even put my name forward in 1982 for selection for constituency MP, as Diane Abbott was on the list but no local Battersea women were. I organised meetings on issues affecting women – violence against women, employment discrimination and under-payment, pornography, the sex industry, and, under-representation in politics and executive positions. I joined public meetings on kerb crawling in Bedford Hill and went on a Reclaim the Night March with my teenage daughter.

By then, I realised that I wasn’t happy with the Labour Party on the two issues that were part of my identity – on women and being mothers, plus Ireland and the Irish experience of discrimination and prejudice in Britain.

I had trained as a youth worker and worked part-time with particular interest in facilities for girls. At the same time, I was part of a group of Irish people who set up the Battersea and Wandsworth Irish Group (BWIG). We organised cultural events like ceilidhs, a festival and an exhibition on Charlotte Despard who, as an Anglo-Irish socialist, suffragette and Irish nationalist, had been the Labour candidate for Battersea in 1918. I tried to get her commemorated with a blue plaque in the 1980s, but it took until 2024.

Myself and our worker at BWIG, June O’Sullivan (now CEO of the London Early Years Foundation – LEYF), started doing assemblies in primary schools and libraries on Irish identity and themes. We also became aware of the differences in emphasis in BWIG between men and women. I was particularly interested in getting an Irish dimension in Education and raising awareness of the needs of the Irish community, especially in campaigning to get the Irish recognized as an ethnic group in the census and by local government and charities.

The 1980s were a crucial time for issues around diversity. Initiatives on gender, race, ethnicity, discrimination and inequality were begun in academia, education and local government. There was even funding for voluntary sector initiatives. The Irish Studies Centre, the London Irish Women’s Centre (LIWC) and the Greater London Council/Inner London Education Authority (GLC/ILEA) were all pivotal, for example, in terms of research and resources for the Irish community. The LIWC was established in 1986 in Stoke Newington. It was an invaluable asset both in terms of support for individual Irish women, holding conferences and for its research papers. We also set up a South London Women’s Group meeting in the Women’s Centre in Brixton.

I had been on school governor and local voluntary sector training courses. I was convenor of the Wandsworth Community Forum, and started as a free-lance trainer on the Irish Dimension in Education and Local Government and Irish Women’s Perspectives. At the same time, I started as a community education worker in adult education in the Wandsworth Centre. This entailed tutoring classes in, for example, ‘A taster of Irish Studies’ and ‘Feminism for Girls’. I also worked with young mothers on their CVs who wanted to get into childcare and playgroup courses. When that centre closed, due to cost-cutting reorganization, I trained as a volunteer alcohol counsellor in the 1990s. This also brought up gender issues in gender and Irish perspectives in alcohol use.

I decided at that stage of my meandering career, in the nineties, to go into comedy very much from a feminist perspective, as I adopted the persona of Sheela-na-Gig – the masturbating, exhibitionist female, stone carvings found in Ireland. A Sheela-na-Gig seemed to be a very suitable role model for a menopausal, pagan Irishwoman compared to the alternative of the Virgin Mary. The latter was the Mother of Sorrows, the former enjoyed safe solo sex without the fear of pregnancy or AIDs.

I used the image of a Sheel-na-Gig on a tea-towel and decided to also use images of male nudes to elucidate aspects of the male genitalia, pointing out that it is a blunt instrument, that the tie is a phallic symbol and that a bow-tie is a sign that a man has had a vasectomy. I took my show to the Edinburgh Fringe and was delighted with the four-star reviews and being called the Irish female Rab C Nesbit. More recently, I gigged at the Irish Cultural Centre in a concert SacrumProfanum on Sheelas as part of St Brigid’s week celebrations. I was also compared to the Irish comedian Dave Allen, whose funeral I conducted in 2005, as by then I had become a Humanist Celebrant. Incidentally, I also conducted the first same-sex civil partnership registration ceremony in City Hall when it was piloted in September 2002 by Mayor Ken Livingstone.

In 2018 I started doing walks, talks and putting up Battersea Society plaques to women when I discovered that of the seventeen to men there were none to women. This culminated in my book Inspiring Women of Battersea. Next year I will be unveiling plaques to Jeanie Senior, the first woman civil servant in 1874, and one to actor Elsa Lanchester and her feminist mother Edith, who was hauled off to the asylum for renouncing marriage in favour of cohabiting. Finally in 2025, we will have a sculpture commemorating Charlotte Despard. We have to keep flying the flag for women’s liberation!