Dr Leeann Lane's 'Cork Afterlives' Exhibition

Dr Leeann Lane’s exhibition ‘Cork Afterlives: Single Women and the New Irish State’, is now on display in O'Reilly library until the end of November

This exhibition examines aspects of the later lives of women from Cork city and county who participated in the campaigns of the revolutionary period and who did not go on to marry. ‘Cork Afterlives: Single Women and the new Irish State’ outlines how many within this cohort of Cork female activists experienced poverty, ill-health, economic dependency and loneliness in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. Their unmarried status left these women particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal state structured, legally and culturally, on an essentialist view of the married, childbearing woman.
The Irish Free State placed a premium on the idea of male breadwinner wage; men should be facilitated to earn a sufficient wage to allow them to maintain a wife and family. This economic priority and the lack of equal pay for equal work impacted heavily on women who did not marry. The lack of statutory benefits for lower-class single women who were unable to access paid employment and who did not have the requisite social insurance stamps meant that they faced a vista of poverty and dependency on charity and family members. The latter were often begrudging and indisposed to assume the financial burden of those who they often deemed economically ‘unproductive’.