Dr Leeann Lane contributes exhibition which will feature in Cregan and O'Reilly libraries

‘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’.

The exhibition is currently on display in the Cregan library on the St Patricks Campus and will move to the O'Reilly Library on the Glasnevin Campus in November.