The sisters

Mondays at Gaj's traces the lives of the eclectic women who founded the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. Gaj's was the Baggot Street restaurant where the IWLM met every Monday night. Rosita Sweetman was one of the sisters, albeit a little one

Monday at Gaj's: The Story of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement. By Anne Stopper. Liffey Press, €16.95

Oh dear. It's supposed to be a light hearted, celebratory bash. The long-awaited, long looked forward to launch of Monday at Gaj's , The Story of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement (IWLM), by the very wonderful young American writer, Anne Stopper. Joy! Cheer! The getting together of all the old gang! Swapping of jolly reminiscences of life on the front line! And here's me, completely unexpectedly, going through a sisters (is it?) moment.

How can I explain? Once we were all sisters together. Big sisters and little sisters and medium sized sisters. All fighting for the same thing – more fun for women! Then I went off with my man and while I was gone the sisters broke up. Then things got bad with my man and I got broke up. And while I was going through my terrible Gethsemane, not one of the sisters came to help me! Not one!

Next thing, of course, it's show time, and, my darling Chupi, who hasn't willingly come anywhere with me since she was two months old, has announced she is coming along. Yay! Hello Sisters. I may have disappeared for 20 years but look at the beautiful young creature I've come back with. And then before you can say "brassiere", Chi and I are plunging into the already lively throng in Anthology Books' tiny and exquisite glass bookshop in Meeting House Square.

Wow.

Everybody is unbelievably gorgeous and friendly. Hi Rosita. How are you Rosita? Rosita how are you?

I instantly feel terrible. What kind of a mean-spirited, victim-complex beast am I?

Then I start to look around.

None of the "big" sisters – Nell, Mary, other Mary, other other Mary, Moira or June – have shown. Very frustrating. They were the ones at whom I principally wanted to sob and make pretend concerned comments about them behind their backs, "Jesus! poor J---, she's got terribly old looking hasn't she?", and so on. Then it hits me like a ten-ton truck: we're all incredibly old! Mairin de Burca, wonderful, kind, sane Mairin, who doesn't actually look a day over 45, is going to be 70 in two years. 70. Mairin.

Another realisation, even more shocking: everyone has had, or is having, their own tailor-made Gethsemane too. For crying out thunder, Nell has just had a quadruple heart by-pass. Talk about feeling terrible-terrible.

Those of us who do make it: Maureen, other Mairin, Marie, Emer, Mary and other Mary, and most astonishingly of all, an 87 year old Margaret Gaj, stand around like Veterans of the Somme on VE Day, all clinking medals and awkwardness. Did we really fight that fight way back then? Did we?

Of course we did. We, the women of Ireland, Mná na hÉireann, spurred on we hope by the IWLM, rose up and took pious little, nasty little, parochial little, patriarchal Ireland of the 1970s by the neck and gave it a really good smacking.

O yeah.

Across the big pond, the American sisters had been standing up on their hind legs and tearing the status quo to pieces for a couple of years already. Equal status. Equal pay. Free contraception. Liberation from the stifling prison of post-war, supposedly blissful, domesticity. Over here, an even more stifling parish pump patriarchy, run by (male) priests and (male) politicians, (and male doctors and male teachers and male nuns) was in full swing, where, God help us, the only real sin was sex and everything and everyone associated with it was dirty. And had to be punished.

A vicious little meritocracy, violently ruled by priest and politician, where there was no contraception. No divorce. No independent legal status for women. No independent legal redress for women. No legal status whatever for those born outside marriage. No legal status for mothers of those born outside marriage. No legal status for widows. No independent legal status whatsoever for married women. (If your husband went off with another woman and sold the family home underneath your and your children's' feet, there was nothing you, as a woman, could do). No jobs for women, or, only jobs at the messier end – nursing, cleaning. Married women got fired.

It's hard to realise how backward it all was. A whole bunch of guys, half of them supposedly celibate, telling women: Do This. Do That. Don't Do the Other.

While we in the IWLM campaigned for what now seem the most simple, basic rights – equal pay, full, independent legal status, contraception, equal education for boys and girls, the safeguarding of the rights of women and children inside marriage, and the safeguarding of the rights of women and children outside marriage, priests denounced us from the altar, complete strangers yelled abuse from passing cars, and politicians alternately grovelled, patronised and sneered ("Ye should be fucked on your hands and knees like animals because that's all ye are"). Even the Garda did their bit by trying to frame Marie McMahon. An ugly travesty that had a seriously negative impact on her life.

Brilliant, hey?

Actually most of the time, despite the abuse, probably spurred on by it (you know you've hit a nice juicy problem when they start yelling and screaming and behaving appallingly), we had a ball.

"Rise up, Rise up. And have the facts on your hands. If your cause is just you cannot go wrong..." quoth Nell, fresh from the barricades in Derry.

Huzzah!

We marched on the Dáil. We rode the "contraception train" to Belfast and back, scattering the hallowed halls of Connolly Station with all kinds of hellish and devilish devices – now available in every chemist. We drew up a list of some of the "facts" on which our wonderful little society was based and made our demands. We took over the Late Late Show. For heaven's sake, we took over the Mansion House, when 1,000 women turned up for a meeting, for which 150 had been expected.

Of course one of the reasons it had such an impact was we had unparalleled access to the media. We were the media! The three Mary's between them edited the Women's Pages of the Irish Times, the Irish Press and the Irish Independent, and a team of women writers all passionately pro the feminist cause both made the news, and then wrote about it. Wonderful stuff. You opened the Women's Page of your newspaper first. That's where the heat was.

Suddenly though – or it seemed like suddenly at the time – the core group ran out of steam. The worries of some of the founders, that the extroverts in the group (ie Darling Mary Green Satin Hotpants, Pipe-Smoking Kenny) might prove top heavy, turned out to be well founded. As Mary left for a new life in London, she rubbed salt in the wound, bitterly and publicly regretting and renouncing her old, madcap feminist self. Ouch. And double ouch. Others, like me, went off to pick up the pieces of their personal lives – husbands, children, jobs. Still others had had the joy of battle kicked out of them by one bust too far. And, just over a year after it was born, the IWLM, as a distinct group, folded. Of course, many other women's organisations sprang up and did really good work after, but sadly or no, the mothership disbanded.

And actually, it was sad. These were incredible women. Ex- president Mary Robinson, Dr Moira Woods, Maureen de Burca, Mairin Johnson, Mary Maher, Nell McCafferty, Mary Holland, Eavan Boland, Emer Philbin Bowman, Mary Cummins, Anne Harris, Deirdre McQuillan, Mary Sheerin, Nuala Fennell, Fionnoula O'Connor, June Levine, not to mention honorary members like Frank Crummey, (Hi Frank), with overall of course, the indomitable Mrs Gaj, who provided the physical – and psychological – space within her eponymous, and, almost impossible to imagine in these slick, hard ass days, restaurant.

If only somebody had had the sense at the time to install the women in Leinster House, throw the other lot out and their schoolbags after them, Ireland would probably be the most advanced society on earth by now.

Ah, Halycon Days...

But hey, I've been on such an emotional rollercoaster, I've almost forgotten to tell you about the book...

Well, it's wonderful book. Fittingly, it's been written by "an outsider", who has had the "distance", and the get-up-off-your-butt-ness, to do the whole story proud. The book's midwife has got to be Ailbhe Smith of WERC, (Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre), in UCD, who supported the young author as she put together her Fulbright Scholarship project: an aural history of the women's movement in Ireland. It was out of these interviews with the founding members, that Monday at Gaj's was born.

The book is a good, unbiased account of the founding and brief but intensely productive life of the Irish version of the worldwide women's movement. As Ailbhe Smith said in her stylish launch speech, the IWLM was a beginning. The women who founded it were/are her absolute heroines. But in this corporate, global, unequal world, there is still a huge amount to do. Where are we now on rights for women? Mmmm...

Where I am, post party, is filled with total yumminess for them all. How could I have even thought such hideous thoughts about them earlier? Actually, I'm so yummy I'm even almost (almost) ready to forgive June for writing in her book on the movement, Sisters, that I was in bed (with Chupi's Dad) when the contraception train drew out of town. It was my birthday, Juno. I was in love.

Don't forget to go out and buy the book now.p