The Irish mammy is many things, but she’s not a racist stereotype

The Irish mammy has been through a lot. She’s been a stereotype, a cliche, a punchline and a legend. She’s gone viral on Facebook and TikTok, chasing dogs that have stolen the Christmas ham and crying rivers for prodigal children on a surprise visit home from Sydney.

She’s been a wooden spoon-toting, tea towel-gripping, pearl-clutching moral crusader, and she’s been a street-pounding, placard-waving fighter for rights and fairness. She’s been Brenda Fricker in My Left Foot and Sarah Greene in Normal People, and everything else in between.

[ Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen: Our friendship and the personal crisis that deepened it ]

When my writing partner Sarah Breen and I were writing the first Complete Aisling novel, we knew we wanted to get the balance of Aisling’s Irish mammy just right. We wanted a woman who was a recognisable touchstone without being a cliche. We wanted her to have a complex past and a cultural and social life beyond domesticity and martyrdom, while still acknowledging the space she often occupies at the centre of home life. Most of all, we knew she would be called “Mammy”. Not mam, or mum or mom or “Marian”, but Mammy.

If you call your mother by her first name, you either changed your own nappies or grew your own food

An American colleague working on a tangential project involving the books struggled with “mammy”. Not with our use of the word in the context of Aisling’s world, but with saying it out loud themselves. There are words that none of us should be able to roll off our tongues – and for this colleague “mammy” was up there with them. I wasn’t surprised, given “mammy” in the US is a damaging racial caricature, a maternal black nanny or housemaid figure who cares for her white employers or owners and delights in doing so. She’s been portrayed as safe and contented, and perpetuated a myth of humanity at the heart of slavery that carried on for over a hundred years after abolition.

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In popular culture you’ve seen the Ruth character in Gone with the Wind, a slave originally owned by Scarlett O’Hara’s grandmother and the woman who raised Scarlett’s mother. Hattie McDaniel, who played Ruth, was the first black actor to win an Academy Award in 1940. In The Help (set in 1963), the white mothers are portrayed as monstrous or inadequate, while the black mammies provide love and care to their charges and expect nothing in return.

In Ireland, the discourse around “mammy” is often one of class or geography, and rears its head at least twice a year. If you grew up saying “mum”, maybe you had notions. If you’re from a “ma” family, then perhaps you share authenticity with the “mammy” gang. “Mom” is something you either picked up in the mid-Atlantic or on the shores of the Lee. If you call your mother by her first name, you either changed your own nappies or grew your own food. In my house I started with “mammy”, and then progressed to “mam” as teenage embarrassment set in. As a kid I had a teen neighbour who sat in our kitchen smoking cigarettes, gossiping with my Mammy and calling her own mother “Margaret”. To this day I think she might be the most poised and aloof person I’ve ever met.

When Aisling eventually hits the big time in America, we’ll be advocating for Mammy to keep her place

This past week, the Irish “mammy” has clashed with the very different usage in the United States, leading to some heated discussion. A “Mammies for Trans Rights” T-shirt, shared in a tweet by its creator, was picked up by some US twitter users and questioned. In Ireland, the word has deep roots as an affectionate term and has no association with slavery or racist stereotypes, but try explaining that to indignant Americans who sometimes forget that the whole world isn’t walking on sidewalks and eating zucchini and arugula. Yes, “mammy” carries a lot of weight across the Atlantic, but expressions of disgust at Irish people using a word with historical – and harmless – significance here in Ireland are a little far-reaching. We can appreciate the hurt it causes in the US context without feeling pressure to discontinue it here.

[ Emer McLysaght: I am never more of a Complete Aisling than when I’m on holidays ]

The Sky show 50 Ways to Kill your Mammy was changed to “Mother” for the US market, while Séamas O’Reilly’s book Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? was published with the title unchanged, while Derry Girls and its liberal use of “mammy” has been a big hit Stateside. When Aisling eventually hits the big time in America, we’ll be advocating for Mammy to keep her place, if only because “mom” just doesn’t have the same ring to it in a rural village teeming with hurls, Tidy Towns meetings and four pubs per person.