Reading obituaries is a strangely comforting experience if you have two X chromosomes about your person
IT IS wonderful to know that women do not die. That last week not one woman died in the whole of Ireland. Truly we are the superior sex, taking vacations from death at will. Have women given up dying altogether? If you were to judge by the obituary pages of the nation’s newspapers you certainly would think so.
In fact, reading the obituary pages is a strangely comforting experience if you happen to have two X chromosomes about your person. You can skim through the obituary pages with a light heart, because the evidence of several weeks would suggest that even if women do die, only one of us dies for approximately 10 of our male peers. Pretty good odds. Time to take up sky-diving.
Last Saturday The Irish Timespublished five obituaries, not one of them of a female.
But the criticism pertains to most newspapers on what we like to call “these islands”. The accepted wisdom holds that traditional female lives, lived much less publicly than men’s, consequently have been and always will be in the minority, even on the modern obituary pages. But in Ireland I think we are reaching the limit of what this sliver of sociology covers. The old public life excuse will not really work, for two reasons.
Firstly, because most of the men who are commemorated on the obituary pages are not famous either, or even particularly well known, and nor do they have to be. The best obituaries, from a reader’s point of view, commemorate unknown lives which have nothing in common with your own. This is why fabulous American divorcees, polygamous Communists and that old RAF bloke who never forgot his duty as an officer and kept on escaping from his retirement home, make for such fascinating reading.
On the other hand it would be very interesting to know how the obituary subjects are decided on. If it is simply a question of wishing to acknowledge interesting and possibly virtuous lives then Irish women are in a lot of trouble, being one tenth as interesting and virtuous as the men. Nobody, with the possible exception of a couple of male columnists, believes this to be true.
Then there is the generational argument, which modern women like to comfort themselves with. The generational argument is that women’s lives were so circumscribed in times gone by that they could not have glittering careers like, as Ernie Wise so memorably wrote, what we have got. The corollary of this argument is that now that we have so many women in the workforce we’ll definitely be hitting the obituary pages in a couple of decades. Dream on, girls.
The subjects of Saturday’s obituaries were born between 1914 and 1947. It is difficult to believe that their sisters were not as active as they were. Modern people like to patronise the past, but actually the past is the same country, with less traffic. It is true that women were forced to leave the Civil Service and some of the banks when they married, but they did not enter purdah. Instead they just got on with it. They participated and became powerful in many social movements and organisations. They joined political parties and worked hard in them. They campaigned on the issues that changed Ireland – and by this I don’t just mean the usual suspects of divorce, rape and contraception, but the female campaigning on, for example, questions of education and facilities for children with intellectual disabilities, and later, as the children grew, for the education and facilities for adults with intellectual disabilities.
I don’t know where that bit about adults with intellectual disabilities sprang from. Perhaps from the fact that there were no facilities for those people until their parents – chiefly their mothers – campaigned and badgered and fund-raised for them. But perhaps this example sprang to mind because it is a very good instance of the private nature of many of women’s lives in the past being catapulted into the public arena, simply because the welfare of these women had never crossed the collective mind of officialdom, and nor had the welfare of their children.
In our own time women are equal, if not dominant, in their communities around the country, and there is no reason to suppose that this has not always been so. It has always been women who keep things ticking over, but there is no acknowledgement of that in the newspapers on their death. It seems that we only have one small set of rules to judge what makes a successful life, and this code fails to value the lives of women and, if we’re honest about it, most men as well.
President Mary McAleese and her husband have noted that men, particularly old men, are as good as invisible at many of the events they attend in rural areas. So we are left with the rather strange situation whereby old men are invisible when they are alive, and old women are invisible when they are dead.
It is hard to justify any system which ignores the labour and achievement of 50 per cent of the population. If women’s work and preoccupations are not important enough to justify obituaries maybe we should be looking a bit more closely at our own criteria for judging what constitutes an interesting and valuable life.