The Female Line: An Anthology of Northern Irish Women Writers

THE FEMALE LINE

An Anthology of Northern Irish Women Writers

Edited by Ruth Hooley Carr

Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Lorna (drawing by Anne Noble)

Preface | Ruth Carr, 2016

Introduction | Ruth Hooley, 1985

The Chain | Anne Tannahill

Indefinite Article | Francine Cunningham

The Dolls | Laura Shier

A Child Falling from a Cliff | Laura Shier

Knock Three Times | Stella Mahon

Dreams | Una Woods

Legacy | Ann W. Gleave

Pictures | Geraldine Bradley

Nursery Rhyme | Ruth Hooley

The Last Thing | Frances Molloy

Rape | Christine Hammond

Daddies’ Girls | Maura Johnston

Him | Carol Scanlon

Father Figure | Maura Johnston

One For Sorrow... | Laura Shier

From Tea in a China Cup | Christina Reid

A Curse | Brenda Murphy

From The Countrywoman | Una Woods

An Invitation to Dinner | Francine Cunningham

Mandrake | Francine Cunningham

From Myself | Dorothy Gharbaoui

Familiars | Ann W. Gleave

From Lay Up Your Ends | A monologue by Marie Jones

Leaving | Anne-Marie Reilly

The Bonfire | Geraldine Reid

Heading Home | Mary McGowan

Five Notes After a Visit | Anne Devlin

Phantoms | Ann W. Gleave

Selvedge | Francine Cunningham

A Closed Book | Medbh McGuckian

The Old Excuse | Bernadette Ross

From A Furnished Room | Janet McNeill

The Moon Mother | Medbh McGuckian

A Month’s Mind | Medbh McGuckian

Nervous Breakdown | Janet Shepperson

Frizelle Pump | Mary Twomey

Moselle | Ann W. Gleave

The Wall-Reader | Fiona Barr

Snipers | Ann W. Gleave

Happy Birthday | Brenda Murphy

Under Control | Mary Beckett

Change of Life | Evelyn Berman

Circus Love | Delia Rimington

The Palm House | Shirley Bork

Exile | Mary Twomey

Documentary | Mary McGowan

Inner City | Francine Cunningham

A Riot | Anne Noble

Lost Roots | Anne Strain

The Girls in the Big Picture | Sandra Marshall

I’m sitting with Zen | Geraldine Reid

The Comedian | Blanaid McKinney

Dora | Polly Devlin

Rabelais | Blanaid McKinney

The Secret Share | Christine Hammond

Limbo | Brenda Murphy

Woman Alone | Ruth Hooley

All I Ask | Maura Johnston

Letting Go | Anne Jago

The Reprisal | Jill McKenna

Chivalry | Anne Strain

He Haunts Me | Sheila Mulvenna

An Irish Fairy Tale | Frances Molloy

When It Comes | Kate Madden

The Charm School | Medbh McGuckian

Morocco 1956* | Christine Hammond

Solicitor’s Office | Patricia Mallon

The Eighth Station | Francine Cunningham

Still Life | Eileen Kelly

The Cage | Frances McEnaney

One Autumn | Maura Johnston

Meleagris Gallopavo | Ann W. Gleave

Grandmother’s Signature | Una Woods

My Mother’s House | Ruth Hooley

From The Christmas Tree | Jennifer Johnston

A Death in the Family | Francine Cunningham

Sunday Visit | Mary Twomey

Bone China and Old Lace | Elizabeth Miller

Babushka* | Bernadette Ross

June 23rd | Jan Kennedy

Mistaken Stratagem | Elizabeth Miller

Acknowledgements (1985)

Acknowledgements (2016)

Notes on the Contributors (1985)

Original back cover blurb

© Contributors, 1985, 2016

All rights reserved.

Preface (2016) © Ruth Carr

Introduction (1985) © Ruth Carr

This digital edition published in 2016

by Herself Press, Belfast

www.herselfpress.com

ISBN 978-0-9956567-1-0 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-9956567-0-3 (mobi)

Cover: based on the original by Ann McGreevy

Every effort has been made to contact the contributors or copyright holders to the pieces published in The Female Line (1985). Many are no longer with us; not everyone could be traced. Nevertheless, copyright remains with the original author. The acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright.

First published in 1985

to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the

Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement

18 Lower Donegall Street, Belfast BT1 2GP

with the assistance of

the Equal Opportunities Commission for Northern Ireland

and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Printed by The Universities Press, Belfast

ISBN 0-948599-00-6 (original print edition)

Lorna by Anne Noble

Photograph by Elizabeth Lightbody

Preface | Ruth Carr, 2016

On Thursday 28th November 1985, The Female Line was launched in the Arts Council Gallery, at that time housed in Bedford Street, Belfast. Both floors of the gallery were packed, mostly with women, a good number of whom had never set foot in the gallery before – for this was during the Troubles when not so many ventured into the city centre after dark. Some had travelled from as far away as Derry/Londonderry and Dublin to attend. For many of us it was an important moment. Few of us had been published before. Even fewer had ever appeared in an anthology, an anthology that was exclusively female rather than male, for a change.

As it was a birthday celebration (the tenth anniversary of the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement), there was, of course, a cake. There were readings, too, and a ribbon to cut. The Equal Opportunities Commission and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland were thanked for their financial support, books were signed and sold, and I breathed a sigh of relief, not least because when we got the books the day before, the ink was not dry and the covers were smudging. That night we had laid out the books and dusted the covers with talc or flour, praying they would dry in time. I very nearly postponed the launch, but on we went, and within a month the book had sold out and gone into a reprint.

Initially, the NIWRM had proposed to celebrate its anniversary by producing a pamphlet of poems by Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian. I countered this with the suggestion that this could be an opportunity to raise the profile of women writers of all genres in the North, given their abysmal under-representation in existing anthologies. It was agreed that I seek funding for such a venture, and so The Female Line was born.

Inspired by the examples of Virago, The Women’s Press, and Attic Press in Dublin, and uninhibited by any knowledge of the publishing business, I warmed to the challenge. Having decided to include established and unpublished writers side by side, I invited women, through the media, writing groups, libraries, women’s centres and other organisations, and by leafleting and word of mouth, to send in poems, stories and extracts for consideration. I received over 300 submissions. Established authors were easier to locate and I was heartened by the response.

Our efforts culminated in an anthology that brought the voices, experiences and imaginations of women into the public arena, and the public wanted to read it. In fact, in that bleak era of Thatcherism and conflict dominated by issues of national identity, taboo-breaking fiction, poetry and drama was lifting the lid on still closer oppressions in women’s lives. There was a distinct sense of ‘can do’ – most likely trickling down, somewhat belatedly, from more dynamic cultural centres elsewhere in the world.

Less overtly, the anthology challenged the criteria that so frequently barred women poets and writers of fiction from having their work considered for inclusion – namely the prerequisite of having something substantial already published. In her essay, ‘Ambiguous Silences? Women in Anthologies of Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry’, Alex Pryce sums up the situation for women poets thus:

Women received little critical attention when they did publish, were accused of not publishing, did not feature in anthologies and were represented in the poetry that was published only as holograms of femininity created to further a self-interested, ultimately masculine and heteronormative, poetic narrative of life at the time.¹

Every anthology involves selection, but selection cannot avoid an element of subjectivity. In fact, some anthologies deliberately celebrate the personal choice of the editor. But there can also be built-in agendas that we as editors are partially (or wilfully) blind to. Too often cultural and social mores influence judgement to limiting effect. If I have learned anything about anthologising, it is to lay before the reader the criteria upon which the contents have been selected. Thus absences may be more clearly seen for what they are – often not what they initially appear to be. In other words, the process whereby publication is achieved has its own inbuilt levers and bolts, agendas and preferences, and the selection is only as ‘fair’ – as informed, as felicitous – as the gatekeepers themselves.

I have few regrets concerning The Female Line. Certainly not the fact that one contributor admitted, months after publication, to being male. I breathed a sigh of relief that there had been only one and felt mild comfort that he had put his mother’s name to the two poems in the book (no, I am not revealing which poems they are, even now). It made me reflect on the claim that Tillie Olsen made in Silences (The Feminist Press, 1978), that it was not so long ago that it was harder for a working-class man to get published than a middle-class woman. Of course, Silences is as much about self-censorship as about not being heard, and that has been one of the major challenges for women writers. But practical obstacles have been every bit as significant for women. ‘"[Silences] begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of [Olsen’s] own long, circumstantially enforced silence, [Margaret] Atwood wrote. She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both."’²

I do regret that more writers were not included in The Female Line, especially some who were unknown to me in 1985 – principally, the poet Joan Newmann, and fiction writers Linda Anderson and Deirdre Madden – women who were writing in the 1980s, though their work was not widely known (exactly the concern of this anthology). I wonder how many more might have surfaced in an atmosphere of encouragement.

I feel some regret that I did not take up the offer to reprint The Female Line, made years ago by the redoubtable Rebecca Pelan (author of Two Irelands, Literary Feminisms North and South, Syracuse University Press, 2005) and the intrepid Alan Hayes, Arlen House publisher. At the time I felt that a new anthology of contemporary women writers would be more relevant. (But of course that did not occur either, until this year.)

Certainly one resounding factor that has made a real difference in the last thirty years for women poets in the North has been the initiative taken by Joan and Kate Newmann when they set up Summer Palace Press.³ Between them they have published 46 titles, the work mostly of women poets. Theirs is a unique example of good practice and alternative political thinking about publishing. As Joan remarked of the late 1990s, ‘… there were a great number of people who were worthy of publishing, who had no hope of ever doing so with the publishing situation as it was. Rather than moan about the ageism and sexism of the poetry scene, we decided to pool our joint expertise.’⁴ Summer Palace Press was founded in 1999 so that voices from the peripheries of this island could be heard, exacting high standards yet adhering to the very human perspective of one of their authors, Stewart Parker: ‘The only whole lives are the broken lives’.⁵

On re-reading The Female Line I was struck by several things. Firstly, the freshness of the writing – there is an urgency and authenticity in a lot of the pieces, the sense of a genuine release in putting into words something that was of concern to the writer, the woman, the human (not necessarily in that order). Secondly, although no subject matter was specified for inclusion in The Female Line, it was impressive how many issues, still relevant to women’s lives today, had surfaced in its pages. Female entrapment, identity, injustice, rape, violence, abuse, powerlessness, poverty, discontent, loss, insights into childhood, desire, celebration of the self, a search for something better – they all were, and still are, of pressing concern.

The success and recognition of a significant number of the contributors is heartening and does not surprise me – it is what they deserve. Indeed, it may also be indicative of a shift towards evaluating literature in terms of merit before gender. An equally important aim of the anthology was to highlight literature as an outlet for the feelings, ideas and experiences of women, the sharing of worlds through an art form. The role and process of writing is, of course, multiple and complex; much of its value cannot be measured in literary achievement. So long as we write, so long as we share and communicate, we have a means to break down the barriers that continue to dictate and limit who we are and who we might become, individually and collectively, with a little courage and imagination.

This brings me to the present day and the fact that a second anthology (of fiction) by Northern women writers, The Glass Shore (New Island Books, 2016) was published just a month ago (hard on the heels of The Long Gaze Back (New Island Books, 2015)) thanks to the dedication of Sinéad Gleeson, the editor of both collections. This development poses a question I cannot answer: why didn’t a second anthology come out years ago? Why now? Perhaps there was not the collective impetus, until now. We are not in the same position of silence or absence as we were 30 years ago, yet we have not achieved a balanced or healthier process of gatekeeping. We still have stories to tell that are as urgent, and we need to hear them from all quarters. It will be a great step on when stories from transgender writers, second-generation immigrants and ethnic minorities grace the pages of Northern/Irish anthologies. Achieving a balance is so much more than a numbers game – it is about challenging, creatively and imaginatively, the social and cultural attitudes embedded in us, in our social structures, those lesser impulses that narrow the posts of the gates and saddle the keepers with narrower budgets and, possibly, narrower horizons. The New York-based feminist arts activist group, the Guerrilla Girls (formed in 1985 and still going), puts it very well: ‘How can you really tell the story of a culture when you don’t include all the voices within the culture? Otherwise, it’s just the history, and the story, of power.’⁶

This digital reprint – which goes against the grain of my unreconstructed self – is a beautiful means of ensuring that The Female Line continues, that evidence of northern Irish women’s stories, poems, plays and longer fiction of the 1980s is digitally preserved as a resource for future generations. I am deeply grateful to Averill Buchanan for convincing me of the worth of this venture and for expertly undertaking the bulk of the task. I am grateful to all the contributors for their creative input and apologise to those out there whom I did not manage to locate. Thank you.

Ruth Carr (formerly Hooley), November 2016

¹ Alex Pryce, ‘Ambiguous Silences? Women in Anthologies of Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry’, in Time and Space in Contemporary Women's Writing, Issue 9, Peer English (August 2014). .

² Julie Bosman, ‘Tillie Olsen, Feminist Writer, Dies at 94’, New York Times, 3 January 2007 .

³ As a junior fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies, QUB, Kate Newmann also ensured that women were well represented when she compiled The Dictionary of Ulster Biography, published in 1993.

⁴ Mary Turley-McGrath, Poetry Ireland News, March/April 2010 .

⁵ Stewart Parker, ‘The Broken Lives’, in The Casualty’s Meditation (1967).

⁶ Melena Ryzik, ‘The Guerrilla Girls, After 3 Decades, Still Rattling Art World Cages’, New York Times, 5 August 2015 .

Introduction | Ruth Hooley, 1985

We are living in a