'The hand that rocked the cradle rocked superficial perceptions'

On Nell McCafferty and mothering

On Tuesday evening I went to see Lola Olufemi and Helen Charman in conversation about Helen’s brilliant new book Mother State: a political history of motherhood. It was a great discussion that covered so much important ground: the ways that motherhood and care are valued and devalued, how the state prioritises certain forms of motherhood over others, Thatcher’s lasting influence on our political conception of motherhood and the impact of housing precarity on the ability to care for one another. (I'm merely scratching the surface here, if you weren’t there I'm sure you can listen back on the LRB podcast soon) A thread running through all of it was the need for expanded ideas and practices of motherhood, which value and materially support the care and labour currently performed by mothers the world over, but also harness the care and nurturing that all human beings can offer (and indeed that they need), whether they are biologically mothers or not. This, in turn, should enable all of us to ‘mother’, including men and fathers.

I've been thinking a lot about Nell McCafferty since she died last month, about how much I owe her and how important she’s been to my work and my thinking, and Helen draws on her writing in Mother State, on a section on Ireland and women republican prisoners. I wrote about Nell in my PhD; her book Peggy Deery is the focus of one of the chapters (a version of which was published as an article here if you’re interested and if you need access just let me know) and I found reason to quote her in most of the other chapters. I’d used Nell’s work on my Irish Literature masters some years before when writing a slightly mad essay about masculinity and the Irish constitution in Colm Toibin’s novel The Heather Blazing, but I’d never heard of Peggy Deery,  the non fictional account of the life of this working class Catholic Derry woman during the Troubles, until I saw academic Rosie Lavan give a paper at an Irish Studies conference in Derry in 2017, about Derry and life writing.

2017 was a time I was in need of a great deal of mothering, trying to establish myself in Ireland in the aftermath of a painful relationship breakup, start a new life, make new friends. On my way to that Derry conference, I had something approaching a panic attack in the queue to board the plane at Stansted; my ex partner and I had moved out of our flat in London the week before and it was a terrible phase of the breakup aftermath for me, untethered and nervy. I’d hoped that the conference and a bit of academic focus would help root me in this new stage of my life but I almost didn’t board the plane. I texted a friend and my sister rom the departure gate about it – what should I do? I can’t do this!  - and they sent back kind, encouraging responses. Eventually I did get on the plane and go to the conference and thank god that I did.

After Helen’s talk on Thursday, remembering that first encounter with Peggy Deery and the first year of my PhD, I've been thinking of all the different ways I was mothered by people in my life during that time, including my own actual mother and, indeed, my father. But there was also – and I hope I'm not stretching Helen’s idea too much here –  a kind of mothering performed by all the writers, scholars and activists I encountered, either in person, or, like Nell, through their words. It became a time of exciting reorientation for me and I see it now as kicked off by that Derry conference, where I met loads of interesting people, had loads of great conversations and it all felt like the beginning of something new. There were ideas and debate, but there was also kindness:  a particularly vivid memory concerns sitting outside the Magee buildings with an Irish Studies academic I’d befriended after hearing his talk on queer support networks during the Troubles. We sat on a bench drinking tea and smoking and I told him about my breakup. Oh I’m so sorry, he said with what seemed to me like genuine feeling and I almost cried. Later that summer I gave a paper at a roundtable event in Edinburgh and made more new friends with people who were working in similar areas to me; I heard Aimée Walsh give a paper on women republican prisoners and their no-wash protests, some of which also drew on Nell’s work on the Armagh Gaol. (Aimée has a book on her research coming out soon which I can’t wait to read)

On the day Nell died, I paid a rare visit to twitter to read what people were writing about her and saw that a tweet of mine from 2020 had resurfaced. It contained a screenshot of a passage from Nell’s 1991 essay about women and media in the north of Ireland, in which she argues that journalists who wanted to truly understand injustice in the region needed to speak to working class women. I’d highlighted this particular sentence because I loved the detail:  

Frantic British journalists who could not get to the outside toilet in the swinging sixties in NI because the scullery door was closed while a teenage girl performed ablutions in a tin bath on a Friday night - it takes an awfully long time to heat up pots of water - wrote more passionate copy when they finally regained the luxury of their hotels.

According to Nell teenage girls performing their ablutions before a night out have much to teach a ‘serious’ British newspaper journalist. It made me think of a particular passage from the work of Caroline Magennis on intimacy in Northern Ireland that I quote whenever I get the chance. She calls for an understanding of life that

would be as attentive to the experiences of my late grandmother, who raised six girls and a boy in Portadown during the Troubles, as it would be to the experiences of a combatant. That would consider teenage girls deciding the risk was worth it to go to a nightclub in Mid-Ulster in the 1990s a kind of political act.

We know that Nell would have no problem considering such an act as political and time and again she proved how attentive she was to the subversive and expansive potential of such small everyday acts. Nell’s fearless activism and journalism grabbed headlines and played its part in forcing significant political change: the notorious Contraceptive Train, her coverage of the Kerry babies case, and her reporting on the women republican prisoners in Armagh Gaol. But she also understood the inherently political nature of life for women in more ‘unremarkable’ settings. I recently wrote a book chapter about gender, conflict, diaspora and the Irish pub (watch this space for that one) and in it I write briefly about the protest she lead in Neary's pub in Dublin in the early 1970s against the fact that pubs in the Republic were then legally allowed to refuse a woman a pint of beer on the grounds it was ‘unladylike’. But I also discuss the parts of Peggy Deery where Peggy claims a bit of space for herself to get dressed up and go out drinking with her friend Sandra. Peggy’s life is a hard one, beset by tragedy and poverty, bereavement, violence and harassment, and Nell’s inclusion of these outings in her account seems pointed. She understands the political power of having a great night out with the girls.

For Nell, your understanding of the world will be immeasurably enriched by paying attention to the lives of women. Here she is again in that essay about the media and the Troubles:

Journalists seeking to draw word pictures began to leave the public lounge and knock on doors. It was women who admitted them, women who acquainted them with the intimate detail of slum dwelling, women who raged eloquently about children sickening for want of space, light and air. The hand that rocked the cradle rocked superficial perceptions

Talk to women. Observe what their homes are like, what their housing conditions are like, what people, especially women, are up to there. What are they eating, watching, talking about? These propositions obsess me slightly – it’s not only what my PhD was about it’s become a kind of central organising principle of my politics, not just about the Troubles, but about everything. You can’t understand anything about the world until you understand the homes that people live in!

Nell took the decision to write Peggy Deery at a difficult time in her own life: she was banned from appearing on RTÉ after remarks made on air in support of the IRA days after the Enniskillen bombing, and she was having problems getting her work distributed. Peggy had just died; her funeral, which McCafferty attends and describes in her memoir, was a ‘small unregarded affair’ and there’s an unspoken contrast here with the funeral of Peggy’s son Paddy, an IRA volunteer who had died a planting a bomb a few months earlier. That funeral was the subject of a protracted, high-profile battle between the Catholic church and the IRA, over whether the remains of Paddy and his colleague Eddie McSheffrey would be allowed within the precincts of the Church. But Peggy’s funeral received no such attention, was not made part of the official history, and Nell wants to correct this.  

There’s a methodology here that can be applied to all lives, not just those of women and it’s one which is about looking beyond grand narratives and understanding history as collective and multi layered, rather than made by individuals or heroes. I actually dread to think what my academic work would be like – how much more insipid and uninteresting it would be - had I not encountered Nell’s writing. Perhaps that’s an absurd counterfactual given how unavoidable she is in the field of feminism and the Troubles, but the point is she changed me and she changed how I saw the world. If you haven’t already, I implore you to read her.