WIMB £100 RUNNER UP PRIZE WINNER RACHEL NEWELL
A woman’s role is in the revolution by Rachel Newell
Had we been born one hundred years ago, I would not have been able to vote but my younger brother would have. His idea of involvement in politics is taking old election posters from telegraph poles and leaning them against the passenger seat window of his car to scare my mother when she opens the kitchen blinds. Since we can both vote, I find it funny. However, the uncomfortable truth behind it belies the celebrations we had three years ago, marking the hundredth anniversary of women being granted the vote. Some women were granted the vote in 1918. Many were not.
It is simpler to pick one date, the landmark change when a woman was allowed to vote for the first time. If not, we might have to interrogate our heroes. I mean heroines. Except, do I? Many of us might have to learn their names before we start questioning why their fight for the rest of us stopped. Our own history, their history, is so detached from what many of us are taught in school that we might struggle to place the events side by side at first. Did you know that Craig was a suffragist but Carson was not? That one Redmond brother was against women voting and the other for it? Perhaps not, but the names, at least, are familiar, if out of context. It would be odd to think of these men as side characters in a story of women when their narrative has always been the visible one.
The visibility is important; it is hard to say I am here if it feels like no one in the world, in your world, has ever done so before. It is hard to imagine the possibility if you have never known it to exist. It is as big and small as that. It is as big and small as a little girl hearing about Gráinne O’Malley and writing about a pirate queen in her story. It is as big and small as knowing that one hundred years ago Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper loved one another. For women, same sex attraction is often lost to history. As so many people have been arguing lately in relation to sports, if we do not see, we struggle to be and in this country, in particular, history is always a legitimising force. Yet, so many girls are forced to seek out their own past and argue for its existence, it is never theirs by right like it is for others.
Despite exercise being proven to be beneficial for mental health, opportunities for women and girls are still underfunded or non-existent in many sports. Female athletes who represent their country at the highest level may not be paid, Ireland’s rugby team are not. Outside cities and large towns that matters little, in a literal sense. The prestige which women’s sport is given and the power that has to influence participation matters less when girls will only be able to take up most sports if or when they reach university and their mothers might never. We count on girls to fight for their place in ‘boys’ football teams, we ask them to sign petitions each year to be allowed to play rugby as well, to force themselves into places that they only really see men succeed. The sports in which we see women compete in on our televisions come with price tags, not in PE classes. Many women learn young that things must be fought for and that fighting is hard.
A woman’s role is in the revolution, in a revolution, because there is not one revolution and there is not one woman. A woman’s role is in the revolution as much as she wants it to be because the weight of the world is often placed too heavily on the shoulders of women. Often women are tasked with holding their families together in a thousand tiny ways each day that are invisible. Their lives and choices can be intertwined with the happiness of those they love. They must fight against a world that is not designed for them in the most basic and fundamental of ways, be it office thermostats or airbags in a car. Sometimes they must struggle against the misunderstanding of those whose shoulders they stand on, mothers, grandmothers, aunts. There is an emotional burden to the idea of revolution that each woman must decide to bear in big and small moments, that she must be able to continually renegotiate.
Sometimes, a woman’s role is whatever she pleases. Sometimes her contribution need only be her own happiness. Sometimes, that happiness is a revolution of its own, the product of a million tiny moments that built upon each other, all those moments of difference that she has met in the world and how she responded to them. The happiness of girls is often dismissed, nothing is as looked down on as something that teenage girls love. Their happiness is discussed by those older and supposedly wiser than them. Grandparents think a partner of the right kind will bring it, that a wedding must be on the cards soon as they age. Parents that a stable job will end all stress. There are so many people in an individual’s life who care, who give ideas, who want to help, and a girl is often socialised from birth to feel beholden to this, to tread lightly around the feelings of others.
Often, by the time she is old enough to be called so, a woman herself is a revolution against what she has always known.
