Úna Gan A Gúna : Irish Women's Missing Stories

Unagada Goona is a charity that collects and archives oral histories of Irish women from the 20th century. Ruth Beecher, the founder, started the charity to explore changes in Irish society and to give a voice to women whose stories are often missing. The interviews reveal the emotional and symbolic significance of personal experiences, such as leaving loved ones behind when emigrating. The stories also highlight the repression and judgment faced by women in Ireland, particularly in regards to relationships and reproductive rights. These archives serve as a reminder of the progress made, but also the need for further change. Hi, this is Si Brannigan. In the following, I'll be chatting with Ruth Beecher, the founder of the charity Unagada Goona, which is a charity that collects and archives the oral histories of Irish women from the 20th century. Throughout, you'll also hear clips from Dorothy Duffy and a woman that has been interviewed by Unagada Goona and reminisces about her life from the 1960s. Start us off by saying what is Unagada Goona and tell me why you started the charity. Yes, thanks so much for asking me to do this today. I'm really, really happy to be here. Yeah, I'm Ruth Beecher. I'm a historian and an applied researcher. It's a charity that aims to be a cooperative sort of collaboration between women to record women's stories. We don't have a lot of women's stories in the archives in Ireland. It's still pretty a male society. My original idea was that I would explore changes in Irish society and not just in Ireland, but in the diaspora as well, because we have Irish women all over the world, really. But we've also recorded lots of interviews with people whose mothers have passed on or with people who we don't know at all, who just would like their stories to go into the archives. Really, it's about trying to get a more complex understanding of Irish women's lives in the 20th century and where were their continuities and where were their actual ruptures in how people lived their lives and how they had relationships or their education or all of those different things. So we were trying to transcend stereotypes, really, because I think there were lots of stereotypes still about Irish women. Lots of people's memories from the past are quite hidden because women's stories are missing and that means they're silenced. And I think that's really sad. Listening to Dorothy Duffy's interview, I was really struck by the emotion and the storytelling aspect of it. So I was just sitting in the library and I was listening to this interview and suddenly I'm tearing up because she's talking about the day that she left Ireland. And of course, it wasn't leaving her family, it wasn't leaving Ireland, it was her leaving her dog. And so that really struck me because that's something you don't see written down. My dog, my beautiful station dog, and I'd go 100 yards and he'd go and I'd say, go home, go home. And this lasted all the way to the station. He'd skulk and he'd hide in doorways and I'd turn around, his little head was poking out, waiting for me to carry on and I had to shout and say, go home. And I think in the end, I had to slap him to try and get him to go home. Because he couldn't be with me. And I remember that broke my heart because I wanted to explain to him and I couldn't. I think that's a beautiful detail about her dog that like, it's like hugely emotional and also hugely kind of symbolic, isn't it? That, you know, imagining the dog waiting for her to come back and it's kind of like, it's kind of hugely symbolic for anybody who's ever left Ireland. Yeah, I could see a little puddle of that, you know, that farewell and everything. So it is, she really does hit you in that way. I had a couple of other boyfriends, but I didn't want to get serious about anybody because I wanted to leave Ireland. I couldn't bear the repression, the moral judgment, the church, the feeling that everybody knew what you were up to, but particularly the way people judged you. And as for having sex, you know, I mean, my God, I knew a friend of mine who told me afterwards, she had sex on a frequent basis in the sitting room of her house with her boyfriend. And I was, what? What? She got pregnant and had an abortion. That's the organ harvesting. Which again, you know, reinforced my deep hatred for the Catholic church. That women, young girls had to do that because had she had that baby, she would have been vilified. So for instance, in every story, you know, relationships and sex do come up all the time because it's just a natural part of life and they want to open up about it, they want to talk the fact that every woman has experienced that control that you don't seem to have over, or say, over your own sex life or reproductive rights as a woman in Ireland. And I feel like abortion services and the control that is still, that the Catholic mind still has, and the United States still has, and not being able to give women these freedoms is mind-boggling to me. As Dorothy said, like the hypocrisy is mind-boggling to see the difference that the Irish state has for men and women. And, you know, it's great to see the change and the modernity that has come with women, but I feel like it's constantly, a lot of people still say, oh, Ireland's not the same as it used to be. But I know, I think there's a lot more that can change. And I feel like these archives really help you come to terms with that, you know, like, okay, this has changed so much, but also, I still understand that feeling. I still understand that emotion. I still feel that exploitive nature being put on me as a woman. And I don't know if you would feel the same when you go through them? Well, I suppose one thing I would say is, you know, I was a teenager in the 1980s. And at that point in time, you know, if you told me that America would repeal Roe v. Wade, and, you know, abortion rights would, reproductive rights would begin to be curtailed again all over the world, I would not have believed you. You know, I believed at that time that feminism was just, you know, getting, getting going in terms of like, the 70s was the time of radical feminism in Britain and in the States. And okay, Ireland was a little bit behind, you know, I think we were in the 80s, you know, but I still thought that that was just the beginning and a very optimistic teenager. And if you told me that some things would be going backwards by the time I was 50, I would, I would not have believed you. And so I think it's really important that we gather the histories, but also use them as, you know, I believe in, in being activist historians and using that material to help people to talk about things. But it's kind of our job, I see, I see our job as, as saying, you know, these things are worthwhile, you know, and they're not written down, and they're going to be lost. So, you know, to try and encourage people really to come forward. It's where I grew up, it's where I became me in a way. And it is my cultural heritage. There's an awful lot to be proud of about Ireland, there's huge amounts to be proud of. But in late 1970s, Ireland, I knew that if I stayed, I would be emotionally strangled in that place. And I couldn't do it. So I wasn't leaving Ireland, I was leaving a way of living.