Join us in celebrating International Women’s Day

That’s the country our mums were born in to. It sounds like something from a dodgy Netflix series, so surreal it couldn’t possibly have been true yet it is. So much has changed but there is so much still to do.It’s international women’s day, there will be lots of corporate saccharine posts about women being great, but I always try to remember that equality, or even the beginnings of it, is a very recent thing. When asked if feminism is still relevant I think of these moments:

• 1970: Women were finally allowed attend university
• 1973: Married women were finally allowed keep their jobs
• 1985: People were allowed buy contraception through a doctor
• 1991: Rape within marriage was FINALLY made illegal
• 1993: Being gay was no longer punishable by jail
• 1996: Divorce was made legal
• 1998: The last mother & baby home in Ireland closed
• 2005: Ferns report into child abuse which uncovered a horrifying cascade of similar reports
• 2010: Civil partnerships finally allowed, but not yet marriage
• 2012: Catherine Corless begins the search for 792 babies that were buried in unmarked graves by the Catholic Church in 1 single institution
• 2013: After the terrible death of Savita abortion is allowed if mother’s life was at risk
• 2015: Equal marriage voted in
• 2018: The right to choose was granted after the repeal campaign

But we also must remember that progress is not linear; we just have to look to the US where women are being prosecuted for the most basic rights of bodily autonomy to understand we have to hold what we have and demand a more equal world for everyone and if we can’t quite work up the energy to do it for ourselves, we should at least do it for the next generation.

For our daughters and sons so that they get to live in a better world