Left Feminisms: Conversations on the personal and political

Abstract

permit the use of the contraceptive pill and deemed artificial birth control as ‘intrinsically evil’. There was a growing defiance, which Kelly covers ably, to both government and Church restrictions on contraception. The Irish Women’s Liberation Movement played a significant role in this campaign, and Family Planning clinics began to appear around the country between 1969 and 1978. New legislation was introduced, and the 1979 Family Plannning Act attempted to ensure that even non-medical contraceptives were available only to married couples. In relation to access to contraceptives one female activist observed ‘you would think they are explosives the way they are treated’ (p. 299). The Customs service sometimes turned a blind eye to the importation of contraceptives. One activist was stopped at a border checkpoint returning from the North of Ireland where he had collected forty thousand condoms then held in the boot of his car. When questioned about them he replied, ‘They are for my own personal use’ and he was told by the police to ‘Have a nice weekend’ (p. 206). For all the activism and campaigns there was also a considerable and well-organised opposition to these liberal developments. The Irish Family League, a group of Catholic campaigners, was one of the most prominent organisations to campaign against contraception. It was only in 1985 that a prescription was no longer needed to acquire condoms but even in the 1980s and 1990s, class, where you lived, the presence in a town of sympathetic doctors or chemists shaped access to contraception. By the mid-1990s contraception was fully liberalised by the law. Kelly provides us with a fascinating account of people’s private sexual lives, and reveals how complex the relationships were among married couples around contraceptive practices. It reveals how many negotiated their religious beliefs with their desires to rationalise the number of children they had. There was moral complexity among citizens of the State regarding the legislation that shaped access to contraceptives and further complexity about how individuals and couples reconciled their beliefs with the dictates of the Catholic church. Kelly has engaged in extensive research in church archives, court records and the records of campaigning organisations. The oral histories illuminate all of this research material and infuse it with humanity. This is a very fine and necessary study.