Mary KennyDespite social divisions,”everyone has to make an effort to change” in order for everyone to have the respect they deserve, writes Mary Kenny
Following the Pope’s call for an end to prejudice against Travellers, I have been examining my conscience on attitudes to the Travelling people, who were, in my childhood, called ‘Tinkers’ (not always disparagingly).
Trying to be honest here: I think the attitudes transmitted to me were basically ambivalent. On the one hand, there was a kind of romantic idea about Travellers of all kinds (including gypsies, now called Roma). We read the stories of Patricia Lynch, a delightful children’s writer, who took us into the magical world of The King of the Tinkers. Living in a caravan, away from the well-ordered suburban lawns of Sandymount, seemed somehow enchanting.
Then there were songs and ballads which romanticised that travelling life, such as the Dubliners’ wonderful rendering of I’m a Freeborn Man/Of the Travelling People, with its bucolic line about “country lanes and byways/were always my ways”.
But there was indeed a darker side. Settled people are always mistrustful of nomadic peoples, because there is a belief that they don’t have a ‘stake’ in the community, and may thus be more likely to steal. And there were – and are – always complaints about halting sites being squalid and untidy. I also heard jokes about Travellers’ weddings sometimes leading to fights between clans.
So far as I remember, the Church has always been something of a champion of the Travellers – even Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin, regarded as such a dragon, had a genuine soft spot for the “poor Travelling people”.
As with most social divisions, maybe everyone has to make an effort to change. For settled people, consider if attitudes are rooted in prejudice; for Travellers, whether they are doing what they can to respect the wider community values.
Washing machines may have been women’s greatest liberators
Our film critic Aubrey Malone greatly liked the movie Suffragette. I wasn’t sure I’d warm to it, because films have a poor track record when it comes to historical accuracy. From Calamity Jane to Braveheart, the cinema has done more to create mythical legends than record history. Would Suffragette tell the true story of the women’s suffrage movement, or manipulate the audience’s emotions?
No, it does not tell the complicated historical truth: though it shows a fictional version skilfully. It doesn’t reveal, for example, that Mrs Pankhurst distrusted Emily Wilding Davison (who threw herself under the king’s horse at the 1913 Derby – the high point in the film) and the Suffrage movement saw EWD as a “loose cannon” seeking self-martyrdom.
My strongest reaction to Suffragette was a feeling of gratitude to the men – yes, all men – who gave us the washing machine. Poor Maud, the heroine, was a laundress in a hot and hazardous laundry, scrubbing away at the washing board with her bare hands, 12 hours a day.
But in 1908, an American, Mr Alva J. Fisher, patented that superb invention, the automatic washing machine (and two men had previously patented prototypes, Hamilton Smith in 1858 and William Blackstone in 1874).
Did the washing machine do more for women than the vote? It did more for laundresses and poor women. Every day, we benefit from washing machines. Once every few years we cast a vote.
The washing machine was, possibly, a greater liberator of more women than anything else. Thank you, Alva J. Fisher.
Big families toughen you up
It’s been noted that the late Maureen O’Hara grew up in Ranelagh, Dublin, one of six children and that one of her sisters, Peggy, was a Sister of Charity.
She herself said she was the only leading lady tough enough to play opposite John Wayne confidently.
That’s what comes of being one of six kids – it toughens you up!