A PIONEER of Irish comedy, Anne Gildea started out in London in the late 1980s.
She co-founded the Irish female comedy musical trio The Nualas, who toured internationally for many years.
Working solo, Anne has multiple other comedy tours under her belt.
Here she discusses her latest show Further Adventures in Womaning...
Anne Gildea is on at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith this monthIn the 2024 documentary feature Housewife of the Year, which revisited the nationwide competition that ran in Ireland from 1968 to 1995, there is a clip of a 1980s contestant reciting a self-penned poem:
“It’s very nice to be good looking / But that will not excuse bad cooking / For men have got such funny natures / They judge you by your beef and potatoes,” she intones to an appreciative audience.
The documentary is a litany of such gasp-inducing gems, reflecting and examining women’s experiences in Irish society at the time.
That piece stood out for me because it reminded me of my mum’s oft-repeated advice when I was growing up in 70s/80s Ireland: “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” And she wasn’t being ironic.
It was an era in Ireland when old-school views of womanhood were being both perpetuated and dismantled. There were long overdue legal changes: the Marriage Bar, which required women to leave their jobs in certain sectors upon getting married, ended in 1973. Until 1974 it was the children’s father who was legally entitled to receive the Children’s Allowance. Until 1976 a wife had no right to a share in the family home, even if she was the breadwinner. She was deemed to have the same domicile as her husband.
‘Women’s lib’ may have been emerging as a force for change in the 1970s, but my only childhood recollection of it was as a punchline in newspaper cartoons or TV sketch shows.
Commercials were still all 18-hour girdles, lift-and-separate bras and Slimcea. What did a woman want in this world? Apart from the perfect hourglass figure, washing-up liquid that left her hands as soft as her face, detergents that made her weekly wash so bluey-white and freshly scented she couldn’t resist having a good sniff before scrubbing the floor with Flash, scouring the pots with Brillo Pads, and rounding off the day by drowning everyone’s dinner in steaming brown Bisto. Bliss.
The dark side of this supposed domestic bliss was the lack of power, encapsulated in the phenomenon of ‘the running away money’: the bit of housekeeping cash a wife secretly saved each week, in case the day came when she needed to escape. Divorce, for example, was not legally permitted in Ireland until 1996.
Such topics are core to my new show. I was interested in marking that journey of change, from a time when women were second-class citizens in Ireland to the contemporary picture.
My attitude has in part been shaped by my own mum’s experience. She ‘surrendered’ to being the homemaker, wife, and full-time mum, as per the norm back then.
She gave up her office job when her first child, my brother Kevin, was born in the mid-1960s in Manchester. And then any opportunity of paid work or financial independence when she acquiesced to my dad’s desire to move us all to his isolated homeplace in the west of Ireland.
It was a typical Irish story of the time: The Land Commission were going to compulsory purchase the land otherwise. And like many a story before and since, things turned out less Ballerina Farm and more a John B. Keane tragi-comedy of everything going from bad to worse.
It’s all there in my show!
Further Adventures in Womaning is at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith on October 23. For tickets and further info click here
