This chapter explores the contraception campaigns of feminist groups in the 1970s including the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, Irishwomen United and the Contraception Action Programme. It places the activities of these groups within the wider historiography of feminist health activism. Drawing primarily on oral history interviews with former members and feminist magazines, newspaper sources and the Roisin Conroy/Attic Press Archive, this chapter illuminates the personal experiences of Irish feminist activists. It illuminates the personal experiences of Irish feminist activists and illustrate the nuances of feminist demands for reproductive rights within the Irish case study. Moreover, as well as service provision, later groups such as IWU and CAP drew attention to the important class and geographic inequalities with regard to access to contraception in Ireland.

In this chapter, the author examines clinical psychological, traumatic developmental, and sociocultural perspectives of a serial murder. This includes media dynamics and feminist perspectives. The author discusses malingering, or the faking of mental illness. The case of female serial killer (FSK) Aileen Wuornos is revisited to illustrate clinical psychological issues. The cases of male serial killers (MSKs) Ronald Dominique and Dennis Rader (BTK Strangler) highlight phenomena from the chapter.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.

This chapter sets out the central argument of this book – that personal bioinformation has critical roles to play in our construction of self-narratives that are capable of remaining coherent and inhabitable when confronted by our embodied and socially embedded experiences and of supporting us in making sense of and navigating these experiences. It suggests that our lives and experiences are inescapably those of embodied beings and outlines what is entailed by this claim. It proposes that any satisfactory account of narrative self-constitution must accommodate the significance of our embodiment as the context in which we construct our self-narratives and as the source of both narrative contents and limits upon unfettered self-definition. From these premises, this chapter argues that personal bioinformation – to the extent that it provides reliable and meaningful insights into our bodily and biological states, capacities, and relationships – can provide vital constitutive and interpretive tools for the interpretation and construction of our embodied self-narratives. This discussion distinguishes its position from suggestions that personal bioinformation gets us closer to narrative ‘truth’ and responds to concerns that proposing a narrative role for bioinformation commits us to the view that our identities are defined by our biology or bodies as objects.

This chapter introduces a set of six principles to guide the evaluation and design of rights-based care and support policy in liberal welfare states. The principles build on and extend the reconciliation efforts discussed in earlier chapters, using the common thread of social citizenship rights claims that runs through the feminist, carer and disability rights perspectives. The principles provide criteria for evaluating the extent to which existing policies encompass the concerns of multiple care and disability perspectives, including whether they ease policy tensions between supporting women’s unpaid care and paid work and between meeting the claims of carers and those of people with disabilities. The principles can also inform the design of policies that promote equal social citizenship rights to care, support and paid work participation for all parties to these relationships. The principles address matters including access to financial resources and good quality services; flexibility in how life is organized; time for unpaid care, paid work and self-care; incorporation of the ‘voice’ of all affected people in the policy design; and responding to difference associated with gender inequality, disability and impairment, and citizenship status.

This chapter explores the importance of women’s leadership with a focus on community-building activities. The term leadership is examined in relation to sex/gender, feminism, the qualities and styles that align with women’s gendered socialization, gender scripts and worldviews. Using a case example, we illustrate how feminist community leaders might select among six approaches to build trust and optimism in their followership. These frameworks include Transformational leadership, Servant leadership, Collaborative leadership, Innovation leadership, Diversity and Inclusion leadership, and Emotionally Intelligent leadership. Each leadership approach is synergistic with a feminist framework. The chapter discusses how women leaders can draw on these frameworks to maximize their effectiveness. We also discuss strategies to develop women as community leaders with consideration of the unique circumstances and needs of women underprivileged backgrounds.

This chapter explores how twentieth-century feminist and LGBTQ+ literature deconstructs and reimagines gender in formal experimentation and genre-bending. It proposes that this literary tradition contributes to a larger cultural conversation that tends to think in binaries: trans vs. queer, gay vs. straight, male vs. female. The work of a diverse group of writers-- Djuna Barnes, June Arnold, Bertha Harris, Armistead Maupin, and Leslie Feinberg—reinvents conventional understandings of gender in forms that range from avant garde experimentation to popular and autobiographical novels. Genderqueer American writers remind us that the complexities of gender and sexuality always exceed our attempts to describe them. When we incorporate genderqueer texts by queer American writers into the larger conversationwe can access another theoretical language, one written within contingency and resistance.Only radical reimagination and continual (re)creation can ever hope to approximate the complex play and multiplicity of genders.

This chapter explores the influence of the women’s liberation movement on Heaney’s poetry, criticism and critical reception by examining the changing status of ‘the feminine’ in his poetics. Heaney’s early criticism subscribed to a Gravesian dichotomy between masculine mastery and feminine receptivity, which he later tones down in light of feminist critique. The controversy over Heaney’s figuration of colonialism as rape in North (1975), and the ensuing debate over the aisling genre, present mixed attitudes both towards patriarchal ideology and towards diverging emphases in contemporary feminism. Heaney proved adept at becoming canonical at a time when the patriarchal biases of literary canon-formation were critiqued by feminists, most notably during the critical furore over the marginalization of women from the 1991 Field Day Anthology. ‘Station Island’ (1985) reveals Heaney’s gift for finding his place in the canon even as his patrilineal trajectory towards ‘major-poet’ status vindicates the feminist case against patriarchal bias.

This essay explores women’s antiwar activism in New York, California, and Kansas demonstrating the national breadth and regional diversity of pacifist and peace organizing. The essay identifies some of the individual women who raised their voices and pens against the war and includes some of the antiwar and pacifist organizations women created or joined including the Woman’s Peace Party, the People’s Council, and the Union Against Militarism. It argues that women of the First World War peace movement linked state-sanctioned violence in war with state-sanctioned violence against women, children, and the poor. Women thus contributed to the process by which the peace movement transitioned from defining peace as the absence of war to defining peace as the presence of social, economic, and political justice.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the US Supreme Court could have used the feminist technique of storytelling by rewriting Desert Palace v. Costa from the perspective of the plaintiff, who received a jury verdict in her favor in the district court. The feminist judgment corrects the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow the defendant to write the plaintiff’s story by detailing the egregious facts in the case that shed light on the gendered treatment she suffered – treatment that included repeated severely hostile behaviors among her coworkers and differential treatment by her supervisors. The rewritten opinion gives the reader a significantly different view of the case from that offered by the original opinion. The rewritten opinion demonstrates that the feminist method of storytelling illuminates the ways in which the facts occurred in the real world, and in doing so creates a counterbalance to the supposedly “neutral” and “objective” view that the Court originally presented.

Emerging from four nations romantic scholarship and recent historical revisionism, this chapter challenges the negative view of the liminal period 1798–1800 as a dark and silent moment, following the collapse of United Irish republicanism and its associated publications. Pushing beyond 1798, public print and private correspondence discoveries in relation to key figures among elite and working-class circles alike yield evidence of continued collaboration towards the goal of a more high-brow, if less overtly political, northern periodical culture in Ireland. These circles contributed to several ‘enlightened’ periodicals like the Belfast Monthly Magazine (1808–14) and the Belfast Literary Journal (1815), which enabled a productive collision of politically radical writers like James Orr, Dr William Drennan, and Samuel Thomson with the ascendancy of conservatives, particularly the coterie poets of Bishop Thomas Percy. This chapter focuses on a key study of a short-lived Belfast periodical, The Microscope and Minute Observer (1799–1800), a unique publication that represents the convergence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic literary energies at a pivotal point of historical flux.

One of the works of the 1764 season at Covent Garden was a new burletta called Midas. Midas was, though, not ‘new’; it was only new to London: an early version of the work had its first staging privately in 1760 in Lurgan near Belfast, and the first professional version was at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre in 1762. The professional version was prepared in response to the appearance in Dublin of an Italian burletta company, a company that had previously performed in London and would do so again after its Dublin engagement. This interplay of repertory between the two cities - of which Midas was the most obvious product - resulted both in a new genre and a tangling with Italian opera troupes. Midas was the product of a group of Irishmen, of whom Kane O’Hara, the librettist, was the most important and the most enigmatic; this chapter explores his role in the cross-currents of drama between the two cities. In so doing, Burden’s chapter re-contextualises the history of the burletta and offers a powerful demonstration that theatre historians cannot and should not write about London’s theatre in isolation: regional influences were important tributaries to the Georgian capital’s culture.

This chapter explores performances of Irish femininity in London and Dublin following the Act of Union, sketching a literary relationship between writers Sydney Owenson and Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and between the two cities. Although Sydney Owenson is usually thought of as a novelist, Taylor shows how her play The First Attempt (Dublin 1807) and the author’s own public performances drew on tropes employed by earlier male playwrights in order to (re)stage Anglo-Irish relations in feminine terms. At a special performance of The First Attempt, and in later social gatherings in London, Owenson, dressed in her “wild Irish girl’s” red silk mantle, strategically feminizes and civilizes an earlier Irish character type, such as John Henry Johnstone’s Teague from The Faithful Irishman. Similarly, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu’s comedy The Sons of Erin (1812) restages and feminizes her brother’s earlier play, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s St. Patrick’s Day (1775), asserting that Enlightened, politicized Irish women hold the power to influence the Union beyond the stage doors.

The chapter argues that Owenson and Le Fanu’s feminized rewritings of male Irish playwrights chime with London’s desire for feminized pacifications of Irish characters following 1798. At the same time, Owenson and Le Fanu also offer a subversive message about women’s place in Anglo-Irish politics and Ireland’s place in the Union. Both women used the domestic English setting to stage Irish grievances right at the heart of the empire.