Ellen Ross

Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology

“The personal is political” was a central insight of the wave of feminism which gathered momentum in the 1960 s. Within that phrase is condensed the understanding that the seemingly most intimate details of private existence are actually structured by larger social relations. Attention to the personal politics of intimate life soon focused on sexuality, and many canons of sexual meaning were challenged. The discovery of erotic art and symbols as malecentered, the redefinition of lesbian sexuality as positive and life-affirming, and the dismantling of the two-orgasm theory as a transparently male perception of the female body were among the products of this critique.

Excluded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914–1929

general for her to range over her choice of themes and subjects without losing coherence. Kinealy’s secondary solution—provided, as noted above, by ‘social justice’—is much less effective. Indeed, it leads to some awkward transitions: in a few pages, the narrative moves from Ireland’s Hollywood stars, through Prince Charles’s visits and Rhonda Paisley suing her father’s party for sex discrimination, to drug crime (pp. 296–8). Like awkward transitions, errors that leap out to the specialist are an almost inevitable part of a general history. Gerry Fitt was not ‘the leader of the Nationalist Party’ (p. 32), Michael Farrell was not a student at Queen’s University in 1968/1969 (p. 41) and Stormont did not promise Derry thousands of jobs and houses after the civil rights movement started (p. 39). These, however, are minor points compared to the biggest systemic weakness with general histories. Writing at a generalized level renders the author dependent upon the quantity and quality of the relevant secondary literature—and, apart from work on politics, population, literature and law, Kinealy is not particularly well served here. Admittedly, she has overlooked a lot of recent scholarship, perhaps because she believes ‘revisionism’ dominates ‘the small number of universities in Ireland’ and has sought to ‘destroy a coherent nationalist narrative of Irish history’ (pp. 136–7). And Kinealy has further limited herself by preferring to do her research online rather than in the archives (in the chapter covering 1969 and 1970, over a third of the endnotes cite websites, yet there is not a single reference to material held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland nor the National Archives of the United Kingdom). Nonetheless, the book highlights where the existing literature is weak. To give just a few examples here, work needs to be done on sexuality, suicide, the environment, urban development, material culture and sport. War and Peace offers a readable, well-crafted narrative of Ireland during the Troubles and the peace process. But Henry Patterson’s Ireland since 1939 and Diarmaid Ferriter’s Transformation of Ireland still remain the places to start for anyone interested in the history of post-war Ireland.