Writing a Sexual Revolution: Contraception, Bodily Autonomy, and the Women's Pages in Irish National Newspapers, 1935–1979

Following independence from Britain in 1922, the Irish state embarked on a nation-building project based primarily on the precepts of the Roman Catholic majority. As 92 percent of the population identified as Catholic in the 1926 census, the church was the undisputed arbiter of morality in every aspect of Irish life. As noted by Tom Inglis, the power of the church in Ireland lay not just in its numerical supremacy but also in the way that religion permeated every aspect of Irish life, including politics, health, education, and family life.¹ Its annual message to the faithful—the Lenten pastorals—warned of the dangers lurking in foreign dances and music, alien dress codes, alcohol consumption, dance halls, risqué literature, and British Sunday newspapers.² What followed was a great deal of legislation designed to address the Catholic hierarchy's concerns and an acknowledgment from the political class that independence constituted a political rather than a social revolution: in 1923 the minister for justice, Kevin O'Higgins, described the new Irish political establishment as "probably the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution."³ All political parties were careful to publicly demonstrate that their political programs did not contradict the teachings of the church; the 1937 Irish Constitution, while granting freedom of religion, recorded the "special position" of the church as the faith of the majority of the population. By and large, the indigenous press followed a similar template. The various titles were careful to avoid issues that might incur the wrath of the church, and the women's pages were predominantly restricted to domestic related matters such as shopping tips and recipes. All the titles were conscious of the campaigns by a multitude of Catholic organizations against certain "objectionable" content. Indeed, a key concern for the Catholic hierarchy of the 1920s was the presence of publications—books and British periodicals—that advocated or provided advice on birth control. Following much lobbying and vigilante activity against newsagents, the state established the Committee on Evil Literature in 1926, the report of which led to the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929.⁴

Although primarily aimed at books deemed to be indecent or obscene and at newspapers that devoted substantial space to crime news of a sexual nature, the legislation also banned information on birth control. The censorship board established by the act was empowered, under section 6, to impose a permanent ban on any book deemed to advocate "the unnatural prevention of conception." In relation to periodicals, section 7 of the act allowed for a three-month ban when "several issues of a periodical publication recently theretofore published have usually or frequently been indecent or obscene or have advocated the unnatural prevention of conception." A second offense resulted in a permanent ban on the periodical. In addition, section 16 made it a criminal offense (punishable by a fifty-pound fine and/or six months' imprisonment) for anyone to print, publish, sell, or distribute any book or periodical that advocated "the unnatural prevention of conception," and section 17 banned as indecent any advertisement pertaining to medical products relating to sexually transmitted diseases or the prevention of conception. As noted by John Horgan, the parliamentary debate on the legislation "was notable for the almost universal acceptance of the edicts against literature dealing with contraception."⁵ A similar process followed for the banning of contraception proper. Established in 1930, the Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Acts and Juvenile Prostitution (better known as the Carrigan Committee) led to the Criminal Law Amendments Act 1935, section 17 of which made it an offense (punishable by a fifty-pound fine and/or six months' imprisonment) "for any person to sell, or expose, offer, advertise, or keep for sale or to import or attempt to import into Saorstát Eireann [the Irish Free State] for sale, any contraceptive." Such was the sensitivity of this legislation that normal parliamentary process was bypassed in favor of a small all-party committee examining the Carrigan Committee's report "with...