Is It Possible to Identify Different Types of Feminism? How Have These Different Types Influenced Policy Developments in Ireland?

‘Is it possible to identify different types of Feminism? How have these different types influenced policy developments in Ireland?

‘Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights. Feminism is mainly focused on women's issues, but because feminism seeks gender equality, some feminists argue that men's liberation is therefore a necessary part of feminism, and that men are also harmed by sexism and gender roles. Feminists are "person[s] whose beliefs and behaviour[s] are based on feminism’

Historian and activist CherisKramarae once famously remarked that ‘feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings’. For a long time, Irish women’s lives were strictly confined to the private domain and women’s issues such as marital abuse and abortion were largely silenced and hidden from public knowledge. Additionally, both Church and state maintained that women should hold a certain morality, particularly relating to areas of sexuality and reproduction. As a result, until relatively recently, Irish women’s issues remained largely ignored and therefore unremarked upon.

In recent years, some historians have increasingly rejected the notion that feminism in Ireland only came about and was established during the 1970’s and rejected that it was absent and stagnant between the beginning of the First World War and the emergence of The Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970’s. Dr Linda Connoly( Head of the Sociology Department in University College Cork, Ireland) argued in her book that ‘it was those organisations which existed for a long period before 1970 in an atmosphere hostile to feminism, which were crucial in maintaining a ‘core cadre of feminists’ . She speaks of such organisations such as the IHA, which in 1961 hosted the nineteenth Triennial Conference of the International Alliance of Women...