Alan Hayes – författare

The Irish Women's History Reader is an exciting collection of essays revealing the tremendous diversity of women's experiences in Ireland's past. For the first time this unique book draws together key articles published in the fields of Irish women's history and women's studies over the past two decades, including contributions from Ireland, North and South, England, USA, Canada and Australia.The Irish Women's History Reader explores the lives of ordinary Irish women since 1800, looking at the key themes of:* historiography and the development of, and writing of, women's history in Ireland* politics and the variety of political activities undertaken by women including suffrage, nationalism and unionism* health and sexuality revealing hidden histories of sexual activity, mental illness and attempts to control fertility* religion and the experiences of catholic nuns, protestant evangelicals and salvationists* emigration and the pattern of female migration to USA, Britain and Australia* work including both paid and unpaid employ inside and outside the home.

The Irish Women's History Reader is an exciting collection of essays revealing the tremendous diversity of women's experiences in Ireland's past. For the first time this unique book draws together key articles published in the fields of Irish women's history and women's studies over the past two decades, including contributions from Ireland, North and South, England, USA, Canada and Australia.The Irish Women's History Reader explores the lives of ordinary Irish women since 1800, looking at the key themes of:* historiography and the development of, and writing of, women's history in Ireland* politics and the variety of political activities undertaken by women including suffrage, nationalism and unionism* health and sexuality revealing hidden histories of sexual activity, mental illness and attempts to control fertility* religion and the experiences of catholic nuns, protestant evangelicals and salvationists* emigration and the pattern of female migration to USA, Britain and Australia* work including both paid and unpaid employ inside and outside the home.

The writers in Washing Windows Too have things on their minds that have exploded into that love-urgency that makes writers write. And, just as it should be, few subjects are off limits. A poet may not always love her inspirational material, but those here revere the act of writing so much - value it so much - that honing their ideas, visions, and insights into poem-shaped, concrete objects has become crucial. It is an honour to witness what has urged these writers to the process of thought, cogitation, sentence, and finally, poem.Many writers use writing as an attempt to solve life's conundrums - to solve themselves. And to understand the self and others better, too, because writing is the best way they know to gain sight into, and survive, the vagaries of life. Perhaps the writers in this anthology are like me - maybe for them, too, writing is their sanity and their joy, their best thinking and settling tool. A poem can be a path into the deepest, purest self, and back out again - through the very act of writing - to a calmer, less frenetic place.Because poets deal with issues that concern them - universal truths, often - certain themes emerge, as they do in all anthologies. In Washing Windows Too, particular groupings of motifs re-occur and these include birth and motherhood; child-love and empty nests; migration and refugees; women's power and agency; bodies, the male gaze, and violence; nature and its beauties; art, creation, and the act of writing itself; uneasy relationships; politics; health and illness; and grief and death. And, because we are living in the early twenty-twenties, the pandemic naturally features in some poems

Washing Windows III anthology is representative of contemporary Irish literature, and of a new society and a new way of accepting and honouring the talent all around us.

"John Brennan" (Madame Sidney Gifford Czira) was a woman of the twentieth century, and along with her five sisters, the Giffords, she contributed to many of the developments of that time. Born Sidney Gifford in 1889 into a well-off Protestant unionist family, she was attracted to the nationalist cause and started publishing articles as a school girl for Arthur Griffith's Sinn Fein. For the next 65 years she was well-known as a journalist, broadcaster and political activist, and counted as her friends and associates, the men and women who were leaders of the nationalist struggle.In The Years Flew By, her memoir first published in 1974, she recounts her memories of these people. More than biographical portraits, she gives an insider's view which is perceptive, entertaining and enlightening and adds greatly to the study of the political developments of the early decades of the last century. She also provides us with a vivid picture of some of the customs and social life in Dublin in the early twentieth century, and recounts the exciting developments in theatre during this Irish literary renaissance.This edition includes "John's" original manuscript of The Years Flew By, complete with a foreword by Gifford Lewis (who knew her and was the original publisher of that book), a biographical article on "John" and her five sisters, by Alan Hayes, and selections from the journalism of "John Brennan".