Clodagh Finn: Walking women back into the fabric of our cities

As the poet herself so evocatively put it, it was once “easier to have a political murder in an Irish poem than a washing machine”.

If we have become better at naming the experiences of women in literature, we are still lagging very far behind when it comes to the built environment.

There is some progress, though. I paid my respects to Iris Ashley Cummins last Saturday at University College Cork. In 2022, the civil engineering building was named after its first female engineering graduate. To echo CNN’s words, it only took 177 years.

Though that’s not entirely fair because two years before, UCC’s medical trailblazers, Dr Dora Allman, the first senior consultant female psychiatrist in Armagh General Hospital, and Dr Lucy Smith, the first female obstetrician in Cork city, were celebrated on campus too — they both have rooms named after them at the student Hub.

But how often do we have a new building to name after the very many women overlooked to date? Not anywhere near often enough to redress the balance.

There is, however, another really accessible way of putting women back into our environment. We don’t even have to wait for a new structure to be built; all we have to do is stand in front of existing ones and tell the many forgotten stories already written into the stones.

That’s exactly what A Feminist Walk of Cork does. The initiative has developed two separate routes (maps can be downloaded free here) that walk the hidden stories and unheard voices of women back into the weave of the city’s streets.

As Professor Maggie O’Neill of UCC explains: “In the streets and landmarks around us, there are these hidden histories in the fabric of the buildings; the history of the buildings, the history of the spaces and places, where women lived, worked, contributed, did amazing things.”

Prof O’Neill developed the walks in collaboration with students, staff, and community partners. Many of them were out on International Women’s Day to narrate the stories written into those landmarks, such as the former Cork County Gaol (built 1818-1823) at the north-west corner of UCC’s campus bounded by Gaol Walk.

JP Quinn is standing in front of it. He is head of visitor services at the university, an author and a storyteller but it is his role as father of two-year-old twins, Joseph and Corazon, that is most pertinent today.

As he puts it, his two small assistants will help to paint a picture that words probably can’t. He is entirely right because seeing them hammers home the shocking fact that children not much older were once imprisoned here, along with many impoverished men and women.

In 1833, for instance, five-year-old John Russell was charged with vagrancy and sent here to join his mother Mary Russell who had been charged, a few months before, with stealing a piece of cloth.

Mother and son were sentenced to seven years’ transportation, but they never made it to Australia. Their convict ship the Neva set out from Cork in January 1835 but sank, in May, off the coast of Tasmania. There were nine free women, 150 female convicts and 55 children, many of them babies, on board. All of them perished.

While Mary Russell’s story is not immediately accessible, sometimes we are blind to what is in front of us. As JP Quinn points out, the graves of 13 Republicans executed in 1921 are visible outside UCC’s electrical engineering building, though many of the university’s 25,000 students and 5,000 staff members walk by without even realising that.

There are many new realisations to come on a two-hour walk that makes you look at the world through a new lens. That’s the aim. The two feminist walks are designed to open a space to allow you to slow down and really connect with different places.

Prof O’Neill again: “Learning is not just about what happens in our heads, but it’s also about our hearts and our bodies.”

And there is a jolt to heart and body when Conach Gibson, PhD student and feminist walk researcher, draws our attention to what she describes as "the asylum and containment district" across the River Lee.

On previous occasions, I have admired the sweeping view from this viewing point — near Gaol Bridge — but now it takes on a different hue as Conach points out the Good Shepherd Asylum, Cork City Gaol and Our Lady’s Psychiatric Hospital; buildings designed to rehabilitate their occupants through discipline and labour.

“Do penance or perish,” to quote the title of Frances Finnegan’s excellent book on the Magdalene asylum system which locked up tens of thousands of Irish women not that long ago.

Conach Gibson quotes the experience of one of them, Mary Norris (1932-2017), who was sent to do two years’ hard labour at the Good Shepherd Asylum aged 16. She said: “It was hell on earth — like a prison. We were called inmates or sheep. They took everything away from us.” That included her name; the nuns felt she did not deserve to share a name with the mother of God. Instead, she was known as number 30.

Her crime? Going to the cinema without permission with a boy that didn’t actually exist.

There are several speakers on the walk, too many to mention here. They act like spokes of a wheel charting a new course through the cityscape, putting down markers, claiming space by challenging social and sexual inequalities in the hope of forging a safer and fairer future for everyone.

Outside the Erinville Hospital, Angela Flynn, lecturer at the school of nursing and midwifery at UCC, recalls the generations of women who endured life-long health issues due to symphysiotomy — a barbaric alternative to caesarean sections which were poorly viewed by the Catholic Church.

But this walk is about celebrating women’s achievements too. The aforementioned trailblazers, Dr Allman and Dr Smith, get a shout-out as well as the “amazing changes” that have taken place in maternity care.

Further down the road, we stand in a huddle around Sheila Connolly, CEO of the Cork Alliance Centre, on the steps of the courthouse on Washington St. She talks a different reality into being — the one faced by the women who make up 3.8% of the Irish prison population.

Consider the woman charged with a non-violent offence who goes to court today having dropped her kids off to school. The judge might put back her case or she might find herself in a prison van on her way to jail wondering what, in pity’s name, will happen to her children left waiting at the school gates.

The thought that we have made so little progress is inescapable — we are still locking up people instead of dealing with poverty, trauma and addiction. There’s so much to unpick but we’re on the move again, down Oliver Plunkett St, over the Mary Elmes Bridge and on towards our final destination, the Sexual Violence Centre on Camden Place which turned 42 last week.

Its chief executive officer Mary Crilly and therapist Dola Twomey give walkers the warmest welcome; a defining feature of this singular hub.

There’s much more to say, and some of it is touched upon. As Mary Crilly says, we have to keep having conversations that challenge public attitudes to sexual violence.

In essence, we need to keep on talking the talk. Now, thanks to these exceptional feminist trails, we can walk the walk too.