Category: women’s rights

Flawed but not Forgotten–Maud Gonne

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

William Butler Yeats

Maud Gonne was born in England into a wealthy family. Her mother died while she was a child. Maud and her sister were sent to a boarding school in France and grew up speaking both French and English fluently.  Her father, Thomas Gonne, who served as an officer in the British Army, spent time in many countries around the world. In 1882, when Maud was in her early teens, he was sent to serve in Dublin. At that time, he brought his two daughters to live with him. It was during those years that Maud got to know Dublin and observed the poverty of many of its people. These were difficult times in Ireland and Maud became a strong opponent of the British landlords who evicted tenants from their homes when crops failed and the farmers were unable to pay their rent. 

After the death of their father in 1886, Maud and her sister were sent to live with an uncle in London but were not happy there. Maud, who had grown into a beautiful young woman, decided to train to be an actress. Unfortunately, her career was cut short when she developed TB and was advised to move to a spa in France. In 1887, she came of age and inherited her share of her mother’s fortune. For the rest of her life, she was wealthy and had no need to earn money. She divided her time between France, England and Ireland and maintained a lively social life in each of those countries.

Maud Gonne

In Paris, Maud met Lucien Miklevoye and began her first serious love affair. Miklevoye was married, and a divorce was almost impossible to obtain in France, but the two of them remained devoted to each other for several years and eventually had two children, although the eldest died very young. As was usual in wealthy families, the children were raised mainly by a devoted governess. When Maud spent time in Ireland, she never acknowledged the children but referred to her daughter as her niece. Yeats, who was a close friend for many years, knew almost nothing of Maud’s Parisian life or about her children. He fell in love with Maud and repeatedly asked her to marry him, but she turned him down without apparently telling him about her relationship with Miklevoye or about her children. It was several years before he learned about Maud’s private life.

The 1890s were difficult years in Ireland, and Maud spent much of her time in Dublin working with other activists to oppose British rules. She supported the Boers during their war to drive the British out of South Africa and started a women’s association. She is credited with starting the Sinn Fein (“ourselves alone”) organization, which became a powerful anti-British association.

Gonne’s private life remained turbulent. She met John McBride, a hero of the Boer War, and married him. They had one son, but the marriage was not a happy one. In 1905, she sued for divorce in France (divorce was illegal in Ireland), but she lost her case and the divorce was denied. McBride later became a hero of the Irish republican movement and was executed by the British in 1916.

As the years went by, Maud became more and more anti-British and was accused of supporting the Germans. In 1918 she was jailed for six months after being accused of supporting a pro-German plot. During the years between the two World Wars, Gonne’s strongly anti-British feelings led her to support the anti-Semitic actions of German fascists. She never spoke out against the prison camps or the deaths of many Jews during Hitler’s rule. She did much good during her lifetime, but also sometimes supported cruelty and caused pain.   

A recent biography The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne by Kim Bendheim (OR 2021) tells the story of Maud Gonne’s life and achievements. The author gives a clear and detailed account of Gonne’s life, but mysteries remain. Maud’s own writings, including her letters and memoirs, are not always accurate and sometimes raise more questions than they answer. Perhaps we will never be able to understand all the complexities of Maude Gonne, but we can be grateful that her life inspired some of the best poetry written by one of the greatest poets of her time, William Butler Yeats. Perhaps he was thinking of her when he wrote these lines:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Losing the Right to Plan Our Lives–An American Tragedy

Adele Fasick2 Comments

Back in the mid-1950s when I was a newly married graduate student at Columbia University, one of the most important discoveries in my new life was the Planned Parenthood Clinic on 125th Street. Having grown up in a family where contraceptives were never mentioned, I was on my own in finding out about birth control.

Contraception was a lot more unreliable during those post-war years than it is now. Aside from condoms for men, the only realistic choice was a diaphragm for a woman, but that had to be fitted and prescribed by a doctor. Of course, a few couples used the only method approved by the Catholic Church. This was the rhythm method which required a woman to take her temperature every day to figure out when she was ovulating and thus likely to get pregnant. Never the most reliable method, it was sometimes referred to as “the pope’s roulette”

The possibility of a surprise pregnancy gave employers and educators an excuse to deny women, especially married women, many of the opportunities available to men. Medical schools, law schools and employers restricted women’s applications because women were not able to control their fertility. States like Connecticut, which made the use of contraceptives illegal even for married couples, added an extra burden for women.

Gradually through the 1950s, new means of contraception were developed. The pill—the  gold standard in birth control—was unveiled to the world in 1954, and during the next twenty years, the pill became more effective and safer for women. The Planned Parenthood organization was instrumental in perfecting the pill. They publicized the need for reliable contraception and helped to fund doctors and scientists who gradually perfected the methods. Planned parenthood ran clinics and publicized the availability of effective contraception as well as providing help in fertility and family planning issues. PBS has prepared a timeline to show the development of contraception. 

Having the means to control fertility changed people’s lives. Birth control allowed women and couples to maintain healthy families they could support. Gradually the repressive laws that prevented people from leading healthy, satisfying sex lives were discarded. States could no longer forbid marriage between people of different races, or people of the same sex. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that individuals had the right to privacy in making intimate decisions. Since that time, women and men have had the right to choose their partners, to decide when to have children and raise them, to limit the number of children they had, or to choose not to have children.

By 2022, the world seemed safer for women. Most of us thought our rights were settled and secure. But we were wrong. In a devastating decision, the Supreme Court abruptly declared that it had all been a mistake. A majority of the Court stripped women of the right to choose whether or not to carry a fetus to birth. Who knows what rights they may decide to take away next? The right to get married? The right to decide the number of children they have? The right to choose their partner? 

America’s Founding Fathers believed people had the right to pursue happiness, but it seems our courts have decided that legislators can determine what form of happiness we are allowed to choose even in our most intimate family relationships. Legislators who know nothing about the science of how pregnancy occurs and the complexity of fetal development are given the power to impose their religious beliefs on all of us. Without any factual basis, they can determine who will receive appropriate medical treatment and who will not when complex issues of life and death occur.

Surely this is not what Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers had in mind when they declared that each of us has the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Future justices will look back on the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as a low point for the Supreme Court. The right to privacy is worth fighting for. We must let legislators and justices know that free people do not easily surrender their rights. The struggle to preserve our freedom is only beginning. We will win it by voting in every election and electing candidates who believe in individual freedom for each of us.  Americans deserve no less.