Witch or woman ahead of her time?

My Twitter handle is 'Biddy Early' - I chose it because I wasn't sure what exactly Twitter was when I joined and wanted to depersonalise my account. And I've always thought Biddy Early - a local 'witch' whose name was often invoked to send children scurrying to their beds when I was growing up in Munster - might have been more misunderstood than 'evil'.
Here's a little piece I put together for the Irish Independent on the myth of Biddy Early... and a stab at the truth behind the legend.


Harry Potter and his merry magic-makers have given witchcraft and wizardry a positive makeover. A few short centuries ago, being called a witch was far from desirable. In fact it could sign your death warrant. At least 50,000 Europeans, mostly women, were killed in a period between the 15th and 18th centuries on suspicion of practising “the dark arts”.

Historians now understand that religious mania, repressive social mores and other factors conspired to send these women to the hangman or the bonfire. Some were condemned on the accusing word of a jealous neighbour or, cruelly, because they may have had a mental or physical disability.

All in all, it didn’t do to be different. Women who stood out in society were to be feared. Such was the fate of the Co Clare woman Biddy Early, known to some as a talented herbalist and healer – and to others, Ireland’s most famous witch.

Even though she died over 130 years ago, the name Biddy Early still sends a frisson through certain of the older generations who grew up with tales of her spells and hexes. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only child in Munster to have scuttled off to bed with the threat of Biddy Early, rather than the bogeyman, coming to snatch any child found staying up too late.

Historian Meda Ryan writes in her biography, Biddy Early: The Wise Woman of Clare: “During my period of research for this book, I constantly came up against wide-eyed amazement: ‘Do you think you should? Do you think it’s alright? How well you’re not afraid!’ were some of the reactions.”

Legend would have it that Biddy was an entity worth fearing. She had four husbands
and outlived them all. She was said to converse with the fairy folk. She had a magic glass bottle that she used to foretell deaths and disasters. Her fury could freeze a horse in its tracks; in a good mood, she could save you or your prized livestock from death’s door.

Most notoriously of all, to her fellow county folk anyway, she allegedly put a curse on the Clare hurling team that stopped them winning the All-Ireland for over 80 years.

Perhaps it’s time for Biddy Early to get a makeover of her own. She was a flesh and blood person, born in Faha, near Feakle in east Clare, in 1798 to poor smallholders Tom and Ellen Connors. Ellen’s maiden name was Early, which Biddy apparently inherited – along with her mother’s talent for concocting herbal remedies for common ailments.

Folklorists collecting oral histories in the area from the late 1800s onwards were told that even as a young child, Biddy was marked out by her bright red hair. There were various superstitions about foxy-headded ladies. It was bad luck to meet a red-haired woman in the morning; the unannounced arrival of one in your dairy could stop your butter from churning properly. (The prejudice is thought to have come from the fact that red hair was introduced to the Irish gene pool by invading Vikings).

Biddy was also said to be in regular conversation with the fairy folk. Whether the little people were Biddy’s imaginary friends or not, at this time rural Ireland was awash in superstition and fear generated by turbulent social and political conditions.

Biddy had been born into the year when British Crown forces violently quashed a rebellion of the United Irishmen, killing up to 30,000 Irish people. Like most tenants existing on a small patch of land, the Connors made an insecure living and feared being evicted by their landlord. When Ellen died at 16 – legend later had it that Biddy asked her mother one day if she was not feeling well, and Ellen fell critically ill that very night – and Tom died six months later, Biddy was alone in a very inhospitable world for a young, uneducated Catholic girl.

She could no longer pay the rent and went to relatives in north Clare. That didn’t work out as apparently they didn’t take too kindly to Biddy’s reputation of being “away with the fairies”. The teenage Biddy ended up on the roads, turning up at one point as a domestic servant on the Clare estate of a Limerick landlord called Sheehy. At another time, her name went on the books in the workhouse in Ennis known euphemistically as the House of Industry. If Biddy later garnered a reputation for being a tough cookie, it’s not entirely surprising given the harsh nature of her early life.

Sheehy was a hard taskmaster and Biddy would have worked long hours at menial tasks but it was here that she was taught to read and write by another worker whose father had been a hedge school teacher. She also began to become known locally for her herbal cures, receiving visitors to her cottage who were looking for cures for various ailments.

The winter of 1916 brought more hardship for the then 18-year-old Biddy. After joining with other hard-pressed tenants of Sheehy to petition him to stop raising the rent to unsustainable levels, she was evicted for her insolence. That night, three of the other evicted tenants murdered Sheehy and burned his body. Although she was not mentioned in the subsequent trial for Sheehy’s murder at Limerick court, it became part of her growing notoriety that Biddy Early had warned Sheehy of his impending doom as he threw her out of her cottage.

The next time Biddy pops up in official records is in her early 20s when she marries a much older widower called Pat Malley, a farmer from near her native Feakle. Settled at last, she built up a solid reputation as a herbalist among her neighbours and also gave birth to at least one son, Paddy. Malley died when she was 25 and she went on to marry his son – her stepson – John.

The issue of Biddy’s husbands is one of those that marked her out as outside the pale of ‘normal’ society. John was also to die at a young age, and Biddy married twice more. Scandalously the last of these was a man in his 30s, while Biddy was 71. All four died while married to Biddy, something that obviously aroused suspicion in certain parts.

Biddy’s biographer Meda Ryan points out that there was probably a very banal and understandable connection between the deaths of John Malley and his father Pat. It was certified that John died of a “liver ailment”, and both father and son been known to be fond of the drink that Biddy’s wellwishers brought as presents. Healers traditionally didn’t accept money as payment for their remedies, believing that to charge for their talents would lead to their healing powers being taken away from them.

While Margaret Murphy, a woman whose father was a regular caller to Biddy Early’s house, told folklorists that “people were always bringing items like batches of bread, flour, home-made butter, as well as the drink”, the alcohol was generally low-grade whiskey and lethal poteen.

“Unfortunately, he drank more than was good for him,” writes Ryan of Pat, “because the house was never without bottles of poteen which people brought as gifts for cures.”

Biddy’s subsequent husbands, Tom Flannery and Thomas Meaney, also died after short illnesses but in their cases, it seems it was the age gap between them and the much older Biddy that caused consternation.

The Limerick Chronicle newspaper carried a fairly salacious report about her final marriage on July 29, 1869: “We understand that a marriage of an extraordinary kind was celebrated this week in Limerick by one of the parish priests, that of an old woman known as ‘Biddy Early’ who resides near Tulla, and who, among the peasantry, has the reputation of a witch or sorceress, who could cure all kinds of diseases, and such was her fascinating power over a fine young man… that she succeeded in inducing him to become her fourth husband.”

An openly sexual woman and Ireland’s first ‘cougar’ at that? She was clearly in league with the devil.

“I always think of Biddy as a very intelligent woman,” says Jane O’Brien, who recounts the tale of Biddy Early on her historical walking tours of Ennis. “She apparently made a very good living out of what she did.

“The police didn’t like her and the church didn’t like her – I always think she was a bit of a rebel. For a woman at that time especially, she went her own way. She used to drink and smoke and had four husbands so clearly she was a bit of a character.”

The connections with drink and general ‘high’ spirits continues today. There are Irish-themed pubs named after Biddy Early in far-flung cities from New York to Stuttgart and an, ahem, herbal plant called ‘Biddy Early’ won second prize at the High Times Cannabis Cup in 2003.

Far from being a devil-worshipper, Biddy was said to be quite spiritual and many believe she was psychic. Legend grew up around a famed blue bottle that she carried with her and which the fairies were supposed to given her son Paddy after he won a hurling match for them. She apparently used the bottle as a sort of crystal ball to predict future events – politician Daniel O’Connell famously visited her in 1828 to ask her advice on seeking election in Clare that year.

The bottle was thrown by a local priest into Kilbarron lake behind Biddy’s cottage on her death (although ‘authentic’ blue Biddy Early bottles pop up for sale on the eBay auction website from time to time).

With or without her bottle, her powers of healing - or at least the following and fame she had attracted because of her reputation as such - alarmed the Catholic Church. She was denounced from the pulpit and, understandably, stopped attending Mass. A Limerick doctor questioned her methods and in 1865, she was brought before a court in Ennis charged under the 1586 Witchcraft Statute. The case was dismissed “due to lack of sufficient evidence against the accused” because the prosecution couldn’t find a witness to speak out against her.

The interesting thing about the woman is that although she lived an extraordinary life in context of her social status and gender, she never really courted personal fame in the way the clergy suggested she did. When two separate men named racehorses after her for luck, she apparently visited them to ask that they not do so. Of course, the legend has it that when they refused, the horses came to a terrible end.

The Anglo-Irish folklore enthusiast Lady Gregory also had a hand in stirring up the legend by travelling to Feakle just 20 years after Biddy died to collect locals’ tales about her exploits. WB Yeats was said to be obsessed by her legend, and he references her in his Celtic Twilight poem first published in 1893, nineteen years after she died of natural, age-related, causes. The Catholic Church, too, had realigned themselves with her, her local parish priest Fr Andrew Connellan anointing her on the death bed. Fr Connellan was the man who supposedly chucked the ‘magic’ bottle away too – clearly, they were taking no chances.

The ruins of the cottage in which Biddy died are still standing in a field outside Feakle but they are overgrown and untended, somewhat like the real facts of her life. Evil sorceress or a New Age healer pilloried for her unconventional lifestyle?

A good reputation is not easily restored although some have tried. An Ennis man
called Bill Loughnane wrote this letter defending her honour to a newspaper after Clare ‘broke’ her curse on them by winning the 1995 All-Ireland hurling championship.

“Biddy Early is fondly remembered in Co Clare as an extraordinary woman who devoted her time to comforting and healing the sick. She is not known ever to have cursed anyone. She experienced some difficulty with one local clergyman of the day who, for reasons of his own, would have her labelled a ‘witch’… Biddy Early died in 1875 before the foundation of the GAA and long before there was any inter-county competition!”

• Biddy Early: The Wise Woman of Clare by Meda Ryan is available at www.mercier.com

Witches or wise women?
BRIDGET CLEARY: Bridget was a young farmer’s wife outside Clonmel, Co Tipperary, apparently considered uppity by her neighbours for her independent spirit – she designed her own clothes and wore an ostrich in her hat when other local women would be clad in their traditional black shawls. She and her husband Michael were childless after eight years of marriage and in 1895, believing her to be inhabited by an evil spirit, he tortured and burned her death in the hearth of their home with the aid of family and neighbours. Michael Cleary alleged she had disappeared “with the fairies” but was charged with her murder. He was found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for 15 years.

ANNE BOYLEN: Although officially executed for adultery against the English King Henry VIII, at that time a treasonable offence, in 1536, the whispering campaign against her had included accusations that she was a witch. It was alleged that she had supernaturally made Henry go impotent, had charmed her brother into committing incest with her and had miscarried a “monstrous” foetus.

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS: The infamous witch hunts in Salem, Massachussetts, America in 1692 led to the deaths of over 30 people and the imprisonment of 150. Now seen as a cautionary tale against religious extremism and mass hysteria, the evidence against the supposed ‘witches’ at the time rested on the rather incredible testimony of two young cousins, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams. Arthur Miller revived the awful events in his play The Crucible, using it as an allegory for the metaphorical witchhunts for Communists of 1950s McCarthyism.

ANNA GOLDI: The Swiss woman was the last person convicted and executed in Europe under witchcraft legislation. She was beheaded with a sword in 1782, 90 years after Salem. She was a live-in maid for rich Swiss families all her life and when she accused one employer of making sexual advances on her, he retaliated by saying she had cursed his daughter, causing her to become ill and spit up 100 needles.

The girls are back in town

Again, this is a post-dated, er, post. This was printed on September 8 as the fourth series of Mad Men began on BBC4. Looking forward to it coming to RTE in the new year.

By Susan Daly
Wednesday Sep 8 2010

Rolling Stone magazine likes its sexy covers and the current issue is very hot off the presses. It features the three lead female actors from TV series Mad Men -- January Jones (Betty), Christina Hendricks (Joan), Elisabeth Moss (Peggy) -- sitting pretty in the back seat of a car with co-star Jon Hamm, who plays the enigmatic Don Draper.

As one paper put it when the mag hit the newsstands, that's quite a Hamm sandwich. Then again, no one's really looking at the filling. While the male of the species think they call the shots in Mad Men's early 1960s world of casual sexism, the female characters are the fascination.

The first few series revolved around the question: 'Who is Don Draper?' The fourth series, which begins tonight on BBC4 and will be aired on RTE2 early next year, is more likely to ask 'What would Joan do?'

It opens in 1964, against the still male-dominated backdrop of Madison Avenue's advertising agencies. Real men keep mistresses in the city and a wife in the suburbs, close deals over lunchtime martinis and flirt with their secretaries when they swagger back to the office.

Even so, the times, they are a-changin'. The year 1963 saw the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the book that ignited the women's movement and criticised the notion that the perfect woman was a Stepford housewife. (A fate that Don's wife Betty has clearly become discontented with.)

For another thing, Don and his colleagues at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce are starting to have to consider the desires of women on at least a business level because at that point in America's history, women were becoming the ones to make most of the buying decisions in households.

It's a neat reversal of the first series when Don poses the question: "What do women want?" and to which his then boss Roger replies: "Who the hell cares?"

Well, you'd better get to caring, mister, and fast. The women of Mad Men are beginning to make their desires very clear indeed.

Peggy, formerly Don's secretary, has always worn her career ambitions on her sleeve. It didn't take her long to go from fear of operating a typewriter -- "It looks complicated"; Joan, then head of the secretarial pool, reassured, "But the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use" -- to nabbing a job as a copywriter, a job no woman had had in the office since World War II and there was a shortage of men.

Peggy has had a remarkable evolution from innocent ingénue to getting her own office with her name on the door. She's earned some respect from her male colleagues, a hard-won battle after her first clever piece of copywriting had one remark bemusedly: "It's like watching a dog play the piano."

But nothing ever comes easy in Mad Men and Peggy operates in a sort of no-woman's land.

She has had to give up her baby by office smarmpot Pete. She struggles with a social life in Manhattan, pretending to be an air-headed party girl so as not to scare off potential flatmates and telling a one-night stand that she is a secretary so that he won't be intimidated by her job.

When we last saw her, she was having a queasy sexual fling with a former colleague called Duck. In a way, she's the female Don Draper, reinventing herself but not quite able to escape her past but we still hold out hope that she's going to be the one to Have It All.

Cool-eyed WASP princess Betty was also on her way to escaping her gilded cage when we last saw her.

Bred to be the perfect social hostess, with her perfect children in her perfect split-level house in Winchester, Betty was the poster girl for what women were supposed to want in the 1950s.

Her decision to divorce Don at the end of series three reflects the general social upheaval of the 1960s (although not entirely understanding what shape her freedom should come in, she already has husband No 2 lined up).

She's not an easy character to like. She's spiteful, she's childish and she's a pretty terrible mother whose idea of discipline is to tell her kids to go watch television or lock them in the cupboard. And that's what's so delicious about Betty's character to the modern viewer: she blows the myth of perfect womanhood out of the water.

Of course, you can't mention the word perfect without mentioning Joan Holloway. Her Amazonian curves, or rather those of the actress Christina Hendricks, have made her part of the Mad Men iconography. Joan knows she has a body to die for, and she's not afraid to use it, gliding around the Sterling Cooper offices like a battleship with a particularly magnificent prow.

Yet she too has proven to be more than the sum of her considerable parts.

She might conform to what men want but she's fiercely independent, razor-sharp and worldly-wise which is why her submission to her horrible new husband has been so heart-breaking. In her soul, Joan is a warrior but in society, she's a woman past the age of 30 who must be married or be damned.

With her return to work at the new ad agency at the end of the last series -- and hubby's possible shipping off to Vietnam now that he's joined the army as a medic -- Joan is thankfully showing signs of rising from the ashes of her bad marriage.

It's all so intriguing because in season two of Mad Men, the creatives at Sterling Cooper decided during a campaign for Playtex bras that all women could be divided into two camps, sexpot or wife, Marilyn or Jackie.

Clearly, the Peggys, the Bettys and the Joans are too busy making their own moulds to fit into either.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/the-girls-are-back-in-town-2328995.html

Are we all white, there?

The bride wore white and the groom wore a proud grin from ear to ear.

The photograph of Brian O'Driscoll and Amy Huberman in the porch of a church in Leitrim in their finery is shaping up to be the most reproduced wedding pic of the year.

The image of a beloved sportsman and his beautiful bride subscribes to all the fantasies. It's easy to imagine this generation of Irish girls studying the picture of Amy in a princess-skirted dress, and vowing: one day, my prince too shall come.

It's not entirely about pulling Prince Charming: for girls, little and not-so-little, it's mostly about The Dress. We know that the wedding has not gone out of fashion. More than 19,000 couples will tie the knot in Ireland this year. One might assume, however, that the traditional white frock might be going the same way as the dowry.

After all, our society has changed immeasurably in the past 20 years. Many people have cohabited before marriage. Some have bought houses or already have children. Certainly, it's a given that there are not too many virgins walking down the aisle these days, any more than there's a virgin groom waiting for them at the altar. Yet the big white/ivory/cream/any-shade-of-pale dress is still the focus of the big day for the majority of brides.

Even Sarah Jessica Parker has admitted that she regrets wearing a black dress to wed husband Matthew Broderick. "I would white it up," she said in 2008. "I'd wear a beautiful, proper wedding dress, like I should have that day." Ciara Elliott, editor of bridal magazine Confetti, says: "The big, white dress endures as the key element for most Irish brides. You can wear a beautiful dress for any nice occasion, but you only get to put on the white dress once and I think people feel special when they put it on."

It's this transformative effect that relationship counsellor David Kavanagh says is key to why most Irish women live modern, unfussy lives -- but have no problem becoming Princess Di for their wedding day. In his experience in running pre-marriage guidance courses, Kavanagh has noticed that Irish women are still very much influenced by traditional expectations of what 'looking like a bride' will do for them.

"Wearing that white dress conforms to the fantastical notion of beauty we would have had from when we had fairy tales told to us as children by our parents," he says. "When people put these dresses on, they feel a sense of joy because endorphins are released as they tap back into those good memories of being told that this is the happy ending." For some brides, the psychology of wearing the white dress is simple: it's easier to wear,

than not to. "Some people wear alternatives but they are a small percentage," says Ciara. "We are a traditional country and when it comes down to it, people feel pressure to do the traditional thing. I knew a woman who was going to wear a pink dress, but her mum was horrified and she buckled."

It's not just pushy mums who are at it. Celebrity PR agent Joanne Byrne said in an interview last month that when her client Cecelia Ahern had her secret wedding, the media were obsessed with one detail. "The only question I asked the couple was who did Cecelia's dress, as I was being inundated with that question," she said. (Oscar de la Renta, if you're interested.)

The irony is that the white wedding dress might be seen as a tradition -- but it's not as time-honoured as we think. Blue was traditionally associated with purity, but, in fact, the earliest wedding gowns tended to be in plush, luxurious colours, like purple and red. In the Middle Ages, such expensive coloured dyes showed that the bride was coming from a family with money. The value of her purity was second to her value in cash.

Social media agony aunt Amanda Brown wore a strapless, linen two-piece to her civil wedding. "I couldn't wear the traditional white dress," she says. "I find that convention oppressive. You are dressing yourself up as chattel: it's a tradition I could do without being a part of."

There are some changes afoot in the world of bridalwear, however. Some cash-conscious ladies are steering away from the dressing-up box clearly marked 'Bridal'.

"The special dress has retained its value in the same way as the engagement ring has," says Tanya Grimson, stylist and fashion editor at Irish Brides. "But I am being asked a lot by readers: 'Who could make me something bespoke?' Designers who are not bridal designers are being asked to create something because people want to be able to wear it again.

"There will always be the die-hard traditionalist who wants the tiara, the veil, the pearls and the Gina shoes. But the long veil is gone for most brides. The idea of unveiling yourself to your husband, as if there is no sex before marriage ... oh, please."

IT'S NOT ALL WHITE
Meet some brides who chose an alternative to the big, white wedding dress.

BARBARA SCULLY Home-maker, writer and blogger

"I was 34 when I married, so I felt I was quite old -- well, relatively. I also already had a daughter. I didn't go for subtle, though: I wore a Grecian-style traffic-light-red dress. I'm 6ft tall and when I came down the stairs at home that morning, my two brothers said, 'Jesus, you're Mighty Aphrodite'. It must run in the family. My mother got married in a red suit in the 1960s."
PRISCILLA DIAMOND Financial controller

"Being from Galway but getting married in Kildare, I thought it would be nice to bring the Galway colours with me. I didn't try on any all-white dresses, but I did have a few panic attacks as the big day got closer, wondering if people would wonder, 'What was she thinking with that dress?' But I loved it and it was the dress for me."

MICHELLE WYATT Soap-maker

"I didn't go for the traditional white dress because I'm not a 'traditional' person. I got married in a cave (Wookey Hole in Somerset, England), in November. I also think the whole white dress thing is a bit dated. It's meant to symbolise purity, and I think it's quite safe to say that nowadays most brides are not still virgins by their wedding day."

SOOZI HADJ LAZIB Project co-ordinator

"As I married my husband in his family home in Algeria, I wore traditional dress -- but it was a traditional Berber dress, as his family are of Berber [original ethnic group of North Africa] stock. I have definitely loved having more colourful pictures to look back on and show friends."

AISLING McGRANE PRO for Project Arts Theatre

"I love well-tailored clothes and have always loved the '40s look, so I guess it was inevitable I would be drawn to this dress. I saw it in Costume and I also thought that champagne was more flattering on the skin than traditional white. I chose a dress that I was comfortable in and can wear again, if I choose to."

ANNIE WEST Illustrator

"I just wasn't into the thought of a meringue, so, exasperated with trying to find something, I ended up spending a cool 40 quid on a lovely dress from an Indian shop and dressed up a very plain hat. I bought two dresses in Marks and Spencer for the bridesmaids Anna and my daughter Amy [also in the picture and now 19]. They were a bit too new-looking, so I soaked them in tea overnight to get a nice sepia effect."

-Susan Daly

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/pure-nostalgia-white-weddings-2262743.html
AND HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/fashion/its-not-all-white-2264396.html

Rollers on, elbows out

I recently went to see Ireland's first women's roller derby team during one of their hair-raising training sessions and reported on it for the Irish Independent. They might look sexy but, they say, roller derby is not about titillation for a male audience; it's feminism on wheels and, more importantly, a valid sport.
See what you think (Pic by Martin Maher).

SKIRTS, SKATES AND SCRAPES:
The rollerskate revival is uniting the sisterhood. Susan Daly on the sport that's sexy and tough.

A group of kids has just finished a sports session at a Dublin inner city community centre but they are reluctant to go home. They jostle for space on the staircase that overlooks the central gymnasium, peering through the glass for a glimpse of what is about to be unleashed below.

At exactly 7.30pm, the source of their excitement reveals itself. The door to the gym flies back and a line of women stream in on retro four-wheel rollerskates. They whizz around the polished wooden floor in tiny tartan skirts, hot pants and fishnet tights, their bulky knee and wrist pads giving them the air of a tribe of battle-ready warriors.

These are the Dublin Roller Girls, Ireland's first -- and so far, only -- rollerskate derby team. Banish all thoughts of roller discos. Roller derby originated in the US in the 1930s as a sort of skate marathon, and gained huge followings in the 1940s and '50s, but had fallen out of fashion by the 1970s. In its current state -- since it was revived in Austin, Texas in 2001 -- roller derby is a tough amateur sport.

There are now more than 400 leagues around the world. Although the Dublin Roller Girls (DRG) have only been training together since October of last year, they might soon be part of an all-Ireland league. A group is currently setting up in Belfast, with women in Galway, Cork, Tipperary and Limerick expressing interest in following in their tracks.

It's hard to describe the game, other than to say it will look like hell on wheels to those of a sensitive nature. Irish audiences will have a better grasp of it when the new Drew Barrymore-directed film Whip It! hits cinemas today.

The movie stars Juno's Ellen Page as a young Texan called Bliss, whose mom wants her to be a beauty pageant queen. But Bliss wants to break out of her small-town existence -- she finds her escape in the "skirts, skates and scrapes" sorority of roller derby in nearby Austin.

Self-expression is a huge part of the attraction to roller derby. All roller girls pick a personalised name. These nicknames, along with the punk-rock-cute outfits, help them climb into their on-track alter-egos.

So when she laces up her skates, Eilise, a wine importer employee, suddenly becomes Alice En'Rage. Teacher Christine is transformed into Scarlet Macabre. Grad students Dee and Sarah become Lil' Edee and Lady Axe-A-Lot; a Belladonna Blitzin' (psychology student Vivienne) and a Sue Killfester (aka facilities manager Eimear) shout to each other across the hall.

"There is a huge mixture of girls playing this," says Liz Clonan -- sorry -- Agent Provocative. "In the leagues internationally, you have some really crazy girls and you have some really girly girls and that all fits into their alter-egos.

"The names are just a bit of playfulness but they're also a bit provocative. I like to freak people out a bit on the track." Liz, by day, is a legal secretary.

The skirts might be short and the fishnet tights give track burn, but there is a sense the owner wears the outfit rather than the other way round. The tights are often accessorised by punked-up legwarmers; one helmet bears a 'Bite Me' sticker; another has a pair of handprints painted on the backside of her shorts. The effect is sexy-tough.

"They are hot girls and there is a derby style," says retail manager Ruth Hirsch (aka Feline Rowdy), one of the founders of the DRG, "but it's not about that. It's a sport.

"But it can get us attention and that's good because if you're saying, 'Oh, grassroots sport, all girls', some people will think that sounds a bit lame.

"The thing I love about derby is you literally have the tattooed punk girl with the piercings who has never been on a team, the girl who ducked out of PE in school. Then you have the girl who loved sport, playing side by side."

If this sounds like a reinvention of sisterhood, it might well be. On the night I visit, the DRG is hosting two Texan Roller Girl stars, Heather Villalobos (formerly Crasher) and Bloody Mary, aka Julianna Gonzales, executive director of the governing Women's Flat Track Derby Association. These are huge stars but, as goes with the spirit of the sport, when they met the Dublin girls at a boot camp in London they offered to drop in to their home town.

Tonight, Mary is gliding around the "starstruck" Dublin girls, offering tips and advice; Heather is showcasing some of her signature blocking moves.

Heather rejects the stereotype of foxy catfighting that might attract, say, a hopeful male spectator. "I have had experience of women who don't get along with other women and then find themselves in the middle of 16 other women running a business and they have to learn how to get along," she says, "That just has to be a good thing for women."

It is a no-man zone on track but there is room for men to help out in the backroom. Kitty Cadaver -- children's book buyer Christine O'Connor -- has gotten her fiancé Christopher Goggins (Coach Puppetmaster, to you) on board as coach alongside Alan Flaherty.

But essentially, sisters are doing it for themselves. "I do think there is more of a bond in derby because you eat, sleep, drink it," says Ruth. "It's not just a kickaround on a Saturday afternoon. I love the mix of girls and that the age group is so wide (the girls range from 21 to 30 but girls over 18 are welcome on 'freshmeat Sundays')."

The derby is self-funding -- through typically inventive ways like a metal music and cake sale evening -- and democratic.

Some of this camaraderie is reflected in Whip It!, which, naturally, the DRG has already seen a preview of. "But every one of our girls and other roller girls we've spoken to have had real goosebumps at the bit in the film where Bliss goes, 'You don't get it -- I am in LOVE with this'. It sounds corny -- but you just fall for it."


NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED:
They might love roller derby, but even the Dublin Roller Girls will admit that love can hurt -- a lot.

The basic set-up of roller derby is that two teams of five skate in formation around an oval track. Each team has one jammer whose job it is to outskate the four 'blockers' on the opposite team, and vice versa.

How they do this is subject to a number of rules but it's fair to say that heavy elbow action, jostling and body blocking are par for the course.

"My mother doesn't want to know about it," says Liz Clonan, "She just asks, 'Are you going rollerblading?' and I say, 'Yeah, I am'. You learn to fall properly, but you know, this is all at speed, so yes, you'll get a couple of bruises, but it's like your war wounds and you wear them proudly."

FIRST PUBLISHED HERE:
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/health-fitness/skirts-skates-and-scrapes-meet-our-roller-derby-girls-2127533.html
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/not-for-the-fainthearted-2127532.html

Feminism. So, like, not a dirty word.

My rant from Saturday's Evening Herald (the online link has gone AWOL)....

GOD bless the Rose of Tralee and all who sail in her.
Some people have a problem with the competition that this week saw a girl wrestle with a snake, another lip sync to Bon Jovi and – my favourite – a contestant who managed to fit her entire fist into her mouth.

The naysayers call the event outdated and insulting to women. They say that it perpetuates the over-rated value of ninny-headed femininity, so brilliantly skewed by Father Ted’s Lovely Girls episode.

I don’t agree. The party pieces said it all: don’t take this too seriously. It’s like the Blarney Stone – a bit of harmless tourist hokey-cokey. Everyone has a bit of a laugh, the contestants included, and the local economy gets a shot in the arm. Fine.

It’s not like Miss Universe or Miss World. I don’t care how many rocket scientists the organisers like to say are in the line-up of lovelies. Let’s face facts: the target audience is interested in what these women look like in a swimsuit, not what they know about nuclear fission.

But then the minute you start complaining about any representation of women, Rose or Miss, you know people are bracing themselves for the word: sexist.
You’re not allowed to use that word. It makes you a throwback, a burn-your-bra harridan, a man-hater. Sure, women are in charge now apparently. Men are emasculated by women who want too much sex, earn too much money, have too much control over the remote. Women in cutaway swimsuits are all they have.

Give me a break. Women are still second-class citizens in any developing country you care to inspect. And that is most of the world. They are oppressed by patriarchal regimes and religions that require them to be obsequious and invisible.

Even in our ‘developed’ society, there is some done, much much more to do. Men still earn a higher average wage for the same work. A survey just last year showed that women – even those in full-time jobs outside the home – still shoulder the burden of domestic chores and childcare.

Women do not have it all.

It makes me so angry to hear some idiot starlet or celebrity banging on about how they don’t like to call themselves a feminist. To them, feminism is a dirty word. They think it makes them sound hard and unattractive, and implies that they wear dungarees.

Well I am quite happy to say I am a big, dirty, unapologetic feminist. I like men – I even let them hold the door open for me from time to time without belting them with my handbag and calling them chauvinist pigs.

True feminism does not wish death to all males and the creation of an uber-race of Amazonian she-warriors. It wants equality for both sexes – and right now, the balance still tips heavily on the side of men.

To say that is not true is to stamp all over the grave of a woman like Nuala Fennell, who died earlier this month. Under her tenure as junior minister for women’s affairs and family law in the 1980s, she righted some of the very serious wrongs against women that were enshrined in Irish society.

The dizzy young things who think that it’s uncool to say you’re a feminist these days have come to take for granted the better lives that previous generations of politically-aware women secured.

And we could so easily slip backwards. Feminists fought for women to have control over their sexuality; now someone like Paris Hilton confuses sexual confidence with titillation for the boys. Just because I don’t have a problem with the Rose of Tralee doesn’t mean I can’t have a problem with Miss Universe.

That boxer Katy Taylor is only now getting the much-belated nod to compete in the Olympics shows that equality war is ongoing.

We think it ridiculous that women were once perceived to be too weak-minded to vote. You can bet future generations will look back and laugh at us.