Making Visible the Invisible
By Dr Antonia Hart
One of the things #VisibleWomen2020 champions is making visible those women whose stories have never been told. Close to my heart are those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women in business, who have had little or no share in recent reassessments of women’s historical role in Ireland. There’s endless pleasure to be had, too, in exploring similarities with their entrepreneurial Belgian sisters, as creative, as hardworking, as tenacious.
The official record, in Ireland, can hide the truth of such women’s stories. The census recorded Kathleen Daly as having no occupation at a time when we know from her letters to her future husband, Tom Clarke, that she was running a hugely successful dressmaking business in Limerick. Someone struck through the space allowed for ‘Occupation’ for Mary Andrews although she was running a shop in Terenure and, in the words of her son Todd Andrews, ‘made enough to provide a rent-free ho