June levine - Sisters: The Personal Story of an Irish Feminist

O ut of the South circular road she came, a most improbable citizen outlaw. Down the grand canal she sailed, a designer-label galleon, in lipstick and high heels. Up the wooden staircase to Margaret Gajs restaurant she walked, in 1970, to join the other eleven founder members of the Irish womens Liberation Movement. When the law is unjust, the place of every just person is outside those laws, and June Levine placed herself immediately outside such laws as those which made the use of contraception illegal in Ireland, punishable by penal servitude.

She faced jail sentence and death threats, troubled the waters of state and church, then brought friends home for dinner, a bubble bath and breakfast in a bed of fresh linen.

Therell be guards on duty, June, you might have to run. Should you be wearing that kind of gear?

Should, shouldnt... she gave her trademark Jewish shrug.

June was the first of us to die, in 2008, aged seventy-five.

She had risked her own murder when she gave shelter to Lyn Madden. Lyn testified against the pimp for whom she worked, John Cullen, who had burned three women to death in the house of a former prostitute, hoping thereby to silence all who worked for him. There was a 24-hour police guard on Junes house during the year that she gave sanctuary to Lyn.

She defied the death threats and wrote Lyn, the definitive story of murder, rape and prostitution in Ireland.

She never stopped working to achieve Jerushalayim Shel zahav, the golden city on the hill. We who survive are not there yet. Next year in Jerusalem, June. For you, it is now the Gaelic lament:

S mo laoch, mo ghile mear.

Farewell brightness. Farewell, thou good and faithful citizen outlaw. Goodnight, sister dear.

***

Her first book, Sisters (1982), an account of the founding years and founders of the movement, is a seminal work. June was the first of us, in contemporary times, to place value on the written word, which is why she was selected for the honour of contributing editor, in 2002, to the Field Day Anthologys section on modern feminism.

Though much has changed, it is useful to go back to 1971, to see how utterly so. That was when we took the Contraceptive Train to Belfast. We could not obtain every device that we wished to illegally import back to Dublin crucially we could not get the contraceptive pill. We bought aspirin instead, to declare to the customs officers in Dublin, on the reasonable assumption that those men in uniform would not be able to tell the difference, never having themselves seen a contraceptive pill. We were right. They mistakenly identified the aspirin as contraband and tried and failed to seize them.

Contraceptives are sold today on supermarket shelves in Ireland. Modern safe sex ads on television show a mother calling upstairs to her daughter, who is in bed with a male partner, Have you taken your pill? The government is currently devising legislation that will recognise same-sex civil union. The Dil has agreed to make cervical-cancer vaccine available, free of charge, to girls of twelve, when the economy picks up as all too often, females must wait.

Far too many advances have been made slowly, agonisingly, forged on the anvil of individually punished females, whose names toll down the doleful decades that came after the visit of Pope John Paul to Ireland in 1979. The joy that greeted that decent mans arrival airports were closed, ports shut down, skies were cleared for his arrival and a million people gave him a vast hosting in Phoenix Park was viciously parleyed after his departure into a crusade against abortion. The country was torn apart in uncivil war between 1981 and 1983, which saw three governments come and go before a referendum was passed which conferred constitutional protection on the foetus and gave it equal status with the host mother. Catholic Bishop Cassidy declared that the most dangerous place in the world is in a womans womb.

One only has to say Joanne Hayes, Ann Lovett and Eileen Flynn to invoke flashbacks of their crucifixion by state and church. In 1982, schoolteacher Eileen Flynn was sacked from a convent school because the baby to which she gave birth was deemed incontrovertible evidence of her contravention of the Catholic ethos. She was not then married to the man she loved because divorce was not available to him.

In 1984, fifteen-year-old Anne Lovett died in hiding, alone, as did her baby, while giving birth on the stony ground of a Marian shrine in Granard. She was not married.

Joanne Hayes, a single mother of one, who gave birth in a field to another baby which died immediately, was wrongfully accused of killing both it and a second baby whose corpse was found a hundred miles away. She was hauled before the infamous Tribunal of Inquiry into the Kerry Babies case.

Their ordeals made Junes account of vibrant sisterhood in the seventies seem like golden years. Worse was to follow.

The X Case which erupted in 1992 brought the shamed country to its reluctant senses. A fourteen-year-old suicidal girl, who had been raped by a neighbour, was brought to England by her parents for an abortion. They hoped to use the DNA of the aborted foetus as evidence in court. The Irish Attorney General ordered them home they obeyed and the child was interned in the country while the Supreme Court hastily considered the matter. It upheld the right to abortion where there was a threat to the life, as distinct to the health, of a female. A subsequent referendum conferred on women the right to information about abortion within Ireland, and the right to travel abroad for one, and the limited right to an abortion in Ireland if the expectant mother can indeed prove that she is suicidal. The threat to a mothers mental health is still considered insufficient grounds for termination, even when she is carrying an unborn baby which has such physical defects that it will die shortly after birth.