Lesbian activism

The emergence of the second wave of the women’s movement in Ireland tends to be associated chiefly with campaigns concerning reproductive rights and equality in employment. Against this backdrop, the ways in which the women’s movement became a focus for the sexual liberation of women in Ireland from the 1970s onwards has received little attention. For much of the twentieth century, Irish society was dominated by repressive social and cultural attitudes to sexuality in general. The women’s movement addressed this silence in a number of different ways – in particular, consciousness-raising groups became a forum for Irish women to express and discuss their sexuality in a more open fashion. Consciousness-raising groups were some of the first “safe spaces” in which Irish lesbians and bisexual women began to define and address their sexuality in a more open way for the first time in 1970s Ireland.