Introduction: women writing work

Abstract

“I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” So wrote Oscar Wilde, in his characteristically glib and stylish manner. The idea of a world without work might well jar with our contemporary minds, as indeed it might have with the working classes of Wilde’s own times. Recent world events have put conventional forms of work under strain as well as highlighting forms of work we might previously have taken for granted. We might detect a distorted echo of Wilde in the title story of Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (2019), which depicts an unpaid job placement scheme at a garage in rural Ireland. It opens with the lines: “The schemes were for people with plenty of time, or people not totally unfamiliar with being treated like shit. I was intimate with both situations.” In this special issue, we seek to consider a variety of representations of work across recent Irish writing, spanning Wilde’s world without work and Flattery’s sense of worthless work while also highlighting Irish writing which moves away from traditional understandings of work, challenging and troubling them. This is a special issue which seeks to re-politicise work in its various and heterogenous forms, especially as it is rendered across literature. Specifically, we are interested in Irish women writers’ literary engagement with work. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how the so-called “second shift” is still a reality of women’s lives, despite professions to gender equality. To take just two examples, the majority of homeschooling over lockdown was performed by mothers rather than fathers, and, in our own field, female academics’ submissions to peer-reviewed journals fell sharply over lockdown as those of their male counterparts rose. For all the changes the pandemic may have wrought on the ways in which we work, work remains, like all other areas of patriarchal society, fundamentally gendered. In Kathi Weeks’ words: “To say that work is organised by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed and recreated.” We contend that this foundational gendering of work has significant implications for all forms of labour carried out by women – from waged work to domestic and emotional labour to creative practice – and that more general trends in how we view work in various phases of social development are refracted through this gendered lens. As editors and contributors, we take work to be a multivalent, intricately connected entity that cannot be considered within one domain or discipline alone. Its many meanings, broadly (although not exclusively) differentiated in this issue between economic, domestic, and creative work, are at play across the articles collected here. Although, in what follows, we parse economic, domestic, and creative work under distinct headings,