We see you, writing us out of history. Again.

The radio was on this weekend while I was in the kitchen. I was doing about seven different things at once at the time so I’m not sure what show it was or who was on it, but it was some male author or playwright or actor or some such being interviewed on it by a male presenter. The interviewee was being asked about his favourite authors and was predictably listing off Joyce and Beckett et al, and talking about taking part in a production of Waiting for Godot when younger with a listing of his male relatives and how lifechanging it all was and it suddenly occurred to me that what I was listening to was the ongoing act of removing all women writers and thinkers and playwrights and artists and dramatists and actors from the accepted list of ‘important’ work yet again.

We see it everywhere really; male bloggers and self-appointed, as well as actually appointed ‘political analysts’ only commenting and retweeting and talking to one another in their all-men’s social media echo chambers that may as well be the all-men’s exclusive social clubs of yesteryear and not even noticing that the voices of women and other not male people are missing from their conversations. It becomes particularly obvious when they start offering their (generally incredibly facile and poorly thought-out) opinions on women’s bodies, women’s health, and women’s rights as though they and their opinions were both revolutionary and also the final possible say on the matter. We see you.

We see you, men of the left who wouldn’t give up a platform to a woman even if you were paid to, suddenly proclaiming that the women of 1916 are revolutionary unsung heroes and listing all of their names and achievements; a list you have absolutely definitely lifted from the academic research of other women of today whose work you didn’t even credit in  your oh-so-feminist shout-out.

We see you, men who call yourselves feminists who absolutely Never Ever even think to include a single solitary work by a woman in any of your social media listings of your absolutely favourite, groundbreaking writers, artists, social commentators, thinkers, musicians, and creators. You claim you think we’re people too; just not people with anything of import to ever say about the world.

We see you, male curators of this year’s performances in the Abbey Theatre who decided that not a single solitary play by a single solitary woman was worth including in their year long celebration of Irish theatre. Teresa Deevy‘s entire body of work was utterly forgotten by an Abbey Theatre of 1937 onwards, who found her too uncomfortably revolutionary and feminist in Dev’s Ireland; the same is happening with the women writing and directing and performing plays in Ireland of 1990 onwards as their work, our work is being overlooked and ignored all over again by the men who continue interviewing each other and deciding that each other’s work and each other’s opinions are what is canon and important and Worth Reading.

We see you, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Nell McCafferty, Teresa Deevy, Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Nuala O’Faolain, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, Jennifer Johnson, and many many others and your works being written out of history, out of the context of 20th century Ireland, and left to gather dust. We see you Rosaleen McDonagh, Belinda McKeon, Sarah Clancy, Rita Ann Higgins, and the many other vivid, radical, angry women’s voices of 21st century Ireland who are only ever treated as the ‘other’ voice, writing from the edges; never as though their narratives were a genuine and driving one, on which entire stories and entire movements could be centred.

We see you.