Second-wave feminism was key to subverting the head-and-master regime, and constitutional sex equality provisions gave birth to an inclusive gender constitutionalism, which, by overcoming family exceptionalism, affirmed the need to produce gender-neutral legal orders and to suppress marital-status discrimination. Two variants of the inclusive paradigm were shaped: one, prevalent in the United States and with a focus on combatting gender stereotypes that limited women’s market options (assimilationist workerism), and another one (maternalist accommodationism), better suited for constitutional regimes combining sex equality with motherhood/family protection mandates and seeking not only to allow but also to accommodate women’s pregnancy and motherhood-related needs. In confronting women’s claims to reproductive autonomy, constitutional orders had to rely on constitutional interpretations and gave way to radically different constitutional architectures around abortion, with the right to abortion (based on privacy) appearing in one tradition (as exemplified in US constitutionalism) and the duty of motherhood (based on the protection owed to the fetus) being affirmed in the other (as exemplified in German constitutionalism).

The impact of idealized myths of femininity, including the trope of woman-as-nation, is addressed through embodied mythmaking as a consideration of the reiteration, reperformance and reinscription of myths on and through the body. Stasis and containment define violent mythmaking, yet the chapter also looks to the possibility of myth’s liberating and utopian function. Counter to the unhomely experience which marks woman’s displacement outside of culture, the introduction proposes the potential for women’s mythmaking to reconceive spaces, myths, and theatrical forms which accommodate female expression. The assertion of a creative female corporeality redresses scholarly neglect of female bodies; both their creativity and their histories. The introduction addresses the overarching question of this book, namely how to ‘house’ the body of women’s work in Irish theatre, and proposes a new paradigm, the genealogy, as a means of remodelling our understanding of the development of Irish theatre. Deploying a feminist genealogy enables the assertion of a coalition of women in Irish theatre united by their unhomely experience and mobilized through the collective action of embodied mythmaking.

Chapter 1 provides the background for the story told in the book. In the nineteenth century, when mobilizing to ban abortion, physicians insisted that outlawing the procedure would strengthen the traditional family and improve the nation’s genetic stock by forcing Anglo-Saxon women to have more children. While abortion was illegal for decades, physicians still performed the procedure, justifying it as necessary to save women’s life. But in the 1940s and 1950s, obstetric care improved, making it harder to invoke this justification. Doctors organized to seek the reform of abortion laws, initially arguing that reform would improve women’s health. In the 1960s, however, reformers also argued that legal abortion would prevent the birth of severely disabled children and preserve scarce environmental resources. In the 1960s, as groups formed to defend criminal abortion laws, pro-lifers emphasized arguments about a right to life as a way to expand their movement beyond its existing Catholic membership. As more feminists joined the abortion-rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, grassroots activists demanded the outright repeal of all abortion restrictions, and reformers emphasized rights-based claims of their own. Roe v. Wade made rights-based claims even more important to the discussion.