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TO US TODAY, a competition to select the best housewife in Ireland seems strange, retrograde, and maybe even darkly humorous. (It certainly brings up thoughts of the Lovely Girls Competition in Father Ted.)

But as a new documentary of the same name shows, the Housewife of the Year competition was a major event on the Irish calendar from 1968 until its demise in 1995.

It attracted women from across the country to compete and be judged on their housekeeping skills (like ‘budgeting effectively’ and ‘preparing a simple meal’) as well as how they performed in an interview. From 1982 the event was televised and included a ‘personality’ interview live on stage with broadcaster Gay Byrne.

It was like the Rose of Tralee, but for married mothers. The overall prize was cash, while the prize at the regional finals was a gas cooker (for many years, it was sponsored by Calor Gas).

The documentary about the event, directed by Ciaran Cassidy (Jihad Jane, The Moderators), focuses on 10 competitors and their individual stories. Growing up in Cavan, Cassidy was aware of Housewife of the Year as one of his neighbours had taken part. “I knew the big deal it was at the time, and it was in the local papers,” he says.

He was drawn to making a documentary about the competition after spotting the potential in archive footage from it. “It was clearly something that could be quite powerful, but we just weren’t sure if there was enough archive – or if the women wanted to talk.”

The initial research by Cassidy and his producer Maria Horgan involved getting in touch with some of the participants. “It was a laborious process, because it involved the National Archives, getting old Women’s Way [magazine issues], then getting the list of who was in the competition that year, and then trying to track them down,” he says.

Once they had funding for the film (which came from Screen Ireland, RTÉ and others), they reached out to more participants and Cassidy began visiting them at home to do audio interviews. From here, they had a sense of the women’s stories and the basis from which they could plan the filmed interviews.

Women’s voices

At the centre of the documentary are the voices of the 10 women. Cassidy lets them all gradually reveal their own stories, and it’s this that is the most remarkable part of Housewife of the Year.

Through them, we get to discover what motivated women to take part in Housewife of the Year, the opportunities it gave them – and how some of them have changed their thinking about the event over the years. Each of the women has a personal story that links into Ireland’s treatment of women over the decades. 

Some of their stories are sad, and even disturbing. For example, one woman, Ellen Gowan, was sent to a Magdalene Home in Waterford after a pharmacist reported photographs she took of herself and some friends while they were hanging around with boys to the local priest. A story like that “does stop you in your tracks”, says Cassidy.  

Another woman, Ena Howell, talks about being born in a mother and baby home and the impact this had on her life.

Through these personal narratives, the film shows the specific pressures on women in Ireland over the decades: how the marriage bar meant until 1973 many women had to leave their jobs once they got married; how the ban on contraception meant that until 1979 women had little options for family planning; and how taking care of the home and children often fell entirely down to them. As the documentary underlines, roles for women were far more tightly circumscribed in society compared to today.

Yet for all that women were expected to do in the home, their work in this realm did not always feel acknowledged. The Constitution said – and still says – that by her life within the home “woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”. But that didn’t mean being a housewife was celebrated.  

So while the idea of a Housewife of the Year might feel diminishing to us now, the documentary shows it was nonetheless a chance for women to be recognised for all they did in the home. It gave them the chance to have a day for themselves, to stand on stage and talk about their lives, and to have it publicly acknowledged all that they did to keep the family going.

This tension between celebrating women and keeping them trapped within a certain role is threaded throughout the film. As Margaret Carmody, who won Housewife of the Year in 1978 says, the event was a “day out” instead of being at home caring for five young children.

But she also says in the documentary, regarding how women were treated in Ireland at that time: “Why did we go along with all these things? Women were definitely the lesser people.”

By the early 1990s, a few decades on from the emergence of the women’s movement in Ireland, there was more analysis of gendered roles in Irish society. With a female President since 1990, and more opportunities for women in the workplace, Housewife of the Year began to look seriously outdated.

The final Housewife of the Year event took place in 1995. It was replaced by Centra Homemaker of the Year, which was also open to men. But this iteration didn’t last long.

Capturing a generation

The documentary officially reaches cinemas today, and reaction to the preview screenings so far has been positive and often emotional, says Cassidy. “People are really resonating with it. I think people get the tone of it, which was the thing that we as a team worked really, really hard on.”

That balance of tone is key to the documentary – it’s never patronising towards the women, which could have happened in another documentarian’s hands. 

“It’s about capturing who they are and how they feel about these events at that time,” Cassidy says. “It was about finding a balance. You don’t want to be seen as taking it in any way lightly, that you are making a joke out of it. You don’t want to make it feel too earnest.”

Wildcard Wildcard

Cassidy and the rest of the team wanted to ensure their documentary had nuance. “There is stuff which people were surprised about, like how positive a lot of the women feel about the show, and that was something we had to include.”

“I think everybody looks back on things in the past in different ways, because you lived through it. And that was something that we respected with the women,” adds Cassidy. “We chat to women like Margaret Carton or Margaret Carmody, and they talk about how they changed their opinions [about how women were treated in society] – I think that was something that we felt represented the country itself. But also, it was very honest of them.”

Housewife of the Year depicts an Ireland from the past, but it’s also an Ireland that’s within touching distance of today. While watching it, you reflect on how we live now – and what we might look on with a critical eye in the not too distant future.

Housewife of the Year is in cinemas from today (Friday 22 November) nationwide. A special screening will take place at the Light House Cinema at 6.15pm this evening with a Q&A featuring Ciaran Cassidy and several of the documentary participants.