What Our Grannies Got Right About Womanhood

As a young girl, I grew up heavily influenced by my grandparents. My mam worked all week so I was lucky enough to be half raised by four beautiful people who all had an impact on my life for the better. I wanted to focus on my grandmothers, as they’ve taught me so much about myself through their own teachings and how they lived their lives.

My grannies were two very different people, but they shared important common ground: they are profoundly strong, kind, dignified country women. They also lived by an unspoken rulebook that was passed down to the women of their generation. This rulebook held some timeless knowledge that I still like to intertwine with my own life today. However, there are also a handful of aspects that need to be left in the past.

Chrissy, or ‘Gick’ as I call her, always keeps a warm fire on, serves up roast chicken dinners after school, bakes homemade bread almost every day, and has a huge heart and deep empathy for others. One of my fondest memories of Gick was how she comforted me when my beloved cat, Felix, died. He was my first proper pet, and after five years he was struck down by a car. My first heartbreak, Gick consoled me and explained that he was in heaven now, providing much-needed comfort at the time.

Gick taught me so much about kindness and holding space for others. This makes even more sense when you consider her career as a young woman. She has always inspired me to focus on my career, be determined and fight for my own corner. Gick didn’t get to finish school, but she fought her way through nursing school, working incredibly hard to pass exams and defy the odds. Gick made a lasting impression and went on to become a matron in a psychiatric hospital. Her empathy and passion for helping others is reflected in her work.

She was perfect for this role. She has always looked after others throughout her life, whether it was patients, her own parents and in-laws, her children, grandchildren and cats. Gick worked as a matron until she had to give up her career when she got married, as this was required of women at the time. Although her time working was short, Gick talks about it to this day as if it was yesterday and I bet if you put her back into the hospital, it would be as though she never left. She still races around like a woman on a mission, always busy and taking care of something.

My father’s mother is named Patsy, but I’ve always known her as “nanny.” Nanny was a bit of a “glam-ma” as she was still in her 40s when she became a granny, she’s always been chic and has a great eye for aesthetics. Known locally for her performances on stage, I’ve been at events where people talk about nanny’s great acting. She loves films and classical music, an artistic streak I always noticed. Nanny is crafty, she could sew, garden, and taught me how to knit and plait hair. She was a very feminine woman and a great homemaker.

I love that nanny takes great pride in her appearance, especially when going to events or mass. She wears beautiful coloured coats, berets, scarves and red lipstick. She always looks so put together. I feel as though women from her generation didn’t talk about self-love as it was seen as shameful, but nanny always displayed self-pride through her appearance. This wasn’t a form of vanity, but instead dignity and self-respect through presentation, which can be lost nowadays as fast fashion culture can make fashion lose its sense of effort and thoughtfulness.

Nanny used to try and help me with my appearance but that didn’t always go down well. When I was 14, I used to have really thick eyebrows. I have memories of getting my eyebrows waxed since primary school so this was obviously an ongoing thing. Once it got to around 2017, thick eyebrows were super trendy and of course I had to join in. I had a cheap dark brown brow pomade which I used to meticulously cover my eyebrows in, extending them and thickening them further. Nanny would go mad, at one point referring to them as slugs. I would go crazy because how dare my grandmother disrespect my trendy eyebrows?

Turns out she was correct, when your classy, elegant grandmother gives you advice, you should take it. She said that the dark eyebrows made me look angry and to embrace my natural eyebrows. I’ve given up eyelash extensions and a lot of other makeup products recently and I can see that seeing my natural face every day has been healing for me and I wish I listened to my granny sooner. However, generational trends will also clash with traditional beauty standards and maybe that’s just another aspect of having an involved, caring grandmother.

Two things both my grannies have in common are food and faith in particular. In both my grannies’ homes, food was a ritual. We all sat down together and they were both great cooks, especially when it came to traditional roast dinners, my favourite meal to this day. They also both baked nearly every day, Gick would make brown bread and boxty, nanny would make scones and apple tart.

Both treated this as an act of love and service, mostly to their husbands and children. Dinner together is a form of domestic intimacy, the social glue that allows families to discuss their days and maybe have a few cheeky arguments. Kitchen culture back in the day was more traditional and strenuous, but in the age of JustEat and eating alone with your phone, dinner together is a lost art for many households.

My grannies both have a very strong faith. The tradition spoke to me through prayers, lighting candles, and the sense of community that came with attending Mass. The time spent at mass with my grandparents would’ve been the foundation of my faith. Seasonal masses, ceremonies and funerals were attended, familiarising myself with ideas of God, life and death from a young age. I would love to hear the Angelus play on RTÉ, it takes me right back to my grandparents’ living room, hearing my grandad take a sharp inhale before uttering; “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Gick would always tell me to pray to Saint Anthony when I lost something, and somehow, I always found it no matter what. My grandparents would always light candles for me during exams and stressful periods, an act of love and protection through faith that I always appreciated, even when I lost my own faith. With my heart drawn to something bigger than I could describe or understand, I came back to my faith in recent years, and it reminded me how my grandparents’ faith was an anchor in my early relationship with God. The older generation’s act of performing rituals and holding belief is psychologically powerful, these small traditions or old-fashioned superstitions create continuity beyond life.

I can’t even begin to comprehend being in your 80s and being able to look behind you at all the memories you’ve made and all the people that exist as a result of you. With decades worth of life lessons and experience, this leads me to believe the older generation are (usually) wiser than the rest—and that their advice is worth taking.

But not everything is worth carrying forward. I feel extremely privileged to grow up in an age where I have full access to my education, career and can make my own choices in any sector of my life, without the input of a man. I have learned a lot from observing the minds of my grandmothers and what they’ve been through.

An idea I would leave in the past is the resistance to self-care for older ladies. From my experience, older ladies can be confused by the concept of women in the gym, getting facials, or their nails done regularly. This is of course a generalisation, but I’ve experienced this plenty of times through observing the older ladies in my life, and ladies I’ve encountered through years of retail experience. My philosophy is that this confusion around self-care is the aftermath of living a life centred on prioritising others rather than themselves.

My grandmothers were not just mothers, they were chefs, teachers, wives, all in small homes, juggling everything. A mother’s mental sanctuary wasn’t protected and they certainly didn’t get to enjoy the simple pleasures that we take for granted nowadays. Trained to serve everybody but themselves, older women may view today’s self-care trends as overindulgence. However, the act of self-care ends cycles of rejecting the self for many women.

Another aspect of the older generation of women I picked up on was their relationship with their body. Back in the day being skinny was a badge of honour and excess weight was a shameful burden. It’s not much better nowadays, but there’s been so much discussion on complex body topics since the 1940s. I’ve heard older women glorify the years they were their skinniest, but I can’t recall any male family members properly referencing their bodies, regardless of how big or small they were. I remember my grandad as a child was a big man, who thoroughly enjoyed nanny’s homemade apple tarts on a regular basis (good for him), however, nobody ever monitors a male’s body the way they would a woman’s.

Regardless of the fact that older women I know have survived childbirth, hysterectomies, surgeries, illnesses and years of raising children, cooking, cleaning and working every day, they’ve complained and sighed at their bodies, never satisfied with the power and life they’ve brought to this world through their bodies. When I observe the women in my family, I see nothing but strong, beautiful women, who I feel nothing but honoured to take after. I wish they spoke to themselves the same way.

Self-talk is the last aspect of the older generation that I wouldn’t be interested in taking advice from. The older women in my family are so humble towards themselves. I don’t know why, but humble self-talk is not something I do, I’ll never not talk well about myself in terms of my appearance, intelligence and other great aspects about myself. I have a lot of self-confidence and nobody can tell me otherwise, I know who I am.

Positive self-talk is a foreign concept to older ladies, I believe they may perceive it as boastful or perhaps embarrassing or rude. Uplifting self-talk is my best friend and has changed my life more than any self-help book could. The rumour is true, if you don’t talk well about yourself, no one else will. Don’t give anybody the burden of feeling like they have to constantly support your self-esteem in order to stop you from tearing yourself down. Uplift yourself and feel your life uplift with it. Shrinking yourself isn’t a benefit to you, confidence isn’t arrogance as a woman, but survival.

There is so much to be learned from the women before us. I take every conversation with my grandmothers as an opportunity to learn about them and myself. As the world changes every day, this much-needed reflection on life through the simple perspective of a hard-working country woman is necessary. This can also give us the chance to reflect on our own blessings, as although life in this day and age is not perfect, the women before us fought tooth and nail to get to where we are, and they deserve every respect, as they went through what we never had to. I choose to inherit the hard-working, homemaking spirit my grandmothers hold, maintaining appearances, community and faith while serving myself.

Words by Katie Walsh