Living With My Century

Professor Eda Sagarra, born in 1933, has been a significant and influential figure in Irish and European academic policy-making, contributing to the early development of the Erasmus scheme. Now, aged nearly 88, this memoir gives striking evidence of her self-discipline and formidable energy. This substantial memoir by one of the foremost female academics in Ireland starts with Sagarra's own perspective on committing her life story to history during the pandemic lockdown of 2020: The following memoir recalls for those born in the present century andschooled without the strong sense of Irish history, which defined ourpeople from the Great Famine of the 1840s until recent times, whatit was like to grow up as a woman in the twentieth century and seeka career in a man's world. It tries to re-capture as much what it feltlike to the person experiencing it as what was happening in society.Younger people today who read of the restrictions to which womenwere subject in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, will find it difficult tocomprehend why our generation and the one that followed oursdidn't challenge them. But probably the greatest contrast between theIreland of then and now was the room for manoeuvre - or rather theabsence of it. Today our lives are premised on a constantly changingworld. Ireland is more connected across the globe than ever it was.Today most people are mobile. The Ireland when I was young was inalmost every respect a static, hierarchical and paternalist society, onein which the accident of your birth would generally determine yourwhole life. No life is representative, but every person's experience isunique and worth recording for those who come after us. A south Dublin convent girl, Sagarra probes childhood and family, schooling, and UCD - with a perceptive commentary on the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. Her remarkable memory and shrewd eye for detail present at times a painfully honest account of family and in the upper middle-class world of Catholic south Dublin, revealing the profound influence of Europe during her postgraduate years in post-war Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Running through this forensic account of her academic life is a keen awareness of the constant if subtle barriers to female advancement. For contemporary critics reconstructing the history of gender equality in Ireland and for readers of feminist history, this makes for essential reading. Her description of retirement since 1998 is colourful, poignant and revealing, and her reflections on old age and youth resonate.