Asking Angela Macnamara: An Intimate History of Irish Lives

Description

Using the letters published by popular Sunday Press agony aunt Angela Macnamara between 1963 and 1980, this fascinating book offers a unique insight into intimate relationships within family life in Ireland.

It charts how dating and married couples negotiated a new understanding of their intimate and sexual lives, and shows how women rejected relationships where sex was a duty within marriage as opposed to an expression of love.

Table of Contents

1. Exploring Intimate Life, Past and Present
2. Introducing Angela Macnamara
3. Dancing, Dating and Courtship
4. Balancing Love and Lust in Irish Marriage
5. Transformations in Parenting
6. Same Sex Intimacies
7. Angela Macnamara: Sexual Traditionalist or Modernist?

About the Author

Paul Ryan is Assistant Lecturer in Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.