Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Muscles rippling, Irish actor Paul Mescal charges across cinema screens in the film Gladiator II, roaring: \u201cThis is about survival.\u201d He might have taken inspiration from real-life warriors in his home country, like housewife Ann McStay who had 13 children by the age of 31, including four sets of twins. Facing a furious rhino in front of an emperor, as Mescal\u2019s gladiator does, surely pales in comparison to McStay\u2019s daily life.In 1969, McStay won Housewife of the Year \u2014 a long-running but now defunct annual competition broadcast on Irish national television. It is now the subject of a documentary that feels like ancient history, even though it is not. Judging by the laughter and chatter among the largely middle aged and upwards audience at the cinema where I saw Housewife of the Year in Dublin, many women can relate. McStay was apparently left alone to wrangle her children when her husband was out downing pints. \u201cThe more kids I had, the more he receded into the pub,\u201d she says in the film. The contest, in which housewives held hands and twirled in their frocks with host Gay Byrne, judged the women on their cooking skills and posed questions about where they met their husbands. At stake was a cash prize and a cooker. It was only scrapped in 1995, the year before Mescal, 28, was born.By contrast, the annual Irish Rose of Tralee beauty pageant has been going strong for 65 years. Prizes include \u20ac25,000 euros of world travel, a plug-in hybrid car and a year\u2019s hair styling. Applications for the 2025 edition are now open.Housewife of the Year, and another new Irish film, Small Things Like These, starring Oscar winner Cillian Murphy, about the cruelty of Ireland\u2019s notorious church-run laundries for unmarried women, movingly depict how far Ireland has come. The last infamous Magdalene laundry \u2014 a hulking, haunting presence in Dublin\u2019s inner city \u2014 closed in 1996.Historian Diarmaid Ferriter says Small Things Like These is \u201cbathed in Dickensian darkness\u201d. Yet the pain of this chapter in Ireland\u2019s past is still unresolved. A compensation scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes only opened last year and preliminary digging and preparatory work has begun at the site of a mother-and-baby home in Tuam, County Galway, ahead of plans for a grisly excavation of 796 babies buried there.While Ferriter challenges Small Things Like These\u2019s depiction of modern Irish history as \u201cone giant, black cloud\u201d, a country that last year failed to pass a referendum updating the constitutional description of a woman\u2019s \u201cduties in the home\u201d is not always as progressive as it likes to think.The flawed wording of the referendum, which led to its comprehensive rejection, \u201cinadvertently showed how misogynistic the state still is\u201d, says Deirdre Foley, a researcher on women\u2019s working lives in Ireland.The National Women\u2019s Council also points out that \u201csignificant barriers\u201d to abortion remain, despite its legalisation in 2019. And while a ban on married women holding public sector and many private jobs was abolished in 1973, the prospect of pregnancy can still discourage investors from betting on female entrepreneurs, one recently told me.Still, modern women can take heart at some significant changes to political life in Ireland in the past few years. There has yet to be a female taoiseach, or prime minister, but three parties \u2014 the main opposition Sinn F\u00e9in, Labour and the Social Democrats \u2014 are all led by women.\u00a0One, the Social Democrats\u2019 Holly Cairns, gave birth to her first baby on election day last November. Irish women are also celebrating a fighter who emerged victorious from a harrowing gladiatorial struggle of her own last year. Hairdresser Nikita Hand from Dublin won a civil rape case against Irish mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor in a case that prompted an outpouring of solidarity with her and a surge in calls to the Dublin\u2019s rape crisis centre.The country is determined to keep pressing for change. As the marchers who gathered at a rally after Hand\u2019s verdict chanted: \u201cWe support survivors here.\u201djude.webber@ft.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Muscles rippling, Irish actor Paul Mescal charges across cinema screens in the film Gladiator II, roaring: \u201cThis is about survival.\u201d He might have taken inspiration from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":174238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-174237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174239,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174237\/revisions\/174239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}