Jean Wriggins
Spring 2022
Motivated by curiosity and love, Sadhbh came to the United States in 1963. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, Sadhbh moved to Paris when she was nineteen and spent two years there teaching English before coming to the United States. There, she met her sister, who lived in New York. She recounted experiences that seemed to her, upon her arrival, uniquely American: buying prepared food at Horn & Hardart and gazing up at the skyscrapers of New York. Originally planning on visiting for a year, Sadhbh and her sister traveled across the United States on a Greyhound bus from New York to California, seeing Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and El Paso before ending their trip in Los Angeles. While Sadhbh had planned to return to New York for a job, she remained in Los Angeles with her sister for a time, then moved to San Francisco.
Sadhbh describes her time in San Francisco as an adventure— she claims the city was “kind of the Wild West”— and also as transformative. She found professional opportunity working as a programmer, which she says would never have been available for a woman in Ireland at the time. While she was figuring out her sexual orientation, she found a community in the only lesbian bar in San Francisco, even with its strict police regulation. And she credits her time in San Francisco with her political development:
“[Maud’s] was the only lesbian bar in San Francisco…I met a whole community there. So, essentially, all of my political evolution occurred in San Francisco. The professional thing, in a sense, was very important too, because, Ireland, where I had come from, was very repressive to women.”
Sadhbh compared the professional opportunities she found in the United States with the expected role of women in Ireland in the 1960s: she described a newspaper ad for a government job in Ireland that contained a four-step pay scale, with married men at the top and married women at the bottom, in order to disincentivize them from working outside of the home. She explained how Ireland’s Constitution at the time recognized the special position of the Roman Catholic Church. Sadhbh was taught that women should be in the home having children, “for the honor and glory of God”.
Through her career as a programmer, which included the novel experience of working in a company with female leadership, and with the wave of feminist literature and thought at the time, Sadhbh came to understand herself as a feminist. While always having considered herself a rebel, she figured out that she was also a feminist:
“I became more and more aware— I always knew myself to be a feminist, but I became— but I didn’t ever call it a ‘feminist.’… I was always like a rebel. And resisted any kind of attempt to repress me. But then when I met other women who had that— like that, I realized, and I met a lot of those in the early days of my programing career when I worked for a, a company of consultants, and a lot of the leadership was female, and that was just so uniquely wonderful in the world of work.”
In the early 1970s, Sadhbh moved back to Ireland for three years to take care of her dying parents. At the end of three years, and while wondering what she would do next, she moved back to the United States. Sadhbh loves Ireland, “like all Irish people”, and she visits whenever she can and loves seeing her friends and family there. Ultimately, though, she credits sexual orientation and women’s rights in her decision to remain in the United States— including professional opportunity and reproductive freedom.
As Sadhbh puts it, her “political evolution” occurred in the United States. She remembers that as a young person who had recently immigrated, she believed in the idea that the United States promised freedom and equal rights to everyone. She notes that she has seen “almost every Western movie that was made”, and that at the time, she believed in that specific view of American culture and opportunity. Sadhbh discusses that with time, her views changed and her political perspective on the United States broadened from outside her own circumstances and grew more critical. She points to, for example, free postsecondary education in Ireland and most of Europe, and not in the United States. Now, when asked about the American Dream:
“It’s a myth. It does not exist […] but it was certainly true when I came here in the sixties. And, and I just think it’s terribly ironic that the American Dream has left and gone elsewhere. The American Dream is now alive and well in Ireland, and the American Dream is really alive and well in Europe! [I]t’s not here anymore.”
Sadhbh strongly believes in the importance of community. She describes finding community in San Francisco, but also advises people who have recently moved to the United States to get involved with a community group— she suggests community radio, which has been a passion of hers for decades, or a women’s rights group— and also advises spending time with people from outside one’s national community, in order to establish new relationships: “Much better just to jump in the deep end and do it that way.”
Sadhbh has spent nearly sixty years in the United States, and has seen— and been a part of— different communities and political change. At the end of our interview, the conversation turned back to women’s rights, and Sadhbh acknowledged that, in many ways and despite recent legal changes, the United States is still a beacon of opportunity for women. Sadhbh talked about feeling like a proud American when Venus and Serena Williams competed in the U.S. tennis final, and our interview ended with a discussion of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court:
“I want to see [women] where the power sources are, but— but there, we’re going to have four women, and out of, what is it, nine people? So, that’s something. Bader Ginsburg, of course, told us that nine would be the appropriate number of women on the Supreme Court and I totally agree with her. But we’re getting there, you know?”