The Second Shift by Clare Gallagher

Press/Media: Research

Description

Review of The Second Shift book by Rosita Sweetman in The Irish Times Culture section on 8th February 2020

Period8 Feb 2020

Media coverage

1

Media coverage

  • TitleThe Second Shift by Clare Gallagher
    Media name/outletThe Irish Times
    Country/TerritoryIreland
    Date8/02/20
    DescriptionThe Second Shift by Clare Gallagher
    Self-published
    No sooner has Clare Gallagher’s quietly furious photobook, The Second Shift, landed when Oxfam Ireland announce women here contribute 38 million hours of unpaid care work every week, and that “sexist economies are enabling a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of ordinary people particularly women and girls”. This, 50 years after Second Wave Feminism? Sweet Jesus. A photography lecturer at Belfast School of Art, Gallagher’s third book, named by The Guardian as one of 15 best of 2019, worries away at an on-going dilemma: getting the domestics done, while calling out for resistance to capitalism’s neatest trick – getting us ladies to work for free. Her photos focus tightly on the unacknowledged banal – baskets of overflowing laundry, overstuffed bins, food detritus in the sink, fogged up windows, as well as beautifully tender portraits of her three young sons. There’s a savage poem by Leonita Flynn and Joan Rivers’s fabulous quote: “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes – and six months later you have to start all over again.” Back to the barricades sisters. Rosita Sweetman
    Producer/AuthorRosita Sweetman
    URLhttps://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/browser-not-so-tickled-a-biography-of-ken-dodd-that-stays-on-the-surface-1.4160347
    PersonsClare Gallagher, Rosita Sweetman