The concluding chapter draws together the empirical threads identified in the preceding chapters and considers their theoretical and political implications. At one level, the aims of the book have been simple and straightforward: to examine in what ways women’s experiences of transition to first-time motherhood have changed since the original study was conducted 21 years earlier. But the unfolding accounts of transition have been anything but simple or straightforward in what they signal about women’s lives, societal expectations and contemporary motherhood. This returns us to a question posed in the opening chapter of this book, ‘has it ever been a more challenging time to be a woman who is also a mother?’ This was asked for several reasons, including a notable policy gap between discursive tropes of ‘balancing’ work and family life and everyday working and childcare conditions in the UK. But it was also posed in relation to older first-time motherhood, the effects of digitalisation on transition/motherhood experiences and how selves and gendered agency are narrated. Just over a decade ago, in her controversial article, Anne Marie Slaughter concluded that ‘women still can’t have it all’. My question is: why are we still doing it all?

This chapter is concerned with the plays and tableaux vivants authored, and performed, by women at the turn of the twentieth century. Irish myth was identified as a source for the creation of a national theatre, and the cultural bedrock for an independent nation, but it was also a source for women’s activism and theatrical work. Through comparison of nationalist feminist performances: the tableaux vivants performed by the Inghinidhe na hÉireann in 1901; Maud Gonne’s performance in Kathleen ni Houlihan in 1902; and Gonne’s play Dawn (published 1904), with the pacifist feminism of Eva Gore-Booth’s play The Triumph of Maeve (published 1905), we can see how women’s diverse approaches to mythmaking and theatrical form provide a revealing study in the challenges that feminist politics faced in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Intervening in and exploiting the contradictions and tensions which animated this period of political ferment allowed these women to utilize myth to facilitate their self-authorship and to assert the creativity of female bodies; a revolutionary action which engaged with the rise of the woman-nation figure and countered disembodied icons of femininity.