What matters for women: Discovering Irish women through Maeve Binchy’s “all that matters”

Irish women have long been marginalized, but sexual politics in Ireland has undergone many changes since the 1970s. This paper focuses on Maeve Binchy’s short story “All That Matters” in the hope of exploring the image of Irish women as presented in the story. The short story is collected in New Dubliners (2004), a collection of eleven stories by distinguished contemporary Irish writers presenting modern-day Irish scenarios in honor of James Joyce’s writings about Dubliners around a century ago. The study argues that although the phantom of patriarchy still haunts women’s lives in different forms, women in contemporary Ireland are more eager to challenge social taboos and work for their self-actualization. Copyright © 2017 Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary.