ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how women's actions in the past inform maternal and feminist politics in the present. Fallon created the Aprons of Power performances during the “Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment” as an acknowledgement of women, mainly unmarried mothers, incarcerated in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 until 1996. The apron, given to these women on their entry to Laundries, was a symbol of subjugation. By subverting the function of the Apron as a garment of servitude, the significance of its whiteness as a projector of moral righteousness, and the use of military mottos, Fallon discusses how these meanings were further developed through six site specific art activist performances in the Aprons of Power – Places of Power (2018). Claiming space of previous significant occurrences in Irish women's history in three acts of remembrance and three acts of power, the performances bear witness to the various roles of women and mothers within Irish state systems in particular, where the maternal body is invisible or vulnerable.
