Interview with Kate Main
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Spinning The Thread of Intergenerational Labour is an oral history centred around the intergenerational interactions with careers in textile industries through student Molly Bray’s matrilineal line, considering the vacillating social freedoms and visibilities of gendered labour expectations. Regarding temporal bounds, the periods addressed are 1931-1950 as these years pertain to her great-grandmother, Josephine McDonagh, insofar as it is across these years that she relocated to her marital home and gave birth to her four children, thus marking a peak of textile production as home-seamstress; the span of her grandmother, Pat McDonagh’s fashion design career as it began in the early 1960s extending to her passing in 2014; and as for her mother, Kate Main, both Kate’s witnessing of her mother’s career from childhood and the commencement of her career in the early 1990s are considered. The lines of inquiry prompted in the interview reveals familial concepts of legacy, shared work ethic and creativity, and commonalities in pride of production across generations. The interview likewise explores the ways in which these careers altered traditional mores of family life and the roles of both womanhood and motherhood, as well as the ways they afforded extra-domestic independence and fiscal power.