The Changemakers: The pioneer Cork nun who wrote women back into history

She did so, against all the odds. In 1964, for instance, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid asked to see her notes on the counter-reformation while she was lecturing in history at University College Dublin (UCD), but she refused to hand them over.

And when Catherine Rose, the visionary founder of Arlen House, published Women in Irish Society: the Historical Dimension in 1978, she was told there was no market for women’s history.

After the book – a collection of essays Margaret co-edited with Donnchadh Ó Corráin – sold over 10,000 copies, the naysayers had to eat humble pie.

Later Margaret said: “My determination to write women into mainstream history, though resisted for years, has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”

On the second anniversary of her death last Wednesday, Alan Hayes, who is now at the helm of Arlen House, paid tribute to a woman who acted as a foundation stone of Ireland’s fight for equality, justice, diversity and human rights. She was, he wrote, “a lifelong feminist, brave activist, pioneering educator, lone crusader, progressive citizen [and] troublemaker”.

She was one of the few members of the Irish religious community to campaign for a ‘yes’ vote in the 1995 referendum on divorce.

She also campaigned for the recognition of gay rights and supported the use of contraception.

But, as former colleague Mary O’Dowd, professor Emeritus in History at Queen’s University Belfast, points out, she was not defying the Catholic authorities, rather pointing towards a more informed and open-minded approach that would fulfil the vision laid out in the second Vatican Council.

She had a deep faith, yet her family was surprised when she decided to enter the Dominican order after graduating from University College Cork with a first-class honours degree in English, history and Irish. She was a natural scholar, winning a gold medal and the Peel Memorial Award.

She was born in 1929 in Cork into a family where her mother, Ann McKenna, a banker, and her father, Sean MacCurtain, a school inspector, put an emphasis on equality and education. All four of their daughters went to university.

Her external examiner JRR Tolkien, the famous author of The Lord of the Rings, hoped she would continue her university career and invited her to study medieval literature in Oxford with him, but she chose a different path.

She said later that she had been open to the idea of becoming a nun from an early age. When, aged nine, she contracted diphtheria and spent months in a fever hospital in Listowel, Co Kerry, without visitors, her faith deepened: “My thoughts turned to God, especially when one of my companions in that bleak ward died.”

Her work as a nun, however, did not stop her becoming a “troublemaker” or, more accurately, a committed supporter of social reform and change. She said academia needed a “good shake-up” and she supported a wide range of causes, from women’s rights and the campaign to end corporal punishment in schools to the anti-apartheid movement.

In 1978, she joined some 20,000 people on a street protest to try – unsuccessfully as it turned out – to stop civic offices being built on the remains of an exceptional Viking settlement at Wood Quay in Dublin city.

I find myself always in the stream of controversy, in interesting ways, she once said.

As Sr Benvenuta – Sr Ben to her students at UCD – she continued her studies, completing a first-class master’s and later PhD on the 16th-century Kerry-born bishop/diplomat Daniel O’Daly.

She travelled to several European archives and became aware of the pivotal, but ignored, role played by women, setting the course for her pioneering work on women’s history.

She also used her expertise to show that there had been powerful women in the early Irish church. She would have been pleased to know that St Brigid’s feast day on February 1 is to become a national holiday from next year.

She presented the early saint as a woman with real agency; a monastery founder with considerable ecclesiastical influence.

Margaret MacCurtain was also an educationalist who wanted to offer opportunities to as many people as possible.

In 1980, she took time out from university teaching to set up the Senior College in Ballyfermot, Dublin, so that students from disadvantaged areas might have access to education. Four of its graduates went on to be nominated for Oscars in film animation in 2016. That happy fact was recorded in the Irish Times under a headline that read: “Oscars for art of the possible”.

Margaret MacCurtain was a woman who saw possibilities, and pursued them.

As her friend and publisher Alan Hayes said of her: “She was the kind of person who made it her life’s mission to help as many people as possible. She treated presidents the same as she did plumbers. And I think they all realised they had met someone truly great, who offered them a glimpse of a better world.”

The legacy of that better world lives on in so many ways.

The Women’s History Association of Ireland, founded with Mary Cullen, is just one example.

Another, the annual Margaret MacCurtain Scholarship in Women’s History, contains within it a delicious irony because it is offered at the School of History at UCD, the very university which once ignored her calls to tell the stories of women from our past.

• Clodagh Finn is co-author with former Lord Mayor of Dublin Alison Gilliland of 'Her Keys to the City', a book that honours 80 women who made Dublin (www.fourcourtspress.ie) Her history of Ireland in 21 women, 'Through Her Eyes' (Gill Books), is out now in paperback, €14.99