Sinead O'Connor was a feminist icon – even if she refused to describe herself as such. The 56-year-old singer died on 26 July, with the cause of death not yet made public.
O’Connor was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1966, but she didn’t rise to fame until the mid-1980s and became a household name with her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1990.
Yet, O’Connor was the first to say that she was not a feminist. “I don’t think of myself as being a feminist, so I don’t really think about feminism a whole lot to be honest,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “I wouldn’t label myself anything, certainly not something with an ‘ism’ or an ‘ist’ at the end of it. I’m not interested in anything that is in any way excluding of men.”
When she was reminded that feminism insists on men and women being equal rather than one gender excluded, she said: “Well, equally, I’m not interested in anything anyone else might like me to be.”
Despite her protests, O’Connor was a change maker for feminism, from her refusal to live up to society’s beauty standards to being an advocate for women’s reproductive rights, here’s everything she did for the movement.
In her 2021 memoir Rememberings, O’Connor said she first decided to shave her head after a music executive suggested she grow out her hair and start wearing “short skirts and high heels and makeup.” She shaved her hair off the next day.
O’Connor said she made the decision because she “didn’t want to be sold on her appearance or sexuality”.
“I didn’t want to be sold on that. If I was going to be successful, I wanted it to be because I was a good musician,” she told Dr Phil in 2017.
O’Connor was staunchly against women being sexualised in the music industry. So much so that when Miley Cyrus compared her 2013 music video for “Wrecking Ball” to O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”, the Irish singer wrote an open letter to Cyrus.
“Nothing but harm will come in the long run, from allowing yourself to be exploited, and it is absolutely NOT in ANY way an empowerment of yourself or any other young women, for you to send across the message that you are to be valued (even by you) more for your sexual appeal than your obvious talent,” she wrote.
Despite calling out another female singer, O’Connor clarified that it was in the spirit of “motherliness and with love” and that she was looking out for a then-20-year-old Cyrus.
“Real empowerment of yourself as a woman would be to in future refuse to exploit your body or your sexuality in order for men to make money from you,” she added. “I needn’t even ask the question. I’ve been in the business long enough to know that men are making more money than you are from you getting naked.”
O'Connor was a fierce ally to both LGBTQIA and Black communities. Long before the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, O'Connor used her platform to support minorities.
Her 1990 song, "Black Boys on Mopeds" highlighted institutional racism and police brutality, and she also called out MTV in the 1990s after they stopped airing rap videos due to “obscenity”. “Censorship in any form is bad, but when it’s racism disguised as censorship, it’s even worse,” she said at the time.
In 2020, she released a Mahalia Jackson cover to honour the Black Lives Matter movement. “There became this incredible movement that I found really moving with these women in the streets saying that when George Floyd called for his mother, he called all the mothers,” she told MOJO at the time. “It made me feel that this was the right time to release the record, because Mahalia was a very strong mothering figure and a huge figure in the civil rights movement.”
O'Connor was also a supporter of people living with AIDS and HIV, having famously worn a T-shirt supporting the Dublin AIDS Alliance on The Late Late Show in 1990.
In the wake of her death, AIDS survivor Jason Reid tweeted: “In Ireland, Sinead publicly supported people with HIV/AIDS when many denigrated us. She used her fame to help break down stigma and bring about change. We were lucky to have Sinead.”
In 2017, O'Connor asked her Faceboon fans where she could donate “30 years worth of gorgeous and ordinary clothing” to Irish trans youth. After converting to Islam in 2018, she also wore a rainbow pride flag along with her black hijab during an appearance on Good Morning Britain.
In 1992, O’Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL) where she promptly ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II in a protest against child abuse that had been committed and covered up by the Catholic Church in Ireland at the time.
In her memoir, she explained that the image had belonged to her mother and that she took it from her childhood home and would tear it when the time felt right.
“I carefully brought it everywhere I lived from that day forward,” she wrote, adding: “Because nobody ever gave a s*** about the children of Ireland.”
The incident saw Sinead O’Connor banned from SNL and fall out of favour with the American public.
“The 10 years after that Saturday Night Live performance, the way that I was dealt with was shocking,” she told EW in 2021. “It was the fashion to treat me bad, whether you were in my bed, at a board meeting, a TV show, a gig, or a party. Everybody treated me like I was a crazy b**** beacause I ripped up the Pope's picture. We know I'm a crazy b****, but that's not why.”
At the time, O’Connor was an anomaly: A female musician standing up for what she believed in and what she felt was right.
Nearly 30 years before abortion was legalised in Ireland, O’Connor marched with abortion-rights protestors in Dublin calling for a change in Irish law.
“If you’re going to admit that a girl who’d been raped should be allowed to leave the country for having an abortion, then why not come right out and admit that she should be allowed to have it here?” she questioned at the time.
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O’Connor herself spoke of her abortion in 1991, and said it inspired her song “My Special Child” off of her 1990 album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.
“I was left with the decision of whether or not to have the child, knowing that the father wasn’t going to be around. I decided that it was better not to and that I would have a child at a later stage when his father would be around and involved. I didn’t feel that I could handle it by myself,” she told Spin magazine at the time.
“The whole issue is pro-choice. I wouldn’t lobby for or against abortion, but I would lobby very strongly for the right of women to have control over their own bodies and make decisions for themselves. Nobody has the right to tell anyone else what to think or believe.”
Right on, Sinead. Rest in Power.
