Sinead O’Connor’s lifelong dedication to women’s rights: ‘We aren’t merely objects of desire’

Irish singer was vocal advocate for women in the music industry and reproductive rights

Sinead O’Connor is being remembered for her lifelong advocacy of women’s rights following her death at the age of 56.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad,” her family shared in a statement to Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE and the BBC on 26 July. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”

The Grammy-winning Irish singer, who was best known for her rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” rose to fame in the mid-1980s. However, her career wasn’t without its controversy, as O’Connor was known to prioritise her beliefs above the opinions and expectations of the industry.

In O’Connor’s memoir, Rememberings, she recalled the moment she decided to first shave her head. After a record executive suggested she grow her hair out and start wearing “short skirts and high heels and makeup,” the singer-songwriter said that she shaved her hair the next day.

O’Connor explained that she made the decision because she didn’t want to be “sold” on her appearance and her “sexuality”.

“I was asked one day would I grow my hair long and wear short skirts because they wanted to sell me on my sexuality,” she said during a 2017 appearance on Dr Phil. “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.”

O’Connor would go on to defend other women in the music industry, such as Britney Spears, who also shaved her head in 2007 after being hounded by paparazzi. In a 2021 interview with the New York Times, O’Connor spoke of the way Spears was treated by the media: “If you met a stranger in the street crying, you’d put your arms around her. You wouldn’t start taking photos of her, you know? Why were they saying she’s crazy for shaving her head? I’m not.”

However, she infamously took issue with Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” music video for perpetuating the “sexualisation” of young women in music. In October 2013, Cyrus compared her new music video, in which she appeared nude, to O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” clip in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

The Irish musician responded to the comparison in an open letter published on her website, in which she’d warned Cyrus that her image and sexuality was being exploited by the music industry.

“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,” O’Connor wrote.

“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. 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,” she continued.

“Whether we like it or not, us females in the industry are role models and as such we have to be extremely careful what messages we send to other women,” O’Connor added. “Women are to be valued for so much more than their sexuality. We aren’t merely objects of desire.”

While Sinead O’Connor is well-known for her controversial appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, during which she famously ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II in protest against child abuse, the pop singer surprisingly became an ordained priest in 1999.

The Roman Catholic Church famously doesn’t allow women to be ordained as priests. As a result, O’Connor was ordained as a female priest by Bishop Michael Cox - the leader of the dissident Catholic Latin Tridentine Church - in Lourdes, Ireland. She later took on the clerical name: Mother Bernadette Mary.

O’Connor was also an advocate for women’s reproductive rights, and spoke openly about her decision to seek an abortion in 1990 following a planned pregnancy. Her song, “My Special Child,” off her hit album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, was inspired by her abortion experience.

“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,” O’Connor told Spin magazine in 1991.

“I just believe that if a child is meant to be born it will be born. It doesn’t really matter whether you have an abortion or a miscarriage. The whole issue is pro-choice,” O’Connor said at the time. “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.”

While O’Connor has been a vocal advocate for many issues, specifically women’s rights, she has publicly disavowed being labelled as a feminist.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2014, O’Connor was asked how the third wave feminist movement has helped change the pop industry. She replied: "I don’t think of myself as being a feminist, so I don’t really think about feminism a whole lot to be honest.

“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.”

She was promptly reminded that the basis of feminism insists on men and women being equal, rather than one gender being excluded from the other, and that many fans would still classify her as a feminist.

In classic O’Connor style, she responded: “Well, equally, I’m not interested in anything anyone else might like me to be.”