In the early 1970s, Dublin pubs legally refused to serve women pints of beer unless they were accompanied by a male chaperone. Pints were considered “unladylike.” Some pubs wouldn’t even admit women at all.

But Nell McCafferty was having none of it. As a leader in Irish second-wave feminism, she had helped organize a number of illegal events — acts of civil disobedience now considered pivotal moments in the advancement of women’s rights.

In the early 1970s, McCafferty led 30 women to Neary’s pub in central Dublin. They passed between the 200-year-old lamps that still bracketed the front door, the same path literary legends like Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh had taken for decades. Inside was snug and wooden; no music played, and conversation was intimate. Nevertheless, 30 women marched up to the bar. There, each ordered a brandy. After the drinks were lined up, the group ordered a single pint of Guinness. When the bartender refused, each drank her brandy and walked out. “He refused to serve, we refused to pay,” McCafferty remembered later.

It wasn’t until 2000’s Equal Status Act that the sexist practice was outlawed, but McCafferty’s bold stunt had exposed one of the country’s many discriminatory practices targeted solely at women. And she didn’t stop there.

McCafferty argued that, unlike England, where the public could impact legislation, conservative Ireland was bound by its constitution. “We had to run rings around people,” she told The Guardian in 2004. That’s when the women’s movement got creative.

Nell McCafferty on TV for International Women’s Day in 1991. (RTÉ)

The indignities did not stop with a pint of plain.

Women working in public service, for instance, were required to resign from their jobs after marriage, on the grounds that they occupied a job that could otherwise go to a man. The “marriage bar” was removed in 1977 with the Employment Equality Act. Outside the workplace, a woman had few private rights: she was not legally permitted to bar an abusive spouse from the home, in part because her home was not hers; her husband could sell it without her consent. Both of these family laws were amended in 1976.

It was a decade of pronounced change in women’s equality. As a journalist and founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, started in 1970, McCafferty helped expose social and legal inequality. She co-authored the IWLM’s manifesto, Chains or Change, and penned a piece for The Irish Times. She wrote, “Women’s Liberation is finding it very hard to explain the differences, when you come down to it, except in terms of physical make-up. And men are as different as women, which no-one holds against them. It’s the system which divides. Break the system, unite the people.”

She lived by that credo. In one of IWLM’s most famous acts, on May 22, 1971, McCafferty and another group of women traveled by train from Dublin to Belfast, in Northern Ireland, to buy contraceptives. When they reached the pharmacies, they “demanded coils, loops, and pills AT ONCE,” wrote McCafferty, which were illegal at the time in the religious Republic of Ireland. Their plan was to return to Dublin openly carrying the contraband. Problem was, although birth control pills were legal in Northern Ireland, they required a doctor’s prescription, and none of the IWLM members had one (it being illegal in their country). So, they bought a whole bunch of condoms, spermicide, and aspirin, hoping to pass it off, even symbolically, as birth control pills.

When their train reached customs back in Dublin, the women refused to hand over their contraceptive loot. Some tossed the aspirin to women waiting on the other side of the rails, or swallowed it for the news cameras. They “waved their creams aloft,” wrote McCafferty. Soon they burst through customs and marched to a police station, where they declared in front of international reporters that they were in possession of illegal contraceptives.

“It was the fervent hope of those who embarked upon the Pill Train that the Irish government would arrest us on our return, making us instant martyrs and obliterating all our sins,” wrote McCafferty with a wink. “If you want to progress socially…we told ourselves, the first thing you have to do is go to jail.”

Two days later, the prime minister upheld the law and ordered officials to seize all birth control they found. “The matter was solved, by men, by ignoring it.”

Though the Contraceptive Train had broken some of the taboo around birth control in Ireland, legislation would bungle about for the rest of the decade. In 1973, Ireland ruled that marital privacy protected the use of contraceptives by married couples. Yet at the same time, the constitution still forbid their sale. Finally, in 1979 the the Health (Family Planning) Act legalized the sale of contraception in Ireland, with a doctor’s prescription.

Abortion is still illegal in Ireland, of course, and divorce wasn’t allowed until 1997, but McCafferty’s brand of civil disobedience — pints and pills — pushed the cause of women forward for decades.

She continued her work as a journalist and released a memoir, titled simply Nell, in 2004. In it, she confronted another of Ireland’s great shames. During a televised publicity appearance for the book, she again blistered the pope for his homophobia. She turned to the camera in tears and said being gay was the last great taboo in Ireland. She only hoped her mother wasn’t watching, that she had been given a sleeping pill to spare her the shame of worrying what neighbors would say. The book was to mark her “official” coming out. She told The Guardian, “I give them a week to call me a lesbian, then I’ll say it’s getting boring, just call me Nell.”

Nell McCafferty is 73 years old. She lives in Dublin.