This paper explores the ways in which sexulaity has been understood, experienced and negotiated by a cohort of Irish women born between 1914 and 1955. It demonstrates that the women's sexual subjectivities were forged in the tensions that existed between normative sexual scritps and their embodied experiences of sexual desires and sexual and reproductive practices. While recollections of sexual desire and pleasure did feature int he accounts of some of the women, it was the difficulties experienced around sexuality and reproduction that were spoken about in greatest detail. What emerges clearly from the data is the confusion, anxiety and pain occasioned by the negotiation of external demands and internal desires and the contested, unstable nature of both cultural power and female resistance.