Women's history and the Irish Revolution - Part 2

The historian, author and playwright Ann Matthews. Picture taken from her website.

Continued from previous post.

Mainstream historians of both nationalist and revisionist stripes have tended to focus on the advanced nationalist strand within Irish politics during the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary period and emphasised the groundwork laid by this small group of militants which eventually became a popular movement with sufficient political and military strength to challenge British rule. Writers of women’s history, however, have been able to show the importance of a far more broad, collaborative challenge to both the established culture and to political authority as the revolutionary momentum began to build up, in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The common factors of restrictive societal expectations, widespread institutional discrimination and unequal political and civil rights created, for women, a commonality of experience which formed the basis for cooperation between supporters of various political creeds such as socialism, pacifism, nationalism (both constitutional and advanced) and unionism. Indeed, the mainstream or traditional historiographical approach to the years leading up to the revolution, particularly after 1912, tends to emphasize the increasing division in Irish society between nationalists (moderate or otherwise) and unionists. The work of women’s historians, however, has revealed that in some areas of political activity, especially the campaign for women’s suffrage, nationalists and unionists were often able to work together and stand alongside each other in a supportive manner.[1] Generally, they worked through separate organisations although some groups, such as the Munster Women’s Franchise League, incorporated women from both the nationalist and unionist communities.[2] After the outbreak of war in 1914, a significant number of suffragist women also became involved in pacifist activities and this movement, too, brought together both unionist and nationalist suffragists – as well as those from both the constitutional and militant wings of the latter camp.[3]

A historiography of the Irish Revolution from a women’s history standpoint is also more likely to place an emphasis on the level of cooperation that existed between members of the catholic and protestant communities. This is evident both in terms of suffrage campaigning and also philanthropic work (eg. through organisations like the Ladies’ Dinner Committee).[4] This is not to say that protestant involvement in the nationalist cause (as well as cross-community involvement in causes such as feminism and socialism) is not a feature of mainstream historiography of the period, although there are some historians – Peter Hart, for example – who have portrayed the revolutionary period as, in part, an opportunity for sectarian scores to be settled violently, particularly in certain areas of the country (notably, in County Cork).[5]

The writing of women’s history has led to a greater focus on gender as a historiographical category, and this in itself has helped to shed new light on certain aspects of the rise of advanced nationalism in Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century. For example, we know that advanced nationalist political and cultural organisations like Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League, and even their predecessors such as the Celtic Literary Society, tended to be more inclusive of women than the older, more moderate nationalist organisations such as the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. As such they provided an opportunity for men and women to meet socially, at events such as the evening classes and summer camps operated by the Gaelic League,[6] as well as to work alongside each other in political campaigning. This opportunity for both informal and structured socialising in a non-segregated environment may be one of the reasons why the advanced nationalist movement in general was regarded as having a particular appeal to the younger generation of Irish men and women.[7]

Women’s history has also helped to correct some of the bias that has persisted in standard accounts of the revolutionary era. Senia Pašeta quotes nationalist, feminist and labour activist Helena Molony, reacting to Sean O’Faolain’s biography of Constance Markievicz,[8] in which, she says, he describes Markievicz “as being ‘caught up’ by, or rallying ‘to the side’ of Connolly, Larkin, or some man or other”. In reality, says Molony, Markievicz “was working, as a man might have worked, for the freedom of Ireland”.[9] The historiographical elevation of significant men above significant women has been a feature of mainstream Irish history writing, a distortion which women’s history has sought to correct.

Where mainstream history has paid attention to female participants in the events that constitute the revolutionary transition in Ireland, it has tended to focus on a small number of significant actors, such as Markievicz, or Maud Gonne and, as Ann Matthews has pointed out, this has led to a neglect of the history of ordinary ‘rank and file’ female involvement in those events.[10] Cliona Murphy has also argued that “the only women who received attention from Irish historians until recently were a handful of prominent nationalist women.”[11] Irish women’s history has recognised this imbalance and therefore seeks to broaden the scope of the history of women’s involvement in the Irish revolution.

By paying more attention to the history of feminism and women’s suffrage agitation that was taking place prior to and concurrent with much of the nationalist activity in Ireland at the start of the twentieth century, women’s history helps to explain the increasingly radical nature of the new form of separatist nationalism that was beginning to eclipse the older, more moderate form of ‘home rule’ nationalism at this time. Some women advocating for their democratic rights had, by virtue of the fact that they were denied those rights, felt compelled to resort to direct forms of political action. Militant acts such as smashing the windows of government buildings led to imprisonment for significant numbers of Irish suffragist women, with some going on to take part in hunger strikes.[12] This background in, and experience of, radical political activity meant that, as the more advanced nationalist organisations began to attract more female supporters than their more chauvinistic constitutional nationalist counterparts, they also imported a ready-made culture of radical activism that had been forged in the struggle for women’s political rights.

The writing of women’s history concerning the Irish War of Independence has led to a new appreciation of that war as what Ann Matthews has termed a “war on women”. Matthews catalogues many abuses that took place against women, carried out by both sides in the conflict, often in the form of reprisal attacks for alleged acts of spying or collaboration either by the women themselves or their male relatives. Matthews quotes many different sources to corroborate her portrayal of a situation in which many Irish women lived in a state of perpetual fear because of the threat, and the reality, of violent attacks, sexual and otherwise - a situation which she says was later forgotten by those who came to power after the revolution, even by the “elite women” in the republican movement.[13] Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence, prominent nationalist women were certainly aware of the sufferings that women had undergone and were anxious to avoid a repeat of them. Margaret Ward quotes Maud Gonne describing in 1923 how she had known that it was women “on whom the misery of the civil war would fall”.[14]

The rediscovery of the horrific nature of women’s experience in the Irish War of Independence is not just important for the fact that it provides an insight into an aspect of the Irish revolution that has generally been neglected in the past. The accounts by Matthews and others of what the war was like for many Irish women, in terms of the threat and reality of sexual violence, is historiographically significant too. When a general election was held in what was then officially called Southern Ireland in 1922, one of the main issues dividing the parties and candidates was the question of whether or not they were supporters of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which had been signed in December 1921 by Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith and others and ratified by the Second Dáil in January 1922. Although the election was not a referendum as such, the result was taken as an indication that the Irish public, by a significant majority, were in favour of the treaty. Since Britain would be very likely, and indeed had threatened, to resume hostilities with Ireland should the treaty be rejected or its terms not implemented, the memory of the horrors of the recent conflict, catalogued by Matthews and other writers of Irish women’s history, may well have been an important factor in the apparent willingness of the public to accept the treaty, particularly in light of the fact that a significant proportion of the electorate were now women.

TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT POST

[1] Pašeta, Irish Nationalist Women, p. 5
[2] L. Ryan ‘A Question of Loyalty: War, Nation and Feminism in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 20.1 (1997), pp. 21-32, p. 25
[3] Ryan, ‘A Question of Loyalty’, p. 27
[4] Pašeta, Irish Nationalist Women, p. 120
[5] P. Hart, The I.R.A. and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916-1923 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 273-292.
[6] R. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923 (London, 2014), p. 56
[7] S. Pašeta, ‘Ireland’s Last Home Rule Generation: The Decline of Constitutional Nationalism in Ireland, 1916-30’ in M. Cronin and J. Regan (eds.), Ireland: The Politics of Independence, 1922-49 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 13-31, p. 18.
[8] S. O’Faolain, Constance Markievicz (London, 1934).
[9] Helena Molony to Sean O’Faolain, 6 September 1934, Bureau of Military History, Dublin, WS 391: Helena Molony, quoted in Pašeta, Irish Nationalist Women, p. 13
[10] A. Matthews, Renegades: Irish Nationalist Women 1900-1922 (Cork, 2010), p. 9.
[12] R. Cullen Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1889-1922 (Dublin, 1984), pp. 55-67.
[13] Matthews, Renegades, pp. 266-282.
[14] Éire: The Irish Nation (newspaper of anti-Treaty forces), letter from Maud Gonne, 22 September 1923, quoted in M.Ward, from ‘Marginality and Militancy: Cumann na mBan, 1914-36’ in A. Morgan and B. Purdie (eds.), Ireland: Divided Nation, Divided Class (London, 1980), pp. 96-110 in A. Hayes and D. Urquhart (eds.), The Irish Women’s History Reader (London, 2001), pp. 58-63, p. 61.

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