Women's history and the Irish Revolution - Part 2
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| The historian, author and playwright Ann Matthews. Picture taken from her website. |
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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