Irish Women in the First World War Era

Irish Women’s Lives, 1914-18

Jennifer Redmond, Elaine Farrell, Jennifer Redmond, Elaine Farrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000145083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This book is the first collection of essays to focus exclusively on Irish women's experiences in the First World War period, 1914-18, across the island of Ireland, contextualising the wartime realities of women's lives in a changing political landscape.

The essays consider experiences ranging from the everyday realities of poverty and deprivation, to the contributions made to the war effort by women through philanthropy and by working directly with refugees. Gendered norms and assumptions about women's behaviour are critically analysed, from the rhetoric surrounding 'separation women' and their use of alcohol, to the navigation of public spaces and the attempts to deter women from perceived immoral behaviour. Political life is also examined by leading scholars in the field, including accounts from women on both sides of the 'Irish question' and the impact the war had on their activism and ambitions. Finally, new light is shed on the experiences of women working in munitions factories around Ireland and the complexity of this work in the Irish context is explored. Throughout, it is asserted that while there were many commonalities in women's experiences throughout the British and Irish Isles at this time, the particular political context of Ireland added a different, and in many respects an unexamined, dimension.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

INTRODUCTION

War Within and Without: Irish women in the First World War era

Jennifer Redmond and Elaine Farrell

The period 1914–1918 was tumultuous in Ireland when conflict wrought by international tensions was exacerbated by a fractious domestic political scene that ultimately resulted in partition of the island into two jurisdictions: Northern Ireland, comprised of six of the nine Ulster counties, and the Free State, encompassing the remaining twenty-six counties. Both were dominions within the British Commonwealth with domestic parliaments controlling internal affairs. Neither were the desired political outcome of the various factions who had protested, taken up arms, and eventually negotiated. Women were pivotal on both sides of the political divide. For those who wished to stay in the union with Great Britain, the First World War was a chance to demonstrate loyalty and to showcase the particular contributions of women, from hosting Belgian refugees to the encouragement of enlistment of husbands, sons and friends. For those who wished to see the enactment of independence for Ireland, as promised in the 1912 Home Rule Bill and the suspended Act of 1914, the First World War provided an opportunity to enact long-held ambitions for a violent revolution, with women participating in active combat and non-combatant roles. Thus while the First World War was a pivotal moment for women globally, in Ireland it had an additional layer of complexity given the national political context. This article seeks to explore these intersections and tensions, providing an introduction to this special issue in which many facets of the war period in Ireland are explored.

In the years leading up to the First World War, campaigners for women’s suffrage, Home Rule, Unionism, trade unionism and social rights competed for attention in the Irish political landscape. The outbreak of war in Britain led to an outpouring of support but the war as a whole was somewhat more complicated in Ireland due to the political environment of the time. Ireland had been inching towards political independence over the previous five decades. While some sections of the population were fully committed to the war effort, others actively opposed any attempt to force Ireland to fight what was perceived to be a British war. Home Rule, or domestic political independence in Ireland, was due to be enacted in September 1914 and was suspended upon the outbreak of war.

A call to arms by the nationalist leader John Redmond in support of Ireland’s independence through a show of loyalty, saw most of the Irish Volunteers, the militarised faction dedicated to gaining Home Rule for Ireland, voluntarily join the British army. The female arm of this group, Cumman na mBan were, naturally, ineligible for military service but maintained their support on the home front. Most Volunteers who were in support of an independent Ireland believed their fighting would help to achieve this goal and wished to demonstrate Ireland’s loyalty to fulfil their political aspirations. In Laffan’s analysis, a ‘European war provided the opportunity for Irish nationalists to prove their claim that Home Rule would not threaten British strategic interests’.¹ The complexity of the situation is exemplified by the aims of another group on the island of Ireland, also eager to demonstrate loyalty but for diametrically opposed reasons. Unionists, largely based in Ulster, also rallied in response to the call to arms, but in order to show their fealty to maintaining the Act of Union of 1801. Between those who wholeheartedly supported Britain’s war effort and those who viewed it as further evidence of the need for independence and as Ireland’s opportunity to stage a violent rebellion, lay a middle ground: those who supported the war solely for economic reasons or the pacifist men and women who opposed any form of militant action. This special issue casts a critical eye on the spectrum of experiences that existed in Ireland in the years 1914 to 1918, specifically focusing, for the first time, on the lives of women in Ireland during the First World War era.

Fearghal McGarry has outlined that the declaration of war in 1914 ‘transformed the political atmosphere in Ireland, at a stroke postponing the implementation of Home Rule, defusing the impending crisis in Ulster, and forcing nationalists to take a stance on the war’.² Initially, he argues, an ‘unfamiliar and, for some, disconcerting sentiment percolated Irish public opinion: goodwill towards Britain.’³ Two years later, however, the Easter Rising in Dublin and the heavy-handed British response would shift nationalist focus away from Home Rule and towards complete independence. Moderate nationalism had been replaced by a more extreme brand of republicanism that found expression in the 1916 uprising and the subsequent War of Independence. For unionists, the unexpected rebellion in Dublin served to reignite fears about the nationalist agenda. Attitudes towards the war in Ireland, and Britain generally, therefore, were not only influenced by its duration and its devastating effects but also by political events at home. Physical trenches may not have been dug in Ireland but, as John Horne argued in 2008: ‘Few countries were more decisively affected by the Great War than Ireland.’⁴

Regardless of the levels of support, the war had a direct and immediate impact on Irish citizens, transcending political, social, geographic, generational and economic boundaries as it did elsewhere. War challenged and simultaneously reinforced such boundaries. Although conscription was never implemented, around 210,000 Irish men, most of whom were Catholic, voluntarily enlisted.⁵ These absences, and the resulting fatalities and injuries, strained relationships and family economies. The introduction of rationing and subsequent food shortages caused further hardship for many families. Leisure activities and recreational travel were also impacted.⁶ Societies and committees, such as those related to the suffrage and labour movements, often reduced the number of meetings or suspended them entirely, thus slowing down social advances and political developments. For though Senia Pašeta argues in this special issue, that ‘Feminist activism and ideas touched all aspects of Irish political life in the period, from the national question, to socialism, to pacifism and to social reform activism’,⁷ progress in these areas was affected by the outbreak of the war and the ensuing domestic conflicts. The first decades of the twentieth century could thus be seen as ones of restriction and stagnation as much as of new war-related opportunities. Indeed, as Pašeta also highlights, Ireland became an important arena for militant suffrage activity in the immediate pre-war period, with the Women’s Social and Political Union targeting their efforts at both nationalist and unionist politicians due to the large number of Irish MPs at Westminster who had it in their power to tip the vote for any proposed suffrage bill. Unfortunately for suffragists throughout the United Kingdom, they continuously declined to do so.

This special issue focuses on how women in Ireland experienced the First World War era. It follows other gendered analyses of war and violence in modern Ireland, for as McIntosh and Urquhart have observed: ‘Conflict is a central motif in twentieth-century Ireland. Adopting a gender analysis adds a crucial dimension to the debate.’⁸ This gendered perspective is particularly important given the legislative and social changes relating to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tammy Proctor has insisted that:

as war workers or propaganda poster girls, women functioned as necessities for the successful militarization of society and the state rhetoric of warfare. Far from being tangential to war, women are central.⁹

Despite these astute observations, recent commemorative research and activities have not always shone a light on the particular experiences and contributions of women in Ireland. As Keith Jeffery identified in 2011, women’s activities during the Great War have remained in ‘a kind of historically hidden Ireland’.¹⁰ This collection brings together insights about women of opposing political and religious affiliations, various ages, and different classes and geographic regions of Ireland, imbricated as they were with the social and political tensions of the era. It focuses predominantly on women in Ireland but also considers Irish women overseas. Together the essays illuminate the roles and activities of, and attitudes towards, particular groups and individuals and draw together perspectives from north and south of the island. These have often been traced separately, reflecting the political divide created in 1920 through the Government of Ireland Act, with women’s contributions either to the unionist stance against political independence or the nationalist effort to gain self-rule side-lined or ignored in historiography.¹¹ Gregory and Pašeta have highlighted that not all war experiences ‘fit neatly into the mainly political studies of unionist and nationalist responses to the Great War’ and this special issue confirms their assertion.¹² While drawing out some unique experiences for women in the period, this volume also demonstrates both the increased politicisation and militarisation of life in Ireland. It further highlights the ways in which feminist activism interacted (and sometimes clashed with) the dominant political organisations. Essays in the collection also move beyond the political, shedding light on Ireland’s social, cultural and economic landscape at the time. Analyses are enriched by women’s first-hand accounts, such as the letters written to and from Ireland during this period, or the literary works penned by Susanne Rouviere Day from the camps for displaced individuals in France, as well as by newspaper articles, pamphlets, minute books, family case files, and photographs that recorded women’s activities during the war years in written or visual form.

Each of the contributions interrogates contemporary understandings of femininity and various facets of womanhood during this period. As with other collections and publications on women and the war, it is impossible to generalise about women’s experiences of or attitudes towards war, and as Fell and Sharp argue, ‘there was no clear consensus about what constituted the proper “womanly” response to the war’ even when they belonged to small, niche groups such as suffragist or feminist organisations.¹³ In Ireland, the range of women’s experiences was even more acute given the polarised attitudes towards Britain and the war effort generally, and thus this collection does not profess to be comprehensive. The experience of the war in Ireland therefore has an added dimension for women not apparent in Britain: their attitudes towards Ireland’s political future were often interwoven in their activities. Knitting ‘comforts’ or gathering sphagnum moss could be an overt expression of unionism; gathering signatures against conscription or learning semaphore could be an explicit statement of advanced nationalism; learning first aid techniques could be either.

As the essays in this collection make clear, social status could, and did, shape responses. In her article on alcoholism, Holly Dunbar notes the 1901 view of Fr James Cullen, a Jesuit who established the Total Abstinence Society of the Sacred Heart, that ‘women have ever been by word and example the world’s great social reformers’.¹⁴ Philanthropy and charity work was seen as an appropriate role for middle- and upper-class women before the war and indeed during it.¹⁵ War offered women opportunities to further participate in charitable endeavours or to increase their involvement in certain roles. Maeve O’Riordan argues in her article on landed women in the province of Munster that women of this class assumed leadership roles in their localities in the pre-war period to foster a community spir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: War Within and Without: Irish women in the First World War era
• 2 ‘Growing Up Poor’: child welfare, motherhood and the State during the First World War
• 3 Titled Women and Voluntary War Work in Ireland during the First World War: a case study of Ethel, Lady Inchiquin
• 4 Women and Alcohol During the First World War in Ireland
• 5 Relief Work and Refugees: Susanne Rouviere Day (1876–1964) on war as women’s business
• 6 The Dangers and Temptations of the Street: managing female behaviour in Belfast during the First World War
• 7 New Issues and Old: women and politics in Ireland, 1914–1918
• 8 Women, War Work, and the State in Ireland, 1914–1918
• 9 Unionism, Orangeism and War
• Index