Marital violence in post-independence Ireland, 1922–96

A living tomb for women'

Cara Diver

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526120137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Irische Geschichte

Marital violence in post-independence Ireland, 1922–96 represents the first comprehensive history of marital violence in modern Ireland, from the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the passage of the Domestic Violence Act and the legalisation of divorce in 1996. Based upon extensive research of under-used court records, this groundbreaking study sheds light on the attitudes, practices, and laws surrounding marital violence in twentieth-century Ireland. While many men beat their wives with impunity throughout this period, victims of marital violence had little refuge for at least fifty years after independence. During a time when most abused wives remained locked in violent marriages, this book explores the ways in which men, women, and children responded to marital violence. It raises important questions about women's status within marriage and society, the nature of family life, and the changing ideals and lived realities of the modern marital experience in Ireland.

1

Marital violence as a social problem in post-independence Ireland, 1922–65

In her memoir, Are You Somebody?, Nuala O’Faolain describes the bleak life of her mother Catherine, a woman who lost herself in novels and alcohol in order to take refuge from her thirteen pregnancies, her enduring poverty, and her philandering and largely absent husband. Catherine was neither domestic nor maternal, and she became an increasingly neglectful mother as she spent more of her time drinking at the local pub. ‘My mother didn’t want anything to do with child-rearing or housework’, writes O’Faolain. ‘But she had to do it. Because she fell in love with my father, and they married, she was condemned to spend her life as a mother and a homemaker.’¹ Catherine, like so many of her contemporaries, lacked the independence and opportunities available to later generations of women, but, as O’Faolain so powerfully writes, ‘1940s Ireland was a living tomb for women’.² Of course, not all women in post-independence Ireland met Catherine O’Faolain’s tragic fate; indeed, at least some women thrived during this time. However, historians generally agree that with Irish political independence came a marked decline in the status of women.³ Legislation enacted during the 1920s and 1930s limited women’s participation in public and economic life: women were ‘exempted’ from jury service, were increasingly subject to the marriage bar, and could not serve in the highest positions of the civil service. Gendered legislation was supplemented by religious discourse urging women back into the home to fulfil their roles as wives and mothers in accordance with Catholic doctrine.

In an environment so stifling to women’s rights, the battered woman occupied an extremely vulnerable position. It was not uncommon for a chronically abused woman to remain with her violent husband because she had insufficient means to support herself (or her children) and little recourse to the law. Essentially, she was condemned to the ‘living tomb’ described by O’Faolain. Because of women’s inferior status, wife beating represented a social, rather than a personal, problem in post-independence Ireland: an abused woman had a socially determined inability to escape her husband’s violence as a result of her economic dependence, limited legal options, and social and religious expectations. As Linda Gordon has argued, wife beating is based on male dominance – not superior strength, but rather political, economic, and social hegemony.⁴ The argument that wife beating is a social problem is not meant to suggest that every powerful man beat his wife, and of course it must be acknowledged that some women abused their husbands. However, it is because of women’s inferior status in post-independence Ireland, and their corresponding inability to escape the violence of their husbands, that we can label marital violence as a social problem. As Linda Gordon points out, it was one of the great achievements of second-wave feminism to define wife beating as a social problem, instead of a phenomenon of particularly violent men or relationships.⁵

This chapter will explore the ways in which marital violence was sanctioned and controlled through Irish culture during the years from 1922 to 1965. Social, religious, and economic pressures made it difficult, and often impossible, for an abused wife to escape her husband’s violence. Indeed, a battered woman had no access to divorce facilities and few legal options available to her; she likely did not work outside of the home and was thus kept in a state of financial dependence; and she faced enormous social and religious pressure to stay with her husband, whatever his sins. By failing to provide victims of wife beating with any real refuge, Irish society ignored and even condoned male violence. Only in the 1960s and 1970s, with the help of significant cultural shifts, was the plight of the battered woman eased, but not erased.

Demography

Before we explore the ways in which Irish society shaped marital violence, it is important to review what we already know about Irish marriages and family life in the mid-twentieth century. A good place to start is an examination of broad demographical trends. Because demography had a profound impact on the nature of family life in Ireland, it is crucial to our understanding of marital violence and marriage breakdown. For most of the twentieth century, Irish family patterns differed from those in other countries of Europe: the Irish marriage rate was the lowest in Europe, men and women tended to marry at a later age than their European counterparts, and marital fertility was relatively high.⁶ Demographic change within Ireland was driven in large part by economics; lack of money, employment, and/or property encouraged the trends of late marriage and permanent celibacy. Only with the economic upswing of the 1960s and 1970s did Ireland begin to follow the demographic pattern associated with the other nations of Western Europe: marriage rates increased, fertility decreased, and non-traditional family forms became more common.⁷

The Irish pattern of low marriage rates and late marriage can be traced back to the post-Famine era. Although historians debate the extent to which the Irish Famine of 1845–49 was responsible for Ireland’s long-term demographic patterns, most agree that major population transformations occurred during this time.⁸ The most remarkable change was perhaps the population decline: Ireland’s population had quadrupled in the century before the Famine, but fell by half in the following century.⁹ In addition, the Famine initiated, or at least accelerated, the trends of late marriage and low rates of marriage. In 1864, the first year for which accurate data is available, there were just over 20,000 marriages registered; this number dropped steadily until it reached its lowest point in 1932 when there were only 13,029 marriages registered.¹⁰ Unmarried persons accounted for a sizeable portion of the population: in 1911, 27 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women aged forty-five to fifty-five had never been married (these figures were 15 per cent and 14 per cent in 1861).¹¹ Those who did marry often waited until they were relatively old. At the turn of the twentieth century, the average age at marriage was thirty-three years for men and twenty-nine for women, which was five to ten years older than the average ages-at-marriage in other European countries.¹² Part of this change was due to a transformation in rural social conditions after the Famine, and, indeed, the greatest shifts in marriage patterns occurred in rural areas. A decline in the number of agricultural labourers and small farmers (and a corresponding rise in the number of large farmers) left fewer men with the economic ability to marry and support a family. Moreover, the post-Famine practice of impartible inheritance ensured that family land would not be subdivided but would instead be inherited by a single heir, thus reversing the pre-Famine trend of early marriage based on the subdivision of family land.¹³ It appears that after the calamity of the Famine years, the Irish also became more hesitant to enter into economically unstable marriages. Hasia Diner writes: ‘As the Irish changed their marriage patterns, they basically adapted the behaviour of the more economically stable elements in the society, convinced that the devastation and destruction of the late 1840s had in part been caused by irrational, carefree marriage and family practices that failed to treat conjugal life as a fundamentally economic enterprise.’¹⁴

Thus, the trends of late marriages and permanent celibacy were closely related to economic opportunities. Because men were more likely to wait to marry until they had inherited the family farm or had achieved some element of economic stability, they married at a later age or not at all. Increased life expectancy meant it took even longer for a son to inherit family property, which remained in the hands of his parents until they died or retired.¹⁵ Additionally, a number of scholars argue that high marital fertility may have dissuaded some men and women from marriage. Since children tended to follow marriage in plentiful numbers, marriage could literally mean starvation for those without adequate economic resources.¹⁶ Along the same lines, some men and women may have chosen to marry late because, without access to contraception, it was one of the only ways to control family size.¹⁷

Since men in particular were waiting until later in life to marry, the age gap between husbands and wives grew larger. Prior to the Famine around 20 per cent of husbands were at least ten years older than their wives, but the proportion had climbed to 50 per cent by the early twentieth century.¹⁸ This trend continued well into the twentieth century: of those couples marrying in 1946, for example, half were at least five years apart in age and a quarter were at least ten years apart in age.¹⁹ J. J. Lee argues that the widening age gap between husbands and wives ‘tended to enhance the authority of the husband, who could claim to be much more experienced than his wife’.²⁰ Although my research neither refutes nor confirms Lee’s claim, it is interesting to ask if, and how, large numbers of younger wives and older husbands affected patterns of marital violence. While incomplete court records make it impossible to know if a couple with a wide age gap was more likely to suffer a violent marriage, it is nevertheless reasonable to suggest that this trend may have fuelled an already well-established culture of male dominance.²¹

In addition to late age of marriage and low marriage rates, high marital fertility was another important component of Ireland’s unique demographic profile. By the 1930s, Irish families were the largest in Europe. In 1946, Irish couples married for at least twenty years had twice as many children as those in Britain (an average of 4.39 versus 2.16), and half of women who had been married for twenty to twenty-four years had given birth to six or more children.²² Nevertheless, Ireland was not immune from the trend towards declining fertility that had been sweeping across Europe since the late nineteenth century, although the decline was more gradual in Ireland than elsewhere. The birth rate in Ireland fell from 26.2 per 1000 during the years 1871–81, to 22.8 per 1000 during 1881–91, to 19.6 per 1000 during 1926–36.²³ Although Ireland...