Women and the Decade of Commemorations

Oona Frawley

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253053855
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

When women are erased from history, what are we left with?

Between 1912 and 1922, Ireland experienced sweeping social and political change, including the Easter Rising, World War I, the Irish Civil War, the fight for Irish women's suffrage, the founding of the Abbey Theatre, and the passage of the Home Rule Bill. In preparation for the centennial of this epic decade, the Irish government formed a group of experts to oversee the ways in which the country would remember this monumental time. Unfortunately, the group was formed with no attempt at gender balance. Women and the Decade of Commemorations, edited by Oona Frawley, highlights not only the responsibilities of Irish women, past and present, but it also privileges women's scholarship in an attempt to redress what has been a long-standing imbalance. For example, contributors note the role of the Waking the Feminists movement, which was ignited when, in 2016, the Abbey Theater released its male-dominated centenary program. They also discuss the importance of addressing missing history and curating memory to correct the historical record when it comes to remembering revolution.

Together, the essays in Women and the Decade of Commemorations consider the impact of women's unseen, unsung work, which has been critically important in shaping Ireland, a country that continues to struggle with honoring the full role of women today.

ONE

REMEMBERED FOR BEING FORGOTTEN

The Women of 1916, Memory, and Commemoration

MARY MCAULIFFE

IN THE PAST, CRITIQUES OF gender and commemoration focused on the “absences” or marginalization of women from historical narratives or memorial performance. Critiques, however, should focus not just on these “absences” but also on how what is commemorated is made visible—and by whom. Gendered discourses of sacrifice, patriotism, and the masculine nature of heroic republicanism mean certain observations on the gendered memory of the 1916 Rising can be made. As noted by Karen Steele, Irish women’s republican activism during the 1916 Rising as well as the subsequent War of Independence and Civil War, which was “shaped and encoded by gender norms,” prevented “both comrades and enemies from noticing their political agency and effectiveness in the struggle for Irish liberty,” resulting in the elision of much of what the women said and did from contemporary and subsequent historical accounts and commemorations (2010, 58). Women who participated in the Rising are made semi-visible, in mainstream narratives, through the very specific categories of carer and nurturer, and, post-Rising, this gendered narrative was expanded to include women as official mourners and keepers of the heroic male patriot flame. Women’s militancy, on the other hand, has been invisible, censored, or noted with the understanding that militancy remained unique to a small number of “extraordinary” women. Women such as Countess Markievicz or Margaret Skinnider¹ have been encoded as unfeminine, and their behavior, as it was dictated by extreme or unusual circumstances, was considered temporary. These “unfeminine” women, even if lauded for bravery, could be set aside as unusual, and, therefore, once the “acceptable” women’s nurturing and caring roles are mentioned, no other experiences need be considered. This constructed, safe, and passive image of the women of 1916, which would dominate mainstream narratives, was set in place soon after the Easter Rising.

CONSTRUCTING THE GENDERED DISCOURSES OF 1916

In traditional histories, the years from 1916 to 1921 are regarded as most important in terms of republican propaganda; it is the period from the summer of 1916 to the end of 1918 that firmly established the gendered discourse that dominates received narratives of the Rising until, it can be argued, the present day. The lacuna of women’s contributions in the mainstream narratives that emerge in republican propaganda can be perceived as a dismissal of the propaganda activism of republican women between 1916 and 1918. However, women historians² of the revolutionary period recognize the continuing importance of militant women, post 1916. As Margaret Ward has noted, in the months following Easter Week, “only the women remained free to consolidate the new mood and generate a new movement; it all depended on their energy and their commitment,” so it was left to Cumann na mBan, the Irish women’s paramilitary organization, to wage effective propaganda campaigns (1983, 118). This retrospective acclamation of the heroes of 1916, a constructed masculine “patriotic cult” of the Rising, developed very quickly and depended, as historian Peter Hart wrote, on the “flood of rebel memorabilia, of postcards, mass cards, song sheets, pamphlets, flags, badges, pictures, photograph albums, calendars and a host of mass produced items” (2000, 207). It was women who produced and distributed much of the Easter Week memorabilia, postcards, posters, and flags that commemorated the executed and imprisoned leaders of 1916; they also produced pamphlets that emphasized the loyalty owed by Ireland to the successors of the men of 1916, those men who were now leading Sinn Féin. A 1918 Cumann na mBan pamphlet declared that “not a week passes but some incident occurs in every part of the country which could be turned to account in driving home the lesson that the country must look to Sinn Féin for its salvation” (Novick 2002, 38). Women also submitted articles to newspapers describing the heroics and sacrifices of the men of 1916, positioning them as inheritors of a patriotic iconography stretching from the eighteenth-century heroes of 1798 such as Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone through the myriad of nineteenth-century rebels.

This positioning of the male dead of 1916 in the chronology of the “glorious” patriot dead is evident in one of the most emotive occasions for republican propaganda post-Rising, the funeral of Thomas Ashe (see McAuliffe 2017). Ashe was one of the two senior surviving commandants of 1916 (Éamon de Valera was the other) and had commanded the garrison in Ashbourne. He had been court-martialed and sentenced to death, a sentence then commuted to life imprisonment; he was released as part of the general amnesty of 1917. Ashe was regarded as one of the most important, popular, and senior leaders of the Irish Volunteers. On release, he was determined to take advantage of an environment now more receptive to republican ideology, traveling the country and making seditious speeches in breach of the conditions of his release under the Defence of the Realm (DORA) regulation. Because of these activities, he was rearrested in August 1917 and imprisoned in Mountjoy Jail with dozens of other republican men who went on hunger strike to force the authorities to grant them “political prisoner” status. On September 25, 1917, Ashe suffered a heart attack while being force fed and died soon after being transferred to the nearby Mater Hospital. His funeral was deliberately planned, with Cumann na mBan help, to be one of the largest displays of republicanism since the Rising. As Michael Brennan of the East Clare Brigade of the IRA noted, “Ashe was given a national funeral which was probably the biggest and most impressive demonstration so far in our movement” (BMH 1,068, 29). Over nine thousand volunteers, eighteen thousand trade unionists, and members of the Irish Citizen Army and Cumann na mBan joined his funeral cortege from Dublin City Hall, where he had lain in state, to Glasnevin Cemetery.³

The cortege took a deliberately circuitous route to Glasnevin in order to pass sites associated with the patriot dead. At High Street, it passed Tailors Hall where Wolfe Tone and United Irishmen met prior to the 1798 rebellion; at Thomas Street, it passed the site of execution of Robert Emmet, whose failed rebellion in 1803 was still remembered in song and story. On the Quays, it passed the Four Courts, and, on O’Connell Street, it passed the GPO, both iconic sites associated with the 1916 patriot dead. It was noted that over “200,000 spectators and sympathisers thronged the route . . . roofs, windows, verandas—even lamp-posts, railings, walls, hoardings, trees, statues, and monument—every possible point of vantage was utilised by eager sightseers” (Evening Herald, October 1, 1917). The funeral cortege was filmed and shown around the country—and in the footage numerous members of Cumann na mBan, as well as Irish Volunteers and other militant groups, are seen marching in tight formation behind the hearse.⁴ The message was that Ashe, now in his turn, joined the masculine pantheon of martyred patriots for Irish freedom. If executed signatories of 1916 and Ashe in 1917 were now firmly emblematic of the sacrifice of republican men, it was the widows and mothers of 1916, especially the widows of the executed signatories, who quickly became effective emblems of the sacrifices of women. A gendered concept of sacrifice was used in these propaganda campaigns, and it fell on fertile ground. In a culture already attuned to the concept of the heroic male fighting and dying for a passive, waiting Mother Ireland, images of the dead, mostly young male patriots of 1916 and Ashe, good looking, tall, the only militarily successful 1916 leader, reenforced the relationship between militant nationalism and masculinity. Republican womanhood, on the other hand, with the odd exception, had, in the propaganda, a more passive image.

One potent example of this passive image is the series of photographs reproduced in the Catholic Bulletin.⁵ In December 1916, its editor, J. J. Reynolds, commissioned these photographs of the widows and orphans of the dead signatories of the 1916 Proclamation. Áine Ceannt, Muriel McDonagh, Lillie Connolly, Agnes Mallin, and Kathleen Clarke were photographed in widows’ weeds, several of the women surrounded by their young orphaned children.⁶ Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, widow of the murdered Francis, was photographed with her son Owen, while Nannie O’Rahilly, whose husband The O’Rahilly had been killed in the vainglorious charge up Moore Street on Easter Friday as the GPO garrison prepared for their retreat, was photographed with her four sons, one of whom, Rory, had been born in July 1916, three months after his father’s death. Agnes Mallin also held a baby, Moira, born four months after the Rising and her father’s execution. In particular, the poignant and romantic image of Grace Gifford resonated. Gifford was the fiancée of Joseph Plunkett, a poet, a journalist, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, one of the planners of the Rising, and a signatory to the Proclamation. The couple were to marry on Easter Sunday in 1916, but, as the Rising broke out, their nuptials were postponed. After the surrender, Plunkett was court-martialed and sentenced to death. On May 3, 1916, Gifford was brought to Kilmainham where she and Plunkett were married in the prison chapel and granted ten minutes alone in his cell a few hours before his execution. The story of the 1916 rebel and his true love was widely publicized, with articles about their marriage appearing in Irish, English, and American newspapers. The fact that Gifford was an accomplished artist, political cartoonist, and activist in her own right was rarely mentioned. As noted by Brian Murphy in his study of the importance and impact of the Bulletin, “Few could remain unmoved by the pictures of children, many mere babies, surrounding their mothers” (1989, 75). These widows, sweethearts, and mothers of the Rising leaders became emblems of the nation, the ever patient, expectant, and sacrificing Mother Ireland; they were potent but passive symbols of the sacrifice of their men.

The Bulletin, as Clair Wills notes, was very important in molding the growing post- Rising support for the rebels’ ideologies (2009, 110–116). Unlike other more radical or ostensibly republican publications, it was not heavily censored under the DORA regulations.⁷ It was, as Sinn Féin historian P. S. O’Hegarty later admitted, one of the papers that helped “make the Rising acceptable to a majority in Ireland” (Ó Drisceoil 2012, 58). Editor J. J. O’Kelly understood that the “first stage of recession of Easter week into history” was important and determined that the Bulletin would be in favor of the heroes of 1916 (B. Murphy 2012, 48). The Bulletin, he wrote, would eventually be searched by students of history for “material that will enable them to place in its true perspective the lives and the methods and the motives of the men of Easter Week” (ibid., my italics). The “subtle mix of historical narrative and propaganda” in the Bulletin urged the Irish public toward support of the formation of a republican Sinn Féin by 1917 (ibid., 51–52). The Bulletin kept to the forefront of its readers’ minds a narrative of the sacrifice of the “men of 1916.” With its laudatory obituaries and its twenty-three photographs of the widows and orphans of the men of 1916, the Bulletin helped normalize and gender the patriotism of those who fought and died in the Rising. These hagiographic images and sketches of the male heroes and their grieving but proud widows showed a nonthreatening, acceptable republicanism, gendered in a respectable discourse of sacrificial male patriot and passive, keening, grieving woman. This, as Wills notes, reassured the initially skeptical public that the “rebels were not German stooges but Irishmen and Catholics, who devoted themselves to their nation” (2009, 111–112). The sacrifice of the widows, and of the wives and mothers of the thousands of imprisoned Volunteers, was swiftly constructed as one of stoicism, loyalty, and emotional suffering.

WOMEN AND THE FIRST COMMEMORATION, 1917

The first anniversary of the Rising in April 1917 was vital in the ongoing republican propaganda campaigns, but, with many of the male leaders in prison, constrained under DORA or on the run, it was, again, the political women who were central to organizing commemorative events. That April the Bulletin and other publications produced a glut of writings replete with the “hazy symbolism of the sword, righteous flame and Mother Ireland . . . hagiographical portraits of individual [male] insurgents emphasising their devotion to God and the Irish nation” (Wills 2009, 115–116). However, when women were mentioned in these articles, the focus was on their roles as caregivers, nurses, and assistants. As Ireland was still under martial law in 1917 and physical acts of commemoration were banned, it fell to the republican women, despite their traditional representation in the media, to attempt illegal but emotive commemorations at the Rising outposts. According to Helena Molony, one of the organizers of that first commemoration, the women “intended to run up the flags again in all these positions and to get out the proclamation, and proclaim it again, and to try to establish the position that the fight was not over, and that the Republic still lives” (BMH, WS 391, Helena Molony, 42). This action was left to the “extremist group” in Liberty Hall, “women, including Jinny Shanahan and Winnie Carney” (ibid.). With some help the women managed to get the tricolor up a flagpole at the GPO the night before the date chosen for commemoration—which was Easter Monday, April 9, rather than the actual anniversary of the Rising, April 24.

Molony and her comrades also commemorated James Connolly with a major event at Liberty Hall on the first anniversary of his execution, May 12, 1917. A large scroll was created that bore the words “James Connolly Murdered, May 12th, 1916.” Rosie Hackett described what happened: “Miss Molony called us together Jinny Shanahan, Brigid Davis and myself. . . . Getting up on the roof, she [Molony] put it high up, across the top parapet. We were on top of the roof for the rest of the time it was there. We barricaded the windows. . . . Thousands of people were watching from the quay on the far side of the river. It took the police a good hour or more before they got in, and the script was there until six in the evening, before they got it down” (Rosie Hackett, BMH WS 546, 10–11). In these first commemorations, as in all subsequent commemorations until the late twentieth century, it was the ideologies, activism, and sacrifices of the male heroes of 1916 that were central to the commemorative narrative. The flags, the emblems, and the reprinting and reposting in the city of the Proclamation “would become part of the battle for legitimacy not just between Republicans and the State, but between Republicans themselves; and women would adopt the mantle of guardians of the ideals of the Rising” (R. Higgins 2016b, 51). Nowhere, in any of these commemorations, was the role of women at the forefront. For republican ideologies to take root, it was important to focus on Pearse, who had proclaimed the Republic, on the sixteen men who had been executed, on the men still in prison for their republican activism: and it was thus important to consign the role of women to auxiliary or marginal status. The resulting narratives did not go unnoticed by some of the republican women in the years after the Rising. Senior activists such as Jennie Wyse Power and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington campaigned long and hard to gain executive roles in the Sinn Féin, which was now the political wing of republicanism. The aim, in having these roles at senior level in Sinn Féin, was to hold the party leaders to the promise of equality, as included in the Proclamation.

Because of the outbreak of the War of Independence and subsequent Civil War, the first formal commemoration of the Rising did not take place until 1924, when the Cumann na nGaedheal-led Irish Free State organized a military commemoration at Arbour Hill, where most of the executed men of 1916 are buried. Due to the divisions of the Civil War and since Cumann na mBan had, for the most part, rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty, very few republica...