The British Left and Ireland in the Twentieth Century

Evan Smith, Matthew Worley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367701499
• eBook ISBN: 9781000389029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This collection explores how the British left has interacted with the 'Irish question' throughout the twentieth century, the left's expression of solidarity with Irish republicanism and relationships built with Irish political movements.

Throughout the twentieth century, the British left expressed, to varying degrees, solidarity with Irish republicanism and fostered links with republican, nationalist, socialist and labour groups in Ireland. Although this peaked with the Irish Revolution from 1916 to 1923 and during the 'Troubles' in the 1970s–80s, this collection shows that the British left sought to build relationships with their Irish counterparts (in both the North and South) from the Edwardian to Thatcherite period. However these relationships were much more fraught and often reflected an imperial dynamic, which hindered political action at different stages during the century. This collection explores various stages in Irish political history where the British left attempted to engage with what was happening across the Irish Sea.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Contemporary British History.

Divided sisterhood? Nationalist feminism and feminist militancy in England and Ireland

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

ABSTRACT

The generally accepted story is that British militant suffragists performed an unexpected and abrupt move away from the feminist movement and towards a fiercely jingoistic nationalist campaign once the war began in 1914. Yet, given the nature of exchanges between Irish and British militant feminists, Irish feminists should not have been surprised by this turn from gender solidarity to English nationalism. In this article, I argue that Irish-British militant feminist entanglements worked to expose the powerful role that English nationalism played in suffrage politics at a time when nearly all the focus was on the disruptive influence of Irish nationalism.

Introduction

In July 1912, three English militant suffragists – Mary Leigh, Gladys Evans and Lizzie Baker (Jennie Baines) – travelled to Ireland where, in what is now a renowned display of suffragette¹ activism, they threw a small hatchet at Herbert Asquith, visiting British prime minister, and John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, who were meeting to discuss the issue of Irish Home Rule. Later, they also set fire to Dublin’s Theatre Royal where Asquith was due to speak. The three women were arrested, tried and accorded heavy sentences for their militancy – five years penal servitude in Leigh’s and Evans’s cases – before undergoing the strains of a hunger strike and the brutality of force feeding while incarcerated in Ireland. The women were members of the British organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), and they had not consulted Dublin-based militant suffragists, members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), before undertaking either action. Members of the IWFL, far from condoning the actions of Leigh, Evans and Baines, were angered and frustrated that members of the British organisation had conducted a brief violent campaign in Ireland without considering either the volatility of nationalist and Unionist relations there or the leanings and strategic outlook of Irish suffragists, who were, like Irish men, divided along nationalist and Unionist lines with the result that the Irish suffrage movement was highly fractured. The actions of English militants in Ireland only served to exacerbate anti-suffragist sensibilities on the island as the Irish suffrage movement came to be tainted by its supposed collusion with a British militant feminist movement that was becoming increasingly opposed to Irish nationalist aspirations. The decision made by the English women to ignore Irish women while carrying out suffrage militancy in Ireland also had the effect of exacerbating what was already an uneasy alliance between Irish suffrage militants and their British counterparts.

Irish and British suffragists were allied in many ways. Indeed, to observers at the time, it surely seemed that both campaigns were inextricably linked. Both movements were, of course, embedded within the left-wing political cultures of their respective countries. The WSPU grew out of the British labour movement: its founders, although mainly middle-class, were all members of the Manchester branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and socialist leader and Labour Member of Parliament, Keir Hardie, had even raised £300 to help the suffrage organisation establish itself.² On the Irish side, the IWFL was located at the radical end of the left-wing spectrum, advocating, as it did, not only radical feminism but also increasingly a radical anti-colonial strain of Irish nationalism that was at odds with the ideas of the more moderate Home Rule nationalists. Women on both sides of the Irish Sea were further connected by the fact that they were ruled by the same male British parliament over which they had no control. Their desire to empower women through enfranchising them made them part of the same network of suffrage activists. English and Irish women referenced each other’s campaigns, exchanged funding, ideas and approaches, and travelled across national spaces. Those who shared a commitment to using militant tactics were also arrested and imprisoned across those various national spaces.³ Both groups of women acknowledged the role that Irish nationalist politics had and was continuing to play in their cross-border feminist campaigns. Irish and British suffrage militants admitted that they had modelled their methods on the politically aggressive and often violent actions of successive waves of Irish nationalist politicians. Increasingly, they each referenced the intensifying militancy of the nationalist and Unionist movements in Ireland in order to legitimise their own forceful and disruptive techniques. As the 1910s progressed, both Irish and British feminists became highly sensitive to the obstructive role that Irish nationalist politics was playing in suffrage politics; negotiations over Irish Home Rule had led the Irish Parliamentary Party, which held the balance of power in the Westminster parliament, to block the passing of the 1912 Conciliation Bill which would have enfranchised eligible women across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (UK), for example. There is little doubt, then, that on the basis of these forged connections and because of what they saw as Irish men’s undue influence in feminist politics, women of the British WSPU felt that they had every right to perform militancy in the Irish capital – whatever the objections of Irish nationalist feminists at the time.

In 1995, pioneering historian of Irish nationalist feminism, Margaret Ward, published an article on the conflicting interests of the Irish and British feminist movements.⁴ Her argument was that the WSPU took a pro-British stance not only on the Irish Question but also on the issue of suffragism that had dire consequences for the Irish suffrage movement. Since then, a number of other scholars have followed by examining the British and Irish movements within the same analytical framework. Louise Ryan has called for more attention to the role of British imperialism in Irish feminist affairs, commenting that the Irish movement had more in common with that in India and the Philippines than with those of other European sites who were not engaged in anti-colonial campaigns.⁵ More recently Ian Christopher Fletcher has outlined the similarities and differences in various British suffrage organisations’ approaches to the issue of politics on the so-called Celtic fringes.⁶

In this paper, I expand on the work of Ward, Ryan and Fletcher by extending the argument that political expediency informed the approach taken by the British WSPU towards Irish feminist politics. I argue that it was nationalist ideology, centred on a notion of Englishness, which directed the wider political priorities of the WSPU and which had a commanding hand in shaping suffrage politics in the United Kingdom. A pervasive sense of Englishness had enabled the leaders of the WSPU, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, to construct a fantasy nation – drawing here on the theories of Ghassan Hage⁷ – that defined the United Kingdom as a multi-cultural and multi-racial entity where the more knowing, mature, rational and superior Anglo-Saxon or English core tolerated and led the more emotional, irrational, childlike and inferior Celtic peripheries. Constructing their fantasy nation in this way enabled English suffrage leaders, like the Pankhursts, to promote the idea of a UK-based transnational feminist solidarity across the ‘four nations’, while actively denying the legitimacy of separate nationalisms within that ‘multi-national’ construct. However, by repeatedly asserting that their movement was distinctively Irish and not simply a branch of the more dominant English campaign, Irish suffrage militants, led by staunch nationalists like Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins, worked to deny English militant suffragists’ construction of the tolerant, inclusive but superior English feminist. Far from ignoring or eclipsing the importance of the national within the transnational, as English nationalist feminists had done – and while acknowledging the imbalance of power existing between suffragists in the British metropole and those in the Celtic peripheries – Irish nationalist feminists stressed that their entanglements with English militants were transnational in actuality as they crossed national boundaries that were or should have been in place and respected. Such an interpretation of the unequal status of feminists within the various colonial and imperial contexts of the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century is intended to open up discussions about the powerful role that English nationalism played in suffrage politics at a time when nearly all of the focus was on the seemingly disruptive influence of Irish nationalism.

Nationalism and transnational feminism in the United Kingdom

Historians of empire and those studying women’s history have long had cause to embrace transnational approaches to the past; that is, studying the movements and exchanges across national and colonial borders.⁸ Empire by its very nature operates across multiple and dispersed sites or nations. Participants in women’s movements, although often grounded in their national context, have also tended to connect with ideas and activists internationally.⁹ Scholars of feminist activism within a colonial or imperial paradigm have multiple reasons for examining the circulation of peoples, goods and ideas between and across national and colonial sites. Those examining the lives of colonial women have the opportunity of using transnational methodologies to challenge traditional or conservative notions of metropolitan-colonial relationships by highlighting the value of ideas flowing from the so-called ‘margins’ into the ‘centre’; and many have done so.¹⁰ Re-evaluating the flow of ideas between imperial and colonial sites is not without its challenges. Scholars of feminisms in the Americas, like Maylei Blackwell, have warned against adding to the inequalities suffered by certain groups of women by ignoring their distinctive contexts and conditions – geopolitical, colonial, racial, economic and sexual – and instead concentrating on the linkages formed by the ‘Sisterhood is global’ approach.¹¹ It is this wariness of overlooking diversity and the differences of the local or the national that directs my examination of the relationship between British and Irish militant suffragists.

Transnational approaches to the study of different but connected feminisms have appropriately been applied to histories of the British Empire. The Empire connected multiple sites, nearly all of which were experiencing some form of feminist agitation in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century while also negotiating colonial-national identities (this is certainly true for colonies like Australia, India...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: the British left and Ireland in the twentieth century
• 1 Divided sisterhood? Nationalist feminism and feminist militancy in England and Ireland
• 2 ‘They’ll never understand why I’m here’: British Marxism and the Irish Revolution, 1916–1923
• 3 ‘As imperialistic as our masters’? Relations between British and Irish communists, 1920–1941
• 4 The Connolly Association, the Catholic Church, and anti-communism in Britain and Ireland during the early Cold War
• 5 Two flags in the sand: anti-Communism in early Cold War Northern Ireland
• 6 Northern Ireland and the Far Left, c. 1965 – 1975
• 7 Intersectional solidarity? The Armagh women, the British left and women’s liberation
• Index