A Social History of Women in Ireland, 1870–1970

An Exploration of the Changing Role and Status of Women in Irish Society

Rosemary Cullen Owens

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780717136810
• eBook ISBN: 9780717164554
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

A Social History of Women in Ireland is an important and overdue book that explores the role and status of women in Ireland from 1870 until 1970, looking at politics, sociology, marriage patterns, religion, education and work among other topics. It provides a vital missing piece in the jigsaw of modern Irish history. Using a combination of primary research and published works, A Social History of Women in Ireland explores the role and status of women in Ireland. It examines lifestyle options available to women during this period as well as providing an overview of the forces working for change within Irish society. In bringing together a wide-ranging portfolio of material, A Social History of Women in Ireland 1870–1970 fills an important gap in the literature of the period by focusing on the experiences of Irish women, a group so often overlooked in histories of revolutionary men and prominent politicians. Crucial to a determination of the status of women throughout this period is an examination of the choices available regarding work, marriage and emigration. Rosemary Cullen Owens stresses at all times the importance of class and land ownership as key determinants for women's lives. A decrease in home industries allied to increasing mechanisation on the farm resulted in a contraction of labour opportunities for rural women. With the establishment of an independent farming class, the distinguishing criteria for status in rural Ireland became ownership of land, in which single-minded patriarchal figures dominated. In this context, the position of women declined, and a society evolved with a high pattern of late-age marriages, large numbers of unwed sons and daughters, and an accepted pattern of emigration. In the cities and towns, the condition of lower-working-class women was especially distressing for most of the period, with particular problems regarding housing, health and sanitation. Through the work of campaigning activists, equal educational and political rights were eventually attained. From the early 1900s there was some expansion in female employment in shops, offices and industry, but domestic service remained a high source of employment. For middle-class women, employment opportunities were limited and usually disappeared on marriage. The civil service — a major employer in an economy that was generally un-dynamic and stagnant — operated a bar on married women for much of the period. Rosemary Cullen Owens not merely traces these injustices but also the campaigns fought to right them. She locates these struggles in the wider social context in which they took place. This important book restores balance to the narrative of modern Irish history, changing the focus from key male political figures to society at large by unveiling the often forgotten story of the country's women over a tumultuous century of change. In doing so, Rosemary Cullen Owens enriches our understanding of Irish history from 1870 to 1970.

A Social History of Women in Ireland: Table of Contents

Introduction

• Part 1. Irishwomen in the Nineteenth Century
• 'A progressively widening set of objectives'—The Early Women's Movement
• Developments in Female Education
• Faith and Philanthropy—Women and Religion
• 
  Part 2. A New Century—Action and Reaction
• Radical Suffrage Campaign
• Feminism and Nationalism
• Pacifism, Militarism and Republicanism
• 
  Part 3. Marriage, Motherhood and Work
• The Social and Economic Role of Women in Post-Famine Ireland
• Trade Unions and Irish Women
• Women and Work
• 
  Part 4. Women in the New Irish State
• The Quest for Equal Citizenship 1922–1938
• The Politicisation of Women Mid-Twentieth Century
• 
  Epilogue: A Woman's World?

	PART 1
	Irishwomen in the Nineteenth Century

	1
	‘A PROGRESSIVELY WIDENING SET OF OBJECTIVES’^1—THE EARLY WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

A hundred years ago, women had not begun to make the vindication of their rights the prominent political and social problem it has become today (E.R. PENNELL, 1891).

So begins E.R. Pennell’s introduction to an 1891 edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft.² First published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication has been described by Deirdre Raftery as ‘the work in which all previous arguments for the inferiority of the female mind are synthesised, and new ground was broken’.³ Part of a young liberal and intellectual radical group seeking social and political reform in the revolutionary era, Mary Wollstonecraft argued in particular for female emancipation, having seen that those articulating demands for ‘the rights of man’ did not always wish to extend these rights to women. Her abiding commitment was to establish that human reason was the same in man and woman and, from this point, to argue that all humans are equal. She questioned the contemporary definition of woman’s social role, arguing that the education of women was fundamental to the well-being of the state:

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to (women) their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.⁴

Wollstonecraft was the first to link education with the idea of financial independence, arguing for change in the traditions and laws which prevented women from working in society:

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility … I have seldom seen much compassion excited by the helplessness of females, unless they were fair … How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty.⁵

The forceful views expressed in the Vindication led to vilification during her lifetime and for many years after her death. With historical reinterpretation of women’s role in society, Wollstonecraft has been accorded her rightful position ‘as the woman who dared to assume the doctrine of human rights for her own sex, and who wrote what may be seen as the first declaration of female independence’.⁶

In 1820 the English philosopher, economist and historian James Mill published a treatise On Government in which he argued that political rights could be removed without inconvenience from certain classes of people, including women, ‘the interests of almost all of whom are involved in that of their fathers or in that of their husbands’.⁷ In response, Tipperary-born Anna Wheeler—an admirer of Wollstonecraft —collaborated with William Thompson (originally from Cork) to produce a definitive work advocating female suffrage. While it was rare in early nineteenth-century England for a man to publicly acknowledge the collaboration of a woman in the writing of a major political work, Anna Wheeler was so acknowledged by Thompson in what Dolores Dooley has described as the ‘first complete statement of a socialist defence of sexual equality’.⁸ The rather unwieldy title of the work is in fact a synopsis of its content: Appeal of one Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Published in London in 1825, the work declared:

All women and particularly women living with men in marriage … having been reduced by the want of political rights to a state of helplessness and slavery … are more in need of political rights than any other portion of human beings.

Arguing for equal political, civil and domestic rights for women, the authors stated:

Without them (equal rights) they can never be regarded by men as really their equals, they can never attain that respectability and dignity in the social scale … they could not respect themselves.⁹

Wheeler and Thompson did not claim that a change in laws would automatically lead to emancipation from oppression, accepting that cultural attitudes and public opinion would have to be changed. But legal changes were necessary precursors to such attitudinal change. These equality claims for women were articulated against a backdrop of much social unrest in Great Britain during the 1820s. Common to most western societies, extensive social and economic upheaval was taking place with the development of industrialised capitalism. Contemporaneously, a legacy of enlightenment philosophy and revolutionary ideals of equality synthesised into a liberal ideology. As the emerging middle classes began to play an increasingly prominent role in political and social life, they used their power to press for a voice in the nation’s government through the creation of parliamentary institutions based on a property-qualified franchise (to exclude the lower classes) with full ministerial responsibility (to minimise aristocratic power exercised through court intrigue). They pleaded for the liberal principles of representative government, equality before the law and careers open to talent. As a result of such pressure a gradual democratisation of local and national government took place throughout Great Britain during the 1800s. The Franchise Reform Acts of 1832, 1868 and 1884 significantly shifted the power structure from the traditional wealthy landowning and aristocratic classes to ‘newly rich’ industrialist and professional groups. It was not until 1872 that secret balloting became law, enabling workers in towns and country to use their vote freely without fear of reprisals from employer or landlord. However, in spite of the added enfranchisement of many urban and rural workers towards the end of the century, the parliamentary vote retained two major disabilities. It was primarily property-based rather than person-based, leaving significant levels of the population without a vote. In addition all women, irrespective of whether or not they fulfilled the property qualifications, were excluded.

The passing of the Act of Union in 1800 established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This involved the loss of Ireland’s native parliament and the absorption of Irish parliamentary representatives into the Westminster parliament. From 1800 until Ireland achieved independence in 1921, all laws governing Ireland would emanate from Westminster. During the nineteenth century a series of movements emerged in England and Ireland aimed at improving the social, economic and political status of women. A number of influences converged to bring such organisations into existence from the 1850s. Richard Evans has noted that it was out of the involvement of middle-class philanthropists in the debates over measures such as women’s rights within marriage, extension of second- and third-level education to women, and the abolition of state regulation of prostitution that organised feminism began.¹⁰ In addition, he cites John Stuart Mill’s 1869 essay on The Subjection of Women as an incalculable influence on feminism.¹¹ During the 1850s in Britain, the forces of reform were realigning, and middle-class concern with social questions was growing after the Chartist challenges of the 1840s. Two other important influences on emerging women’s groups were the experience of many within the anti-slavery movement earlier in the century, and with the Anti-Corn law agitation of the early 1840s. The tactics of the nascent women’s suffrage campaign would be based on those of the Anti-Corn Law League, including the retaining of itinerant lecturers, the holding of indoor public meetings, the production of a steady stream of tracts, handbills and petitions to parliament, and the pressurising of candidates in parliamentary elections.¹² Another significant development was the emergence of a number of associations dedicated to social reform, of which the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), the parent body of the early feminist movement, was perhaps the most important.¹³ Women were active in many of these associations, and it is at meetings of such organisations, and in their journals, that we find the first debates of many reform issues related to women. Luddy has pointed out that the NAPSS provided an important platform for women activists, and offered a meeting ground for women from Ireland and England.¹⁴

Demands for better educational and employment opportunities for single, middle-class women provided a springboard for a series of further demands including property and child custody rights for married women, female representation on public boards and local authorities, the right to vote in local elections, and ultimately the right to the parliamentary vote. This process, paralleled in most western countries, has been described by R.J. Evans as ‘the history of a progressively widening set of objectives’.¹⁵

It was in fact the 1832 Reform Act which specifically introduced sex discrimination into electoral qualifications with its use of the words ‘male persons’. This was extended in 1835 to include local and municipal government franchises. This act has been described as planting the seed of later female suffrage agitation.¹⁶ Up to 1832 women in England and Ireland had been prevented from voting by custom only, and in medieval times many qualified women had exercised their right to vote. From 1832, however, all women were prohibited from voting by law. The campaign for women’s suffrage therefore took place against a backdrop of ever widening male eligibility for the vote with no recognition of equal rights for women with similar qualifications.

Between 1830 and 1860, the subject of woman and her ‘place’ was not entirely ignored in Irish publications. One such article in 1839 comparing Irish and French women noted approvingly that ‘there is no free country where the women have less of a separate existence than in Ireland’.¹⁷ While conceding the need for new avenues of employment for middle-class women, an article in Dublin University Magazine in 1859 stated: ‘A woman’s mission is to be true to her own womanhood, and surely no nobler portion of this mission is there than the exalting of men.’¹⁸ Two years later it was reported that the issue of the Employment of Women in Ireland had been long and frequently discussed at recent meetings of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (SSISI) in 1861; while accepting that educated women should not be limited to the profession of governess, the author advised that ‘the sex of a woman, though it may be a misfortune, is not a crime’.¹⁹ Reflecting these discussions, Andrew Rosen has written:

In the 1850s and 1860s there was simply no career offering any degree of intellectual scope, pecuniary reward, and social respectability open to an unmarried middle-class woman. It was primarily as a reaction against the manifest lack of opportunities for unmarried middle-class women that organised feminism began in Britain.²⁰

Similarly, George Dangerfield has comm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: Irishwomen in the Nineteenth Century
•    CHAPTER 1: ‘A PROGRESSIVELY WIDENING SET OF OBJECTIVES’–THE EARLY WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
•    CHAPTER 2: DEVELOPMENTS IN FEMALE EDUCATION
•    CHAPTER 3: FAITH AND PHILANTHROPY–WOMEN AND RELIGION
• Part Two: A New Century–Action and Reaction
•    CHAPTER 4: RADICAL SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGN
•    CHAPTER 5: FEMINISM AND NATIONALISM
•    CHAPTER 6: PACIFISM, MILITARISM AND REPUBLICANISM
• PART THREE: Marriage, Motherhood and Work
•    CHAPTER 7: THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ROLE OF WOMEN IN POST-FAMINE IRELAND
•    CHAPTER 8: TRADE UNIONS AND IRISH WOMEN
•    CHAPTER 9: WOMEN AND WORK
• PART FOUR: Women in the New Irish State
•    CHAPTER 10: THE QUEST FOR EQUAL CITIZENSHIP 1922–1938
•    CHAPTER 11: THE POLITICISATION OF WOMEN MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY
• EPILOGUE: A WOMAN’S WORLD?
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan