Women and the Irish Revolution

Linda Connolly, Linda Connolly

• Verlag: Irish Academic Press
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788551557
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Irish History

The narrative of the Irish revolution as a chronology of great men and male militarism, with women presumed to have either played a subsidiary role or no role at all, requires reconsideration. Women and feminists were extremely active in Irish revolutionary causes from 1912 onwards, but ultimately it was the men as revolutionary 'leaders' who took all the power, and indeed all the credit, after independence. Women from different backgrounds were activists in significant numbers and women across Ireland were profoundly impacted by the overall violence and tumult of the era, but they were then relegated to the private sphere, with the memory of their vital political and military role in the revolution forgotten and erased.

Women and the Irish Revolution examines diverse aspects of women's experiences in the revolution after the Easter Rising. The complex role of women as activists, the detrimental impact of violence and social and political divisions on women, the role of women in the foundation of the new State, and dynamics of remembrance and forgetting are explored in detail by leading scholars in sociology, history, politics, and literary studies. Important and timely, and featuring previously unpublished material, this book will prompt essential new public conversations on the experiences of women in the Irish revolution.

PART I

Chapter 1

NATIONALISM AND FEMINISM:

The Complex Relationship between the Suffragist and Independence Movements in Ireland

LOUISE RYAN

The relationship between feminism and nationalism globally is complex and multifaceted.1 In the early decades of the twentieth century, for countries embroiled in anti-colonial struggle, including Ireland, feminism and nationalism were often regarded as competing priorities.2 However, that is not to suggest that these were oppositional movements. On the contrary, it has been suggested that feminism and nationalism emerged in the same discursive environment.3 Feminism was a critical dynamic in the development of the Irish revolution, including the 1917 to 1923 period, encompassing the War of Independence and the Civil War.

The relationship between women’s liberation and national liberation was complicated, in part, by gendered evocations of traditional culture, practices and identities.4 Nationalist movements tended to use traditions not only as a source of national identity but also as a way of differentiating between the indigenous culture and heritage of the nation and the ‘alien’ influences of imperial culture. Within nationalism rhetoric, that ‘alien’ culture was frequently presented as immoral, evil and dangerous. In Ireland, as indeed in many other countries striving for independence, nationalist discourse tended to ascribe women a limited range of roles within a narrow repertoire of maternal iconography.5 Hence, women were constructed as the keepers of traditional moral and social order.6 However, a small but vocal group of activists took an opposing viewpoint.

In this chapter, drawing on the body of work I have developed over the last twenty years, the complex role of feminism and feminist activists during the Irish revolutionary period is contextualised and interrogated. Now, in the early twenty-first century, with nationalist movements again on the rise across Europe, it seems an appropriate time to revisit and reappraise the ways in which feminists in the past engaged with nationalism, especially in anti-colonial contexts. I argue that by challenging double moral standards, hypocrisy and conventional morality, Irish suffragists represented a feminist analysis of Irish society. However, like feminists in other countries engaged in anti-colonialism, such as Poland7 or India,8 for example, Irish suffragists had to negotiate a tricky path between demanding women’s rights and risking the antagonism of groups demanding the nation’s right to self-determination. The challenge for feminism was in trying to reconcile traditional images of Irish womanhood with a modern women’s movement demanding equality and rights.9 This frequently led to conflict with nationalists and to a contestation of ‘tradition’ whereby feminists attempted to redefine or reinvent traditional images of Irish womanhood. While focusing on the tense relationship between feminism and nationalism in Ireland, the chapter draws on some analytical frameworks from the wider international literature. In so doing, I aim to analyse some of the strategies feminists used to reposition feminism within narratives of national identity and nation-building.

Feminism and Nationalism

Over the last decade or so there has been renewed feminist interest in the issue of nationalism. Far from the assumed death of the nation-state in a rapidly globalising world, it has been increasingly realised that the nation-state and hence nationalism remain salient forces in twenty-first century societies.10 In the early twenty-first century, the rise of ultra-nationalist groups in Europe has underlined the urgency of taking nationalism seriously. Without wishing to under-estimate the specificities of modern nationalist movements, I argue that much can be learned from an understanding of historical movements. In particular, how feminists had engaged critically with nationalist movements over one hundred years ago, at the start of the twentieth century.

In Ireland, in recent years, there has been growing interest in the active role played by women in the nationalist campaign for independence.11 The centenary commemorations of the 1916 Rising included several celebrations of the role of women.12 However, women’s activism should not be analysed only through the lens of nationalism. There were other groups of women in the early twentieth century who had a more complex relationship with the nationalist movement.13 Irish suffrage activists offered new insights into gender inequalities. In developing their critical analysis, these campaigners were part of a long history of feminist thinking in Ireland going back to pioneers like Anna Wheeler.14 While many suffragists supported the aim of Irish self-determination, nonetheless, they refused to blame all social evils on colonialism or to assume that national independence would solve all social problems. Instead, they challenged the prevailing power relations and patriarchal order throughout all the social, economic and political institutions of societies.

Of course, Ireland was not alone in experiencing the thorny relationship between colonialism, nationalism and feminism. As discussed at length elsewhere,15 in countries such as India, feminists not only had to engage with the oppressive force of colonial rule but also the constraining influence of gendered nationalist discourses, which constructed idealised masculinity and femininity in relation to tropes like ‘Mother India’.16 There is scope for more comparative research in the analysis of suffrage history. It would be interesting to see new comparative work on suffragism in Ireland and India, for example. But that is beyond the remit of this chapter.

As a sociologist, I am interested in drawing upon theoretical analyses of gendered nationalist discourses and counter-discourses. In so doing, it is necessary to consider how nationalism and feminism have been mutually constitutive of each other. According to Haque, feminism and nationalism emerged as part of the great reformism programme at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘not only enriching one another in the process but also each bearing traces of the discourses and practices against which it self-fashioned itself (e.g. feudalism, monarchy, patriarchy, tradition and so on)’.17 Feminist scholars have long debated the complex relationship between nationalism and feminism.18 Indeed, as Liddle and Joshi have argued, while nationalists and feminists were united on issues where women’s demands also furthered the nationalist cause, there were splits over issues that posed a direct challenge to male privilege.19 Many nationalist men were ‘forced to admit that whilst they were determined to resist national subordination they did not want to forgo their own domination of women’.20 As Haque argues, ‘Disillusioned and embittered, advocates of female interests’ felt the need ‘to re-examine the whole national/social question vis-à-vis the interests of women’. In so doing, ‘a new course of action is adopted, re-aligning the priorities of nation and women. The process gets under way by delinking the two agendas: feminist and national. From then on, the fight for the rights of women becomes an agenda in its own merit.’21

These observations from international scholarship offer useful insights into the processes taking place in Ireland. Irish feminists, although in many cases supportive of Irish self-determination, argued that nationalist men were using women to further the national cause but were offering those women no guarantee of rights, citizenship or equality in an independent Ireland.22

Although the relationship between nationalism and feminism is multi-faceted and cannot be reduced to one single issue, I am particularly interested in how disputes about ‘national tradition’ often underpinned these tense relationships. ‘Despite all its modern paraphernalia, the discourse of nation, for instance, is always torn between its adherence to a glorious past (revivalism) and its commitment to a (cosmopolitan) future brighter than the present.’23 This echoes what Tom Nairn has described as the ‘Janus quality’ of nationalism – two faces – one looking backwards to history, the other looking forwards to the future.24 Anne McClintock has gone further, arguing that the gendering of nationalism and, in particular, the trope of family makes this Janus quality possible.25 While men are associated with the public world of business and decision-making, where they can build the nation’s future, women represent tradition and links with the past that they should dutifully preserve in the family, in other words, passing on language, religion and culture to the children.26 George L. Mosse, in his influential, classic text on gender and nationalism, notes that ‘woman as a national symbol was the guardian of the continuity and immutability of the nation, the embodiment of its respectability’.27 The portrayal of women as symbols of the nation renders invisible the everyday reality and challenges that women may endure within society.28 National identity often glorifies masculinity while keeping women in narrow, family-oriented roles.29

Nationalist movements tend to use traditions not only as a source of national identity but also as a way of differentiating between the indigenous culture and heritage of the nation and the influence of the alien imperial culture. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, in my earlier work on Irish national and provincial newspapers, the alien culture is frequently presented as immoral, evil and dangerous.30 Radhakrishnan examines the strategic use within nationalism of what he terms as the insider/outsider dichotomy.31 He sees this dichotomy as a line of exclusion between the native ‘insider’ culture and the foreign ‘outsider’ culture. The latter is deemed negative and seen as a threat to the native culture. As Radhakrishnan puts it, women become the ground of allegorical transactions of national history. The inner self, the locus of identity, is associated with the home, the family, where the woman is keeper of the traditional way of life that must be protected from corrupting influences. Citing the work of Chatterjee, Radhakrishnan claims that once one has grasped the insider/outsider dichotomy one can see more clearly how gender roles develop into an ideology of nationalism.32

Katrak points out that such traditions may have been deeply oppressive of women: ‘The arena of female sexuality – fertility/infertility motherhood; the sexual division of labour – is the site of certain “traditions” most oppressive for women.’33 In the particular context of anti-colonial struggles, Katrak says that such traditions became a source of national identity against foreign domination, but as a result, women’s idealised social positioning was reinscribed within such limiting traditional roles in the name of national liberation. The nationalist movement thus may appear contradictory; on the one hand inviting women into the public sphere to engage in active protest for the nationalist cause, while on the other hand, limiting women to purely traditional roles. Moreover, many male nationalist leaders have tended to assume that once the nation has been liberated from imperial domination, women would simply leave the public sphere and return to the private world of domesticity.34 Of course, feminists in many contexts across the world have found this unacceptable and clashed on numerous occasions with the nationalist leaders.35 Irish feminists too had some rather interesting views on tradition, as will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

As has been well documented, Irish feminists active in the campaign for enfranchisement were deeply affected by nationalism.36 In the context of anti-colonial struggles, nationalist movements can pose serious questions for feminism. In the following section, focusing on the Irish suffrage movement, I analyse how feminists in early decades of the twentieth century engaged with national self-determination while simultaneously developing a sharp critique of a male-dominated society. Drawing on the theoretical framework outlined above, especially the concept of nationalism as a gendered Janus-faced discourse, I aim to offer deeper insights into the ways in which suffragists engaged with and sought to interrogate constructions of ‘traditions’ in the Irish context.

Suffragism and ‘Masculine Political Ideals’

Although Irish suffrage societies were set up in the latter part of the nineteenth century, only in the early twentieth century did the movement grow and develop a higher public profile.37 There are a number of reasons for this: the emergence of a group...