Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism, 1850–1950 9781526136404

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Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism, 1850–1950

Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism, 1850–1950 CA R A D E L AY

Manchester University Press

Copyright ©  Cara Delay 2019 The right of Cara Delay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3639 8 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services

For my parents, Richard and Susan

Contents Acknowledgements

page viii

Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1 Women and Catholic culture

15

2 Catholic girlhoods

58

3 The Irish Catholic mother

98

4 The holy household

138

5 Gender and space

174

6 Women, priests, and power

209

Conclusion

237

Select bibliography

243

Index

251

Acknowledgements I have benefitted from the assistance and support of many while ­writing this book. I would like to express my gratitude to the staffs of the following for their assistance with research: the National Archives of Ireland, Dublin; the National Library of Ireland, Dublin; the Dublin Diocesan Archives, Drumcondra; the John J. Burns Library, Boston College; the Galway Diocesan Archives; the Cloyne Diocesan Archives; the Kerry Diocesan Archives; the Limerick Diocesan Archives; and the National Folklore Collection, University College Dublin. The revisions for this manuscript were completed while I was on a Fulbright fellowship in Dublin; my thanks to the Fulbright Commission as well as Gerardine Meaney and the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin for hosting me. For additional financial support I thank the History Department and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston. I also am grateful to the editors of Éire-Ireland, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Études Irlandaises, the Journal of Family History, and Four Courts Press for permission to reproduce parts of previously published articles and chapters. The editorial team at Manchester University Press, especially Emma Brennan and Alun Richards, were enormously helpful and patient throughout this process. I thank my amazing students at the College of Charleston and also wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues in the History Department, Women’s and Gender Studies, Irish Studies, and the Women’s Health Research Team. I am especially indebted to Phyllis Jestice for reading a draft of the entire manuscript and to the following colleagues for providing helpful insight along the way: Sandra Slater, Noelle ­Zeiner-Carmichael, Tim Carmichael, Bill Olejniczak, Chris Boucher,

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ix

and E. Moore Quinn. The late Ruth-Ann M. Harris generously offered not only her mentorship but also her amazing Mill House, where I wrote several chapters one memorable summer. Family and friends have sustained me in innumerable ways throughout the efforts that this book required. Thank you to Amy, Deb, Kelly, Derek, Jim, and Johnny; Ryan, Justine, Mackenzie, Madeline, Richie, Keegan, Ava, Lila, Evan, Natalie, Fiona, Finn, Niamh, and Owen; and Cassie, Noelle, Sandy, Moore, Rosalva, Izzy, and Kairo. To my father and my late mother, who always gave me the freedom to have a ‘life of the mind’, I am eternally grateful. And to Paris, the best decision I’ve ever made: how can I express my thankfulness for your support every step of the way? Words are insufficient. Te adoro.

Abbreviations CDA Cloyne Diocesan Archives, Cobh CEDA Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly Archives, National Library, Dublin DDA Dublin Diocesan Archives, Drumcondra GDA Galway Diocesan Archives, Galway KDA Kerry Diocesan Archives, Killarney LDA Limerick Diocesan Archives, Limerick NAI National Archives of Ireland, Dublin NFC National Folklore Collection, Dublin NLI National Library of Ireland, Dublin

Introduction In the 1860s, a reporter from the Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator described the scene at a local holy well, where ‘[a] few poor women were fervently repeating their prayers and “going their rounds” about the well’.1 Several decades later, a special correspondent for the London Times observed an interesting phenomenon when he travelled to Ireland. At a mass in 1886, he wrote, a local man ‘had counted about 100 women in his parish chapel, but not a single man except himself’.2 By the 1930s and 1940s, according to oral histories, Dublin’s working-class mothers prayed with their rosary beads ‘in church, home, on the street, in shops or queues, almost anywhere’.3 These accounts illustrate that lay Irish women came to represent faith and nation in the modern age. They testify to the central positions that lay women held in the religious worlds of nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland even as they document both changes and continuities in how women practiced their faith from the post-famine decades to 1950. In the immediate aftermath of the Great Famine, the Irish Catholic Church remained institutionally weak. Women’s devotional worlds thus were syncretic – intensely Catholic but also steeped in vernacular popular traditions including holy well devotions and fairy belief. By the late nineteenth-century ‘devotional revolution’ (1850–75),4 when the Church reorganised and rebuilt, lay Catholic women came to occupy the public spaces of the parish and chapel in unprecedented numbers. And in the first half of the twentieth century, Irish women’s Catholicism became not only popular but also material and commercial, bolstered by a remarkable flourishing of publications and devotional items including the rosary beads so beloved by Dublin’s mothers in the 1940s and 1950s.

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Notably, lay Irish women played important yet understudied roles in the Church from 1850 to 1950. Women dominated daily lived religion and challenged the established patriarchy through their traditional socially constructed gender roles: church-goers, managers of the holy household, moral-imparting mothers, consumers and creators of devotional culture, correspondents, gossipers, philanthropists and activists, and community members. Amidst enormous political, ­ ­economic, and social change, and even within a culture of intensified patriarchy, women persisted in occupying a central position in religious life throughout the period. This book investigates the roles that lay women played in Irish Catholic life from 1850 to 1950. Nuns, for the most part, have not been incorporated into this study because their religious, material, and physical conditions differed from those of most lay women. Additionally, while several historians have investigated Irish women religious, lay women’s roles remain almost entirely overlooked.5 This book focuses on women in the provinces of Munster, Connacht, and Leinster; Ulster’s unique religious, demographic, and political contexts are largely outside the scope of this study.6 Examining both urban and rural areas across the east, south, and west of Ireland, Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850–1950 analyses women throughout their lifecycles, including the sacred moments that characterised their girlhoods, the rhetorical strategies of Catholic mothers, and the recollections of older women reflecting on their religious memories. My study interrogates the intersections of gender, class, and religion and, whenever possible, integrates the examples of women from various social classes. This book notes key distinctions among women within the wide spectrum of regional, economic, age, and marital variances, yet it also highlights how Catholicism could unify lay women across these divides. Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism demonstrates that the key moments of change in Catholic women’s devotional lives occurred in two stages, first from 1870 to 1890, as the effects of the ‘devotional revolution’ hit full stride; and second, in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Irish Catholic nation-state came into being. During both of these eras, the institutional Church and, in the latter case, the new state intensified pressure on women to conform to Catholic gender

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norms. In the 1870s and 1880s, increased centralisation of the ­Catholic Church inspired abundant literature urging Irish lay women to confine themselves to the home and thus isolate themselves from the enormous political, economic, and cultural changes of the post-famine era. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the independent Irish state came into being, it linked with the Church, becoming an all-consuming cultural power. As J.J. Lee argues, ‘[r]arely has the Catholic Church as an institution flourished … as in the Free State’.7 As a result, by the early twentieth century, a new culture of patriarchy bolstered by the Church–state coalition controlled and contained Catholic lay women. At the same time, however, Irish women increased their public presence in religious rituals, dominated domestic devotional culture, and increasingly controlled Catholic consumerism. The story of modern Irish Catholicism and lay women therefore is complex, marked by losses and gains. The complexity is increased still further because the changes documented by first-hand accounts of Irish Catholicism existed alongside remarkable continuities. From the desolation of the famine years right through the first few decades of independence, Catholicism was central to women’s ordinary daily lives, and women actively participated in ­devotional life and the creation of their religious identities. The role that Catholicism has played in creating modern Irish identities cannot be overestimated. Ireland’s reputation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one of the most religiously observant Catholic countries in the Western world caused many to equate ‘Irish’ and ‘Catholic’.8 Oliver Rafferty writes that for a large part of our history the two primary components in Irish identity, for the great majority of people who have lived on the island of Ireland, are a sense of ‘Irishness’ often conceived in broad terms and subject to fluctuating understanding of what constitutes such an identity, and adherence to the Catholic faith. The influence, authority and role of the Catholic Church in shaping Irish Catholic consciousness are, therefore, paramount as a template for understanding Ireland and the Irish historically.9 Early twentieth-century observers agreed. ‘Ireland’, asserted the Jesuit W. J. Lockington in 1920, ‘is Ireland because of her Catholicity’.10 The

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government of the new Irish state in the 1930s famously modelled its Constitution on Catholic doctrine and specifically recognised the ‘­special position’ of the Catholic Church ‘as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens’.11 Scholars have documented that the decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s were predominantly responsible for transforming Irish Catholicism. In 1972, when the notable scholar Emmet Larkin characterised Ireland’s nineteenth-century religious transformations as a ‘devotional revolution’, he created a revolution of his own, igniting a historical debate that continues today. Larkin maintains that ‘[t]he great mass of the Irish people became practicing Catholics’ only in the late nineteenth century due to Ireland’s previous small population of priests (compared to a growing population of parishioners) and a lack of both chapels and available devotions.12 Only after the rural poor were decimated by the 1840s famine did a numerous and disciplined priesthood, supported by a prosperous, powerful middle class, emerge and make Ireland’s people truly Catholic. In Larkin’s view, the ‘devotional revolution’ was a top-down phenomenon led by male members of the Church hierarchy. This ‘revolution’, he argues, gave way to greater episcopal control over the clergy and clerical control over parishioners, and, in turn, a more observant laity, increasingly well-run parishes, and a unique convergence of national and religious identities.13 Despite the attention that Larkin’s thesis has garnered over almost half a century, the historiography of modern Ireland’s Catholic parish life and local religion is still in its infancy. To date, scholarship on Catholicism overwhelmingly concerns the relationships between the members of the Church hierarchy, the Church’s institutional development, or its influence on politics and nationalism.14 Only recently have social history, devotion and practice, and Catholic parish daily life gained attention. Scholars who have laid the foundation for illuminating the lives of ordinary Catholics have enhanced our understanding of religious life. Nicholas Wolf’s An Irish-Speaking Island, for example, sheds light on the linguistic worlds of ordinary Catholics in the nineteenth century. He argues that Irish speakers actively contributed to the ‘forging of modern Catholicism’, and that they should thus be recognised – and portrayed – as conscious actors rather than passive bystanders.15

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In  Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, sociologist Eugene Hynes, focusing particularly on the pre-famine ­ world, depicts vibrant local religious communities that often c­ onflicted with the Catholic hierarchy. Hynes asserts that the Virgin’s appearance at Knock in 1879 is an example of what James C. Scott has called ‘weapons of the weak’, allowing parishioners to challenge priestly authority.16 Similarly, Donnelly’s work on the Knock apparition and Marian devotion across a century unveils the complexities of popular Catholicism, including the interactions between priests, people, and members of the Catholic hierarchy.17 Yet, it is the serious analysis of lay women that represents the most conspicuous gap in the historiography of modern Irish Catholicism. This omission is particularly remarkable given the centrality of both Catholicism and gender to modern Irish identities, the historical convergence of the ideal of womanhood and the Irish Catholic nation, and the popular presumption, since the late nineteenth century, that Irish women are the staunchest Catholics.18 Most major studies of modern Catholicism ignore the fundamental roles of lay women in a clearly feminised religious revival.19 The existing scholarly work on modern lay Irish Catholic women, meanwhile, is myopic, describing women’s near catastrophic loss of autonomy in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’.20 According to Hynes, the post-famine advent of an ‘authoritarian and puritanical’ Catholicism denigrated women, further exacerbating their declining economic and familial statuses.21 Carolyn Conley argues that it was the Catholic hierarchy that determined women’s positions in nineteenth-century Ireland, and that this new social schema be ‘even more rigid than … the most Victorian thinkers in terms of the proper role for women’.22 In his examination of Irish Catholic motherhood and the relationship between women and priests, Tom Inglis concludes that women effectively bestowed public power on religious authorities by the late nineteenth century, ensuring in return their own dominance in the private domestic sphere.23 By the early twentieth century, independent Ireland bolstered its patriarchal consensus by legislating against ‘deviant’ female sexuality as well as creating oppressive Church/state-run institutions such as Magdalen asylums.24 While these claims still hold true, they are only part of the story. For many women, reality was not as simple as co-existing with an

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oppressive Church, which occupied a complex and, occasionally, contradictory role in the lives of Irish women, variously offering ­ succour and self-agency. Furthermore, many lay women refused passive acceptance of the Catholic Church’s dictates, making significant contributions to their faith even as they skilfully revised and resisted Catholic patriarchy. Drawing upon recent work in Irish women’s history,25 this book asserts a new historical narrative for lay women’s roles, responsibilities, and influence, further elucidating the nuances of female resistance and negotiation within patriarchal structures. Historians’ invaluable work on women, infanticide, and abortion reminds us that women did their best to control their reproduction even in an age that defined them almost solely as mothers.26 Through philanthropy, ­meanwhile, as Maria Luddy has shown, middle-class and elite women invaded the public sphere even in an age that characterised them as purely domestic.27 By the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic women – mostly nuns but also a significant number of middle-class lay women – gained unprecedented access to public worlds through charitable ­activities.28 As in Britain, feminist activism followed hard on the heels of philanthropist organisation. During the first wave of the Irish ­feminist movement, women campaigned not only for suffrage but also for access to higher education and the repeal of the Contagious ­Diseases Acts. Many also became involved in nationalism, both ­constitutional and republican.29 Still, we know little about Irish women’s religious lives. In the ­revision of his seminal Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland (1984), Sean Connolly admits he did not ‘properly addres[s]’ gender or women’s experiences in his study of popular religion. In 2000, he called for more research, arguing that revisionist readings of sources and the opening of new archival depositories ‘will eventually make it possible to fill this gap in our knowledge’.30 Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism attempts to begin to fill the gap. It is grounded firmly in an analysis of primary documents from archives across Ireland. Catholic Church documents, including bishops’ ­visitation questionnaires and diaries, clerical and episcopal correspondence, sermons and pastorals, priests’ journals, unpublished manuscripts, and female parishioners’ petitions and letters comprise a ­significant portion of this source base. Also examined are newspapers,

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Catholic conduct literature, a wide variety of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century printed materials, and the prolific Catholic material culture of the time. This book privileges the words and writings of lay Irish women from different backgrounds. Published oral histories afford a window into the daily lives and religious practices of many women, particularly those absent from some Church documents. Other life-writings, including memoirs, diaries, and letters, allow us to interrogate the ways in which Irish women constructed, interpreted, and, in some cases, complicated their religious identities. Folklore narratives and oral traditions provide access to poorer and rural women’s cultures and help us explore how Irish women both experienced and shaped Catholic rituals, traditional practices, and parish life.31 While these sources cannot always be taken at face value, they do, when interpreted carefully, shed valuable light on world-views and women’s cultures. Chapter  One, ‘Women and Catholic culture’, analyses the construction of nineteenth and twentieth-century lay Irish Catholic womanhood. It demonstrates that women and girls were bombarded with messages on Catholic womanhood from an early age and reveals that the Church hierarchy’s sustained and determined attempts to define the ideal woman were linked not only to the evolution of Catholicism but also to the creation of the modern Irish nation. Chapter One also exposes the ideal as pervasive but essentially fragile: constructions of Irish womanhood sometimes were more wishful thinking than reality and might reflect deep-seated anxieties about women’s changing roles in the modern world. A deeper exploration of Catholic girlhoods is the focus of Chapter Two. This chapter posits that from 1850 to 1950, Catholicism served as the major influence in Irish girls’ identity formation in the community and the family, and that girls were integral to the creation of Ireland’s Catholic culture. Through an analysis of Irish women’s autobiographical writings and Catholic material and print culture, this chapter explores girls’ devotional experiences, such as the bishop’s visitation and First Communion. Devotional artefacts figure prominently in women’s autobiographical writings, a reminder that Catholicism was a material religion with a tangible physical presence, often lending itself to fantasy and the imagination. Chapter Two also highlights the

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significant interrelationships between girls and women: nuns, grandmothers, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and especially mothers emerge as girls’ principal religious influences. Catholic memoirists and diarists from the 1850s through the late twentieth century affirmed their affection and awe for their mothers, whom they depicted as self-sacrificing and martyr-like. In recent decades, however, scholars have assigned to the Irish mother a more sinister role, indicting her for priestly collusion and instilling a repressive and damaging Catholicism in future generations. Chapter Three, ‘The Irish Catholic mother’, debunks the martyr/villain trope through a detailed analysis of Irish Catholic motherhood. It compares constructions of motherhood (both contemporary and scholarly) with mothers’ real-life experiences. Mothers’ own words, particularly evident in their letters to bishops, demonstrate that they did not always work in tandem with the Catholic clergy but frequently negotiated the authority of clerics. Women asserted their autonomy within the home and over their children even as they made use of their maternal status to demand that priests and bishops respond to their needs and wants. As Irish culture increasingly identified women with the home and the private sphere, as Catholic devotions gained favour throughout Ireland, and as household prayers increased in popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish women welcomed their new role as guardian of religion in the home. How this worked in practice, though, remains obscure. Chapter  Four, ‘The holy household’, offers a case study of the Irish Catholic home and material culture. This chapter looks further at religious iconography and Catholic artefacts. Exploring gender and consumption, it reveals that the growing power of homebased Catholicism depended on women’s consumerism and financial management. It also examines the central roles that mothers and grandmothers played in household devotions and prayers. The ways in which Irish women shaped religious experiences for themselves and their families during several key moments, such as the rosary and the station-mass, show how lay women created and maintained Catholic households and thus ensured the future of the Catholic nation. From 1850 to 1950, Irish Catholic women not only led home-based devotions but also, in overwhelming numbers, made themselves

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dominant actors in public religious spaces. The landscape of the Irish town, village, or city was both fundamentally a Catholic and a feminised landscape. Chapter  Five, ‘Gender and space’, investigates women’s place in devotional places and spaces. This was an age in which Catholic officials urged women’s roles to be domestic and private, and when women’s bodies were increasingly contained and controlled in disciplined spaces, including the Catholic chapel. Still, women resisted the civilising mission of the ‘devotional revolution’ by maintaining their commitment to vernacular landscapes and traditions. They also made themselves indispensable to the construction and upkeep of newly built chapels and became the main congregants at the chapel-mass. By demanding a central place in religious spaces, women complicated the divide between private and public and challenged patriarchal consensus. Chapter  Six, ‘Women, priests, and power’, illuminates the relationship between lay Catholic women and priests through case studies of women’s correspondence and oral traditions. Scholars have argued either in favour of the clergy’s complete control over lay women or conversely that lay women maintained close connections, even collusions, with priests from 1850 to 1950.32 This chapter challenges both dichotomous interpretations, arguing instead that the relationship between priests and women was one of both closeness and conflict, involving complex interactions often defined by struggles for power and influence. Priests and lay women denounced each other at mass; meanwhile, in rural areas, women used oral traditions and legends to poke fun at their priests and undermine clerical authority. In their letters to bishops and priests, for example, denouncing the behaviour of their own parish priest, literate women used their epistolary words to challenge the authority of the Church. Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism solidifies a growing scholarly consensus confirming the agency of Irish women: they were active in philanthropy (both lay women and nuns), worked for wages, participated in the new feminist movement, and sought improved lives by emigrating in extraordinarily high numbers.33 In The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women, and Nationalism in Ireland, Carol Coulter challenges the notion that Ireland’s early twentieth-century politically active feminists ‘[came] from nowhere’ and

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contends that even after independence, women utilised pre-existing community networks to assert themselves.34 This book argues that a powerful and determined body of lay women built on traditions of female empowerment to not only help create a popular modern Catholicism but also to complicate and challenge it. This project therefore contests views that the increasing power of the Church caused a uniform decline in Irish women’s status after the Great Famine of the 1840s. Instead, my book reveals the era’s complexities, highlighting how lay women rejected, negotiated, and reworked Church dictates to become principal actors in the trajectory of modern Irish history. Notes 1 Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator, 25 August 1863. 2 Special Correspondent of the Times, Letters from Ireland, 1886, cited in John P. Harrington, ed., The English Traveller in Ireland: Accounts of Ireland and the Irish through Five Centuries (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991), pp. 303–4. 3 Kevin Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines: Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006), p. 157. 4 Emmet Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical Review 77: 3 (1972), pp. 625–52. 5 For scholarship on Irish nuns, see Caitriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987); Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Yvonne McKenna, Made Holy: Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006). 6 For more on Northern Ireland, see Marianne Elliot, The Catholics of Ulster (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001). 7 Joseph J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 159. 8 Brian Girvin, ‘Social change and moral politics: the Irish constitutional referendum 1983’, Political Studies 34: 1 (March 1986), p. 63; Emmet Larkin, ‘Introduction’, in The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism, ed. Emmet Larkin (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), p. 2. 9 Oliver P. Rafferty, ‘Introduction’, in Irish Catholic Identities, ed. Oliver P. Rafferty (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 1.

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10 William J. Lockington, The Soul of Ireland (London: Harding and More, 1920), p. 7. 11 Constitution of Ireland, 1937, www.constitution.ie. 12 Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution’, pp. 58, 71. 13 In the years following the publication of Larkin’s article ‘The devotional revolution’, several scholars attempted to modify Larkin’s thesis, mostly questioning the timing of the revolution he describes. Desmond Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Sociological Study (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983); Patrick J. Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin: Helicon Limited, 1981); and David W. Miller, ‘Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine’, Journal of Social History 9 (1975), pp. 81–98. 14 John Newsinger, ‘The Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Ireland’, European History Quarterly 25 (1995), p. 247. See also James O’Shea, Priests, Politics and Society in Post-Famine Ireland: A Study of County Tipperary, 1850–1891 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1983); and Eugene M. Hynes, ‘The Great Hunger and Irish Catholicism’, Societas, viii: 2 (spring 1978), pp. 137–56. 15 Nicholas Wolf, An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1880 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), pp. 196–7. 16 Eugene Hynes, Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). 17 James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Marian shrine of Knock: the first decade’, Eire-Ireland 27: 2 (summer 1993), pp. 54–99; ‘The peak of Marianism in Ireland, 1930–60’, in Piety and Power in Ireland, 1760–1960: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin, ed. Stewart J. Brown and David W. Miller (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of  Belfast, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), pp.  252–83; ‘Knock shrine, the worst of times: the 1940s’, ÉireIreland 48: 3&4 (fall/winter 2013), pp. 213–64; ‘The revival of Knock shrine’, in History and the Public Sphere: Essays in Honour of John A. Murphy, ed. Tom Dunne and Laurence M. Geary (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), pp. 186–200. 18 For examples of women’s piety, see Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines; for a sociological analysis of the links between women and religion in modern Ireland, see Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987). 19 See, for example, Emmet Larkin, The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,

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1987); The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1976); The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); The Roman Catholic Church and the Creation of the Modern Irish State, 1878–1886 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1975); The Roman Catholic Church and the Emergence of the Modern Irish Political System, 1874–1878 (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996); and The Roman Catholic Church and the Home Rule Movement in Ireland, 1870–1874 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990); Patrick J. Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1985); David W. Miller, Church, State, and Nation in Ireland, 1898–1921 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); and John Henry Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–1970 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971). Other works, such as sociologist Tom Inglis’s Moral Monopoly and short articles by Joseph Lee, Séamus Enright, and Patrick Corish, have only begun to examine the links between women and Catholicism in modern Ireland. See Inglis, Moral Monopoly; J. J. Lee, ‘Women and the Church since the Famine’, in Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension, ed. Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha Ó Corráin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 37–45; Patrick J. Corish, ‘Women and religious practice’, in Women in Early Modern Ireland, 1500–1800, ed. Mary O’Dowd and Margaret MacCurtain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 212–20; and Séamus Enright, ‘Women and Catholic life in Dublin, 1766–1852’, in History of the Catholic Diocese of Dublin, ed. James Kelly and Dáire Keogh (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 268–93. 20 Lee, ‘Women and the Church’. 21 Eugene Hynes, ‘Family and religious change in a peripheral capitalist society: mid-nineteenth century Ireland’, in The Religion and Family Connection: Social Science Perspectives, ed. Darwin L. Thomas (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1988), p. 166. 22 Carolyn Conley, ‘No pedestals: women and violence in late nineteenth-century Ireland’, Journal of Social History 28: 4 (1995), p. 801. 23 Inglis, Moral Monopoly. 24 Una Crowley and Rob Kitchin, ‘Producing “decent girls”: governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922–1937)’, Gender, Place, and Culture 15: 4 (August 2008), pp. 355–72; James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2007).

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25 Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 1. C.f., Caitriona Clear, ‘Women in de Valera’s Ireland 1932–48: a reappraisal’, in de Valera’s Irelands, ed. Gabriel Doherty and Dermot Keogh (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003), pp. 104–7, who challenges the consensus of ‘an oppressive, stagnant, uncomfortable social environment’ for women in de Valera’s Ireland. She argues that many women held comfortable public roles ‘as long as they were upholding Catholic principles’ and rejects the notion that the ‘injustices’ perpetrated against women at the time resulted from ‘a prevailing ideology of domesticity’. 26 Elaine Farrell, ‘A Most Diabolical Deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society, 1850–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Cliona Rattigan, ‘What Else Could I Do?’ Single Mothers and Infanticide, Ireland 1900–1950 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012); Leanne McCormick, ‘“No sense of wrongdoing”: abortion in Belfast 1917– 1967’, Journal of Social History 49: 1 (Fall 2015), pp. 125–48. 27 Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–2. See also Rosemary Raughter, ‘Introduction’, in Religious Women and Their History: Breaking the Silence, ed. Rosemary Raughter (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), p. 4. 28 Margaret H. Preston, Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy, and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). 29 Maria Luddy, ‘Women and politics, 1860–1918’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, ed. Angela Bourke, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 71–3. 30 Sean J. Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780– 1845 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 27. 31 The National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin houses approximately one and a half million pages relating to Irish folk culture. The majority of those documents are the result of projects beginning in the late 1930s, when folklore collectors interviewed older Irish men and women about customs and traditions and when the Irish state encouraged schoolchildren to collect folklore and stories in their own locales. These interviews and questionnaires describe life as far back as the end of the famine years and shed light on post-famine worldviews. Mícheál Briody, The Irish Folklore Commission, 1935–1970: History, Ideology, Methodology (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2007).

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32 Inglis, Moral Monopoly, p. 179, and Mary Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland: How the Irish Lost the Civilization they Created (Springfield, IL: Templegate Publishers, 2000), pp. 47, 56. 33 See Luddy, Women and Philanthropy; Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1996); Sinead McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years, 1900–1923 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Jason Knirck, Women of the Dáil: Gender, Republicanism, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006); and Mary Pierse, ed., Irish Feminisms: 1810–1930 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009). 34 Carol Coulter, The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women, and Natio­ nalism in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), p. 3.

1 Women and Catholic culture Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland boasted a vast body of prescriptive literature that instructed women how to lead proper Catholic lives.1 A key example, Bernard O’Reilly’s 1883 advice book The Mirror of True Womanhood, conflated women’s religious and domestic duties: There is nothing on earth which the Creator and Lord of all things holds more dear than [the] home, in which … a mother’s unfailing and all-embracing tenderness will be, like the light and warmth of the sun in the heavens, the source of life, and joy, and strength, and all goodness to her dear ones, as well as to all who come within the reach of her influence.2 As this passage suggests, the gendered norms of the post-famine era highlighted women’s ‘natural’ roles as wives and mothers. Authors urged Irish Catholic women to focus their life’s efforts on the domestic sphere. There, women would create a peaceful and civilised religious space where they would influence their husbands, educate their children, and secure the future of the Irish Catholic nation.3 Education helped to create and enforce these norms. By the late nineteenth century, Catholicism was the focus of girls’ educational lives. Religious education began early, in the home, but as girls progressed through the state educational system, it reinforced the messages of idealised Catholic womanhood, with the goal of preparing girls for future motherhood. By the first few decades of the twentieth century, religion had become even more enmeshed in education; by then, most Irish girls had access to at least a secondary-level education as well as a

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quickly expanding body of religious print literature – books and ­periodicals – to read. And by this time, Catholicism had become solidified as the central focus of girls’ lives and education. As part of their religious education, Irish girls absorbed the vast prescriptive literature of the era. The conduct literature of Catholic commentators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, did not represent a simple or uniform patriarchy. The messages involved were complex, reflecting anxieties about lay women’s real-world roles. Whereas Church leaders, public political figures, and much of Ireland’s print culture celebrated the ideology of separate spheres and thus advocated a limited public role for women, other commentators recognised that Catholic women were making their mark as philanthropists, nuns, and writers and thus were stretching the public/private divide. Many Irish women, both religious and lay, certainly were limited by the construction of Catholic womanhood, yet some helped to create, and enforce, the ideal.4 And others overstepped the boundaries of the ideal, revealing through their words and actions their agency and activism.5 Complicating the notion of a monolithic gender ideal that male Church leaders imposed, this chapter exposes the multifaceted messages of Catholic womanhood in Ireland from 1850 to 1950. By examining girls’ educational experiences and women’s involvement in the consumption and creation of Catholicism’s popular and print culture, it demonstrates how girls and women were both subjects and agents of the development of modern Catholic identities. Women in Ireland, 1850–1950 Although traditional scholarship has overstated the case, the Great Famine certainly impacted Irish women’s lives. Historians since the 1970s have linked what they describe as women’s declining status to the cataclysmic years of the famine of the 1840s and subsequent changes. Séamus Enright contends that Catholic women were ‘significant agents of change’ before 1850 but became ‘progressively disempowered and marginalised’ thereafter, while in Joseph Lee’s view, the famine ‘drastically weakened the position of women in Irish society’.6 Most scholars identify famine-era changes in the rural economy and

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the family as the catalysts for women’s declining status.7 The ­economic transformations necessitated by the Great Hunger, they argue, led individual families to adapt their inheritance practices. By the late nineteenth century, it was only possible for one of the sons in any family to inherit that family's farm, and a daughter’s marriage portion became dependent on the incoming dowry of a sister-in-law. A growing life expectancy among older Irish people, meanwhile, meant that parents lived longer and children waited longer to receive their land or their dowry. Consequently, large numbers of Irish women married late (past childbearing age), remained single, or emigrated. The effects of these transformations lasted for decades. Before the famine, only 10 per cent of Irish women remained unmarried by the age of forty-five. By 1926, this figure had risen to 25 per cent.8 K.H. Connell, Robert E. Kennedy, and Rita Rhodes have alleged that the status of Irish women fell along with the marriage rates in the subsequent decades, particularly in rural areas, as parents increasingly viewed girls, who would need to be dowered, as unwelcome financial burdens.9 Female emigration also provides some clues to women’s status in the post-famine era: single Irish women emigrants outnumbered male Irish emigrants for some years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This unique phenomenon, which defies the usual European pattern, resulted in a shortage of women in some rural areas of Ireland.10 According to some historians, these high emigration levels attest that women’s status in post-famine Ireland was particularly unstable.11 While unmarried women emigrated or waited to marry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, married women were pushed out of rural economic production.12 In 1861, 846,000 women in Ireland worked for wages. By 1901, this number was only 550,000, with 8 per cent of these female workers concentrated in just ten occupations. Of women doing housework, 56 per cent were unwaged in 1861. That figure rose to 81 per cent by 1901.13 Other historians, however, have revised the overly dismal picture of Irish women’s lives in the post-famine era and early twentieth century. Joanna Bourke, for example, has shown that some Irish women may have welcomed changes in their economic status in the decades following the famine. Their heightened positions within the household meant that well-off rural women became largely, if not entirely,

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responsible for the finances of the family.14 Although many Irish women continued to face economic difficulties in both family and community life, others found increased opportunities in the late ­nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For some, urban work possibilities and emigration afforded them alternatives to marriage and motherhood. Indeed, single women’s high rates of emigration in late nineteenth-century Ireland may not reflect their worsening economic status but rather their rising expectations. These women may have wanted more out of life than Ireland could offer, thus actively seeking the opportunities of emigration rather than viewing emigration as exile.15 Some women emigrants who returned to Ireland after living abroad, as Jeremiah Murphy remembered of the early twentieth century, demonstrated their different expectations: The girls, especially, were prime targets of the young farmers contemplating matrimony and they provided almost unfair competition for other girls who never left home. They were smart looking, well dressed and their manners and speech were a ­distinct asset. However, when asked if they were going to marry a farmer some retorted, ‘I guess I’m too wise for that’.16 Single female emigrants, as Meaney, O’Dowd, and Whelan point out, sought ‘independence’ as well as ‘better living and working conditions’; in the process, they caused angst among Catholic Church authorities, who realised that these women were rejecting the idealised version of Irish womanhood for something different and distinctly modern.17 Whether married wives and mothers, adult daughters, or domestic servants, and whatever their economic circumstances, in most parts of the island, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries navigated life within an atmosphere of heightened Catholic patriarchy. By hastening population decline,18 the Great Famine paved the way for both the growth of a powerful Catholic middle class (featuring thousands of nuns and priests) and the revitalisation of the institutional Catholic Church. Historians in the past few decades have analysed how Ireland – whose Catholics were known throughout Europe in the pre-famine era as disorderly and religiously lax – evolved into a nation

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whose people would, until the late twentieth century, attend mass at levels over 90 per cent.19 Many, most notably historian Emmet Larkin, have documented that the key transformational decades were those following the famine of the 1840s.20 The Irish hierarchy’s attempts to instil orthodoxy during the age of the ‘devotional revolution’ were part of a larger nineteenth-century Irish civilising process that the Church spearheaded.21 Although in the works before the middle of the century, this mission intensified in 1850 when the Irish bishops, headed by Dublin’s Archbishop Paul Cullen, convened at Thurles, County Tipperary for their first national synod in seven centuries; there, the Irish bishops set to work on unifying practices in the Irish dioceses.22 Most of the episcopate agreed to concentrate on improving parishioners’ attention to basic Catholic duties: frequenting mass and confession; attending baptisms, marriages, wakes, and funerals in the chapel, not in private homes; and adopting new powerful devotions, such as the parish mission. In a later (1854) circular to parish priests, Archbishop Michael Slattery of Cashel elaborated on the aims of the Synod of Thurles. ‘The object of these Regulations’, he wrote, ‘is – to invest the sacred functions of our Religion with becoming solemnity, [and] to inspire the people with reverence for things so holy as the Sacraments.’23 Slattery’s words articulate the goals of the new Irish Church: civility, solemnity, uniformity, discipline, and reverence. These concepts informed the rhetoric and actions of the post-famine Irish hierarchy and therefore founded orthodox Catholic belief and practice in modern Ireland.24 Gender also played a central role in the civilising mission, which adjusted priestly masculinities, redefined lay women’s roles by defining them primarily as wives and mothers, and designed systems to contain and control the female body. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Church’s reorganisation and resurgence produced a quickly growing body of professional priests. The diocese of Killaloe, for example, contained one priest for every 4,000 Catholics in 1856. Less than fifty years later, in 1901, this ratio had become one priest for every 990 Catholics.25 A decreasing population and increasing numbers of priests meant that even the most remote parishes soon contained a strong clerical presence. Priests’ education, meanwhile, had become more rigorous and standards of conduct stricter. By the post-famine decades, a

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burgeoning force of carefully trained seminarians worked their way throughout the Irish countryside, bringing a civilising ethos wherever they went and creating a new model of Catholic masculinity based on discipline and hierarchy.26 As later chapters will describe, this increasingly powerful clergy clashed with some lay women, who may have feared that they were losing autonomy and moral authority in an age of increasing religious orthodoxy and patriarchy. The Catholic Church of the ‘devotional revolution’ glorified female piety and virtue, thus herding Irish women into restricted roles as wives and mothers; here, again, the decades following the Great Famine were the key years of transition. Bishops and other Church leaders consistently denounced ‘public’ women; in 1881, Archbishop Edward McCabe of Dublin targeted the Ladies’ Land League by writing in a pastoral letter that those women who ‘are called forth under the flimsy pretext of charity to take their stand in the noisy streets of life’ denigrated Irish womanhood.27 By the early twentieth century, state-building joined with the ‘devotional revolution’, further defining and constricting women’s roles and creating a powerful Irish version of Catholic Republican motherhood. Things appeared to become even more dismal for women and girls in the early twentieth century as the Church and independent Irish state combined forces to create a mythical Ireland founded on the imagined model of the idealised Catholic nuclear family.28 The new Church–state coalition went further than ever before to discipline, contain, and control young women and girls, preparing them to grow into virtuous Catholic wives and mothers.29 In 1925, Galway’s Catholic bishop advised men to keep their wilful daughters in line: ‘If your girls do not obey you, if they are not in at the hours appointed, lay the lash on their backs. That was the good old system, that should be the system today.’30 Controlling the behaviour of girls was essential in a new nation-state that equated women’s roles, and particularly their sexual purity, with the virtue of the nation itself. In November 1922, Rev. J.S. Sheehy published a piece in the Cork Examiner entitled ‘The Influence of Women in Catholic Ireland’. He wrote that ‘a nation is what women make it’, and that this ‘was especially true in the case of mothers who “reigned within the homestead”’. ‘Be Irish and Catholic in your heart and soul’, he advised

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mothers.31 Women’s place in the home, substantiated by the concomitant glorification of the Catholic wife and mother, thus was essential to nation-building.32 Because Catholicism was interpreted as natively Irish and opposed to English Protestantism, it became a central component of Irish nationalism. And because women’s roles were key to Catholicism, the religious ideal of womanhood informed the ideology of the nationalist movement and, by the 1920s and 1930s, the nascent Irish state.33 The Free State, Éire, and later the Republic thus branded women almost exclusively as mothers and declared that their place was within the home.34 A famous example of the new state’s gender ideology is Éamon de Valera 1932 eulogy of the mother of slain revolutionaries Patrick and Willie Pearse. ‘Her modesty’, de Valera proclaimed, ‘would have kept her out of the public eye. Yet it was from her that … [her sons] inherited the strength of soul that made them resolute. ... This loving and tender woman … did not seek to hold her sons back. ... She knew that she … had done right in giving them for their country.’35 Mrs Pearse embodied the ideal of the Irish Catholic woman. She stayed out of the public sphere yet educated her children to be patriots. She was, above all, a mother who had focused her attentions on her sons. Sacrificial, she willingly gave her children to the cause. And the young Pearses, of course, wore their mother’s influence well, martyring themselves for the nation.36 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Irish government also passed legislation that limited women’s roles outside the home. Women were restricted from serving on juries and, beginning in 1932, upon marrying, Irish women civil servants had to leave their jobs.37 Divorce, which had been permissible under British law, was outlawed in 1937, and the sale of contraception was forbidden in 1935. Modelling the Irish Constitution on Catholic doctrine, in it the government specifically recognised the ‘special place of the Catholic Church’ and asserted that a woman’s place was in the home. The 1937 Constitution famously mentioned women only twice: 2.1 In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

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irish women 2.2 The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers should not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties within the home.38

By the 1930s and 1940s, then, women, at least ideally, had become Catholic Ireland’s ‘moral army’, confined to the home but tasked with domestic political responsibilities, namely bearing and educating future patriots.39 It is time, however, to examine the evidence more clearly and explore the gendered nature of Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although scholars have called nineteenth-century Catholicism in the United States and across the European continent a ‘feminised’ faith, investigations of this phenomenon in Ireland remain rare. That Ireland’s ‘devotional revolution’ was indeed a feminised transformation characterised by the active participation of different groups of women, and particularly nuns, has become increasingly apparent. Women religious, who emerged as a potent and visible force in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish society, proved capable leaders of the ‘revolution’ on the local level. In 1800, there were only 12 convents and 120 nuns in Ireland. By 1850, Ireland boasted 1,500 women religious, and in 1900, there were 368 convents and an astounding 8,000 nuns in the country. By 1901, nuns constituted 70 per cent of the entire population of post-famine religious, female and male.40 The spread of convents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland reflects not only the remarkable institutional trajectory of the ‘devotional revolution’ but also the gendered nature of the movement. It also reveals the inextricable connections between religion, gender, and class. Women religious were distinctly middle-class; indeed, entering a convent usually necessitated a substantial dowry, thus ensuring that the religious life was off-limits for the poor. Nuns went on to lead Irish Catholic educational and philanthropic efforts as well as successfully instil a middle-class respectability in the laity, notably the girls and women whom they taught.41 The Church hierarchy was well aware of the effects women religious were having by the middle of the nineteenth century. Nuns, remarked Archbishop Paul Cullen in 1852, were the ‘best support to religion’ in Ireland.42 Cullen may have seen the role of nuns in the

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‘devotional revolution’ merely as supportive, but in reality, nuns’ influence was widespread. Far from merely being swept along in the tide of post-famine Catholicism, nuns guided Ireland’s Catholic revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mary Peckham Magray, who convincingly argues that nuns profoundly affected Catholicism and thus emerging Irish identities, has revised older views of Irish nuns as passive and beholden to their male superiors.43 J.J. Lee and Caitriona Clear, in contrast, argue that nuns, like other Irish women, had only limited autonomy in a patriarchal society. According to Clear, nuns were ‘an institutional embodiment of the caring, self-­ sacrificing and essentially subordinate woman, and their existence played a strong part in perpetuating this image’.44 As Magray points out, however, Irish women religious in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not exclusively marginalised or isolated. Indeed, women often joined convents because they hoped to make their mark on Irish society beyond the private sphere.45 Nuns oversaw the education of Ireland’s children, especially girls; visited the poor, the sick, and the needy; and ran hospitals and orphanages. Women religious did not stand on the sidelines of the ‘devotional revolution’. Indeed, they directed it and, through education, spread its messages across much of Ireland, especially to multiple generations of schoolgirls. This influence persisted and even expanded through the twentieth century; by 1960, over 30,000 Irish nuns were at work in Ireland and in missions across the world.46 Was the influence of Irish Catholic lay women as significant? Recent explorations have revealed that Catholic elite and middle-class women sometimes ignored their roles as wives and mothers to engage in, or supplemented those roles with, political activities. During the first wave of the Irish feminist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholic women campaigned not only for suffrage but also for access to higher education and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.47 By the turn of the century, this increasingly influential feminist movement earned disdain from Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy as it challenged the public/private divide.48 ‘Allowing women the right of suffrage’, wrote Rev. T. Barry in 1909, ‘is incompatible with the Catholic ideal of the unity of domestic life.’49 In the Irish Monthly in 1913, Nora O’Mahony blamed feminism for the decline of motherhood

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and thus the sullying of Irish womanhood. In the same passage, O’Mahony also scathingly denounced the ‘hysterical shriekings of the suffragette sisterhood’, linking women’s public voices with deviance.50 Some scholars continue to assert that the Irish feminist movement was complicated by nationalism and nation-building, was more ‘backward’ than that of Britain, and/or was insignificant in the long term, particularly given the patriarchal nature of the independent Irish state.51 Others have claimed that Protestant women were the only true activists, and some have found the origins of Irish feminism in the activities of Catholic nuns.52 The work of even a minority of lay Catholic elite and middle-class women not only in suffrage and feminist activism but also in the labour movement and nationalist causes, however, should not be underestimated.53 Irish Catholic lay women were more than active in charitable causes. Here the intersections of gender, class, age, and marital status are apparent; elite and middle-class Catholic women were most keen. Analyses of Irish women’s history, when they discuss religion, tend to underscore the roles of nuns and, when they assess the roles of lay women, focus on philanthropists, who usually were married or widowed.54 Indeed, these more privileged Catholic women, mostly through charity and philanthropic work, carved out powerful and public positions in post-famine Irish society. In several essential works, Margaret Preston and Maria Luddy demonstrate how women philanthropists successfully inserted themselves into the public world of the late nineteenth century.55 According to Luddy, by engaging in everything from ‘mere almsgiving, to the provision of employment for women and girls, the building of institutions to house the homeless and outcast, the initiation of schemes to make the poor less dependent on charity, the development of programmes to facilitate moral reform, [and] work in public institutions such as workhouses, hospitals, and prisons’,56 Irish women with some resources and privilege ‘broadened their sphere of action and influence from the private to the public sphere’.57 Although she recognises that Protestant women and Catholic nuns had more opportunities for philanthropic activities than lay Catholic women, Luddy also describes several prominent lay women, including Anna Maria Ball, Sarah Atkinson, and Ellen Woodlock, whose actions were extensive and whose influence was notable.58 In

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addition, as I will discuss later in this book, Catholic women, both religious and lay, demonstrated autonomy through writing and publishing. And other lay women’s involvement in religious confraternities, sodalities, and religious groups and organisations furthered Catholic women’s public influence. Through philanthropy, organising, and social activism, then, middle-class and elite women virtually invaded the public sphere in an age that characterised them as purely domestic.59 While it may not be surprising that elite and middle-class lay Catholic women made their mark on the public sphere, recent investigations also have revealed that poor rural and urban working-class Catholic women, although more constrained than their better-off peers, also found ways to bypass Ireland’s patriarchal culture. Innovative research on the Great Famine has shown that ordinary women demonstrated agency as they confronted hunger and crisis. According to Ciarán Reilly, for some women, ‘the Famine period was one of empowerment, enabling them to take on new roles within the family and community’.60 As Patricia Lysaght points out, depictions of women in famine folklore and popular culture feature the presence of the heroic female who, although a victim, also ‘confronts the Famine conditions in order to support her family and, when necessary, to bury the family dead, and the compassionate generous woman who recognizes the situation and supports her’.61 These trends continued into the late nineteenth century, when many rural women produced the majority of their families’ incomes, particularly in the congested districts of the west of Ireland. Women here also controlled the family’s resources and managed their finances.62 These realities complicate the theory that Irish women uniformly lost economic status after the famine. Additionally, Martha Kanya-Forstner, Ruth-Ann Harris, and Dympna McLoughlin each have demonstrated the ways in which working-class or rural women butted against the hegemony of the Catholic Church, the landlord, and the Victorian state, often successfully challenging these authorities.63 Virginia Crossman’s work on the Irish poor laws reveals how women, the dominant demographic receiving public aid, navigated gendered notions of morality and respectability in postfamine workhouses. Her analysis of women’s active roles in workhouse conflicts demonstrates that poor women ‘were clearly aware of their collective power to protest against ill treatment or to resist

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attempts to change established practices’.64 Similarly, scholars like Brophy and Quinn have demonstrated how rural Irish women used their words, often imaginatively, to rework and resist patriarchy.65 Female emigration and low marriage rates also troubled the construction of Catholic womanhood, which centred on marriage and family. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century memoirs reveal the pervasiveness of single women, widows, and abandoned wives across Ireland.66 Poor, single women also occupied public space in modern Ireland, and they did so in ways that discomfited authorities. Women vagrants and prostitutes continued to be visible deviants, while workhouses and Magdalen asylums housed thousands of women, including unwed mothers, who hardly embodied the Catholic ideal.67 Infanticide and other court cases involving women criminals also pervaded national and local newspapers, providing clear evidence that the construction of ideal Irish womanhood may have been wishful thinking.68 The realities of life for many Irish women, then, challenged the paradigm of female domesticity. The fear of the modern woman In 1910, Ireland’s Cardinal Michael Logue bemoaned the effects of modernising forces on women. ‘One of the most beautiful fruits of our Irish faith’, he articulated, ‘was the … maidenly demeanour of our young Irish girls. Now it appears this must give way to modern ideas and modern theories.’ Logue maintained that the changes of the era threatened to turn Ireland’s ‘daughters’ into ‘coarsened, … degenerate … hoydens’.69 For Cardinal Logue and others, the early twentieth-century world, with its modern ideas, rattled the very core of Catholicism and challenged the hegemony of the Catholic hierarchy throughout the island. Expressed by Logue and others, these anxieties identified lay Irish women as especially vulnerable to the contaminations of the modern world – of particular relevance in an age that not only brought rebellion and war but also saw many single Irish women emigrate. These fears of modernity culminated in the first half of the twentieth century, when the project of Irish nation-building was in full force. The Irish hierarchy’s fears about both women and modernisation homed in on several early twentieth-century modern innovations,

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including dance halls, fashion, and popular fiction.70 In 1927, in a ­pastoral on ‘The Evils of Modern Dancing’, the Catholic hierarchy identified dancing, reading, and fashions ‘as contributing to the general decline of public morals’.71 Dancing and dress, of course, highlight the era’s control and the containment of the sexualised female body, which I and others have analysed elsewhere.72 Important scholarship has shown how central gender was in contemporary discussions of the dance halls; according to Barbara O’Connor, the presence of women’s bodies in the public space of the dance hall led to suspicion and surveillance. Bishops and priests, in particular, commented on how ‘degenerate’ dance halls could corrupt Irish female purity.73 Redemptorist priests in the 1920s vehemently denounced the dance halls in their popular missions.74 In 1935, the Public Dance Halls Act not only required the licensing of dance hall spaces but also allowed for police to inspect them at will.75 Newspapers in the following months and years detailed ongoing debates about dance halls, demonstrating how influential the Catholic clergy were in either sanctioning or forbidding them. In September 1935, the Irish Examiner published an article focusing on the potential granting of a dance-hall licence in Dingle. The local Catholic priests objected to the licence ‘on moral grounds’ because it meant that ‘young people were coming home too late’ and ‘boys were carrying young girls on the handlebars of their bicycles’ to the halls.76 Newer women’s fashions also troubled Church leaders, who utilised Ireland’s vast print culture to disparage modern dress.77 The 1920 volume of the Irish Catholic Directory reprinted a letter to the press from the bishop of Limerick, in which the bishop wrote that the fashion evil is widespread and general, affecting every grade and class of society … It is to be found even in the house of God, and it is painful to observe, too, that our Irish Irelander women and girls, who profess their abhorrence of the Anglicisation which is going on in our midst, fall victims to it themselves.78 This was an age in which nationalists and the Catholic hierarchy defined modernity and women’s changing roles as English, Protestant, and dangerous, thus reminding Irish women that their respectability and roles were tied both to their religion and their nation. Periodicals

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also linked new fashions to foreignness, positing that women who wore such fripperies desired to mimic English women, and thus sullied native Irish womanhood.79 For young Irish Catholic women, the road forward was clear: in order to be pure and sufficiently Irish, they must eschew modern English fashions in favour of traditional modest clothing that covered the body and adequately represented the nation. Prolific Irish Catholic author Joseph Guinan published a tale in the Catholic Bulletin in 1911, in which he highlighted the value of modest dress brought on by genteel poverty: A peasant girl walks seven or eight miles to early Mass. She is fasting and barefooted, as she trudges through bog-paths and mireland, carrying her shoes in her hand until she reaches the house of a friend near the chapel, where she dons them clean and shining in order to enter the home of God becomingly. After receiving Holy Communion she returns the same dreary journey without breaking her fast, her heart elated with gladness, because the way for her is a walk to Emmaus. What an example she sets to the lady of fashion who rolls to church in her carriage, or stays away because of a shower of rain!80 Disdaining ladies of fashion, Guinan’s work asserted that the ideal Catholic woman may have been poor and modest but also took care with her appearance. The ‘real’ Irish Catholic woman knew her place and embraced her ‘traditional’ role, including traditional dress. Prescriptive literature thus reinforced the regulation of the female body, affirming that women’s bodies – the way that they were displayed and contained, and the way that women managed them – were integral to a modern Irish Catholic respectability. The discourse about women’s fashion also highlighted another prominent concern of the age: sex, and especially the sexuality of unmarried women. In 1920, the Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore equated immodest fashions with a potential decline in Irish women’s purity: ‘Unfortunately an inclination to imitate the costumes of other peoples has manifested itself, to the disgust of all who have looked to Irish womanhood as the type of Purity and Modesty.’81

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Rooted in the economic changes of the Great Famine, the Church’s dictates in the century from 1850 to 1950 expressed a new stridency to push women into the domestic sphere and advocate sexuality only within marriage for reproduction. The Catholic Church’s teachings left little room for women who were not nuns or married mothers. Towns and villages, meanwhile, relied upon high marital fertility to perpetuate family farms. For rural families, securing the lineage and land remained important; therefore, protecting the virtue of young women became a central focus. Ensuring that young single Irish women remained chaste until marriage was a primary concern for parents as well as for all levels of the Church hierarchy. Alfonso Maria de L ­ iguori’s Mission Book, published in Dublin in 1910, advised young women that [i]nnocence is the most precious treasure you have on earth, and you ought to prefer death to losing it … In every danger which you cannot avoid, fight like a Christian heroine for the preservation of your purity; employ every possible means to guard it unstained, not only before man, but also in the eyes of God and of your own conscience.82 A loss of virginity was the worst fate that a woman could suffer, and resisting such a fate had become a woman’s religious, moral, and national duty.83 Prohibitions on birth control and abortion enforced these ideologies, while, in the 1920s and 1930s, reports on venereal disease, prostitution, the age of consent, and ‘evil’ literature publicised the dangers of young women’s sexuality.84 Equally alarming as the ways in which some Irish women adorned their bodies was the modern literature, notably popular fiction and magazines, that formed their moral character. A near-obsession with what some Irish girls and women were reading dominated religious publications and pamphlets in the early years of the new century. De Liguori’s 1910 Mission Book, in a section titled ‘Advice to Young Women’, proclaimed There are some books or writings which openly profess infidelity or teach immorality, and which you cannot read without sin; but there are others, e.g. bad novels, sensational love-tales, journals,

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irish women etc., which are not less dangerous, because they contain under the cover of a refined style a secret poison; they cast into your soul the seed of immorality, and by reading them frequently, the corrupt spirit of these writings is little by little infused into your heart.85

De Liguori’s writings reminded female readers to beware seemingly harmless books, particularly love stories, for fear that the subtle messages in them would damage their modest Catholic sensibilities and their virtue.86 Religious and secular publications alike espoused cautionary tales about dangerous reading. In 1880, the Munster News denounced what it called ‘vicious and disgraceful publications’, full of ‘love affairs, mingled with crimes, descriptive of profligacies, familiarizing minds with shocking brutalities’. The News’s article claimed that such horrible books were ‘consumed even in the purest circles in this Catholic country’, pleading with women to abandon their scandalous reading and instead embrace Catholic religious writings.87 Several decades later, a Galway priest reported to his bishop that, despite the Church’s efforts to promote Catholic literature, his parish had ­witnessed a ‘notable falling away’ from Catholic publications and a tendency among his parishioners to embrace ‘undesirable illustrated papers sold in town’.88 When the annual Catholic Truth Society conference opened in 1911, Cardinal Michael Logue took the opportunity not only to support the work of the society, which published Catholic pamphlets, but also to denounce more salacious print culture. Logue spoke about ‘the flood of filth’, meaning English newspapers, that circulated across Ireland. And when the Galway Pilot and Vindicator reprinted excerpts of Logue’s speech, its publisher suggested that the Pilot would, of course, serve as a suitable alternative for Catholic readers.89 Logue and the Pilot thus reinforced the notion of vice as foreign, and specifically English, while encouraging women to consume Irish publications and thus serve both their nation and their faith. 1911’s Irish Catholic Directory printed a summary of a pastoral letter written by Bishop Mangan of Kerry, in which the bishop claimed that ‘England’s literature … is steadily drifting away from revealed religion. At best it is Protestant and bitterly anti-Catholic’, he wrote, ‘at worst it is agnostic and impartial in its hostility to all religion’.90

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Ireland’s anti-colonial, nationalist battle, therefore, was clearly ­gendered: nationalists united with the Irish Catholic hierarchy in denigrating English women’s character, continuously contrasting Ireland’s virtuous wives and mothers to their fashion-loving, romance-reading, ‘cold, harsh, and secular’ English and Protestant counterparts.91 As they constructed this prescriptive literature and public discourse about dangerous reading, Irish authorities revealed their deep fears of change, suggesting that some Irish women might actually be drawn to the modern world and its associated vices. Indeed, the image of the ‘modern girl’ frightened Irish authorities for good reason in an age of female emigration as well as expanding public roles for women.92 ‘[T]he migration of young Catholic women’, according to Jennifer Redmond, ‘appeared to heighten fears about modern sexual behaviour; emigrants, no longer under the watchful eye of family and community, were at risk of sexual transgression once the bonds of propriety exercised so strongly on them at home were gone.’93 One result of the anxieties of the age was the Free State’s Censorship of Publications Act (1929), which prohibited not only the distribution of any information on contraception but also ‘indecent’ or ‘obscene’ reading.94 Consumers and creators By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a Churchsanctioned respectable literature increased pressures on Irish women to conform to gender norms but also afforded women the opportunity to increase their literacy, manage consumerism, and even write. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish women and girls, particularly of the middle classes, enthusiastically embraced reading. They frequented bookshops, travelling merchants, lending libraries, newspaper agents, and reading societies; they subscribed to devotional magazines and newspapers.95 Besides the ‘bad books’ that moralists condemned, they had much material from which to choose. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a plethora of carefully vetted religious newspapers, instructional tracts, magazines, novels, and pamphlets flooded Ireland. As Nicholas Wolf has shown, many of these were in Irish, meaning that rural Irish-speaking Catholics could

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consume them.96 Whether written in English or Irish, these ­publications made concerted efforts to construct and protect women’s sacred roles. Publishing houses such as Dublin’s Browne and Nolan as well as M.H.  Gill and Son produced hundreds of books suitable for the Catholic home. As early as 1852, Catholic publisher James Duffy’s ‘A Catalogue of Standard Catholic Works’ advertised books, pamphlets, and prints ranging in cost from two pence to two pounds. Duffy offered discounts on his works for ‘Reading Rooms, Parochial Libraries, Poor-law Unions, or for Gratuitous Distribution amongst the Poor’.97 The Irish Catholic Directory for 1874 advertised twenty-nine works by publishers in Ireland, Britain, and the United States, including ‘Anthems to Mary for the Month of May’, various catechetical pamphlets, and a ‘Holy Week Book’ of devotions.98 At the same time, Catholic periodicals, such as the Catholic Bulletin, the Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore, and the Irish Rosary featured detailed information about Catholicism and Church activities, from pilgrimage announcements and clerical obituaries to lists of women who contributed funds to the building of a new chapel. Some, such as the Irish Monthly, also published fiction and poetry with a suitable message.99 From the 1830s to the 1860s, James Duffy printed eight nationalist periodicals with a Catholic ethos, including Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine.100 The immensely popular Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart, sponsored by the Jesuits and still in circulation today, began publication in 1888 to combat secularisation in working-class and poor rural areas. During its first year of publication, it boasted a circulation of 8,000.101 Its popularity lasted for decades. According to Áine Ahearne, born in Cork in 1912, ‘[r]eading matter was very scarce,’ but ‘we had The Messenger every month’.102 Decades earlier on remote Arranmore, an island off the Donegal coast, Róise Rua too read the Messenger.103 By 1920, it had a circulation of 250,000.104 In 1914, the Catholic Truth Society’s annual catalogue of publications included lists of one-, two-, and three-penny pamphlets; doctrinal and explanatory works; publications on education; fiction, such as The Catholic’s Library of Tales; and historical works. It also featured stories highlighting female protagonists, including ‘A Mixed Marriage’, ‘Carmen’s Secret’, ‘The Making of Molly’, ‘A Mother’s Sacrifice’, ‘Poor Dear Ann’, and ‘Poor Nancy and other Tales’.105

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Almost as popular, and equally as central to constructing and enforcing religious gender norms, were national newspapers such as the Freeman’s Journal and regional newspapers including the Galway Pilot and Vindicator, Clare Journal, and Munster News, which dutifully reported on Church events. Members of the Catholic hierarchy wrote a substantial number of articles, columns, poems, stories, and editorials for these newspapers. Much of this content underscored women’s proper roles. Letters to the editor, advertisements, and other ephemera both denounced modernity and advocated a ‘traditional’ Catholic womanhood. The 5 June 1880 edition of the Munster News contained the customary rant against the ‘vicious and disgraceful publications’ that, it argued, were especially popular with women. It also, however, reported on a miraculous cure of a blind woman that had occurred at Knock, Co. Mayo (site of a recent Marian apparition) and informed readers that a train from Killaloe henceforth would carry pilgrims to Knock every week.106 When reading this particular issue of the News, Catholic women absorbed information about the dangers of secular literature even as they were reminded that they could, and should, focus their efforts on more proper, religious pursuits. If, as Louise Ryan argues, Irish newspapers were integral in ‘the project of nation-building’,107 they also participated actively in the creation of an explicitly modern Irish Catholic womanhood focused on moral reading, careful consumerism, and popular religious devotion. In an age in which novel-reading was popular and publishing flourished, the female reading public expanded and Irish women became skilful consumers. Úna Ní Bhroiméil argues that Irish women ‘were often the principal readers’ of Catholic publications and literature, claiming that they in particular were ‘very attentive to features of that literature that were specific to the gendered cultural discourse of the nineteenth century’.108 The reach of this prescriptive literature was remarkable, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the patriarchal culture that Catholic women had to negotiate and the difficulties that many had in doing so. By encouraging female literacy, however, Catholic print culture also gave them tools which, in the future, they could use to challenge the consensus. In the twentieth century, new Catholic publications and organisations, combined with ever-increasing female literacy rates,109 resulted in a mass devotional and gendered print culture that a majority

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of literate Catholic women consumed and likely internalised. From 1900 to 1950, female consumerism increased; ‘newsagents, stationers, railway bookstalls, chain-stores, independent newsagents, [and] shops and post offices in towns and villages’, in addition to publishers, ­provided newspapers and magazines to Irish women. In this age of consumerism, Catholic publications encouraged women to buy responsibly, keeping their focus on religious written material and devotional items for the home. In their inaugural issue (1911), the editors of the Catholic Bulletin and Book Review wrote of the importance of providing suitable literature for the woman of the house: We feel, however, we may promise a monthly bulletin of refreshing literature dealing in simple language and in a popular style with all current subjects of interest; and thus we hope in a short time to find our little magazine welcomed as an evangel of light and instruction in every Catholic home in the land.110 Intended for home-based consumption by the lay reader, the Bulletin was directed at the woman of the house. The Bulletin and other similar Catholic publications were produced in an age in which opportunities for female education and literacy rates climbed steadily, producing an expanding female reading public.111 When the Catholic Bulletin began publication in 1911, it declared its intent to encourage women ­towards appropriate purchasing: The Catholic Book Bulletin which we launch to-day will be concerned primarily with recommending Catholic literature, and promoting its distribution. It will not only indicate approved books, but systematically review them as occasion arises; and, further, it will pioneer a scheme by which a library of Catholic literature, sanctioned and approved to the last page by the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities, can be placed on very easy terms within the reach of the humblest Catholic home in rural Ireland.112 Here again the Bulletin revealed its intended audience: the woman of the Catholic home, who was responsible for creating a family library

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and thus ensuring that her children and husband had access to suitable reading materials. Elite or middle-class Irish women could order ready-made Catholic libraries from publishers including James Duffy, who, as early as the 1850s, offered for home delivery a complete collection of twenty-seven essential works, ‘beautifully printed on fine paper, and neatly done up in fancy wrapper’.113 However, argued publications such as the ­Bulletin, even the poorest of Irish households should have at minimum a humble collection of suitable reading material. In her 1911 ‘Domestic Libraries’, a column for the Catholic Bulletin, Mrs Mary A. Coleman wrote that Irish women should purchase for their home library a New Testament, a children’s mass book, one copy of ‘The Imitation of Christ’, ‘a selection of other books of devotion down to the simple Holy Communion book’, and ‘a series of Catholic prayer-books’.114 According to Coleman, the woman of the house also should obtain penny pamphlets produced by the Messenger and the Catholic Truth Society.115 By the 1930s, the enormously successful Eucharistic Congress made inexpensive religious periodicals and pamphlets even more popular. The souvenir book of the Congress sold well, and by 1935, Saint Patrick’s Missionary Bulletin was the most popular monthly magazine in Ireland.116 Ireland’s lay Catholic women, then, especially by the early twentieth century, chose from a dizzying array of periodicals, books, and pamphlets that Church authorities deemed suitable, and that bombarded literate women and girls with messages on proper gender roles. Although it is difficult to discern how girls and women received and responded to Ireland’s Catholic prescriptive literature, it is clear that some enthusiastically embraced the new publications aimed at them. Responses to the Catholic Bulletin in 1911 were positively glowing. A nun from ‘one of the best-known convents in the West’ wrote that she sent a copy ‘to a friend in London to let them see how much better we can do things over here. It is in every sense a Golden Treasury.’117 In the same issue, a Donegal woman praised the Bulletin for being ‘[b]rightly written up in simple language – not too exhaustive, and finally not confined too seriously to religious books alone – launched, in a word, on popular lines’. This woman, who claimed to be ‘delighted’ with the new publication, recognised the potentially transformative effects that

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lighthearted, popular Catholic periodicals could have on girls and women.118 Of course, the Bulletin was unlikely to publish any but the most stellar reviews of its reading material, and we therefore cannot gain access to the voices of those women who may have objected to its content. Still, we do know that some female voices opposed women’s limited reading. Katharine Tynan later described of her late nineteenth-century upbringing a ‘Puritan wave’ in the Catholic Church that led to an abrupt change in her reading habits. She and her mother fought frequently over the type of reading in which Tynan should engage. ‘This argument against my reading’, she wrote, ‘went side by side with the other, e.g. that all novel-reading was a thing to be abhorred by good Catholics.’119 Despite the pervasiveness of prescriptive literature, Irish Catholic women, lay and religious, were not merely passive consumers of it; they did not merely absorb dictates from male leaders. Instead, they stepped forward to take a leading role in the creation and distribution of Ireland’s Catholic print culture. In Labour, Love, and Prayer, Andrea Ebel Brożyna explores the creation of religious womanhood in late nineteenth-century Ireland, asking: ‘Why … were many women intimately involved in its creation and diffusion?’120 Following Brożyna, I argue that Irish women were responsible not only for consuming prescriptive literature but also for creating and promoting it. Their reasons for doing so were complex and sometimes contradictory. Certainly, some women internalised the ideal of Catholic womanhood, viewing themselves as exemplars of it and thus carrying unique responsibilities to civilise men as well as to spread the ideal to other women and girls. Their involvement in prescriptive writing, philanthropy, and in some cases missionary work allowed elite and middle-class women to claim a role in an important activity of the age: educating or even civilising the rural poor or working classes. As they did so, Irish women participated in a contemporary dialogue about race, class, religion, and gender that was common across Britain and the rest of Europe. In her work on lay women and philanthropy, Margaret Preston asserts that female philanthropists in nineteenth-century Dublin used language that ‘mirrored the paternalism informing the relationship between middle- and upper-class philanthropists and Dublin’s poorer classes’.121

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These middle-class and elite women, in Ireland and elsewhere in the Western world, were able to use or even exploit the ideal of domesticity to stretch public–private boundaries. As they wrote tracts encouraging other women to embrace the home and motherhood, they also stepped outside of their own domestic spheres, finding their public voices while encouraging other Catholic women to curtail theirs.122 Girls, too, wrote prescriptive literature. In order to encourage young believers to contribute more actively to Ireland’s Catholic print culture, the Catholic Bulletin conducted a writing contest for youths in 1914. It received a startling number of essays from girls and declared the contest winner to be Margaret M. Murphy, a convent schoolgirl from Cork. Murphy’s winning piece, ‘The Autobiography of Croagh Patrick’, focused intently on religious devotion: I am a high rocky mountain, and my name is Croagh Patrick. I am sure you have often heard of me. ... When Saint Patrick was preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Irish people, he would often after his work climb up my rugged surface, in order to pray alone to his Heavenly Father … Every summer there is a pilgrimage to me in honour of Saint Patrick. How I enjoy watching the pious country people as they struggle over my rocky sides, ­endeavouring to reach the top.123 By anthropomorphising Croagh Patrick, Margaret Murphy demonstrated her commitment to the Catholic ethos of the age and expressed the ways in which Catholic girls embraced and internalised popular devotion. Girls and women, then, not only consumed Catholic print culture – they also were some of its main producers. Indeed, the era was one of prolific writing by Irish Catholic women. At least fifteen Irish nuns published significant works in the 1800s.124 In the late nineteenth century, the popular Margaret Cusack, nun of Kenmare, translated devotional works, wrote histories of Irish Catholicism, composed autobiographical works, and published novels.125 Cusack’s writings paid particular attention to the proper responsibilities of women and girls. In Woman’s Work in Modern Society (1874), she focused on the roles that mothers played in their daughters’ moral and religious education.

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If Catholic mothers did not focus their attention on ­preparing their girls for salvation, she argued, the results would be disastrous. The neglectful mother would produce girls who ‘grow up frivolous, indifferent to parental advice, perhaps a disgrace to their homes’.126 Cusack was not only a productive writer but also actively marketed and advertised her works, reportedly selling over 200,000 copies of her books by the 1870s.127 And she was far from alone. Anne Colman has counted over 500 women publishing in Ireland from 1800 to 1900.128 James H. Murphy’s research demonstrates that middle-class Irish Catholic women novelists wrote with great success from 1890 to 1910.129 Nineteenth-century Irish women were by necessity ­‘multiple-genre’ writers. Poetry, novels, serials, non-fiction essays, hymns, travel writing, and advice tracts all became enormously popular.130 Some Irish lay women were uniquely positioned to take a central role in the creation of prescriptive literature. Ireland’s most prominent Catholic female authors were middle-class or elite ‘socially involved and professionally successful career women’.131 Convent-­ educated sisters Katharine Tynan Hinkson and Nora Tynan O’Mahony of Dublin proved prolific writers of fiction and poetry in the early twentieth century. The well-known Hinkson, friend of Yeats, ­produced approximately 100 novels and 12 books of poetry, including devotional poetry, while O’Mahony wrote at least 71 short pieces for the Irish Monthly from 1905 to 1931.132 Other women sought different opportunities to contribute to Irish Catholic print culture. Ireland’s prescriptive literature often was ‘interactive’, encouraging readers to write letters to magazines and newspapers.133 Women and, in some cases, girls, responded to such requests in astounding numbers. Publishing under the pen-name ‘Eithne’, a woman wrote in the Irish Monthly of 1923 about the ways in which girls became too worldly in the modern world, not only through bad reading but also by working in factories. She advocated the establishment of convent retreats for working girls, where they could learn to become respectable Catholic women and turn their focus from trivialities to religion.134 Although the number of female novelists and critics may have decreased in twentieth-century Ireland,135 women’s contributions to serials and periodicals only increased. The Catholic Bulletin serves as

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a key example of female authors’ importance in the early twentieth century. Its second volume celebrated the fact that ‘three distinguished Irishwomen, two of them, Mrs Nora Tynan O’Mahony and Miss L. McManus, already known very favourably to the reading public, and the third, “Moi Meme”, a gifted nun of the Presentation Order’, were featured writers in their inaugural issue.136 The Irish Monthly, edited by the Jesuit Rev. Matthew Russell, consciously featured writings by women, including the popular Rosa Mulholland. In the Monthly, writers such as Mulholland published romantic comedies that were designed to appeal to women readers while remaining well within the bounds of respectability, that, indeed, sought to define modern Irish Catholic nationalist respectability.137 The Monthly’s content also highlighted women’s roles: a recent search revealed over 2,500 hits for ‘woman’ in articles published in the Monthly from 1873 to 1954.138 Overall, the writings of Catholic women and girls proved to be fundamentally conservative, and few deviated from the prescribed norm. These women declared their devotion, embraced the ideal of womanhood, and rarely challenged gender norms. But an influential feminist movement was well underway by the turn of the century. Earning disdain from both Ireland’s Catholic hierarchy and respectable Catholic women, it challenged the public/private divide.139 Frank Biletz reminds us that most activist and literary women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries denounced the overt political activities of suffragettes and members of the Ladies’ Land League or Cumann na mBan in favour of a cultural and ‘domestic nationalism’ that celebrated Catholic women’s roles in the home.140 Some women supported the Catholic ideal by reserving their heartiest disdain for unmarried women; as they did so, they affirmed that motherhood was the only suitable role for women. In 1885, Mrs Frank Pentrill published her thoughts on ‘old maids’ in the Irish Monthly: Happy wives with children gathering at your knee, when you sit in the light of your hearths, think of the lonely women who are standing outside in the cold. … They sit in gloomy rooms and they wander through the world – alone; they will probably have to meet death – alone.141

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Serving as a warning to young women who might be focusing their attentions on public life, activism, or feminism instead of marriage and motherhood, Pentrill’s piece in the Monthly starkly laid out the potential fruits of such actions. Newspapers and magazines, instruction and etiquette manuals, conduct books, and Catholic doctrinal and devotional works, often written by women, therefore presented the model Irish woman as the domestic angel, the wife and mother who, in the words of O’Mahony, ‘has no thought of self: all her life, all her love, are given to her husband and children’.142 Resistance to such notions, however, did exist. In 1879, one Teresa Rooney contacted Dublin’s Archbishop McCabe because she had been refused absolution by her local priest. Rooney was clear about the reasons for this: she was a staunch supporter of women’s rights. In her correspondence with McCabe, Rooney declared her unapologetic views: It is true that my conscience does not reproach me in the least that there is nothing in it which I would not say on my death-bed, but as I have been refused absolution for that or anything else. … Friday will be Lady Day, & I think it rather hard that while so many wife torturers and women libelers will be at the altar on that day in honour of Mary, I should be excluded for nothing else that doing what her … son did when he was on earth – expressing the villainy, cruelty, hypocrisy & wickedness of men in their treatment of women!143 As Luddy has shown, Irish women also campaigned strenuously against the 1937 Constitution’s declaration that women would now be defined ‘primarily in terms of their reproductive capacities and responsibilities to home and children’.144 Writing shortly after the draft Constitution was published, journalist Gertrude Gaffney accused ­ Éamon de Valera of being a ‘reactionary’ who ‘dislikes’ and ‘distrusts’ women. Well-known writer Rosamund Jacob and doctor Kathleen Lynn each wrote of their opposition to the new Constitution in their diaries.145 Irish women therefore did not merely absorb the print culture and prescriptions of the time; in some cases, they reworked or even challenged them.

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The gendered messages of the day did not appear in print culture only; for Irish women, material culture also provided opportunities to both embrace and negotiate popular Catholic culture. The Catholic Church was largely responsible for a flourishing of visual and material culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Catholic Church was Ireland’s biggest sponsor of art, commissioning paintings, sculptures, altars, and other church décor.146 Visual and material culture demonstrated the wealth and power of the Church after centuries of struggle and demonstrated Catholics’ commitment to rebuild religious life after Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the destruction of the Great Famine. Once Ireland became an independent nation-state defined by a Catholic ethos, the state and the media combined to encourage Catholic consumerism, thus attempting to promote religion while also appeasing the modern laity’s desire to purchase things. John Turpin writes that the ‘ubiquitous and pervasive’ visual Catholicism that pervaded the home, school, and chapel in the early twentieth century was not only integral to defining the new state, but also represented the growing importance of mass production and technology.147 Historian David Miller asserts convincingly that Irish Catholic devotion was able to thrive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only through a new culture of middle-class consumerism.148 What is often overlooked, however, is that lay Irish women managed this culture of consumerism. Women’s commitment to Catholic material objects appears in many contemporary documents. In 1880, Fanny O’Hagan of Dublin sent a chalice to Archbishop McCabe so that he would consecrate it.149 Just a few years earlier, lay Catholic women from the Limerick diocese sent a large book to the pope in Rome. Thousands of women across every parish in Limerick signed their name in the book, which contained the following message: Most Holy Father, While the respectful and devoted sons of your Holiness in this Diocese of Limerick have resolved to perpetuate the Memory of that Glorious Anniversary which fills the whole world with joy and gratitude by erecting in memory thereof the Tower of their

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irish women Cathedral of St. John, WE, your HOLINESS’S obedient daughters, ask permission to lay at your feet the tribute of our profound respect and of our unalterable attachment, Most Holy Father. Deign to bless with a special blessing this Diocese, our families, our children, that they may be worthy of their country, and keep always with the same fidelity and the same love as their fathers did the faith of SAINT PATRICK and of SAINT BRIDGET.150

Here, Limerick’s women built on what many of their female Irish Catholic contemporaries did so successfully: they publicly held to the accepted notion of womanhood (presenting themselves as ‘obedient daughters’), declared their loyalty to their faith and their religious authorities, linked religion with their nation, and expressed all of this by creating both words and an item of value. They thus demonstrated their mastery of material culture. That Irish women, and particularly wives and mothers, were responsible for Catholic consumerism is noteworthy; it reminds us how women were interacting with and influencing their culture. Lay women of all social classes had such responsibilities. Caitriona Clear writes of early twentieth-century Ireland that ‘[w]omen of the house were also responsible for household spending, and for relationships with shopkeepers – very important when credit was needed’, thus recognising the gendered consumerism of the age.151 By the 1900s, women in working-class Dublin had devised clever ways of managing their household expenses. They pawned items nearly every week; they sought charity from the St Vincent de Paul Society. Almost all contemporary observers confirmed that women undertook these actions. One man who worked for the Society later remembered: It was always the mother’s job to meet with us. The men got out of the way. That was my experience. Mothers applied for [relief]. They’d drop a note in a box at the parish church, or go to the priest’s house saying ‘could someone call on me? I’m in a bad way.152 Much of what Irish women bought or even pawned was religious in nature. This led to a unique convergence of the home, popular religion,

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and female consumerism. By almost all accounts, Irish women, no matter their social or economic status, took care to manage their homes as devotional spaces. Women of the house could look once more to newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, which advertised holy statues, religious pictures, rosary beads, representations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and holy water fonts.153 ‘Serving as much more than incidental decoration’, explains historian David Morgan, ‘these images underscore the sacred function of the family and ground the formation of Christian identity in the everyday life of the home’.154 Margaret Cusack wrote in her 1877 Good Reading for Girls that girls should help their mothers manage household Catholicism; this would keep them away from more damaging pastimes, such as fashion and fiction, while preparing them for their future domestic duties. Cusack’s careful instructions to girls included caring for items such as palms, rosary beads, or scapulars.155 Born in the 1920s, Maura Murphy later wrote of how she and each of her siblings had their own prayer book and rosary beads, employing them every day in what she described as ‘a very holy household’. Each evening, the family prayed at a ‘home-made altar in the corner of the kitchen’ that featured ‘statues of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Family and the Child of Prague’.156 Where could women purchase such items? According to the lifewritings of Irish Catholics, the missions provided the most direct opportunity for religious consumerism. In 1961, an eighty-threeyear-old Donegal man remembered of his youth that ‘when missions started all over the country people were asked to buy a picture of the Sacred Heart or Holy Family’.157 Sales of devotional items, including rosaries, medals, scapulars, crucifixes, and prints at mission stalls, brought profits to local parishes and Catholic publishers alike.158 Autobiographies and memoirs give testimony to the impact of the materiality of the missions on children in particular. Marrie Walsh described the mission in County Mayo in the 1930s and 1940s as ‘the greatest event in our young lives’. She also claimed, however, that its importance was not exclusively spiritual but also material. ‘Much to the annoyance of our teachers’, she wrote, ‘we had eyes only for the stalls. They were like an Aladdin’s cave: beautiful statues of all the saints, Sacred Heart pictures, medals, scapulars, prayer books, little prayer cards. And the rosaries; now these were every child’s delight.

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Such beautiful colours, they hung from hooks from the top of every stall, swinging in the breeze’. Although Walsh claimed that many of the local children could not afford to purchase any of the items at the stall, she also remarked that the mission provided an opportunity for ‘every household’ to add ‘another pious object to its already varied collection’.159 County Cork’s Alice Taylor remembered the ‘international’ items that were for sale, including beads and medals, at the mission stalls. For Taylor, however, it was the ‘colourful statues [that] stood in rows high on the back shelves of the stall’ – of the Virgin Mary, St. Theresa, and the Child of Prague – that were most compelling.160 Beyond the ‘everyday life of the home’ and the parish, Irish women also made larger economic contributions to Catholic Ireland through sales and production. This reality encourages us to think about women’s various roles in local economic life: at different times and places, Irish women sold, purchased, and made home-based Catholic material culture. A late nineteenth-century travel account revealed Irish women ‘ply[ing] a trade a profitable one during these days, in the sale of blessed water’.161 Well-known priest, novelist, and chronicler of rural Irish life Joseph Guinan wrote in The Island Parish (1908) that the local shops and mission stalls competed to sell ‘a large and varied assortment of religious objects’. When the mission opened, he observed, the chapel yard looked very gay with the mission stalls, loaded and garnished as they were with a bewildering display of pious objects … Not merely children but old men and women wandered from one to the other of them in raptures of delight and astonishment, as if they had been transported into some fairy palace. They did a roaring trade, those stall-women, during the fortnight the mission lasted; for the Island people were prepared to spend their last sixpence on such religious objects as they fancied.162 While the mission stalls attracted all parishioners, who were dazzled by the colourful displays, in this account, Irish ‘stall-women’ oversaw the selling of devotional items at the mission. A key example of women’s central role in producing Catholic material culture is Mitchell’s rosary factory in Dublin, which

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employed hundreds of working-class girls in the early to ­mid-twentieth century. In his 2001 memoir of growing up in Dublin during the 1940s and 1950s, Bill Cullen describes the process of making rosary beads: Alex Mitchell’s rosary-bead factory had hundreds of girls making rosary beads to help Christians pray all over the world. There was a terrible smell from the factory when the girls were boiling the cows’ horns. That’s right. Made out of cows’ horns the beads were. The boiling softened the horns so the cutting machine could extract little round balls of horn. Then the spike machine stuck a hole through the middle of the ball. The balls were run through a dying machine. Different color every day. Some left natural. The drying machine hardened the beads. The polishing machine gave them a shiny gloss. The machines in rows worked by the girls, who wore white coveralls with a big loose white hat over their heads to keep the smell of the horns off their hair. Hundreds of colored shiny beads with a hole in the center poured into the collecting vat. Buckets full of beads were given to the ‘decade girls,’ who lined up at the workbench with their pliers and a roll of fine wire. Thread the wire through the bead, then cut the wire and make a little hook with your pliers. Attach another piece of wire and thread another bead. Cut and hook again. Until you had a string of ten beads. A decade of the Rosary. Drop the decade into your finishing tray and start again. You were paid by the decade.163 Cullen’s detailed account illuminates one of the myriad ways in which women had become intimately involved in not only the consumption, but also, in some cases, the production, of Irish Catholic things. One hundred and fifty women workers at Mitchel’s also demonstrated their activism in 1940 when they went on strike to protest low wages. Although some newspapers called these women workers ‘girls’, they were in fact overtly politicised members of the Irish Women Workers Union.164 That they were producing devotional items deemed necessary for the faith and future of the nation only heightened their sense of determination and importance.

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This chapter has revealed both changes and continuities in women’s religious lives, gender norms, and modern Irish print culture. From 1850 to 1950, notable political, economic, and social changes occurred. In the mid-nineteenth century, famine transformed rural areas; in Dublin, meanwhile, urbanisation created a more populous working class. Across Ireland, marriage rates declined and emigration persisted. By the early twentieth century, after rebellion and war, a new Irish nation came into existence and the Catholic Church assumed a central role in Irish society and culture; by the 1930s, Ireland was a Catholic state. The independent, overtly Catholic Republic of Ireland that existed by 1950 was one that women of the mid-nineteenth century scarcely would have recognised. What would have been only too familiar to them, however, was the pervasive Catholic ethos and culture that they experienced in their late nineteenth-century childhoods and that continued to dominate the culture of twentieth-century Ireland. Indeed, the origins of Ireland’s twentieth-century state–Church coalition can be found in the late nineteenth century; so, too, can the restrictive Catholic patriarchy that persisted throughout much of the twentieth century. Throughout a century, the messages defining women’s roles as Catholic wives and mothers remained remarkably consistent. Their methods of transmission, however, evolved. In the post-famine decades, Ireland’s English-language print and material cultures had only begun to flourish; literacy rates, although climbing, had not yet reached the extraordinary levels they would by the early twentieth century. As a result, local vernacular, informal, and oral traditions persisted. The ‘devotional revolution’ of the 1870s and 1880s spurred Catholic publishing and the production of Catholic goods and items. By the first few decades of the twentieth century, print and material culture had become central influences in Irish Catholicism and had contributed to a blossoming of public and popular piety that came to define many women’s lives. With growing female literacy and the ubiquity of Catholic popular, material, and print culture, women in the first half of the twentieth century were more exposed than their mothers or grandmothers to the ideal of womanhood. They also lived in a state with an explicitly Catholic ethos. This chapter has demonstrated the roles that ordinary women played in creating these identities and, in

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some cases, complicating them. By embracing and even constructing print and popular Catholicism, Irish women made it their own. And by shaping Ireland’s new popular Catholicism, women proved that they had significant influence in the religious sphere and thus in the new nation. Notes 1 For a summary of religious prescriptive literature in the North of Ireland, see Andrea Ebel Brożyna, Labour, Love, and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914. McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1999). 2 Bernard O’Reilly, The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World. Reprinted from the 13th American Edition (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1883), p. 8. 3 For other examples, see Margaret Anna Cusack (the Nun of Kenmare), Women’s Work in Modern Society (London: Longmans Green, 1874); Patrick S. Dineen, The Queen of the Hearth (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2013 [1918]); and Lockington, The Soul of Ireland. 4 Brożyna, Labour, Love, and Prayer, p. 5. 5 See Gerardine Meaney, Mary O’Dowd, and Bernadette Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman: Studies in Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 6 Enright, ‘Women and Catholic life in Dublin’, pp. 268, 293; Lee, ‘Women and the Church’, pp. 37–8. 7 Ruth-Ann M. Harris, ‘“Come you all courageously”: Irish women in America write home’, Eire-Ireland 36: 1/2 (spring/summer 200l), p. 170. 8 Lee, ‘Women and the Church’, p. 38. 9 Kenneth H. Connell, ‘Catholicism and marriage in the century after the Famine’, in Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays, ed. Kenneth H. Connell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 113–61; Robert E. Kennedy, Jr, The Irish: Emigration, Marriage and Fertility (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973); and Rita M. Rhodes, Women and the Family in Post-Famine Ireland: Status and Opportunity in a Patriarchal Society (New York, NY and London: Garland Publishing, 1992). 10 Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: Irish women and Irish migration’, in Irish Women and Irish Migration, Volume 4 of The Irish Worldwide: History, Heritage, Identity, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester

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University Press, 1995), p. 1; Pauline Jackson, ‘Women in 19th century Irish emigration’, International Migration Review 18: 4 (winter 1984), p. 1018. 11 Kerby Miller with David N. Doyle and Patricia Kelleher, ‘“For love and liberty”: Irish women, migration and domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1900’, in Irish Women and Irish Migration, ed. Patrick O’Sullivan (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), p. 41. 12 Kerby Miller, ‘Emigration, capitalism and ideology in post-Famine Ireland’, in Migrations: The Irish at Home and Abroad, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1990), p. 91; Mary E. Daly, ‘The economy from 1850’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V, p. 530. 13 Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery, pp. 6–38. 14 Ibid., p. 1. 15 Harris, ‘“Come you all courageously”’, p. 170; Maria Luddy and Dympna McLoughlin, ‘Women and migration from Ireland from the seventeenth century’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V, pp. 567–9. 16 Jeremiah Murphy, When Youth Was Mine: A Memoir of Kerry 1902– 1925 (Dublin: Mentor Press, 1998), p. 22. 17 Meaney, O’Dowd and Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman, p. 4; Louise Ryan, ‘Irish female emigration in the 1930s: Transgressing space and culture’, Gender, Place & Culture 8: 3 (2001), pp. 271–82. 18 One result of deaths and emigration during and after the famine was an unparalleled drop in Ireland’s population, from 8,175,124 in 1841 to 4,400,000 in 1911. Rhodes, Women and the Family, p. 5. 19 For mass-attendance statistics, see Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution’, and Miller, ‘Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine’, pp. 81–98. 20 Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution’. 21 Tom Inglis, Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998), pp. 102–3, 118; Lawrence J. Taylor, Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 58. 22 The Synod of Thurles lasted from 22 August to 2 September 1850. Larkin, The Making of the Roman Catholic Church, p. 28. See also John Ahern, ‘The plenary Synod of Thurles’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record lxxv (May 1951), pp. 385–403; lxxviii (July 1956), pp. 1–20, and P. C. Barry, ‘The legislation of the Synod of Thurles, 1850’, Irish Theological Quarterly xxvi (1959), pp. 131–66.

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23 Archbishop Michael Slattery papers (hereafter Slattery papers), CEDA on microfilm, NLI, File 1854/41, microfilm reel # p. 6004. Letter from Slattery to clergy; 2 October 1854. 24 For more on the role of priests in the Irish civilising mission, see Cara Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”: Speaking power, performance, and the lay-clerical relationship in modern Catholic Ireland’, Journal of British Studies 53: 2 (April 2014), pp. 426–52. 25 Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe, 1850–1904 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995), p. 400. 26 Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, p. 201; Joseph Nugent, ‘Producing priestliness’ (PhD dissertation, University of California Berkeley, 2004), pp. 15–16; Joseph Valente, The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”’; and Patrick McDevitt, ‘Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, masculinity, and Gaelic team sports, 1884–1916’, Gender and History 9: 2 (1997), pp. 262–84. 27 Freeman’s Journal, 12 March 1881. 28 Moira Maguire, Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 13. 29 Clara Fischer, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame: Magdalen Laundries and the institutionalization of feminine transgression in modern Ireland’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41: 4 (2016), pp. 821–43. 30 Cited in Myrtle Hill, Women in Ireland: A Century of Change (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003), p. 30. 31 Cork Examiner, 22 November 1922, cited in Louise Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, 1922–1937: Embodying the Nation (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), pp. 151–2. 32 Gerardine Meaney, ‘Sex and nation: Women in Irish culture and politics’, in A Dozen Lips, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press, 1994), p.  191. See also Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change: Race, Sex, and Nation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), p. 3. 33 Lawrence J. McCaffrey, ‘Irish nationalism and Irish Catholicism: A study in cultural identity’, Church History 42: 4 (December 1973), pp. 524–34; Paul Ryan, Asking Angela Macnamara: An Intimate History of Irish Lives (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), p. 4. 34 Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, p. 151; Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, ‘Virtuous mothers and dutiful wives: The politics of sexuality in the Irish Free State’, in Gender and Power in Irish History, ed. Maryann Gialanella Valiulis (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), pp. 100–14. 35 The Irish Press, 27 April 1932.

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36 For a more detailed discussion, see Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, pp. 191–8. 37 Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, ‘Neither feminist nor flapper: The ecclesiastical construction of the ideal Irish woman’, in Chattel, ­ Servant or Citizen? Women’s Status in Church, State and Society, ed. Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1995), p. 168. 38 Constitution of Ireland, www.constitution.ie. 39 Ursula Barry, ‘Movement, change and reaction: The struggle over reproductive rights in Ireland’, in The Abortion Papers: Ireland, ed. Ailbhe Smyth (Dublin: Attic Press, 1992), p. 114. 40 Caitriona Clear, ‘The re-emergence of nuns and convents, 1800– 1962’, in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume IV, p.  517; Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, pp. 9, 103. Popular Irish orders included the Dominicans, the Poor Clares, Nano Nagle’s Presentation Sisters, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Charity, the Loreto Sisters, and the Sisters of the Holy Faith. European orders, such as the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, made their way to Ireland in the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ireland could boast of thirty-five orders. Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 9. 41 Clear, ‘The re-emergence’, p. 518; Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 11. See also Rosemary Cullen Owens, A Social History of Women in Ireland, 1870–1970 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005), Chapter 3. 42 Quoted in Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 11. 43 Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, pp. 11–12. 44 Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, p. 166; Lee, ‘Women and the Church’, p. 42. 45 Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 39. 46 McKenna, Made Holy, p. 1. 47 Luddy, ‘Women and politics, 1860–1918’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V, pp. 71–3. 48 See, for example, Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries; McCoole, No Ordinary Women; and Pierse, ed., Irish Feminisms: 1810–1930, 5 vols. 49 Rev. D. Barry STL, ‘Female suffrage from a Catholic standpoint’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record 4s, 26 (September 1909), quoted in Owens, A Social History, p. 99. 50 Nora Tynan O’Mahony, ‘The mother’, Irish Monthly 91 (1913), p. 529. 51 Linda Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2002), Chapter 1.

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52 Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement, pp. 60–1. 53 Hill, Women in Ireland, p. 51. 54 See, for example, Owens, A Social History, Chapter 3. 55 Preston, Charitable Words; Luddy, Women and Philanthropy. See also Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns. 56 Luddy, Women and Philanthropy, p. 1. 57 Ibid., p. 2. 58 Ibid., pp. 36–7. 59 Ibid., pp. 1–2. See also Raughter, ‘Introduction’, p. 4; and Preston, Charitable Words. 60 Ciarán Reilly, ‘Nearly starved to death: The female petition during the Great Hunger’, in Women and the Great Hunger, ed. Christine Kinealy, Jason King and Ciarán Reilly (Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press/Cork University Press, 2017), p. 48. See also, in the same volume, Cara Delay, ‘“Meddlers amongst us”: Women, priests, and authority in Famine-era Ireland’, pp. 71–81; and Daphne Wolf, “‘Nearly naked”: Clothing and the Great Hunger in Ireland’, pp. 83–93. 61 Patricia Lysaght, ‘Women and the Great Famine: Vignettes from the Irish oral tradition’, in The Great Famine and The Irish Diaspora in America, ed. Arthur Gribben (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 23. See also E. Moore Quinn and Cara Delay, ‘Bounty, moderation, and miracles: women and food in narratives of the Great Famine’, New Hibernia Review 21: 2 (summer 2017), pp. 111–29. 62 Ciara Breathnach, ‘The role of women in the economy of the west of Ireland, 1891–1923’, New Hibernia Review 8: 1 (earrach/spring 2004), pp. 82–6; Mary Cullen, ‘Breadwinners and providers: women in the household economy of labouring families, 1835–61’, in Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1989), pp. 85–116. 63 Martha Kanya-Forstner, ‘Defining womanhood: Irish women and the Catholic Church in Victorian Liverpool’, in The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Donald M. McRaild (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), pp. 168–88; Ruth-Ann M. Harris, ‘Negotiating patriarchy: Irish women and the landlord’, in Reclaiming Gender: Transgressive Identities in Modern Ireland, ed. Marilyn Cohen and Nancy J. Curtin (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 207–26; McLoughlin, ‘Workhouses and Irish female paupers, 1840–70’, in Women Surviving, pp. 117–47. See also Anna Clark, ‘Wild workhouse girls and the liberal imperial state in mid-nineteenth century Ireland’, Journal of Social History 39:  2 (winter 2005), pp. 389–409.

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64 Virginia Crossman, ‘Viewing women, family, and sexuality through the prism of the Irish poor laws’, Women’s History Review 15: 4 (­September 2006), p. 548. See also her Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland, 1850–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 65 Christina Brophy, ‘What nobody does now: imaginative resistance of rural laboring women’, in Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950, ed. Christina Brophy and Cara Delay (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2015); E. Moore Quinn, ‘“All I had left were my words”: the widow’s curse in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland’, in Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950, pp. 211–34. 66 See, for example, Alice Taylor’s Quench the Lamp (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon Books, 1990), pp. 96–9. 67 Caitriona Clear, Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland, 1850– 1922 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Chapter  8; Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 68 Louise Ryan, ‘The press, police and prosecution: perspectives on infanticide in the 1920s’, in Irish Women’s History, ed. Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004), pp. 137–51; Farrell, ‘A Most Diabolical Deed’; and Rattigan, ‘What Else Could I Do?’. See also Cara Delay, ‘“Uncharitable tongues”: women and abusive language in early twentieth-century Ireland’, Feminist Studies 39: 3 (2013), pp. 628–53. 69 Cardinal Logue to Canon McDonald, Westport, County Mayo, 21 July 1910. Irish Catholic Directory (1911), p. 476. 70 Maria Luddy, ‘Sex and the single girl in 1920s and 1930s Ireland’, The Irish Review 35 (summer 2007), pp. 79–81. 71 Owens, A Social History, p. 257. 72 Cara Delay, ‘“Deposited elsewhere”: The sexualized female body and the modern Irish landscape’, Études Irlandaises 37–1 (2012), pp.  71–86; Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries; Fischer, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame’. 73 Barbara O’Connor, ‘Sexing the nation: discourses of the dancing body in Ireland in the 1930s’, Journal of Gender Studies 14: 2 (July 2005), pp. 92–3. 74 Brendan McConvery, ‘Hell-fire & poitín: Redemptorist missions in the Irish Free State (1922–36)’, History Ireland 3: 8 (2000), www. h​istor​yirel​and.c​om/20​th-ce​ntury​-cont​empor​ary-h​istor​y/hel​l-fir​e-poi​ tin-r ​ e demp ​ t oris​ t -mis​ s ions​ - in-t​ h e-ir​ i sh-f​ r ee-s ​ t ate- ​ 1 922–​1 936/​ [accessed 15 March 2017]. 75 Public Dance Halls Act, 1935, www.i​rishs​tatut​ebook​.ie/e​li/19​35/ac​ t/2/s​ectio​n/16/​enact​ed/en​/html​ [accessed 15 March 2017]. 76 Irish Examiner, 30 September 1935.

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77 Luddy, ‘Sex and the single girl’, pp. 80–1. 78 Irish Catholic Directory (1920), pp. 514–15. 79 For a discussion of a similar topic in Irish America, see George Deshon, Guide for Catholic Young Women: Especially for Those who Earn their own Living (New York, NY: The Catholic Publication Society, 1860), pp. 254–7. 80 Catholic Bulletin 1: 2 (February 1911), p. 64. 81 Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore (February 1920), p. 157. 82 Alfonso Maria de Liguori, The Mission Book: Instructions and Prayers to Preserve the Fruits of the Mission / Drawn Chiefly from the Works of St. Alphonsus Liguori (Dublin: James Duffy, 1910), p. 303. 83 Fischer, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame’, pp. 822–3. 84 Luddy, ‘Sex and the single girl’, p. 79; James M. Smith, ‘The politics of sexual knowledge: the origins of Ireland’s containment culture and the Carrigan Report (1931)’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 13: 2 (April 2004), pp. 208–33. 85 de Liguori, The Mission Book, p. 305. In 1852, Duffy offered nineteen books by De Liguori in its catalogue. ‘A Catalogue of standard Catholic works’, Irish Catholic Directory (1852), pp. 463–4. 86 On the connections between virtue, women’s bodies, and the nation, see Fischer, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame’. 87 Munster News and Limerick and Clare Advocate, 5 June 1880. See also Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore (February 1920), pp. 156–7. 88 GDA, File P/38/17 (1), Bishop’s visitation questionnaire, Gort, 1914. 89 Galway Pilot and Vindicator, 14 October 1911, p. 5. 90 Irish Catholic Directory, 1911, p. 458. 91 Brożyna, Labour, Love, and Prayer, p. 22. 92 Ryan, ‘Constructing Irishwoman’, p. 37; Jennifer Redmond, ‘“Sinful singleness?”: exploring the discourses on Irish single women’s ­emigration to England, 1922–1948’, Women’s History Review 17: 3 (July 2008), pp. 455–76. 93 Jennifer Redmond, ‘The politics of emigrant bodies: Irish women’s sexual practice in question’, in Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland, ed. Jennifer Redmond, Sonja Tiernan, Sandra McAvoy, and Mary ­McAuliffe (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2015), p. 74. 94 Censorship of Publications Act, 1929, www.i​rishs​tatut​ebook​.ie/e​li/19​ 29/ac​t/21/​enact​ed/en​/html​ [accessed 15 March 2017]. 95 Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, ‘Fiction available to and written for cottagers and their children’, The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives, ed. Bernadette Cunningham and Máire Kennedy (Dublin: Rare Books Group of the Library Association of Ireland and Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, 1999), p. 214.

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96 Wolf, An Irish-Speaking Island, Chapter 6. 97 ‘A Catalogue of standard Catholic works’, pp. 445–85. 98 Irish Catholic Directory (1874), p. 366. 99 See, for example, Matthew Russell, ‘Our Lady of the Tolka’, Irish Monthly 23: 267 (September 1895), p. 455. 100 Elizabeth Tilley, ‘Periodicals’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV, ed. James H. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 164. 101 Terence J. Fay, S.J., ‘Changing image of Irish spirituality: the Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart, 1888–1988,’ Studies: An Irish ­Quarterly Review 88: 352 (winter 1999), pp. 418–19. 102 Oral history, Áine Ahearne, Nohoba, Kinsale, County Cork, 1920s, in No Shoes in Summer: Days to Remember, ed. Mary Ryan, Seán Browne, and Kevin Gilmour (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995), p. 26. 103 Pádraig Ua Cnáimhsí, Róise Rua: An Island Memoir, trans. J. J. Keaveny (Cork: Mercier Press, 2009), p. 157. 104 Fay, ‘Changing image of Irish spirituality’, pp. 420, 423. 105 Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, Catalogue of the Publications of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, January 1915 (Dublin: ­Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, 1915), pp. 20–33. 106 Munster News and Limerick and Clare Advocate, 5 June 1880. 107 Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, pp. 5–6. 108 Úna Ní Bhroiméil, ‘Women readers and Catholic magazines’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV, pp. 380–1. See also Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997). 109 Meaney, O’Dowd and Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman, p. 132. 110 Catholic Bulletin and Book Review 1: 1 (July 1911), p. 2. 111 By 1911, Ireland had achieved almost universal adult literacy. David Fitzpatrick, ‘“A share of the honeycomb”: education, emigration, and Irishwomen’, in The Origins of Popular Literacy in Ireland: Language, Change, and Educational Development 1700–1920, ed. Mary Daly and David Dickson (Dublin: Department of Modern History, Trinity College, 1990), p. 168. For women’s pre-famine literacy rates, see Deborah Oxley, ‘Living standards of women in prefamine Ireland’, Social Science History 28: 2 (summer 2004), p. 275. 112 Catholic Bulletin 1: 1 (January 1911), p. 1. 113 Irish Catholic Directory (1852), p. 455. 114 Mrs Mary A. Coleman, ‘Domestic libraries’, Catholic Bulletin 4 (April 1911), p. 201. 115 Ibid., p. 201. By 1909, the Catholic Truth Society had published over 400 penny pamphlets. Charles Benson and Siobhán Fitzpatrick, ‘Pamphlets’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV, p. 142.

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116 Elizabeth Russell, ‘Holy crosses, guns and roses: themes in popular reading material’, in Ireland in the 1930s, ed. Joost Augusteijn (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), p. 21. 117 Catholic Book Bulletin 2 (February 1911), pp. 50–1. 118 Ibid., p. 50. 119 Katharine Tynan, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (New York, NY: The Devin-Adair Company, 1913), p. 46. 120 Brożyna, Labour, Love, and Prayer, p. 5. 121 Preston, Charitable Words, pp. 4–5. 122 Ibid. 123 Catholic Bulletin 4: 8 (August 1914), p. 569. 124 Ann Colman, ‘Far from silent: nineteenth-century Irish women ­writers’, in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, ed. Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 208. 125 Patrick Maume, ‘Rome and Kenmare: Margaret Cusack and Ultramontane print culture’, in Visual, Material, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Ireland, ed. Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), p. 102. 126 Cusack, Women’s Work in Modern Society, p. 31. 127 Maume, ‘Rome and Kenmare’, p. 103. 128 Colman, ‘Far from silent’, p. 203. 129 James H. Murphy, ‘“Things which seem to you unfeminine”: gender and nationalism in the fiction of some upper middle class Catholic women novelists, 1880–1910’, in Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2000), p. 60. 130 Colman, ‘Far from silent’, p. 203. 131 Ní Bhroiméil, ‘Women readers and Catholic magazines’, p. 382. 132 Poetry Foundation, www.p​oetry​found​ation​.org/​bio/k​athar​inet​ynan;​ Irish Monthly, 1905–31 [accessed 15 March 2017]. 133 Fay, ‘Changing image of Irish spirituality’, p. 423. 134 Eithne, ‘Retreats for working girls’, Irish Monthly 51: 601 (July 1923), p. 327. 135 Murphy, ‘“Things which seem to you unfeminine”’, p. 77. 136 Catholic Book Bulletin 1: 1 (January 1911), p. 2. 137 Colman, ‘Far from silent’, p. 204; James H. Murphy, ‘“Insouciant rivals of Mrs Barton”: gender and Victorian aspiration in George Moore and the women novelists of the Irish Monthly’, in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, p. 221. 138 www.j​stor.​org.n​uncio​.cofc​.edu/​actio​n/doB​asicS​earch​?Quer​y=wom​ an&fi​ l ter=​ j id%3​A 10.2​ 3 07%2​ F j500​ 0 0375​ & Sear​ c h=Se​ a rch&​ wc=on ​ & fc=o ​ f f&gl ​ o balS ​ e arch ​ = &sbb ​ B ox=&​ s bjBo​ x =&sb​ p Box=​ [accessed 25 August 2013].

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139 See, for example, Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries; McCoole, No Ordinary Women; and Pierse, ed., Irish Feminisms: 1810–1930. 140 Frank A. Biletz, ‘Women and Irish-Ireland: the domestic nationalism of Mary Butler’, New Hibernia Review 6: 1 (spring 2002), p. 60. 141 Mrs Frank Pentrill, ‘Everyday thoughts – old maids’, Irish Monthly 13 (August 1885), cited in Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (Swords, Co. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1990), p. 45. 142 O’Mahony, ‘The mother’, cited in Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History, ed. Maria Luddy (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 18. 143 McCabe Papers, DDA, file 337/6/I/15, Teresa Rooney to McCabe, 12 August 1879. 144 Maria Luddy, ‘A “sinister and retrogressive” proposal: Irish women’s opposition to the 1937 draft constitution’, Transactions of the R ­ oyal Historical Society 15 (2005), pp. 176, 184–5. 145 Ibid., p. 179. 146 Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘The Church and the artist’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook 9 (1991–2), p. 130. 147 John Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism in the Free State, 1922– 49’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57: 1 (January 2006), p. 58. 148 David W. Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice: a study of mass attendance in Pre-Famine Ireland’, Éire-Ireland 40: 1 &2 (spring/ summer 2005). 149 McCabe papers, DDA, file III/337/5/28, Fanny O’Hagan, Dublin, to McCabe, 1880. 150 Bishop George Butler papers, LDA, Box 230, ‘Address of the women of the Diocese of Limerick to the Holy Father’, 1877. 151 Caitriona Clear, ‘Women of the house in Ireland, 1800–1950’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V, p. 594. 152 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, pp. 60–1. 153 Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism’, p. 58. See also Lisa Godson, ‘Catholicism and material culture in Ireland, 1840–1880’, Circa: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland 103 (spring 2003), pp. 38–44. 154 David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular ­Religious Images (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 154. 155 Sister M. F. Clare (Mary Francis Cusack), Good Reading for Girls: Good Reading for Sundays and Festivals (London: Burns, Oates, & Co.; Dublin: H. Gill, 1877), pp. 112, 181. 156 Maura Murphy, Don’t Wake Me at Doyles: A Memoir (New York, NY: Thomas Dunne/St Martin’s, 2005), p. 27.

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157 National Folklore Collection 1611:130–1, cited in Christina Brophy, ‘Keening Community: Mná Caointe, Women, Death, and Power in Ireland’ (PhD dissertation, Boston College, 2010), p. 292. 158 Ann Taves, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 13; Emmet Larkin, ‘The parish mission movement, 1850–1880’, in Christianity in Ireland: Revisiting the Story, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Dáire Keogh (Dublin: The Columba Press, 2002), p. 202. 159 Marrie Walsh, An Irish Country Childhood (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 46–7. 160 Taylor, Quench the Lamp, p. 52. 161 Stiofan O’ Cadhla, The Holy Well Tradition: The Pattern of St. ­Declan, Ardmore, County Waterford, 1800–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), p. 22. 162 Rev. Joseph Guinan, The Island Parish (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1908), pp. 137–8. 163 Bill Cullen, It’s a Long Way from Penny Apples (New York, NY: Forge, 2001), p. 165. 164 Irish Press, 26 April 1940; Irish Independent, 9 April 1940.

2 Catholic girlhoods Sara Hyland, who came of age in the 1900s and 1910s, later reminisced about a visit she made to Connemara when she was fifteen. After a friend died, the devoutly Catholic Hyland attended the woman’s Church of Ireland funeral. ‘I was so bewildered at having to take part in the funeral’, Hyland later wrote, that I did not see where I was going until I heard or felt the church doors close behind me. I was almost distraught with fear that I would lose my religion and that when I came out of the church, people would see a difference in me. I tried in vain to repeat the Lord’s Prayer as I felt it would help me, but I kept getting it all mixed up.1 Hyland’s concern that she would ‘lose’ her religion once she entered the Anglican Church testifies that some memoirists feared that they were ‘getting it all mixed up’ and not living up to the ideal of Catholic girlhood. Hyland worried that she would be changed, even contaminated, by her entry into the space of the Church of Ireland. From an early age, Hyland’s religion was integral to her identity – Catholicism was a central force in the lives of early twentieth-century Irish girls. Hyland’s narrative also raises questions about the ways in which girls experienced their Catholic childhoods, a topic understudied in both Irish women’s history and the history of Irish Catholicism. Through an analysis of women’s life-writings, including diaries, oral histories, autobiographies, and memoirs, this chapter explores the realities of growing up Catholic and female from 1850 to 1950, with a particular focus on the first half of the twentieth century. At this

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time, religion served as the major influence in Irish girls’ identity formation within the community and the family, and girls themselves became integral to the creation of Ireland’s modern Catholic culture.2 At parish rituals such as the bishop’s visitation of parishes and First Communion, girls experienced devotion, awe, and anxiety. As they encountered a pervasive religious material culture in the community and in the home, girls learned to associate the physical, sensual, and corporeal with their faith.3 Girls’ devotional experiences also further document the unique combination of change and continuity that characterised women’s religious lives. Significantly, girlhood narratives underscore the importance of other women to girls’ lives, reinforcing the notion of a woman-centred popular Catholicism. Women – sisters, grandmothers, schoolfriends, mothers, teachers, and nuns – were the primary influences on girls’ daily lives and their religious understandings. Studying Irish girlhoods thus sheds light on the bonds between Catholic women and girls even as it helps us understand the origins and trajectory of the feminised religious culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Girlhoods, memory, and Irish history It is not exclusively the rough-and-tumble urban childhoods of boys such as Frank McCourt that have so enthralled Irish readers in recent decades: To School Through the Fields, Alice Taylor’s account of her rural early twentieth-century upbringing, has been a bestseller in modern Ireland.4 Some scholars who have studied Irish childhoods too quickly dismiss the texts of Taylor and other women as advocating a false ‘rural simplicity’, turning instead to an analysis of what they view as the more complex life-writings of well-known men such as McCourt and Gerry Adams.5 Irish boyhoods have been ‘canonized, prizewinning, best-selling, and even parodied’.6 The Irish girlhood, however, remains comparatively unexplored.7 When authors explore childhood, they privilege boyhoods. When they attempt to explore the feminine, they privilege motherhood. In Elizabeth Dougherty’s words, ‘it sometimes seems that only two subjectivities exist in the Irish imaginary: male child or female mother’.8

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Whether focusing on the idyllic or the tragic, scholarly works and first-hand accounts describing girls’ lives in the past reinforce stereotypes of female passivity. Despite the lack of historical analyses of girlhood, a plethora of memoirs and autobiographies – what Breda Gray calls ‘a memoir boom’ – overtook Ireland beginning in the 1990s.9 The reasons for this are complex, but certainly there was something ‘cathartic’ or ‘confessional’ about these works, likely tied to the late twentieth-century Church scandals, criticism of the Catholic Church’s influence, and writers’ subsequent desires to expose long-held secrets.10 Disclosures about the horrific treatment that some Irish children endured at the hands of the Church and the Irish state in the twentieth century, as well as the scandals of the Magdalen asylums, secret adoption, and mother-and-baby homes, have encouraged memoirists, scholars, and commentators to highlight abuse when writing of the Irish childhood experience.11 Emilie Pine argues that Ireland’s recent obsession with exploring history through publications, film, museums, and commemorations has ‘render[ed] the story of Ireland more traumatic’.12 Historian Diarmaid Ferriter has analysed the late twentieth-century popularity of the dismal childhood memoir. ‘[I]t is strongly tempting to conclude from an engagement with these texts’, he writes, ‘that the greatest blot on twentieth-century Irish society’s copybook was its treatment of children’.13 Ferriter posits that depictions of bleak childhoods must be taken as more historically accurate than depictions of rural childhood innocence, because memoirs of traumatic childhoods reveal moments of happiness, while depictions of the idyllic childhood recognise no ‘darkness at all’.14 In her writings about her childhood experiences with nuns, however, Nuala O’Faolain confronts a different reality: as adult women, O’Faolain’s schoolmates challenged her one-dimensionally bleak memories: Several sisters from my boarding school have talked to me in later life in various states of hurt and bewilderment at the blackness of my memories. “But don’t you remember the good times?” they say. “Don’t you remember all the joy and laughter?” Unfortunately, the truth is that I hardly do.15

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Reminiscences of childhood darkness, then, likely are just as ­problematic as more positive memories. In 2009, James M. Smith and Maria Luddy called for more scholarly investigations of the happy Irish childhood. ‘[T]hese too need to be remembered and recorded’, they wrote, ‘to enable a balanced understanding of how children experienced the world and of how adults comprehended childhood.’16 We also need to remember the complexities of childhood experiences, which demonstrate that, whether happy or not, Irish Catholic girlhoods resembled the realities of their mothers and grandmothers: they demonstrated how girls both existed within an enhanced Catholic patriarchy and negotiated it. Although historians have argued for the centrality of social class and gender in girls’ lives, the role that religion played in Irish girls’ childhoods remains unexplored. A plethora of women’s life-writings published in the twentieth century helps us shed light on girls’ experiences of Catholicism. Analysing life-writings, of course, involves particular challenges. Most of the narratives studied here were composed well after the events described; they thus reflect not necessarily accurate experiences of childhood but rather adult perceptions of girlhood.17 Memoirs and autobiographies expose the ‘uneasy collaboration between history and memory’, forcing us to confront the slippery lines between truth and fiction.18 Still, Harry Bahrick’s research on the maintenance of childhood memories has demonstrated that after a short ‘initial forgetting’ period of several years, memories remain intact for up to an additional fifty years.19 Women’s memories, additionally, give us access to their voices when few other sources from the period can do so. And studying life-writings allows us to assess women’s narrative strategies and subjectivities. If we accept that children organise and make sense of their memories primarily as narratives, then we can analyse those narratives to examine the connections between religion and gender in girls’ lives.20 Twentieth-century Irish life-stories also reveal the complex ways in which women memoirists used their childhood religious experiences to, in the words of Robin Fivush, ‘come to have a richer understanding of their narrative self’. In her examination of gendered narratives, Fivush argues that ‘women’s sense of self may be more heavily based on their autobiographical narratives than are men’s.’21 The life-stories examined in this chapter affirm those

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claims, attesting that Irish women’s remembrances address childhood in deep and complex ways and position their girlhoods as a key stage in the religious and personal development. Irish women’s life-writings are especially rich in describing Catholic girlhood experiences. Indeed, an analysis of Irish Catholic women’s narrative strategies complicates the trope of the Irish memoir and autobiography, blurring the contrasts between the happy, idyllic rural childhood – what Margaret MacCurtain has called a ‘lost innocence’ – and the desperate urban childhood made famous by Angela’s Ashes.22 In women’s memories of Catholicism, moments of fear, shame, abuse, and anxiety interrupt the idyllic rural childhood; the rough-andtumble urban childhood reveals flashes of joy and comfort. Most importantly, perhaps, Irish girlhood narratives, whether rural or urban, and across one hundred years, provide evidence for the prominence of Irish Catholic devotions in the realities and imaginations of girls as well as for the changes and continuities that characterised their religious lives. Girls and education In her study featuring oral history interviews with Irish nuns who came of age between the 1910s and 1960s, Yvonne McKenna remarks on the centrality of religion to their childhoods: By their own admission, the women grew up surrounded by Catholicism: at home, at school, in society. Ireland was experiencing, as Aisling put it, ‘a great age of faith’ during the time she grew up. Clearly, the women’s Catholicism was important in their young lives. Catholicism ‘meant everything’ to Elaine and May, was ‘vital’ to Kate and was a ‘way of life’ for Irene … As Elaine put it, ‘it was natural, a part of you’.23 Childhood was the key stage of the lifecycle in Irish Catholic women’s religious indoctrination and education. Religious scholar David Morgan writes that children often were embedded in religious culture from an early age but also recognises that this culture must be learned. Describing this process, Morgan claims, ‘[the child] was taught how to

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fold his hands when praying, to close his eyes, to sit still and erect, to kneel at bedside, what voice to use as he prayed, …  he learned when and how to stand and kneel and genuflect (if Catholic) during worship, how loud to sing, how to blend his voice with those around him’.24 For Irish girls coming of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, learning to become Catholic was a process that began almost with birth and lasted throughout early adulthood. Girls’ education took place in a variety of spaces: the home, the school, the chapel, and at communal religious occasions. It involved the careful training of both mind and body. In a journal describing her daughter’s upbringing, a Cork woman wrote that her daughter first visited the altar at the age of two-and-a-half. Three months later, the girl attended mass, and ‘knew first chapter in catechism in August 1861’ – when she was a little more than four years old.25 Exposed to Catholic liturgy as a toddler, this Cork girl learned how to conduct herself in the space of the chapel and memorise the catechism; she thus interacted with the spatial and literate elements of the ‘devotional revolution’ from a very early age. Catholicism had moved to the centre of girls’ lives by the mid-nineteenth century. It would stay there, of course, through much of the twentieth century. Key to Irish Catholic girlhoods from 1850 to 1950 was education. Girls’ formal educational opportunities expanded throughout the nineteenth century. Established in the 1830s, Ireland’s new national school system soon reached an unprecedented number of girls, resulting in what Margaret Ó  hÓ gartaigh has dubbed a ‘quiet revolution in female education’.26 There were twice as many boys as girls in school in the 1830s, but this gap closed rapidly. By the late nineteenth century, many Irish girls stayed in school until their late teens, and by the early twentieth century, almost all girls could read and write. Most, in fact, could do so better than boys their age.27 Regional and economic variation persisted, however. For some poor rural or working-class girls, the difficulties that they faced at home or work hampered educational opportunities. In early twentieth-century County Longford, some girls left school at age 14, and one later mused that ‘[a]t home she would be ordered to do her homework but there was no light, only a candle and a little “auld lamp”. She had to work in the dark.’28 As late as the 1950s and 1960s, girls ended their

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education early to help their mothers rear their siblings in w ­ orking-class Dublin. A teacher recalled ‘twelve, thirteen, fourteen children in families and the older sisters were always minding the babies and couldn’t come to school. They’d have three or four babies, wheeling them out and minding them.’29 Maro Wynn, born in Dublin’s red-light district in 1932, later mused: ‘I had to leave school for to look after my mother at ten years old. There was no choice, my mother couldn’t be left on her own. She’d fall. It was multiple sclerosis … Ah, I used to have to wash, dress and feed her, change her.’30 Most Irish girls, however, had access to at least an elementary school education in the early twentieth century, and philanthropic groups helped provide education for some poor urban girls, establishing ‘ragged schools in Belfast, Dublin, Cork, and Limerick’.31 Irish girls’ educational encounters affirmed the gender segregation that dominated much of Catholic life. By 1900, about half of national schools were single-sex institutions.32 Even those that remained coeducational carefully segregated the sexes. Marrie Walsh of County Mayo, born in 1929, recalled that at her local school a ‘dividing wall’ separated the boys and girls on the playground.33 In early twentieth-century Dublin, Mona Henry’s teacher, principal, and classmates were all female; in her recollections (and in the memories of most Irish women), this gender isolation led to an intimate and feminised school-day experience, paralleling the ways in which girls existed in largely female networks within the home and community.34 Reminiscing about her convent education, Edna O’Brien wrote: ‘it was a world of women – nuns, lay nuns and little postulants and one was always seeing veils and starched headgear that framed the face and out of which eyes and nose peered as if out of a burrow.’35 Sligo’s Mary Colum (1884–1957), who attended a convent school in County Monaghan, began her autobiography with the following: Until the day I die my first day at boarding school will stand out in my mind, my passing into a community of girls of all ages from small children to girls of seventeen and eighteen and a community of nuns, and to a life in which each hour of the day was divided into work and prayer with, at two intervals of the day, some time for recreation.36

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Ireland’s schools demonstrate the amalgam of conservatism and progressivism that characterised girls’ religious lives. While these ­ schools held firmly to ‘traditional’ gender norms and women’s roles, therefore perpetuating and enforcing Catholic patriarchal culture, they also educated girls, helping them to become literate and therefore providing them with powerful tools of negotiation and resistance. ­Ireland’s national schools, despite being state-run, privileged the religion of the student as central to the curriculum, which meant that the majority of schools featured Catholic religious instruction beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. One school inspector highlighted the pervasive Catholic culture of a girls’ national school in Cork: At one end of the room [was] a painting representing Nanno [sic] Nagle, the foundress of the Presentation order, teaching young children; at the other end [was] a painting of Our Saviour on the cross and the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene at each side, and a wooden cross underneath this [was] covered with a curtain during school business.37 Over time, national schools became central to the Church, emerging as primary sites of children’s catechetical instruction.38 Because national schools privileged a ‘Catholic structure and ethos’, they also underscored the teaching of proper gender roles to Irish girls. Grá inne O’Flynn would later ponder the fact that, at age seven, when she started school in the early twentieth century, ‘our institutional socialisation into what it meant to be Catholic women began … ’39 This socialisation included preparing girls for life in the home both practically, through sewing and embroidery lessons, and morally, through religious instruction.40 The national school system therefore ‘provided equality of access’ for girls but also, through its curriculum, ‘emphasized and reinforced gender difference’.41 Educational texts and manuals displayed the clearly gendered nature of the Irish educational system; as they evolved throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these publications consistently advocated that girls focus their learning on Catholic morality. As early as the 1830s, national school readers promoted women’s roles as wives and mothers, highlighting domesticity and heterosexual marriage.42 Readers

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that proved most popular were those, such as Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools published by the Commissioners of National Education, that attempted to teach morality and character to Irish girls, which meant focusing on ‘gentleness, honesty, duties of brothers and sisters, and government of the tongue and thought’.43 The 1846 edition of the Reading Book included the following advice to girls: It is very important, not only that the mind should be well informed, but that there should be a taste for knowledge … At the same time [the Irish girl] should ever bear in mind, that knowledge is not to elevate her above her station, or to excuse her for the discharge of its most trifling duties … . It is to teach her to know her place and her functions; to make her content with the one, and willing to fulfill the other.44 Ireland’s gendered curriculum thus was the foundation of a practical education for girls – one that would not fill their heads with lofty notions but instead would prepare them for the physical and moral realities of domestic life. And this curriculum was well established by the famine years. As educational opportunities increased, more and more Irish girls internalised this ideology. By the 1870s and 1880s, a majority of girls received their education from women religious or female teachers who had been educated at convent schools.45 At the same time, the Irish national educational system at the primary level featured the active involvement of nuns, particularly the Presentation Sisters and the Sisters of Mercy.46 Furthermore, by the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of middle-class Irish Catholic girls attended convent schools; Ireland contained more than 300 such schools in the national educational system in 1900.47 Mary Peckham Magray, who posits that nuns were integral to the ‘devotional revolution’ and thus the evolution of modern Irish Catholicism, indicates that nuns ‘exerted’ their ‘greatest authority’ in Ireland over children through education.48 In their interactions with girls, nuns may have reinforced the notions of female passivity and domesticity, but they also provided potent examples of how women, even within Catholic patriarchy, could live outside of those constraints. At the secondary level, convent boarding schools became popular for those who could afford them. More prosperous Catholic families

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by the latter decades of the nineteenth century were able to choose from an impressive collection of schools that women religious managed. St. Catherine’s convent in County Wexford advertised its services in the Irish Catholic Directory in 1880: The School, conducted by the Sisters of St Louis of France, possesses many advantages deserving the attention of parents and guardians. It is situated in a most healthy part of the country, in the middle of extensive pleasure grounds, from which there is a fine view of Waterford harbour and the surrounding scenery … . The deportment and manners of the pupils are scrupulously attended to; no efforts are spared to give the young ladies habits of orders and neatness, that they may return to their families not only accomplished but helpful and intelligent in all the duties of the woman’s sphere.49 This advertisement appealed to parents by underscoring the continental, bourgeois background of the nuns, the importance of the students’ physical environment, and a curriculum focused on female accomplishments. It also highlighted the orderly, middle-class, and distinctly modern sensibilities that so many families embraced at the time and stressed that, when girls exited the school, they would return to their families rather than engage with the public sphere. From 1850 to 1950, descriptions of girls’ schools consistently emphasised that learning the ‘duties of the woman’s sphere’ was the primary goal of a convent education. Advertising the Convent of St. Louis secondary school in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan in 1939, a journalist for the Irish Independent wrote: The primary aim of the Sisters is to give their pupils thorough instruction in the principles and duties of their Faith, while devoting special attention to the character formation and development of the best type of Irish Catholic Womanhood.50 Convent schools, like national schools, affirmed Irish Catholicism’s focus on moulding girls into wives and mothers. Irish girls’ ‘character formation and development’ depended not only on a curriculum that

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featured their future domestic roles, but also on a carefully planned and ordered convent, one that managed girls’ minds, souls, and bodies. Nuns and female education thus became integral to the goals of the ‘devotional revolution’, including ‘the secular project of social organization, integrating mass populations into orderly, well-disciplined societies’.51 Schools also were disciplined spaces in which time was carefully controlled. Convent schoolgirls, like their counterparts whose bodies were managed through the spaces of the household and the chapel, found that religious devotion and practice were imbued with a sense of modern hierarchy and order. After sixteen-year-old Mary Hayden left her home for a week-long retreat at Mount Anville Convent School outside Dublin in the 1870s, she wrote in her diary of the tedium of the school’s daily routine: ‘Every day just the same… ’52 Girls in convent boarding schools, including thirteen-year-old Mary Colum, who enrolled in one in 1897, echoed Hayden’s observations. In Colum’s school, a nun wrote down ‘the schedule of the day’s tasks’ each morning and ‘carefully mapped’ out Colum’s other time for ‘private study’.53 In the late nineteenth century, a majority of girls entered convent boarding schools at around thirteen years old and remained there through their adolescence.54 The curriculum of convent schoolgirls resembled that of other national schools, consisting of ‘a steady diet of catechism, saints’ lives, Church history, and devotion to the Virgin Mary’ that fundamentally was designed to prepare them for ‘a life of Christian service to others’, and specifically for Catholic wifehood and motherhood.55 In convent schools, education privileged ‘the embourgeoisement of Irish culture with missionary conviction’, focusing on ‘ladylike modesty and refinement’ as well as ‘inculcating middle-class values of female propriety in young girls’.56 Still, however, through education and the influence of their nuns, who served as role models, some girls learned the confidence that they would later use to contest women’s limited roles in Irish Catholicism. Bodies, rituals, and senses Increasingly from 1850 to 1950, Irish girls and women participated in popular Catholicism and religious education through membership in a

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vastly expanding network of popular confraternities and sodalities that held to the conservative line but also would expand their experiences and world-views.57 By the 1840s, the confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament and the Christian Doctrine were well established in most parishes. In Limerick, Dublin, and Belfast, membership in the confraternity of the Holy Family was high, and in Dublin, membership in the sodality of the Sacred Heart of Jesus virtually exploded in the nineteenth century.58 In the new century, participation in these organisations had become ubiquitous. By 1932, twenty-three different sodalities, confraternities, and prayer-groups, including the Confraternity of the Sacred Heart, which had women and men congregate separately, met regularly in North Dublin.59 Children’s sodalities in schools gained influence as well; the sodality of the ‘Enfants de Marie’, or Mary’s Children, was the most popular in late nineteenth-century Irish convent schools.60 Indeed, confraternities and sodalities became enormously popular with ­Ireland’s youth, and the Catholic hierarchy enthusiastically ­supported this development throughout the twentieth century. By the early 1900s, confraternities and sodalities flourished alongside a vibrant Church infrastructure and material culture, providing for Irish Catholics a ‘comprehensive system of spirituality from youth until old age’.61 When Dublin’s Archbishop John McQuaid wrote in 1956 of his concerns that children needed more instruction on ‘practising the faith’, ‘sexual morality’, and religious instruction, his solution was youth sodalities.62 McQuaid’s secretary, Father Christopher Mangan, recommended ‘[t]he formation of separate male and female youth sodalities for those aged between fourteen and eighteen years’.63 The archconfraternity of the Holy Family was present in every parish of Dublin by 1960 ‘with an average membership of 450 men, 800 women and 980 youths’.64 Lay women and men in the confraternity of the Christian Doctrine taught catechism to boys and girls (­separately) on Sundays, partly to counter the efficacy of Protestant Sunday schools. This confraternity in St. Michan’s parish outlined the following guidelines for children’s instruction: 1st class, prayers, including the acts of faith, hope and charity. 2nd class, small catechism. 3rd class, abridgement of the general

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In the first half of the twentieth century, Irish children’s participation in parish events and societies increased. By the 1950s, a Dublin girls’ sodality organised streets and neighbourhoods into ten guilds, and each guild studied ‘the life of a saint… the rosary; [and] instruction of doctrine and benediction’.66 More so than their formal educational experiences, girls’ personal and emotional connections with devotional items pervade memoirs and oral histories of the twentieth century, reminding us of the new emphasis on gendered consumerism. Hannah Walsh, who later would become Sister Carmel Walsh, remembered wanting to be a nurse when she was a girl until she received a letter from an aunt in Australia. The letter contained ‘a small picture of Christ on His crucifix and a little girl at His feet, and underneath it the aunt wrote, “Could this be you?”’ Once Walsh’s aunt, she later recalled, ‘planted the idea’ of becoming a nun, Walsh’s life path became very different.67 When Walsh gazed at the picture of Christ on His crucifix with a girl at his feet, she established life-long connections between the body of Christ and her own body. Material Catholicism encouraged Irish children to experience the physical presence of the divine in the world and the corporeality of their faith. For girls, the sensual experiences that were so closely associated with popular Catholic material culture were woven together with their devotions to the bodies of Christ, the Blessed Virgin, and nuns. After first walking into her convent school, Judith Kelly was struck by ‘a huge wooden crucifix on a chain’ on the classroom wall. She remembered ‘an ivory Christ stretched naked, bleeding, elbows and kneecaps jutting through the skin, flesh protruding from open wounds … ’68 The nude body of Christ, with its marks of trauma and violence, made deep impressions on girls such as Kelly, encouraging them to correlate suffering and sacrifice with their faith.69 Their veneration of the bodies of Jesus and the Virgin Mary also helped girls to define notions of Catholic masculinity and femininity. In Ireland, the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus signified a sympathetic, ‘gentle’ and ‘effeminate’

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masculinity,70 perhaps contrasting with what many memoirists described as their distant fathers and the more muscular Christianity that ­ Protestants favoured.71 The tortured body of Christ also encouraged girls to empathise with Jesus and thus share intimacy with him. These connections would persist through adulthood; for Irish women, the image of Christ suffering resonated with their own hardship and pain, fashioning an emotional and empathetic connection between them, the body, and the divine.72 By the post-famine era, sensual devotions within the home, the school, and the larger parish community besieged Irish Catholic girls. The result, as Robert Orsi writes, was the ‘realness and presence of the sacred in the bodies and imaginations of children’.73 At times, however, that realness could morph into something less tangible: a sense of enchantment and even magic. Indeed, a significant number of Irish girls characterised their encounters with local Catholic culture in the early twentieth century as wondrous. Elizabeth Hamilton, who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s in County Wicklow, found that her Anglo-Irish Protestant upbringing often left her bewildered by brushes with Catholic material culture. When she went for a walk one Sunday afternoon, Hamilton came across a Catholic chapel. ‘While still a little way from it’, she later wrote, ‘I smelt incense and the scent of flowers. The door stood open. Inside I saw enthroned above an altar massed with lilies and roses and ablaze with candles the white disc of the Host. It was the feast of Corpus Christi. I stared for a moment in wonder’.74 That Hamilton’s first impressions of a strange faith referred to smell and sight reminds us of the importance of the sensory in Irish Catholicism. Edith Newman Devlin, a poor Protestant Dubliner in the 1930s and 1940s, described a more frightening experience when recounting an early memory involving her Catholic grandmother. ‘… I see myself walking hand in hand with a figure clad in long black garments’, she wrote. ‘We turn aside from the main road and go through a gate towards a large building; there in front of me I see a big dark rock with candles blazing on it and a waxen statue of a lady in blue and white looking down on it. Terrified, I pull at my grandmother’s arm and cry to go home. This was the grotto of the Catholic church in Bantry’.75

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While Hamilton responded with fascination to her encounter with a mysterious Catholic materiality, Devlin’s reaction reflected the fear of the unfamiliar. Yet both were overwhelmed when they saw and smelled popular Catholicism. These Protestant children’s interpretations of Irish religious visual culture as wondrous or fearful affirm that for those girls who existed outside of mainstream Catholic culture, the awe of their surroundings full of Catholic things and places was a memorable aspect of growing up. Even Catholic girls, immersed in devotional culture from birth, had similar responses to sacred things and places, reacting with fascination when they encountered their vibrant religious surroundings. These responses too sometimes blurred into fantasy. When Phil O’Keefe, born in 1928 in Dublin, feared her mother’s strange ailment (which turned out to be labour and childbirth), the familiarity of material Catholicism comforted her. During her confinement, O’Keefe’s mother asked for a visit from her daughter. As the frightened O’Keefe entered the bedroom, she immediately saw her mother in the bed in one corner. Her scrutiny, however, settled on the other corner of the room, where ‘a small table stood under the red glow of the tin Sacred Heart lamp’. When she left the room, O’Keefe ‘smiled tentatively at our mother, and as I turned to crowd past Nanny I glanced at the picture of Our Lady which hung over the Sacred Heart lamp; her gaze seemed to follow me out of the room’.76 For this particular girl, the familiar visual Catholicism of her home soothed her when she feared that her mother may be gravely ill; indeed, her eyes were drawn repeatedly to these vibrant and reassuring images rather than to the ailing body of her mother. O’Keefe’s memories also became fantastical when she described the way that the Blessed Virgin’s own gaze seemed to follow her. In this instance, David Morgan’s assertions that the ‘devotional gaze’, particularly of the child, can sometimes lead to ‘a kind of self-transcendence that can be very empowering, allowing the devotee to slip the bonds of pain, guilt, fear, or oppression’77 are especially relevant. O’Keefe’s memories highlight the ways in which girls’ imaginations served to console them during difficult times as well as how they used their connections to Catholic things as succour. Fantasy could serve as an escape, allowing girls to imagine not only animated religious figures but also perhaps a more active future for themselves.

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In her late nineteenth-century memoir, Limerick’s Sissy O’Brien recounted her devotion to the Virgin Mary. As a child, O’Brien’s faith in Mary resulted in a mystical experience: There was an altar in the room and on it a small painted statue of the Blessed Virgin wrapped in a blue veil. I saw the statue move, grow larger and come down; I saw the veil drawn back and the Blessed Mother coming towards me with her arms open and her face shining. As I started up to meet her the vision faded, leaving me full of wonder and joy and completely comforted.78 O’Brien’s apparition of the Virgin occurred after she had been punished and sent off to bed early. For her, Mary was a benevolent, motherly force who comforted her in a time of stress. For novelist Edna O’Brien, decades later, the blurry lines between the real and unreal focused on the worship of the body of Christ. Writing of her convent education, Edna O’Brien mused: Life was fervid, enclosed and catastrophic. The spiritual food consisted of the crucified Christ. His passion impinged on every thought, word, deed and omission, and sometimes in the wild fancifulness of childhood it was as if one caught sight of Him on a hill stretched out upon a Cross betwixt two thieves, with women at the foot of it, gnashing and weeping … He loved one and at times spoke in an urgent whisper about the importance of being good.79 In O’Brien’s recollections, her visions of Christ did not ease the difficulties of convent-school life, which she viewed as ‘fervid’ and ‘enclosed’; unlike O’Keefe, O’Brien was not comforted by the fantastical elements of popular Catholicism or her own imagination. Instead, she associated her ventures into fantasy with her memories of her ‘catastrophic’ childhood religious experiences. And for O’Brien, the ‘enclosed’ realities of her childhood laid the groundwork for her future resistance and activism, demonstrating how the ‘devotional revolution’ sometimes inspired not obedience but defiance. Similarly, Eibhlí s de Barra, in early twentieth-century Cork city, associated the gaze of the Virgin with guilt. De Barra recalled in

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particular a religious painting that her mother purchased. ‘It portrayed the Blessed Virgin clothed in an olive green mantle and the Child Jesus in a cream-coloured garment’, she later wrote. For de Barra, however, most memorable was the contemplation of the Virgin: The sadness in the Blessed Virgin’s eyes seemed to foretell the fate that later befell the Holy Child on Cavalry. That picture, so big that it almost took up one wall of our bedroom, played a large part in my young life because whenever I stole a fistful of sugar or was guilty of some other such little misdemeanour I fancied that the Blessed Virgin’s eyes followed me around the room as if to remind me continuously of my guilt.80 Childhood recollections of women like O’Keefe, de Barra, Sissy O’Brien, and Edna O’Brien highlight not only the different religious experiences of Irish girls but also how their memories of visions could intersect with fear and anxiety. In addition, they testify to the ways in which girls’ religious imaginations centred on the senses, in this case seeing and being seen.81 When Phil O’Keefe and her friend Jennie went window-shopping at Christmas, they stopped to look through a shop window at a picture of St. Thé rè se and encountered the magical. ‘Let’s count to one hundred’, O’Keefe told her friend, ‘and I betcha she’ll appear to us’. O’Keefe reasoned: [i]f [St. Thé rè se] was going to appear to anybody, it had to be me; I had just taken her name in confirmation. We stared at her solemnly. The trick was to stare without blinking for a count of one hundred and then look swiftly up the street. “I can see her”, I whispered. “She’s just floating down past the coffin-shop”. “Me too”, Jennie affirmed, “but she’s up in the sky. At least that’s where I’m lookin’ and that’s where she should be, if she’s a saint”.82 By focusing their visions on St. Thé rè se, these girls proclaimed their close connections to a feminised Catholicism. By deliberately attempting to conjure up an apparition, they also manipulated a contemporary trope of popular Catholicism. Girls’ devotion and faith was real, but it could border on obsession, and it could lend itself to fantasy,

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blurring the lines between fiction and reality. And, sometimes, within this liminal zone, girls complicated Ireland’s gender norms, fantasising and imagining themselves as intimates of their religious role models. Illness and death, common motifs in life-writings describing childhood, brought about fantastical experiences of their own. The centrality of religion to their daily lives meant that Catholic children were well acquainted with the rituals surrounding death. Dublin’s Katharine Tynan, born in 1859, wrote of her childhood: Of course, I was taken to a wake. I saw more dead people in my childhood than ever I saw in youth or maturity …  I can recall even now the yellow sharpened face of the dead man …  It did not tend to a freedom from nerves. Most girl-children at all events, with these experiences, suffered from nerves and a terror of death later in life, even after they had passed the terrors of childhood which are beyond telling.83 Tynan related her childhood encounters with death as both routine and terrifying; her exposure to death as a young girl had a life-long impact on her. Here, again, is another example of Catholic indoctrination having an unintended effect. According to Tynan, ‘girl-children’ may have been uniquely susceptible to fear and anxiety after wakes. Northern Ireland’s Patricia Boylan’s early twentieth-century interactions with death were more visual and olfactory experiences. She and her friends often played in a coffin-house. Years later, she recalled the smells and sights of the experience: The smell was a clean compound of pinewood, resin, size, and tar. Coffins in all sizes and stages of preparation leaned against the walls and sometimes there was one on trestles being finished in a hurry. The padding was a work of art, a smooth upholstery job of layer upon layer of brown wadding covered with fine white linen tightly tacked in place and trimmed with yards of goffered linen expertly glued around the edge.84 Boylan’s time in the coffin-house solidified her associations between religion, opulence, and death. The lavishness of the coffins made an

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impact on the young Boylan, causing her to distance herself from death but also yearn for such luxuries. Later, Boylan reminisced about another encounter with death. ‘When Tina, the baby sister of a girl in my class did die’, she wrote, I mitched from school to go and see her. Out of respect I turned my pinny inside out …  I polished the toes of my shoes on the back of my black-stockinged legs. I felt a bit daunted when I entered the door of the little two-roomed house … The room was full of women … The candles that burned on the window-sill drew me to the little coffin resting in a bright hedge of flowers on chairs around it. There were roses framing the tiny pale blue face on the little pillow and a pink glass rosary twined the bleached twigs of Tina’s fingers.85 Boylan’s description of this encounter features many of the tropes of Catholic girlhood: the adornment of the body (both her own and that of the deceased girl), the vibrant sights (candles, flowers) of popular religion, and the awe or fear that children experienced at Catholic occasions. Fantasy intruded as well. After Boylan attended Tina’s wake, she imagined herself in the young girl’s place. ‘I longed to die’, she would later write. ‘I would look so beautiful, like a doll in a fancy box. After the funeral I would swoop and soar over the heads of all my friends and relations. They would look up and wave to me as I spiraled away, high over the tops of the cemetery trees, away, away up to heaven’.86 The lines between eroticism and religion, as well as between their fantasies about their own bodies and those of their religious idols, could be blurry for children. Mary Kenny asserts that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish Catholic children were encouraged to be innocent and pure, abstaining from interacting with their own bodies, but that they were ‘then surrounded by holy pictures which depicted the beauty and fragility of human flesh and incarnated the divine, and by poetic prayers which underlined an ecstasy ­sometimes lightly touched with the sado-masochistic’.87 Linking food, sex, and bodies, Edna O’Brien noted of her early twentieth-century Catholic childhood:

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One kissed the huge prone cross on Good Friday and one felt the gravity of it and gazed at the gloomy altar bereft of flowers. One kissed one’s mother’s sallow cheek and thought of blancmange, now and then one secretly kissed a girl friend.88 As she conflated the body of Christ, her mother, and her burgeoning sexuality, O’Brien chronicled the ways in which Irish girls’ lives were deeply sensual, revolving around sight, smell, taste, and touch, and revealed how girls could negotiate Catholic culture, finding some space within it to claim agency. The popular and material Catholicism that dominated most of the twentieth century made clear contributions to fantasy and the erotic. It is difficult to know how or if girls distinguished between the divine, the sexual, and the erotic,89 but because Irish girls existed within a world of women, having little contact with men or boys, their longings often featured the bodies of other girls or women. In her work on women’s friendships, Sharon Marcus argues that, even in (or particularly in) a society that privileged heterosexual marriage, female relationships were central to Victorian British society and integral to girls’ development. Girls, according to Marcus, were surrounded by the erotic both through their female friendships and in their consumption of feminine images.90 This was true of late nineteenth- and early ­twentieth-century Ireland as well: even as they worshipped the feminised body of Christ, girls had their most memorable encounters with the bodies of the Blessed Virgin, nuns, and other women. It should not surprise us, argues Marcus, that girls who lived in female-centric worlds should fantasise about, dream of, and desire other girls and women.91 Irish girls’ experiences in convent schools in the first half of the twentieth century reveal their fascinations with other girls and especially nuns. Ruth Schwertfeger wrote about a French schoolteacher whom all the girls loved. ‘Physically she was a regular Brunhilde, with massive shoulders on a sturdy body that would have been the envy of any male sergeant in the Royal Marines’, recalled Schwertfeger. ‘We took to her instantly …  She loved us, called us charming, a word that had never been used before – or probably since – on any of us’.92 For these girls, the nun’s physical (and masculine) appearance was

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noteworthy, but it was her foreignness and customs that made her uniquely attractive. When Mary Colum entered school at age 13, she encountered a nun, Sister Sebastian, playing the piano. Colum responded with awe. ‘Her mouth was large and bulged a little, and as she stood talking to me she alternately fingered the huge rosary that hung from her leather belt and the black cross that hung on her white guimpe. She was full of charm and mystery. I was aching to ask her to go on playing, but my tongue was tied and I could not speak’.93 Nuns and teachers thus served as objects of devotion and fantasy for some Irish girls. Patricia Boylan claimed that she and the other girls in the convent school ‘invented fantasies about the nuns’, even creating made-up pasts: Sister Brigid had been very beautiful when she was young. She took the veil when the man she loved and was to marry was killed while performing a heroic deed, any heroic deed, in a foreign land during a war …  Sister Josephine must be the daughter of a lord, we dreamed, for she had such dainty ways and such long white fingers.94 Their relationships with their female role models provided both comfort and anxiety for Irish Catholic girls, who sought refuge in their idols but also worried about living up to expectations. Women religious were a paradox in that they existed outside of heterosexual marriage, disturbing the paradigm of Catholic womanhood, but their roles as the virginal brides of Christ also led girls to think of them as somewhat sexualised.95 Some girls, especially when they first encountered nuns, categorised them as objects be observed, feared, and ultimately, in some cases, desired. According to Grá inne O’Flynn: At first, probably because they looked so strange, we looked on nuns as being apart from the rest of humanity. Although we grew used to how they looked, we grew more convinced of their remoteness. They did not live in ordinary houses; they had to be accompanied by other females when they walked in the streets; they had exotic names; they were ‘brides of Christ’.96

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O’Flynn responded to the nuns’ ‘otherness’ by focusing on their physical bodies and clothing, which immediately set them apart. Their remoteness was also ‘exotic’ and touched with the sensual. Their habits, designed to conceal their bodies, only made girls curious; they knew that nuns were chaste but also sexualised as ‘brides of Christ’. Katharine Tynan, who attended a convent school in Drogheda in the 1870s, remembered some of the ‘exquisite’ and ‘beautiful’ nuns there. ‘I used to think’, she wrote, ‘that there never was such beauty as Sister Teresa’s with her classic profile, her face as finely moulded, as purely coloured as a Madonna lily, or Mother Joseph’s with her opulent golden colouring, the magnificent intense blue of her eyes’.97 In Kate O’Brien’s early twentieth-century convent school, one sister had a particular following; some of the girls fainted or feigned illness so that she would ‘carry them out, and, one supposes, sponge their brows and generally restore them’.98 The convent school became, for some, a place of special relationships or ‘adorations’ between nuns and their pupils or between female classmates. ‘We had our little passions, sometimes for a nun, sometimes for each other’, Tynan wrote. ‘Mine was a passion for an elder girl about to become a nun …  She was a rosy-cheeked, dark-eyed girl with burnished black hair, which at one temple showed a strand of white …  I knew her footstep in the corridor and I used to feel faint with love when she came’.99 Tynan also idolised her teachers, remembering, ‘That eldest sister was my first love. I thought her the most wonderful creature. Something of the innocency and fragrance of the convent hung about her, making her elusive, saint-like …  She was just a brief lovely vision …  she knew I adored her and she petted me’.100 The infatuations shared between girls and nuns sometimes became erotic, according to Edna O’Brien, who would later write: ‘Sins got committed by the hour, sins of thought, deed, word, and omission …  the sin of smiling at a nun and having bad ‘thoughts’ about her such as brushing against her hand … ’101 Over time, O’Brien developed a particular obsession with one nun, who consumed her thoughts. ‘Oh to please her and win one’s way into her hard heart and be invited to do little favours for her, like carrying her books, or opening or closing a window or cleaning the blackboards, oh oh to be her slave!’ she

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wrote.102 Scholars of medieval Europe have explored the ways in which nuns themselves experienced the erotic; to my knowledge, however, few historians have investigated the ways in which nuns figured in the erotic imaginations of girls.103 These narratives, however, have important implications: they tell us that girls, by embracing their women’s worlds, also could resist heteronormative Catholic patriarchy and, instead, craft something different, at least in their fantasies. Of course, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century convent was not just a place of fantasy but also of real loving relationships between women. The most common relationship between nuns was that of mother–daughter, with older nuns and Mother Superiors literally viewing themselves as mothers of novices. Writing of superiors, Mother Leahy of Cork remarked in 1843: ‘she is your mistress, she is your mother, and what is more, she is a mother whose tenderness might be disputed with her who has given you birth … ’104 Mary Peckham Magray also explains that nuns’ sisterly relationships with each other dominated convent life. ‘Sisterly affection’, she argues, ‘was also promoted as a kind of nonsexual love. Thus kisses and embraces were made acceptable when motivated by “sisterly” feelings, and statements such as “I give you a sisterly embrace” were ubiquitous in conversation and correspondence between women religious.’105 When discussing the ‘particular friendships’ that some nuns appeared to cherish, Magray recognises the ‘homosocial, intensely homoemotional, and at times homoerotic relationships’ within convents. She gives a few examples of ‘particular friendships’ that may have become physically sexual while highlighting contemporary concerns that women’s friendships may have posed a ‘threat to celibacy’.106 In his work on twentieth-century Irish boyhoods, Paul Ryan asserts that because of Ireland’s ‘denial of childhood sexuality’, same-sex encounters were more likely to be viewed as benign and as a ‘normal childhood experience’.107 Similarly, Sharon Marcus points out that ‘[p]recisely because Victorians saw lesbian sex almost nowhere, they could embrace erotic desire between women almost everywhere’.108 It is likely, therefore, that sexual relationships in Ireland’s convents passed as something more benign. The extent to which girlhood fantasies evolved into physical relationships between women, of course, remains unknown. As Magray summarises, ‘between celibacy and overt sexual

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acts existed a wide range of intimate relations that reflected and often fulfilled women’s desires for emotional and physical intimacy’.109 Catechism, confession, and communion Irish girls’ most vivid childhood memories of Catholic rites and rituals came at key parish episodes including the missions, First Communion, and confirmation. Bishops confirmed local children during their visitations of parishes; in the early twentieth century, most Irish bishops visited each parish approximately every three years.110 Over the hectic few days of his parish visitation, the bishop inspected the chapel, schools, and parochial housing; discerned how well the clergy governed their flock; questioned the local children’s knowledge of the catechism; confirmed the children; said masses; and led processions. For children, the visitation was a special and rare occurrence. It was also an occasion that girls described as being filled with fear and trepidation. In 1991, several residents of a Cashel parish interviewed other parishioners for a pamphlet on the history of the area. When the writers asked local residents about their memories of the visitation, ‘[a]ll of them were unanimous in agreeing that this “grueling” [sic] in the presence of the whole congregation generated the highest degree of anxiety’. ‘Frightened’ and ‘terror-stricken’ were the words most frequently uttered to describe the sentiment that preceded the bishop’s visit, and many people called to mind the (verbal) ‘slaughtering’ they would have received from priests and teachers if they failed the bishop’s examination.111 And most had to sit through hours of anxiety; in 1870s County Tipperary, one confirmation ceremony lasted for at least four hours.112 For girls such as Mona Henry, born in 1924, apprehension was the main sentiment of the days leading up to the catechism examination; the drills were, in Henry’s words, ‘beat into your brain’.113 The effects of these experiences on women’s later lives are unclear, but certainly some women came to have negative associations with these important religious occasions, which, in turn, may have led them to question the Church’s patriarchal culture or even their faith. Priests and people also attempted to show up others at the bishop’s visitation. While instructing his parish’s children, for instance,

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Kenmare’s John O’Sullivan told them ‘how much they will raise themselves in the estimation of their bishop, by being more orderly and better behaved than the children of a neighbouring parish’.114 When bishops wrote about the results of their examination in their diaries or visitation notes, they were quick to evaluate, and compare, children’s performances. Bishop David Moriarty wrote in 1855 that the children in Tralee were ‘so badly instructed’ that he ‘confirmed only two privately’. In 1860, however, there were signs of hope: the ‘many grown persons’ still performed badly, but the 614 children were knowledgeable about the catechism. By the 1864 visitation, the 331 schoolchildren were ‘very well prepared’, causing Moriarty to remark that ‘[a]ll things here indicate a perfect parish’.115 Moriarty also worried in 1864 that children in one parish ‘were not well prepared. Though [sic] in past visitations the children of this parish used to answer perfectly’. Moriarty went on to explain, however, that this was ‘the first time’ that these Irish-speaking children ‘learned the English Catechism’.116 In anticipation of the visitation, priests, teachers, and students worked together – usually for months – memorising the catechism in order to make the best possible impression on the bishop.117 One Killaloe curate in the 1850s developed a rigorous catechism curriculum in his parish. He gathered children, adults, and even workhouse inmates in need of instruction and found a teacher to instruct them on evenings and Sundays. The curate ordered the teacher to report any absentees directly to him, and the priest himself ‘went through the parish, took down the names of the children in every street and townland, had them registered and classed’.118 This priest’s methods of instruction, which emphasised hierarchy and surveillance, led to worry and fear. Mary Fogarty remembered the process of preparing for confirmation in her own parish in the mid-nineteenth century. The days before the visitation ‘were heavy with anxiety and foreboding’, she claimed.119 Decades later, a County Longford woman recalled the angst that such preparation inspired and the punishments that could result if children did not step in line. ‘And if you didn’t wait for the catechism after Mass the priest’d come in during the week and if you weren’t at the catechism and didn’t wait for it after Mass’, she remembered, ‘he’d gi’e you four as hard as can be’.120 The consequences of this environment

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must have been profound for adults, leading perhaps to future resistance and criticism of the Church. In one rural County Clare parish, all the children went to the chapel to learn the catechism every day after school for two years. ‘From one day to the next’, recalled one parishioner, ‘we were learning the prayers until we were fit for Confirmation by the Bishop’. Failure to learn the catechism quickly earned ‘the threat of [the priest’s] stick’.121 Born in 1918, Denise Leonard of County Clare described the emphasis on preparing for confirmation: Each night we had to learn a few questions from the Catechism and the Bible had to be learned from cover to cover. Inspectors called regularly to the school and no-one escaped their questions. If a child didn’t have the correct answer then God help him or her – on the Inspector’s departure the ruler or switch was taken out without hesitation.122 Like the County Longford and County Clare women, Leonard’s recollections of learning the catechism were entwined with corporal punishment, raising questions about how girls may have processed the connections between Catholicism, the veneration of the bodies of Christ and the Virgin, and the treatment of their own bodies. While analyses of physical abuse in Irish Catholic culture are far from rare, historical investigations of this phenomenon outside of industrial schools and other institutions are less common. The evidence provided here, however, suggests that the physical abuse of Catholic children was not limited to institutions but in fact occurred during local parish events. For girls, abuse existed alongside anxiety and fear. How did they cope? During anxiety-inducing religious occasions such as confirmation, mothers served as the main source of strength and comfort for their daughters. In the 1850s, the middle-class Sissy O’Brien viewed confirmation as a ‘dreadful’ ritual that would mark the end of her carefree childhood. O’Brien’s mother, however, remained by her side throughout the entire process. After O’Brien was confirmed, her mother helped her take off her ‘white dress and veil’ and presented her with gifts: a ‘small gold cross on a chain for [her] neck and a Thomas

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Kempis’ book.123 Like the other memoirists studied here, O’Brien’s memories conflate her mother’s influence, clothing, and Catholic artefacts. Roí se Rua’s mother surprised her with a new pair of boots for her First Communion. Roí se cherished them so much, ‘dying of pride about them’, that she refused to wear them for fear of soiling them.124 In a world that underscored the importance of the material to religious devotion, secular material items such as boots and necklaces took on sacred meaning for girls. Like catechesis, confession induced fear and apprehension. Boys and girls were given separate confession times; in early twentieth-century Galway, girls confessed on the second Saturday of the month and boys on the fourth.125 County Longford’s Mary M. Mulvey, interviewed in 2006, related the following: Confession. That was a very, very big thing. Confession was every month. Strictly every month and the teachers always made sure that the children would say their penance after Confession. And Confession was always the day before they would make their First Holy Communion. Confession, you had to have your sins prepared, you went over the ten commandments. A mortal sin was a very, very serious thing. You had mortal sins, you had venial sins and then you had the ten commandments … You were always worried in case that you wouldn’t get absolution when you’d go into the confession.126 Dublin’s Phil O’Keefe was prepared for confession and First Communion not only by her teachers and priest, but also by her older sisters, who relentlessly drilled her before the event. They urged O’Keefe to confess untrue things, such as stealing the sugar, so that she would make sure to be forgiven for everything, including things that she may not remember she had done. As her first confession approached, O’Keefe, like the other girls studied here, was overcome by nervousness. Once in the confessional, however, the kindly priest was gentle with O’Keefe, telling her that for penance she may ‘say the first prayer that comes into [her] head’.127 Others, however, encountered less sympathetic clergy. Christina McKenna of County Derry recollected vividly her experiences of

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what she calls ‘the twin terror – inducing ordeals of confession – the fearful preamble to the First Holy Communion – and the Religious Examination’: I was looking forward to the pomp and ceremony of my First Communion. Nobody, however, had told me about the reality of confession …  Father Monacle’s confession box had been designed for adults, not for very short people or little children like me. I entered its dark interior and, obeying Miss’s instructions to the letter, knelt down on the prie-dieu – and disappeared from view. The bewildered priest waited and waited. I heard a tentative ‘Yes, my child?’ and became so petrified that I could not get up. Miss had impressed upon us that we must always remain kneeling in the sight of God and the priest. As a result, the young McKenna, already terrified, was confronted by the angry priest. “What’s this?” Father Monacle roared at me. “What are you doin’ down there, in the name of God?” “M-Miss s-said – ” “What!” “Miss said I was to kneel down, so she did, and I – ” “Miss isn’t the priest, is she?” “No father”…  “So I hope you’re not going to waste any more of my precious time, are ye?” And with that I was hotly dismissed with a very red face and a decade of the rosary to be said right up at the altar.128 What girls confessed during these fear-inducing encounters is impossible to know. Hazel Lyder argues that Irish girls’ relationship to Catholicism was complex: although most were true believers, she claims, they feared their priests more than God and thus did not confess fully, particularly when it came to sexual thoughts or transgressions.129

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‘Thus’, she concludes, ‘it appears that at the same time girls learned the rituals necessary to practice their religion, they exercised resistance to some of its key precepts’.130 These moments of resistance are difficult to find amidst so much fear and anxiety, but they certainly existed, and they later turned some women against the Church. There was no more important moment in a Catholic girl’s life than her First Holy Communion. In 1872, Rev. J. Furniss’s pamphlet Books for Children and Young Persons advised children on preparing themselves for First Communion, ‘the greatest day of your life’.131 When Phil O’Keefe made her First Communion in the 1930s, she and her mother spent an entire day selecting a dress and a veil, and they negotiated everything from shoes (O’Keefe wanted black; her mother white) to socks. The morning of the big event, O’Keefe woke too early with ‘butterflies’ and wished to get dressed hours before the communion. She also struggled with fasting. ‘It had all seemed very noble when Sister Genevieve explained it’, she recalled, ‘but now I just felt hungry’.132 At the chapel, O’Keefe and her friends preened and compared dresses, but then nervousness hit her once more. Like most girls, O’Keefe searched for the comforting presence of her mother. After she received the host, she also looked for her mother, this time in a moment of pride and accomplishment.133 O’Keefe’s preparations for receiving the body of Christ centred on her own body, clothing, and her mother, thus evoking the central themes in girlhood narratives. First Communion was an occasion when girls experienced, once more, the gender segregation that so dominated their religious lives; girls and boys, although they may have been given the sacrament on the same day, occupied separate parts of the chapel for the day.134 Communion thus was a feminised ritual for girls, involving their female family members and friends, and focusing on clothing and appearance. The Church instructed parents to ensure that their children were ‘suitably attired’ for communion.135 For the hierarchy, the goal was conformity and religious respectability, principally in an age that publicised the dangers of modern fashion. Mothers and sometimes grandmothers took such guidelines seriously, sparing no cost or effort to adorn their daughters appropriately. In fact, mothers often challenged their superiors’ dictates, going far beyond what Church leaders

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recommended when they adorned their daughters for communion. Tilly Blanchfield of County Kildare emphasised what she wore and her pride in her ‘Spanish silk’ communion dress. She remembered the flowers in the church and that she ‘felt very special’.136 Roí se Rua, who grew up on a small remote island off the Donegal coast, also recalled the ‘clothes she got for the big day’ of her First Communion: ‘the skirt was blue, the coat was plaid and belted, and I had a bright ribbon’.137 Although she came of age in working-class Dublin during the 1920s and 1930s, Margaret Duffy too had a special First Communion when her mother, who cleaned the homes of middle-class Dubliners, procured a cast-off dress for her daughter: ‘It was white jap silk and it was very pretty with little flowers embroidered in silk thread’, Duffy later recalled. ‘It was a party dress that belonged to one of the little girls where Mammy worked’.138 Mary Foran, born in a tenement in Dublin, was only able to make her First Communion when a local girl died and Foran’s grandmother procured the girl’s communion dress for Mary.139 Although raised Jewish, June Levine also remembered the importance of the First Holy Communion. Levine was thrilled when her Catholic grandmother gave her some rosary beads and made a white dress in preparation for her First Communion. But her Jewish father put a stop to the preparations, which Levine later recalls as her ‘first disappointment in this life’.140 When the other local children prepared for First Communion, the Protestant Lily O’Shea’s friend Mary boasted about her new clothes. ‘My mammy’, Mary told Lily, ‘bought me a lovely new white communion dress that goes right down to the ground an’ a new blue coat’. The local girls’ mothers took each of them from door to door to show them off after First Communion. Feeling left out, Lily would later write: ‘I wish I had a veil like that, I thought to myself’.141 As she enviously gazed at the Catholic girls in their white dresses, O’Shea clearly felt the power of the visual spectacle of girls’ adorned bodies that so frequently characterised early twentieth-century Irish Catholicism. In late 2012, the Irish Times and National Museum of Ireland nominated the communion dress as one of one hundred objects that best represented the material history of Ireland.142 Articles at the time referred to the extravagant, garish, and even vulgar excesses of communion dresses that they claimed had become popular mostly since

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the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s and 2000s.143 Girls’ dresses and ­accessories, however, had long been central to First Communion rituals, and mothers had long favoured ‘excesses’ when dressing their daughters for the occasion. Here, again, Irish women upheld the Church’s dictates while stretching the boundaries of respectability. Even decades later, Derry’s Christina McKenna recalled the ‘triumph’ of her First Communion, focusing her reminiscences on clothing and accessories. ‘I was all got up in a lacy white dress and veil, white patent-leather shoes and matching handbag’, she wrote, ‘and carried the essentials of every aspiring young Catholic girl: a prayer-book with a pearlised cover and plastic rosary beads’.144 For girls, First Communion endorsed the connections between popular Catholicism, the body, and the senses. As they prepared for communion, they pondered the meaning of ingesting the body of Christ. As they adorned their bodies, they linked themselves to the corporeality of the divine. And as they surveyed the results of their careful preparations, they made note of the senses: the feel of silk on their skin, the sight of other girls in white dresses, the smell of candles in the chapel. Well accustomed to the spectacular visual Catholicism of convents, chapels, Cathedrals, and public processions, Irish Catholic mothers and their daughters saw nothing vulgar in taking particular care with their appearances, but as they put on increasingly elaborate communion outfits, they smudged the lines between religious expression and vanity, evoking some of the same anxieties about modern fashion that had long worried Church officials. In the process, they demonstrated agency and innovation, even in an increasingly patriarchal age. Notes 1 Sara Hyland, I Call to the Eye of the Mind: A Memoir by Sara Hyland, ed. Maureen Murphy (Dublin: Attic Press, 1995), p. 65. 2 Although I recognise that many Irish Catholic girls came of age in Magdalen laundries and reformatory or industrial schools, the focus of analysis in this chapter is on daughters who grew up with their parents in the home and/or attended convent schools. For more on industrial schools, see Eoin O’Sullivan and Mary Raftery, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools (Dub-

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lin: New Island, 1999). For an analysis of the Magdalen laundries, see Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, and for the most recent analysis of childhood in the twentieth century, see Maguire, Precarious Childhood in Post-Independence Ireland. 3 I borrow the words ‘physical’, ‘sensual’, and ‘corporeal’ from Colleen McDannell’s seminal Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 2. 4 Alice Taylor, To School Through the Fields: An Irish Country Childhood (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). Information on the popularity of Taylor’s work is from O’Brien Books, www.obrien.ie/ alice-taylor [accessed 15 September 2018]. 5 Roy F. Foster, ‘Selling Irish childhoods: Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams’, in his The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it Up in Ireland (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 164–86. For exceptions, see Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, ‘Nuala O’Faolain and the unwritten Irish girlhood’, New Hibernia Review 11: 2 (summer 2007), pp. 50–65; and Cara Delay, ‘Ever so holy: girls, mothers, and Catholicism in Irish women’s life-writings, 1850–1950,’ in The Country of the Young: Interpretations of Youth and Childhood in Irish Culture, ed. Kelly Matthews and John Countryman (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 10–30. 6 Dougherty, ‘Nuala O’Faolain’, pp. 50–1. 7 Dougherty argues that this is in part because most Irish women autobiographers and novelists themselves fail to fully explore their childhood experiences, but I disagree. Much of the existing scholarship on Irish childhoods, meanwhile, as James M. Smith and Maria Luddy write, have privileged ‘representations’ rather than experiences. Dougherty, ‘Nuala O’Faolain’, p. 51; Maria Luddy and James M. Smith, ‘Editors’ introduction’, É ire-Ireland 44: 1 & 2 (2009), pp. 2–4. See also Margot Gayle Backus, ‘The “children of the nation”: representations of poor children in mainstream nationalist journalism, 1882 and 1913’, É ire-Ireland 44: 1 & 2 (spring/summer 2009), pp. 118–46. 8 Dougherty, ‘Nuala O’Faolain’, p. 60. 9 Breda Gray, ‘Breaking the silence: emigration, gender, and the making of Irish cultural memory’, in Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society, ed. Liam Harte (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 115. 10 Liam Harte, ‘Introduction: autobiography and the Irish cultural moment’, in Modern Irish Autobiography, p. 2. Writing on the abundance of Irish memoirs in the late twentieth century, Denis Sampson argues that ‘the recovery and articulation of childhood serves a profound personal and cultural need, as if the truth about childhood and

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irish women its defining circumstances can suddenly be stated without inhibition or censorship’. Denis Sampson, ‘“Voice itself”: the loss and recovery of boyhood in Irish memoir’, in Modern Irish Autobiography, p. 197. See Emilie Pine, ‘The remembered self: Irish memoir, past and present selves’, in her The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 52–77. Journalist Fintan O’Toole took on such subjects throughout the 1990s and 2000s; see, for example, his ‘GPA, Magdalen women and the underground connection’, Irish Times, 28 May 1994; and ‘The sisters of no mercy’, Observer Review, 16 February 2003. The 1996 television program Dear Daughter was followed in 1999 by States of Fear, a popular documentary that highlighted pervasive abuse at industrial schools. These popular representations in turn were followed by more scholarly interpretations. See Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, Chapter 3, for a more detailed discussion. The Ryan report, published in 2009 after an investigation into abuse at twenty industrial schools, is a ‘five-volume, 2,600-page …  catalog of horrors, describing “endemic sexual abuse” at boys’ institutions and the “daily terror” of physical abuse experienced by the estimated 30,000 Irish children who were sent to them’. Bryan Coll, ‘For Ireland’s Catholic schools, a catalog of horrors’, Time, 21 May 2009, www.t​ime.c​om/ti​me/wo​rld/a​rticl​e/0,8​599,1​90012​0,00.​html#​ixzz2​ 8zg67​6ef [accessed 12 October 2012]. Pine, ‘Introduction’, in The Politics of Irish Memory, p. 3. Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Suffer little children? The historical validity of memoirs of Irish childhood’, in Childhood and its Discontents: The First Seamus Heaney Lectures, ed. Joseph Dunne and James Kelly (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2002), p. 70. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Nuala O’Faolain, ‘My memories of nuns’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume IV, p. 595. Luddy and Smith, ‘Editors’ introduction’, p. 5. Trev Lynn Broughton and Linda Andersen, ‘Introduction’, in Women’s Lives/Women’s Times: New Essays on Autobiography (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), pp. 3–8. For an analysis of the difficulties involved in assessing childhood memories in autobiographical writings, see Richard N. Coe, When the Grass was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 5. Charles P. Thompson, ‘The bounty of everyday memory’, in Autobiographical Memory: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, ed. Charles

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P. Thompson et al. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), p. 30; Harry P. Bahrick, ‘Semantic memory content in permastore: fifty years of memory for Spanish learned in school’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113 (1984), pp. 1–29. 20 Thompson, ‘The bounty of everyday memory’, pp. 29–30; Barbara Hughes, Between Literature and History: The Diaries and Memoirs of Mary Leadbeater and Dorothea Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 1–3. For a summary of feminist criticism of autobiography, see Ronald P. Loftus, Telling Lives: Women’s Self-Writing in Modern Japan (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), introduction. 21 Robyn Fivush, ‘Gendered narratives: elaboration, structure, and emotion in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years’, in Autobiographical Memory, p. 80. 22 Margaret MacCurtain, ‘Recollections of Catholicism’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume IV, p. 570. 23 McKenna, Made Holy, p. 45. 24 David Morgan, ‘Introduction’, in his Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), p. 4. 25 Notebook describing childhood of Mary Margaret Murphy, Clifton, Co. Cork, 1857–86. MS 19441, NLI. Cited in Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History, ed. Maria Luddy (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 34. 26 Although the national school system was established in 1831, compulsory attendance was not mandated until 1892. In 1892, school attendance became mandatory for all Irish children, ‘and it was only from this period that girls attended the primary school to the same extent as boys’. Maria Luddy, ‘Introduction’, Part II: Education, in Women in Ireland, p. 90; Mary E. Daly, ‘The development of the national school system in Ireland 1831–40’, in Studies in Irish History, ed. Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (Dublin: University College Dublin, 1979), pp. 161–3. By 1900, Ireland had 8,684 national schools. Owens, A Social History, p. 22; John Logan, ‘Dimensions of gender in nineteenth-century schooling’, in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, p. 36; Margaret Ó  hÓ gartaigh, ‘A quiet revolution: women and second-level education in Ireland, 1878–1930’, New Hibernia Review 13: 2 (summer 2009), p. 36. 27 Logan, ‘Dimensions of gender’, p. 36; Anne V. O’Connor, ‘Education in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V, p. 649; Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, ‘Popular reading practice’, in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV, p. 214.

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28 Interview with May Reilly, 5 July 2006, in Ann Donohoe, Longford Women’s Voices: A Social History of Women in Co Longford in the Twentieth Century (Co. Longford: Co. Longford Federation of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, 2007), p. 7. 29 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, p. 129. 30 Ibid., p. 130. 31 Maria Luddy, ‘Introduction’, Part II: Education, in Women in Ireland, p. 89. 32 Ibid., p. 48. 33 Walsh, An Irish Country Childhood, p. 11. 34 Oral history, Mona Henry (born 1924, Dublin), in Irish Days: Oral Histories of the Twentieth Century, ed. Margaret Hickey (London: Kyle Cathie, 2001), p. 220. 35 Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland (New York, NY: Plume, 1999 [1976]), p. 92. 36 Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1947), p. 1. 37 MS Blackrock Convent Female National School, form no. 197, roll no. 5940, Ursuline Convent Archives, Blackrock, Cork, cited in Deirdre Raftery and Susan M. Parkes, Female Education in Ireland, 1700–1900: Minerva or Madonna? (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 34–5. 38 Logan, ‘Dimensions of gender’, p. 44. 39 Grá inne O’Flynn, ‘Our age of innocence’, in Girls Don’t do Honours: Irish Women in Education in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Mary Cullen (Dublin: Women’s Education Bureau, 1987), cited in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume IV, p. 591. 40 Raftery and Parkes, Female Education in Ireland, pp. 36–41; Maria Luddy, ‘Introduction’: Part II: Education, in Women in Ireland, p. 92. 41 Logan, ‘Dimensions of gender’, p. 49. 42 Ibid., p. 45. 43 Readers published by the Christian Brothers were also popular but were for male students only. Lorcan Walsh, ‘Images of women in nineteenth-century schoolbooks’, Irish Educational Studies 4: 1 (1984), p. 74. 44 Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools (Dublin, 1846), cited in Luddy, ed., Women in Ireland, pp. 98–9. 45 Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 82. 46 Owens, A Social History, p. 25. 47 O’Connor, ‘Education in nineteenth-century Ireland’, p. 649. 48 Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 83.

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49 Irish Catholic Directory, Dublin 1880, cited in Hill, Women in ­Ireland, p. 108. 50 Irish Independent, 15 September 1939, p. 4. 51 Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 25. 52 Entries from Tuesday to Saturday, 6–11 May 1878. Mary Hayden, The Diaries of Mary Hayden, 1878–1903, Vol. I, 1878–83, ed. Conan Kennedy (Killala, County Mayo: Morrigan New Century, 2005), p. 24. 53 Colum, Life and the Dream, p. 19. 54 O’Connor, ‘Education in nineteenth-century Ireland’, p. 649. 55 Broż yna, Labour, Love and Prayer, pp. 99–100. 56 Tony Fahey, ‘Nuns in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the nineteenth century’, in Girls Don’t Do Honours: Irish Women in Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Mary Cullen (Dublin: Argus Press, 1997), p. 23. 57 The Church defined sodalities and confraternities as ‘formally erected with ecclesiastical authority and affiliated to an international body with its headquarters in Rome or elsewhere’. Colm Lennon and Robin Kavanagh explain that ‘a sodality was more private in its devotions by comparison to a confraternity, which had a public face, …  that its members were less constrained by formal codes of liturgical or sacral dress, and that the pieties were more general than those of the specific religious orders’. ‘The flowering of the confraternities and sodalities in Ireland, c. 1860–1960’, in Confraternities and Sodalities in Ireland: Charity, Devotion, and Sociability, ed. Colm Lennon (Dublin: The Columba Press, 2012), p. 78. 58 Ibid., p. 78; Cormac Begadon, ‘Confraternities and the renewal of Catholic Dublin, c. 1750–c. 1830’, in Confraternities and Sodalities in Ireland, pp. 49–51. 59 Tony Farmar, Privileged Lives: A Social History of Middle-Class Ireland, 1882–1989 (Dublin: A. and A. Farmar, 2011), p. 177. 60 Broż yna, Labour, Love and Prayer, p. 105. 61 Lennon and Kavanagh, ‘The flowering of the confraternities’, p. 76. 62 Carole Holohan, ‘John Charles McQuaid and the failure of youth sodalities, 1956–60’, in Confraternities and Sodalities in Ireland, pp. 126–7. 63 Ibid., p. 130. 64 Lennon and Kavanagh, ‘The flowering of the confraternities’, p. 79. 65 ‘Rules for the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, St Michan’s Parish’, cited in Begadon, ‘Confraternities and the renewal of Catholic Dublin’, 43. For a complete list of Irish sodalities and confraternities, see www.irishconfraternities.ie.

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66 Fr. Christopher Mangan’s report on youth sodalities, 1956, McQuaid Papers, AB8/b/XXVIII, DDA, quoted in Holohan, ‘John Charles McQuaid’, p. 129. 67 Sister Carmel Walsh (born 1918, Moyvan, County Kerry), oral history, in Irish Days, p. 155. 68 Judith Kelly, Rock Me Gently: A Memoir of a Convent Childhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 16. 69 Paula M. Kane, ‘“She offered herself up”: the victim soul and victim spirituality in Catholicism’, Church History 71: 1 (March 2002), pp. 80–119. 70 Morgan, Visual Piety, p. 97. 71 On muscular Christianity, see David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), Chapter 6. 72 Ibid., p. 67. 73 Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 76. 74 Elizabeth Hamilton, An Irish Childhood (London: Chatto and ­Windus, 1963), p. 127. 75 Edith Newman Devlin, Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood (­Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000), pp. 19–20. 76 Phil O’Keefe, Down Cobbled Streets: A Liberties Childhood (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1995), pp. 10–11. 77 David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), p. 74. 78 Mary Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur: The Story of Mary Fogarty (Sissy O’Brien) (Cork: Mercier Press, 1973 [1937]), p. 3. 79 O’Brien, Mother Ireland, pp. 29–30. 80 Eibhlí s de Barra, Bless ‘em All: The Lanes of Cork (Cork: Mercier Press, 1997), p. 46. 81 Here I borrow Paula M. Cooey’s definition of ‘religious imagination’ as ‘imagination whose creativity is governed by and expressed through religious imagery.’ Paula M. Cooey, Religious Imagination and the Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 5. 82 O’Keefe, Down Cobbled Streets, p. 73. 83 Tynan, Twenty-five Years, pp. 28–9. 84 Patricia Boylan, Gaps of Brightness: A Memoir (Dublin: A. and A. Farmar, 2003), p. 43. 85 Ibid., p. 44. 86 Ibid. 87 Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, p. 46.

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88 O’Brien, Mother Ireland, pp. 30–1. 89 Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), p. 55. 90 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 25. 91 Ibid., p. 1. 92 Ruth Schwertfeger, The Wee Wild One: Stories of Belfast and ­Beyond (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 75. 93 Colum, Life and the Dream, p. 2. 94 Boylan, Gaps of Brightness, pp. 47–8. 95 Fahey, ‘Nuns in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the ­nineteenth century’, p. 8. 96 O’Flynn, ‘Our age of innocence’, p. 83. 97 Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 59. 98 Kate O’Brien, ‘Memories of a Catholic girlhood’ (1976) in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume IV, p. 573. 99 Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 67. 100 Ibid., pp. 42–3. 101 O’Brien, Mother Ireland, pp. 92–9. 102 Ibid., p. 95. 103 See, for example, Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, Chapter 2. 104 Notebook of Sr. Magdalen de Pazzi Leahy, ‘Customs book’, 1843, South Presentation Convent, Cork, cited in Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 49. 105 Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 59. 106 Ibid., pp. 65–6. 107 Ryan, Asking Angela Macnamara, p. 147. 108 Marcus, Between Women, p. 113. 109 Ibid., p. 63. 110 Rev. Edward J. Quigley, The Rites and Ceremonies of the Visitation of Parishes and of Confirmation (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1923), p. 10. 111 A Short Ecclesiastical Survey of Golden/Kilfeacle to Serve as a Memory of the Re-Opening of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Golden (pamphlet, 1991), p. 64. 112 NLI, Ms 31,768, Diary of Events Occurring in the Kyleagarny, Solohedbeg, Cappawhite and Newtown area of County Tipperary, 1871–81. 113 Mona Henry (born 1924, Dublin), oral history, in Irish Days, p. 221. 114 KDA, Archdeacon John O’Sullivan, Praxis Parochi in Hibernia, unpublished manuscript, vol. 1, p. 361. 115 KDA, Bishop David Moriarty’s Diary, entries from Tralee: 1 ­September 1855; 17 August 1858; 18 August 1860; 5 July 1864.

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116 KDA, Moriarty’s Diary, entry from 7 June 1864, Brosna. 117 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the catechism most frequently used in Ireland was Donlevy’s Catechism, which was available in both Irish and English. Michael Tynan, Catholic Instruction in Ireland, 1720–1950: The O’Reilly/Donlevy Catechetical Tradition (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1985). 118 Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe, 1850–1904, pp. 50–1. 119 Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, pp. 92–3. 120 Interview with Mary M. Mulvey, 2006, in Longford Women’s Voices, p. 61. 121 Conchú r Ó  Sí ochá in, The Man From Cape Clear (Cork: Mercier Press, 1992 [1975]), p. 11. 122 Oral history of Denise Leonard, b. 1918, Co. Clare, in No Shoes in Summer, p. 14. 123 Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, pp. 92–3. 124 Ua Cná imhsí , Ró ise Rua, pp. 42–3. 125 GDA, Bishop Thomas O’Dea Papers, file P/12/1 Beagh, ‘Parish of Beagh Visitation Queries, May 1915’. 126 Interview with Mary M. Mulvey, 2006, in Longford Women’s Voices, p. 55. 127 O’Keefe, Down Cobbled Streets, pp. 51–2. 128 Christina McKenna, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (Glasgow: Neil Washington Publishing, 2004), pp. 17–19. 129 Hazel Lyder, ‘“Silence and secrecy”: exploring female sexuality during childhood in 1930s and 1940s Dublin’, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 5: 1 & 2 (2003), pp. 78. 130 Ibid., p. 79. 131 Rev. J. Furniss, Books for Children and Young Persons, Also, for First Communions, Missions, Retreats, Sunday Schools. Book I: Almighty God (Dublin: James Duffy Sons and Co., 1872), p. 4. 132 O’Keefe, Down Cobbled Streets, pp. 53–6. 133 Ibid., p. 58. 134 New Catholic Encyclopedia, www.newadvent.org/cathen/04170b. htm [accessed 23 November 2013]. 135 Ibid. 136 Tilly Blanchfield, oral history, Athy, County Kildare, 1920s, in No Shoes in Summer, p. 81. 137 Ua Cná imhsí , Ró ise Rua, p. 46. 138 Margaret Duffy, oral history, Dublin City, 1920s–1930s, in No Shoes in Summer, p. 39. 139 Ben Savage and Terry Fagan, Memories from Corporation Buildings and Foley Street (Dublin: The North Inner City Folklore Project, 1992), p. 20.

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140 June Levine, Sisters: The Personal Story of an Irish Feminist (Dublin: Attic Press, 2009), p. 252. 141 Lily O’Connor, Can Lily O’Shea Come Out to Play? (Dingle: Brandon Books, 2000), pp. 4–6. 142 ‘“The object for our times” goes on display at the National Museum of Ireland – Decorative Arts & History, Collins Barracks’, National Museum of Ireland webpage, www.m​useum​.ie/e​n/new​s/pre​ss-re​ lease​s.asp​x?art​icle=​203f3​4ca-a​327–4​2f8–8​baf-a​49868​0a827​0. See also www.100objects.ie/ [accessed 23 November 2013]. 143 Ann Marie Foley, ‘Communion dress nominated as object that defines modern times’, CI News: The Web Portal for Christians, CatholicIreland.net, www.cinews.ie/article.php?artid=10998 [accessed 23 November 2013]. 144 McKenna, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress, p. 19.

3 The Irish Catholic mother Autobiographies and memoirs written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affirm the pivotal influence of the Irish Catholic mother. As Maynooth scholar Walter MacDonald reminisced in 1926: I love to think of my mother, who was quite unlike – superior to – any other woman whom I have met, of her class. ... She was always at work, heavy work very often, about the house – ­cleaning, washing, ironing, sewing, cooking … . I remember, above everything else, the reverent care with which she undressed us and put us to bed, reminding us of our guardian-angels, and telling us how shocked they would be if they saw us do anything unseemly.1 MacDonald’s mother was domestic, sacrificing, and martyr-like; her hard physical labour (conducted exclusively within the home and not for wages) was matched only by her attention to her moral duties. Her concerns centred on household, family, and faith; she embodied the ideal of Irish Catholic motherhood. More recently, however, scholars have been more critical of mothers’ roles. According to sociologist Tom Inglis, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish mothers teamed up with priests to control Catholic children and ultimately impede their emotional growth.2 Scholars such as Inglis are correct in arguing that Catholic mothers were central to the evolution of modern Ireland, but they overlook the complexities of motherhood, the nuances of the relationships between both women and priests and mothers and children, and the ways in which women sometimes used their status as mothers to gain influence or even contest Catholic patriarchy. In addition, despite the importance of mothers in raising generations of Catholics and thus helping to

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create the modern Irish nation, we still know little about mothers’ daily lives or their relationship to their faith. Most works on motherhood to date centre on cultural representations and the trope of motherhood in modern Irish literature.3 What remains neglected is an analysis of actual mothers’ words and experiences. This chapter explores Irish Catholic mothers from 1850 to 1950. It traces the evolution of the construction of motherhood, shedding further light on the dynamic between changes and continuities that marked Catholic women’s lives across a century. While motherhood remained contested throughout the entire era, here, again, the years following the ‘devotional revolution’ proved a key time of change; by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, modern notions of motherhood solidified as nationalism expanded. With nation-building and independence in the 1920s and 1930s, women’s reproductive capacities and roles as mothers were politicised as never before, coming to the centre of public attention and coming increasingly under the purview of legislation and policy.4 The idealised Catholic version of motherhood persisted until the 1950s, when several key events, most notably the Mother-and-Child Scheme, signified the beginning of a new era, one that would involve increased contestation and debate as well as more overt resistance.5 This chapter privileges the voices and words of mothers themselves, paying particular attention to lay Catholic women’s life-writings, which demonstrate that mothers did not always work in tandem with the clergy but in fact frequently negotiated its authority. Letters that literate women wrote to members of the Church hierarchy in the late nineteenth century illustrate how Irish women utilised motherhood in order to claim influence and privilege. Calling on their roles as mothers to assert their power within the home and over their children, women also demanded that priests and bishops respond to their needs and wants. Irish Catholic mothers thus sometimes exploited the domestic ideal to their own purpose. The Blessed Virgin and Irish mothers Irish priests and people had venerated the Blessed Virgin Mary for centuries, but a newly powerful devotion to Mary emerged in the

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mid-1800s, and it would continue for a century. Historian Margaret MacCurtain writes that Ireland’s unique devotion to the Blessed Virgin originated in its colonial experience as well as the ‘hardship and adversity’ of the penal era. She also claims that Marianism became particularly relevant after the devastation of the Great Famine caused the Irish people to ‘searc[h] providence for an answer’. That answer, many thought, came in 1879 with the famous Marian apparition at Knock, County Mayo.6 James Donnelly, however, places the peak of Marianism in Ireland much later – from 1930 to the 1960s – with a late twentieth-century decline.7 Although it ebbed and flowed, Irish people’s veneration of the Virgin persisted across a century or more; this is significant for our understanding of the meanings of Irish motherhood. Through Marian belief, devotion, and apparitions, Irish Catholics constructed, worked through, and complicated prescriptions of motherhood and women’s roles. Marian devotion was already on the rise several decades before the Knock event. The French Lourdes apparition (1858) had fostered an obsession with the Virgin across Catholic Europe; Ireland was no exception. Irish people closely followed the events in France, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, devout Catholics, and predominantly women, travelled to Lourdes on pilgrimage. As Neil Bean Uí Uigín, born in Kerry in 1919, remembered, ‘I went to Lourdes a couple of times, and I liked it … I hear that miracles happen at Lourdes … ’8 In his Occasions of Faith, Lawrence J. Taylor recounts how Donegal women continued to visit Lourdes in the late twentieth century. ‘Men might accompany their wives’, writes Taylor, ‘but it was almost always the woman who was represented as the instigator’.9 As Taylor suggests, Marian apparitions were essential to the creation of a modern feminised Irish Catholicism. Through Marianism, Irish women emerged as central actors in popular religion. By the mid-nineteenth century, a uniquely Irish devotion to the Virgin Mary was flourishing. Irish Catholics, for example, celebrated May as Mary’s month. Each May, ordinary Catholics decorated Marian shrines, and pilgrims to these shrines made their way through towns, villages, and hamlets alike. The Irish Catholic Directory described one May devotion in a local chapel as follows: ‘The altar-shrines and images of the Virgin were decorated with flowers, and illuminated with

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tapers’.10 In 1859, a sermon by Kerry’s Bishop David Moriarty asserted that Catholic Ireland revered Mary in its prayers, in festivals, in societies, and in religious orders, by ‘taking refuge under her patronage and trusting in her intercession’. According to Moriarty, the ‘shortest way to come’ to Jesus was through his mother.11 The daily recitation of the rosary, meanwhile, which I discuss in detail in the following chapter, became commonplace throughout homes in Catholic Ireland. Even as early as the 1850s, evenings were dominated by the saying of the rosary in the household of middle-class Sissy O’Brien. The entire household, including servants, gathered every night at nine o’clock for the prayer, which was led by O’Brien’s mother, with ‘the rest responding’.12 What was true for middle-class families like O’Brien’s soon became reality for all different social and economic groups. Because rosary practices privileged Marian devotion, featuring the recitation of multiple Hail Marys, the Virgin Mary became even more central to Irish Catholics’ daily observances throughout the nineteenth century. Developments tied to the ‘devotional revolution’ had a clear effect on the people of Catholic Ireland, creating new generations of devotees to the Virgin.13 As the religious landscape transformed throughout the post-famine decades and into the twentieth century, increasingly Ireland’s architecture and visual culture were resplendent with symbols of Marianism. The Irish Catholic hierarchy encouraged the building of Marian shrines and altars across the island.14 Chapels and cathedrals featured elaborate statues of the Virgin. Some also displayed Marian grottoes.15 Stained-glass art featured in Irish Catholic chapels displayed devotion to the Virgin; popular designs by Harry Clarke, for example, focused on ‘the Visitation, Assumption, Coronation, Presentation in the Temple and Immaculate Conception’.16 Cathedrals, schools, convents, and hospitals, including Dublin’s Mater Misericordia, took Mary’s name or titles. The Blessed Virgin’s presence and symbolism thus permeated Irish national and public culture. Ireland’s dedication to the Virgin Mary was linked to a slew of changes, including not only a broader nineteenth-century European feminisation of Catholicism, but also emerging national ideologies.17 ‘By the late nineteenth century’, Catherine Innes has written, ‘two female images had become potent social, political, and moral forces in Catholic Ireland – the images of Mother Ireland or Erin, and the

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Mother of God, often linked through iconography to Mother Church’.18 As Ireland moved towards political independence, the Virgin presented a model of Irish womanhood that seemed markedly different from the modern, independent British woman. And the Virgin symbolised motherhood, which was promoted as women’s primary role in the new Irish nation. As notions of motherhood in an independent Ireland evolved, they remained tied to the Blessed Virgin; meanwhile, Ireland became known as a centre of both Marianism and idealised motherhood in the Catholic world. Catholic publications, which grew in popularity in the nineteenth century precisely as literacy rates rose, contained devotional essays, poetry, and fiction centred on the Blessed Virgin.19 Reading material on the Virgin was ubiquitous by the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The Song of Bernadette, published by Franz Werfel, became a best-selling novel in the 1940s.20 Teeming with warnings about modernity, these periodicals urged Irish women to find a suitable example in the Virgin Mary. The Southern Star in 1931 warned its readers that the dangers of the age in which they lived were unique. ‘There has never been a time in all the history of the world’, it asserted, ‘when Catholic womanhood needed to be more devout to the Mother of God. The world is filled with temptations of every sort’.21 Much of Ireland’s didactic literature thus featured the Blessed Virgin as the model for ‘traditional’ Irish womanhood, consistently reminding its readers that Mary distinguished Irish women from ‘other’ – more modern, less pious – women. In 1938, Helena Concannon made explicit connections between Irish Catholicism, Marianism, and motherhood. ‘Of all the titles of the Blessed Virgin – and the fervour of Irish poetry and the ardour of Irish devotion have combined to crown our Queen with their richest jewels’, she wrote, ‘none is so dear to the Irish people as this: the Mother of God’.22 Originating in Dublin, the Legion of Mary spread around the globe in the early twentieth century, thus solidifying Ireland’s particular connections with the Virgin and motherhood.23 Concannon’s 1938 volume on devotion to the Virgin in Ireland described the 1921 birth of the Legion of Mary as follows: Fifteen young girls in the company of a priest and a layman were on their knees around a simple altar of the Mother of God.

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Petition was on their lips and in their hearts, seeking to find a way of service in the cause of her Son. Discussion followed the prayers and from that meeting of prayer and work emerged the ‘Legion of Mary’ as we know it to-day in all its features. This place – a top back room of Myra House, Francis Street, a poor and old part of Dublin. The date – 7th September, 1921. It was 8 o’clock, p.m. The birth of the feast of Mary’s birth.24 The fifteen girls alongside two adult men at the founding moment of the Legion highlights the ways in which popular devotion was both feminised and associated with girlhood. Concannon’s description also demonstrates the centrality of the Virgin to this particular meeting and, by extension, popular Catholicism. And it reveals that, by the 1920s, popular devotion to the Virgin was not limited to rural parts of the island. At the same time in towns and cities, sodalities and confraternities such as the Children of Mary, the Living Rosary, and the Blessed Virgin focused their attentions on popularising Mary.25 Overall, then, the establishment of an independent Irish state and the entrenchment of a post-colonial ethos enhanced devotion to the Virgin and more firmly linked both her and Irish mothers to the idea of the nation.26 By the early twentieth century, Irish Catholics across the island, in both urban and rural areas, made her the centre of their devotions. What was the intended goal of this veneration of Mary for the institutional Church, and what did her ascent mean for lay Irish Catholic women? The Irish Church hierarchy viewed the Blessed Virgin as a figure who could bolster, not challenge, existing gender norms. Bishops and priests utilised the ideal of the Virgin to encourage women to embody proper roles as wives and particularly as sacrificial mothers. Reinforcing dedication to the Virgin from the pulpit in carefully constructed sermons, priests asserted that women who looked to Mary as a model were the only Irish women who could achieve true grace and purity. We could, however, read prescriptive literature about motherhood and the Blessed Virgin not as reflective of reality but as wishful thinking in an age of anxiety about women’s roles. Patrick Griffith, author of the popular 1926 tract Christian Mothers, wrote that the ideal mother was ‘modest, hospitable, religious, absorbed in her

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children and motherly duties’. ‘The outside world’, he claimed, ‘the masculine woman and her antics, have little attraction’ for the true Christian mother.27 Griffith’s attempts to celebrate the ‘natural’ roles of mothers, however, expose some angst. Although he maintained that good mothers eschewed the ‘outside world’ with its ‘masculine woman and her antics’, the possibility that some mothers may have been attracted to such a world remained; thus, the need for women to commit themselves to zeal for the Virgin only intensified. Scholars including Andrea Ebel Brożyna, Gerardine Meaney, and Catherine Innes have argued that the Virgin celebrated by the modern Irish Catholic Church was fundamentally, and deliberately, passive. ‘Paintings and statues of Mary popular in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland’, writes Brożyna, tend to be very different from Renaissance depictions of robust Madonnas, sometimes seen suckling the infant Jesus. She is most frequently portrayed as fully covered from neck to foot, cloaked in blue, and … in the attitude of humble acceptance of her destiny at the Annunciation. ... Another very frequent image is of the pieta, the sorrowing mother holding her dead son’s body, or of the ‘stabat mater’, the mother standing by the crucified Christ.28 According to Brożyna, the Virgin as suffering mother was a trope that became uniquely meaningful in an independent Ireland that linked pious and fundamentally sacrificial motherhood with the nation. Similarly, Gerardine Meaney asserts that, unlike the Virgin who appeared in some Andalusian and Latin American images, Irish representations of Mary were ‘curiously lifeless’.29 James S. Donnelly observes that in the late nineteenth century, the popularity of the Children of Mary sodality in schools helped teach girls to embody a particular version of Mary, one that ‘inculcat[ed] spiritual piety and such moral and social values as meekness, charity, and perhaps, above all, female modesty’.30 These interpretations fit within broader arguments that Marian devotion historically has been ‘one of the most fundamental, conservative, and militant forces in the Catholic Church, acting against

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secularism, individualization, and women’s emancipation and sexual liberation’.31 Like most scholars, those discussed above view Ireland’s unique relationship with the Blessed Virgin as central to the confining ideals of motherhood and therefore as fundamentally detrimental to women’s autonomy and authority. It is clear, however, that lay women themselves sometimes found – or made – the figure of the Virgin empowering. For Catholic women, commitment to Mary could symbolise a resistance to real-world circumstances as well as an embracing of the feminine divine. Indeed, across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, Marian apparitions expressed cultural upheaval and opposition to change. In twentieth-century Ireland, apparitions of the Virgin were a form of resistance in that they served to oppose secularisation.32 Similarly, anthropologist Edith Turner claims that older Irish women’s consistent fidelity to the Knock shrine serves as a statement of their stubborn commitment to their faith in a rapidly modernising and secularising world.33 Women not only protested secularisation through their devotion to the Virgin, however; they also used her to substantiate power and influence, to challenge Catholic patriarchy, and, in some cases, to lay claim to space. When Mary appeared at Knock in 1879, she did so beside the local chapel. At a time when the masculine priest was coming to dominate spaces like chapels, apparitions of the Virgin shifted focus away from chapels and thus served as a feminine repossessing of devotional space. Employing Marian devotion to claim, manage, feminise, or sanctify space also occurred in individual homes and in the parish landscape. Twentieth-century women’s memoirs and autobiographies include vivid descriptions of the ways in which they, as girls, took the lead in building May altars every summer in honour of the Virgin Mary.34 One of Alice Taylor’s most detailed memories focused on the time when she and her sisters built their home’s altar: In the bedroom over the kitchen was a large old chest with deep drawers. Over this we draped a white sheet and on top of it we put a box slightly smaller than the chest top and covered this with another cloth. ... On top of this pyramid we perched Our Lady. ... On the steps below her came statues of Our Lord, in

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case he might feel overlooked, and then Blessed Martin and St Theresa. ... Then came the flowers and greenery arranged in jam pots and trailing down from step to step. ... Such was our sense of drama that we draped ourselves in trailing bedspreads with pillow covers as haloes on our heads and danced in front of the altar.35 Through the construction of the May altar, Taylor and her sisters developed a relationship with the sacred and made religious meaning out of ordinary objects. They also created their own religious hierarchy; although careful not to overlook Jesus, they placed ‘Our Lady’ at the top of this hierarchy. By recalling the ‘sense of drama’ associated with the building of the May altar, Taylor also alluded to the ways in which Catholic girls performed both their gender and their faith, as well as the reality that they made the home the site of these performances. Building shrines and altars fostered girls’ devotion to the tangible aspects of their faith. In the case of Marian altars, they also helped girls interact with the feminine form of God. As they arranged flowers and greenery around the statue of the Blessed Virgin, Irish girls learned to associate power with the divine feminine. Although Meaney has argued that the Virgin Mary with whom most girls interacted in the twentieth century was a ‘passive’ feminine figure, sometimes even represented as ‘impersonal’,36 the example of May altars demonstrates that realities for individual girls could be far more complex. Designing May altars allowed girls to privilege their devotion to Mary and to create a more active religious role model. Like Alice Taylor and her sisters, girls could locate Mary prominently at the top or centre of the shrine, even placing a statue of Our Lord ‘on the steps below her’, almost as an afterthought.37 As they did so, they gave Mary a central role in their faith, and they symbolically overturned gender hierarchies. The Knock apparition was a feminised phenomenon as well, and one in which the Virgin emerged as more than passive. At Knock, the Virgin reportedly appeared near a girls’ national school and was seen by women, boys, and girls. This Virgin, the witnesses reported, was ‘dressed in a full loose cloak and had a crown on her head’.38 According to Mary

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Beirne, one of the primary seers, the Knock Virgin had on a ‘rather large crown’. Another witness, eleven-year-old Patrick Hill, described: She wore a brilliant crown on her head, and over the forehead where the crown filled the brow, a beautiful rose; the crown appeared brilliant, and of a golden brightness, of a deeper hue, inclined to a mellow yellow, than the striking whiteness of the robes she wore; the upper parts of the crown appeared to be a series of sparkles, or glittering crosses.39 The Blessed Virgin’s spectacular crown was far from an expression of passivity or weakness; it was a vivid statement of authority and power. At Knock, Mary also appeared with two men: one was St John the Baptist, and the other, St Joseph, had his head ‘bowed respectfully’ towards her.40 In Beirne’s account of the apparition, the three figures of John, Joseph, and Mary were not equal in size: ‘That of the Blessed Virgin was life-size, the others apparently either not so big or not so high as her figure’. Similarly, witness Judith Campbell later recalled: ‘Our Lady was in the centre of the group, a small height above the other two’.41 This Virgin Mary too assumed a position of power in relation to the holy men present; she was not only larger than her male counterparts but also the focus of their respect. According to one Knock witness account, that of seventy-four-year-old Bridget Trench, the figure of the Virgin was so overpowering and she was ‘so taken with the Blessed Virgin’ that she ‘did not pay much attention to any other, yet I saw also the two other figures’.42 Through apparitions, then, ordinary parishioners could transform the passive, martyr-like Virgin into an icon of female religious power. A few years after Knock, at a women’s mission in Athlone, a statue of the Virgin Mary moved; this time, the female witnesses described a much more active and animated figure who rolled her eyes, moved her lips, and raised her arms to bless the women present.43 Worshipping the Virgin Mary had complex meanings for Irish Catholic women and girls, encouraging them to think not only about modesty and motherhood but also power: the power of Catholicism but also the more subtle yet vital power of the holy feminine.44 Although the Catholic hierarchy exploited the Virgin to bolster conservative gender norms and encourage pious motherhood, Mary

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herself sometimes overstepped her approved role, perhaps encouraging mothers to do the same. Marian apparitions including those at La  Salette (1846), Lourdes (1858), and Marpingen (1876) were, according to David Blackbourn, ‘the most spectacular sign’ of a nineteenth-century feminised religious revival in Europe.45 At Knock, Co. Mayo, in 1879, as at most other apparitions, the Virgin Mary directly interacted with ordinary people, especially women and children.46 When she revealed herself to women and girls in nineteenth-century Europe, Mary often warned them of destruction to come and gave them specific instructions on how their community could prevent impending danger. Through apparitions, then, the Virgin Mary spoke. By invoking her in such a manner, Catholic women and children inverted the Virgin’s quietly pious image; they brought her outside of the boundaries that the Church hierarchy had set for her. Those who ostensibly were most powerless – women and children – earned influence through Marian apparitions, sometimes even becoming the only individuals with knowledge that could save their town or village. By gaining the Virgin’s favour, ordinary women also found their own voices, telling their fathers, brothers, husbands, and priests what to do. Marian devotion thus enabled or even encouraged some women, at least symbolically, to invert gender norms, to become powerful voices and influential actors in local life precisely at a time when the institutional Church was determined to contain and control them.47 The role that Mary played in Ireland’s modern history, therefore, was multifaceted, leaving room for some women to use her image to create agency. In his analysis of the body in Western Catholicism, Andrew Louth, building on the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, observes that in European tradition, the body was categorised as feminine (and the mind masculine). Therefore, the veneration of the bodies of both a feminised Christ and the Blessed Virgin afforded women ‘access to power’ by elevating the feminine.48 Although such subjects remain understudied, evidence suggests that similar notions of ­ feminine corporeal empowerment persisted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. In several examples from the early twentieth century, working-class girls from Dublin were told by their

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mothers that their female bodies had particular associations with the Virgin. When Elaine Crowley began menstruating in the 1930s, her mother told her ‘that a girl’s periods were a gift of Our Lady making her into a woman’.49 Another Dublin woman remembered, ‘You told your mother that you were bleeding and she’d tell you, “don’t tell that to anybody, that’s a secret from the Blessed Virgin”’. While social historian Kevin Kearns interprets such interactions between mothers and daughters as representative of a silence surrounding sex and the body as well as women’s discomfort with talking about bodies,50 girls who learned that their female bodies were linked with the Blessed Virgin may have interpreted such connections as powerful, not repressive. Similarly, Juliana Flinn’s analysis of the Virgin Mary in Micronesia demonstrates that, even though Mary historically has been used to enforce patriarchy, ‘it is everyday practice that has popularised Mary and ensured that she holds at least a certain measure of influence’.51 In Ireland, it is the everyday practices of women and girls that tell us the most about the Virgin Mary, power, and authority. Representations and realities A massive print culture offering women advice and practical instruction on how to embody the maternal ideal bolstered the construction of motherhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, girls from a young age were encouraged to think about becoming good mothers. The 1854 edition of the Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools, used in national schools to educate girls, encouraged them to ponder the difficult roles of parents, who must discipline children. ‘The first thing, therefore, to be aimed at’, the Book specified, ‘is to bring your child under perfect subjection; teach him that he must obey you; accustom him to immediate and cheerful acquiescence in your will – this is obedience and this is absolutely essential to good environment’.52 The rhetoric of Catholic authors and commentators repeatedly emphasised mothers’ moral and civilising influence over their children and principally their daughters.53 Here, again, it was in the first few decades of the twentieth century that the ideal became pervasive. Printed in Dublin in 1910, a book that

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featured the teachings of eighteenth-century Italian Catholic figure Alfonso Maria de Liguori gave the following advice to Irish mothers: When you lay your child down in the cradle, or take it up again, sign it with the holy sign of the Cross, and sprinkle it with holy water. As soon as the child begins to speak, do you begin also to teach it to pray. Teach it how to make the sign of the Cross, and to say the ‘Our Father,’ and the ‘Hail Mary’. …as a Christian, mother, see that your children say their prayers when they get up, and when they go to bed, and before and after meals. Take them early to church, and do not allow them to be guilty of any irreverence there.54 To raise children well, mothers had to begin their education at an early age. The Catholic Bulletin, which began publication in Dublin in 1911, stated as one of its main goals to provide mothers with useful literature to help them raise Catholic children in the home. In her ‘What a Mother May Do’, contributor Nora Hanrahan wrote that ‘[t]he companionship of books is, perhaps, one of the few pleasures that never pall, and the mother who wishes to confer a lasting benefit on her children will encourage and cultivate a taste for reading’. The mother was her children’s ‘first teacher’; thus, it was her responsibility to mould their reading interests. Of course, the sort of reading that children did mattered. And even before children could actually read, wrote Hanrahan, mothers could influence them through story-telling. ‘Stories from the Bible, from the lives of saints, Irish history, legend, and fairy tale, will all come to her aid …’ she argued.55 Like other contemporaries, Hanrahan linked religion and nationalism with motherhood, claiming that mothers had a duty to instil both in their sons and daughters.56 In the 1920s and 1930s, Catholic motherhood became an adjunct to the new nation, and religious authorities continued to dominate the discourse on motherhood and Irishness. In November 1922, Rev. J. S. Sheehy published ‘The Influence of Women in Catholic Ireland’. He wrote that ‘a nation is what women make it’, and that this ‘was especially true in the case of mothers who ‘reigned within the homestead’. ‘Be Irish and Catholic in your heart and soul’, he advised mothers.57

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The Free State and later the Republic categorised women almost exclusively as mothers. Indeed, women’s domestic roles became essential to defining the new Ireland. ‘If the family is a microcosm of the nation’, argues Louise Ryan, ‘and the home is the foundation stone of the nation, then “woman” is not simply the mother of the family and the keeper of the home but the mother of the entire nation’.58 It was, according to Heather Ingman, a particular type of motherhood that had national relevance in the early twentieth century: one that evoked the supposed passivity of the Virgin Mary. The idealised Irish mother was not only passive but also, like the nation itself, suffering. ‘The identification of Irish women with suffering Mother Ireland’, writes Ingman, ‘reinforced by the Catholic doctrine on the Virgin Mary, and later the 1937 Constitution making womanhood synonymous with motherhood and placing women firmly back in the home, has weighed heavily on Irish women’s lives’.59 Part and parcel of this national construction of motherhood was the notion of maternal suffering and sacrifice. The ideal of the mother-asmartyr is well represented in the life-writings of twentieth-century Irish men and women. Almost all of the writers and memoirists studied here made explicit links between Ireland’s martyr-like motherhood and its pervasive Catholicism. Dublin’s Mick O’Brien clearly articulated the causes of his mother’s subordination, claiming that the Catholic Church had ‘an iron grip’ on women and that mothers were ‘at the bottom of the submissive, repressed society – because they were the most devout and obedient. The truest believers’.60 Christine McKenna, who grew up in Derry, placed her mother in the ‘martyr’ category so popular in life-writings. ‘She was the typical Irish mother of her time’, McKenna explained, ‘dominated by the overbearing, crude actions of a thoughtless husband and cowed by the misogyny of the Church’.61 Lily O’Connor’s autobiography, set in 1940s Dublin, begins with the following: ‘Down on her knees scrubbing the floorboards in a tenement room, Mammy suddenly remembered it was her twenty-first birthday. She had been married two years and had two young children’.62 O’Connor’s suffering mother represented the complete neglect of her self in the face of her domestic duties. Similarly, the mother of Maura Murphy, also of the Dublin working classes, washed and ironed clothes for a neighbour for a week to buy her

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daughter a First Communion dress, veil, prayer-book, and rosary beads. For the adult Murphy, her mother, her mother’s sacrifices, and her mother’s devotional gifts formed the central narrative of her own First Communion memories. After her communion, Murphy became ‘obsessed’ with the rosary beads and prayer-book; her feelings towards the communion artefacts paralleled her feelings towards her mother.63 For children, the effects of the mother-as-martyr trope were complex. While many Irish Catholic children had deep love or even passion for their mothers, some were anxious that they would disappoint them, and a few resented mothers’ sometimes overbearing religious presence in their lives. The early memories of Moira Verschoyle, born in Limerick in 1904 to a Catholic mother and Protestant father, depict her feelings for her mother as obsessive. Her description of her mother’s behaviours highlights both passionate love and abuse: Mother’s was the only personality that I felt, that interpenetrated my being. Her love encompassed me like the air that I breathed – it was both a cushion and a shield … . My mother’s love was not, thank goodness, the serene, controlled emotion which is such a favourite with child psychologists. It was uncontrolled and instinctive, overflowing all bounds of reserve and expressing itself sometimes by hugs and kisses and sometimes by slaps and tears.64 Love, obsession, fear, and pain intermingled in the recollections of some Catholics when they thought of their relationships with their mothers. Some adult children, mostly from working-class backgrounds, later expressed resentment towards their martyr-like mothers. ‘Mothers, they never really had a life themselves’, recalled sixty-eightyear-old O’Brien in the 1990s. ‘Food on the table and clothes for their children … didn’t do anything for themselves. Their whole life was their children’.65 Adult children’s memoirs then, present a complicated Irish motherhood. While recognising mothers’ importance, they underscore the sacrifices that mothers endured.66 Suffering and sacrifice: such were the crosses that Irish Catholic mammies bore. And children sometimes felt these burdens, too.

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Scholars have long asserted that the close connections between Catholic mothers and children, especially their sons, had a lasting effect on Irish society. In the early twentieth century, Harvard anthropologists Arensberg and Kimball described a too-intimate relationship between mothers and their boys, writing that the Irish Catholic mother retained strict control over her sons and that the effects on those sons were troubling. ‘Even in such an important matter as her son’s eventual marriage’, they documented, ‘she has a very dominant voice’.67 Decades later, in the 1970s, Angela Macnamara wrote in her advice column that fathers’ lack of active parenting and mothers’ overbearing natures were damaging to their sons: In too many cases the father opts out of parenthood and leaves the responsibility of rearing the children almost entirely to the mother. She become [sic] the dominant one in the home. The sons suffer from a lack of positive influence a father should exert. In manhood they exhibit their inner feelings of inferiority and inadequacy by bullying, over indulging in alcohol, temper tantrums, self-indulgence, ‘jokes’ at the expense of others and opting out of family responsibility.68 These representations of Irish mothers dominating adult sons mirror the interpretations of Tom Inglis and Mary Kenny, who also argue that these relationships had negative effects on twentieth-century Ireland.69 Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has gone so far as to blame the high rates of schizophrenia among rural Irish men in the late twentieth century, in part, on the emasculation that these men felt at the hands of their domineering mothers.70 The relationships between mothers and daughters, however, although central to the ideology and the transmission of Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, remain less studied and thus are featured in detail in this book.71 The portrayal of motherhood in Church publications, periodicals, and even the memories of children tell us little about mothers’ actual experiences. First-hand accounts of motherhood, however, reveal the real-world circumstances of many women who lived lives far from the ideal. For some Irish mothers living from the mid-nineteenth to the

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mid-twentieth century, suffering and hardship were all too real. The travails of pregnancy and childbirth, domestic violence, hard physical labour, and hunger caused distress in both rural and urban areas. In the early twentieth century, even as Ireland’s marriage rates were declining in rural areas, births within marriage remained high.72 Rural, poorer Catholic farming families boasted of having the families with the most children. Urban women did their part as well: in a Dublin suburb in 1911, Catholic couples had an average of 6.63 children. In 1911, 36 per cent of all Irish women had given birth to at least seven children.73 Most married women’s lives, then, were characterised by a steady and sometimes punishing cycle of pregnancy, birth, and caring for infants and children; as Mary Daly reminds us, high marital fertility rates ‘must be addressed if we are to understand the lives of Irish women, and indeed Irish men, in the early twentieth century’.74 Some mothers revealed ambivalence towards their roles as bearers of infants and culture in modern Ireland, bemoaning long years of pregnancy and childrearing.75 Oral histories conducted in late twentieth-century Northern Ireland reveal difficulties such as post-natal depression; as one woman recalled, ‘There was post-natal depression, but there wasn’t a name for it. Women were put away in the asylum. It was taken that they were gone around the twist’.76 Meanwhile, in narratives collected by social historian Kevin Kearns in the 1990s, women who came of age in poor, early twentieth-century Dublin spoke, often bitterly, of the terrible circumstances of Catholic mothers.77 Hardship was accompanied by loss and worry. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continuing high infant and child mortality rates, particularly in the working classes, brought anxiety over children’s health and well-being.78 For mothers, the emigration of children, which was endemic by the late nineteenth century, was a catastrophic loss. Discussing his Irish grandmother, Richard White writes: ‘Having borne children for twenty-five years, Ellen Carr spent the rest of her life watching them leave’.79 The illness or death of a child also loomed large in recollections of Irish motherhood. When these tragedies occurred, Irish mothers visibly grieved and sought succour in their faith. The mother of Dublin’s Maura Murphy spent night after night praying in her local chapel after the loss of her child.80 A rural

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woman remembered the death of her 23-year-old sister, who had ­meningitis, as follows: My mother was told that she might linger for a long time, but that she would not recover. My poor mother prayed for the death of her child, imagine the pain of that. And in the morning, when the word came that Kathleen had died, I remember my mother getting down on her knees in front of the picture of the Sacred Heart and thanking Him for taking her daughter to Heaven, rather than letting her linger in pain.81 These challenges often caused mothers to turn even more closely to their faith.82 For women, then, suffering and religion went hand in hand. Writing to Dublin’s Archbishop McCabe in January 1881, a Waterford woman asked him to say some masses in memory of her daughter. ‘Though, I hope she is now in the enjoyment of the beatific vision’, the woman wrote, ‘still, I shall never cease to pray, and ask praying for my darling child, and may I not presume that if she does not stand in need of them, they will benefit others near and dear to us who may now be supplicating for aid’.83 Catholicism could provide grieving mothers with comfort, attention, and a plan for action focused on prayers and masses. Things were not entirely dismal for all Irish mothers by the early twentieth century, an era that witnessed important changes in the relationship between the state and the family. The Women’s National Health Association (1907) and National Council of Women of Ireland (1924) formed to alleviate health problems in working-class areas. These organisations focused on improving the health and nutrition of mothers and children.84 One of the main goals of reform activities in the early twentieth century was decreasing infant and child mortality rates. Here, again, working-class mothers were key. In the 1930s and 1940s in particular, a campaign against artificial feeding and in favour of breastfeeding was directed towards the working classes. As Lindsey Earner-Byrne explains, an analysis of the responses of working-class Irish mothers to these initiatives reveals that women were not ‘always the passive recipients of either advice or charity’. In contrast, she

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argues, mothers ‘derived power and influence in their own right’ as they ‘negotiated the services and charities available’.85 Although some historians have viewed attempts to professionalise medical care, including childbirth, as complex and fraught with problems, they were represented at the time as clear evidence of progress for mothers and infants. The Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for District Nursing began to train nurses in Ireland in 1891; the Lady Dudley scheme followed shortly thereafter, in 1903. Nurses associated with both organisations worked in the west of Ireland, Lady Dudley’s nurses exclusively so. By the turn of the century, there were 104 Jubilee nurses in Ireland. 327 district nursing associations were established in Ireland from 1900 to 1950.86 Hospitals, meanwhile, increasingly became central sites of maternal and infant health care. Dublin’s Rotunda Lying-in Hospital had been in existence since the eighteenth century, but it was not until the early twentieth century that most women entered a hospital to give birth. Dublin had three maternity hospitals in the early 1900s, and by the 1930s, each provided pre-natal care, as did other hospitals across the island.87 By the late 1930s, hospitals reported bed shortages for women in labour.88 The early twentieth century was a watershed in maternal health care, argues Caitriona Clear; while almost 300 women died in childbirth in 1923, that number had decreased to 27 by 1961.89 Across the island, and notably in rural areas, meanwhile, the United Irishwomen (which would become the Irish Countrywoman’s Association [ICA] in 1935) and, later, the Irish Housewives Association provided not only instruction but also support for wives and mothers. These organisations encouraged mothers to come together, ‘to discuss their needs and become involved in the social, educational, and cultural life of the country.’90 While the ICA in particular has often been viewed as conservative or even hostile to feminism, its early members recognised the difficulties faced by the rural bean an tí and offered welcome advice and support. Alongside publications like the Irish Homestead, the ICA also provided training and education in farming and housekeeping.91 Therefore, we must recognise that Irish mothers, whether rural or urban, and no matter what their economic circumstances, were not passive or powerless. They organised to support each other and negotiated state and charitable forces that attempted to

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regulate them. In this way, Irish mothers were similar to their counterparts in other Catholic countries. ‘Part of the myth of the Catholic mujer abnegada (self-sacrificing woman/mother)’, writes Nichole Sanders, ‘is that Mexican women, particularly Catholic women, were submissive and passive and did not publicly organise. Recent scholarship has shown that this was not the case’.92 Of course, unmarried women who became pregnant had significantly different experiences of motherhood than married women. For these Irish women, the ideal of becoming the good (married) Catholic mother was firmly, and permanently, out of reach, and support was scarce. In many parts of Ireland right through the mid-twentieth century, unmarried pregnant women were ostracised; one county Antrim woman, for example, remembered being shunned by her community, even having to ‘plough her fields unaided’, upon the birth of her illegitimate child.93 Other women were confined to Magdalen laundries. ‘Sometimes’, remembered a woman in the late twentieth century, ‘women were put away if they were having a baby and weren’t married. That was a disgrace’.94 In independent Ireland (the 1920s and 1930s), ‘Women were pushed toward home life through a disciplinary grid that ensured that they became married before or once sexually active, maintained their procreative role throughout their twenties and thirties (through the denial of contraceptives) and their mothering and family duties throughout their lives, denied them the ability to divorce, limited their access to public and work space, and punished moral infractions’.95 Despite its attempts to contain unwed motherhood in Magdalen asylums and mother-and-baby homes, the Church–state coalition nonetheless confronted the realities of illegitimacy through, for example, the hundreds of infanticide cases that highlighted the plight of unmarried mothers in early twentieth-century Ireland.96 Recent work on infanticide, contraception, and abortion by Elaine Farrell, Cliona Rattigan, and Sandra McAvoy affirms the prevalence of such practices throughout Ireland, north and south, from 1850 to 1950.97 In the 1940s and 1950s, a string of court cases featuring illegal or backstreet abortion dominated the Dublin courts and the Irish press, bringing to light the ways in which some women – those who had abortions as well as those who gave other women backstreet abortions – were rejecting motherhood entirely.98

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Meanwhile, thousands of Ireland’s young women chose to emigrate, frustrating priests and bishops, who worried that the best and brightest of Ireland’s women were rejecting their maternal roles for freedom – a dangerously sexual freedom – abroad.99 Archbishop Gilmartin of Tuam expressed his criticism in 1937 of ‘foolish girls’ who set out for England without a job or friends to meet them, and who did not make contact with a Catholic agency in English cities. He said that such girls ‘run terrible risks to soul and body’.100 Jennifer Redmond has demonstrated how a gendered morality dominated discourses about female emigrants in Ireland during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s – again, a key era of nation-building. She contends that single female emigrants to Britain were under increased scrutiny by the Irish government and the Catholic Church at the time because of their gender and marital status. Similarly, Louise Ryan writes that Irish single women emigrants represented particular fears about ‘the threat to morality, Irishness and Catholicism … women/girl emigrants represent the absent bodies of rural Ireland and hence symbolise the threat of rural depopulation, low marriage rates and falling birth rates’.101 These discourses, which demonised single female emigrants as sexually deviant, served as a potent warning to single Irish girls and reinforced messages that sex within marriage for the sole purpose of motherhood was the only morally acceptable option. Confronted with disturbing realities that some women were rejecting the ideal of motherhood either by emigrating, utilising contraception, or committing abortion or infanticide, the Irish government acted in the 1920s and 1930s, passing pronatalist legislation and implementing censorship policies. In the Free State, laws restricted women’s work, prevented them from sitting on juries, and banned contraception.102 In 1928 and 1935, the Censorship Act and Criminal Law Amendment Act, respectively, criminalised the sale and advertising of contraceptives. The 1927 Report of the Committee on Evil Literature recommended banning any advertisements for drugs featuring ‘the prevention or removal of irregularities in menstruation, or to drugs, medicines, appliances, treatment, or methods, for procuring abortion or miscarriage or preventing conception’.103 Sandra McAvoy has noted an increase in abortion prosecutions in Ireland by the 1940s, which may reveal the police’s increased attention to the issue.104

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Of course, the state did not act alone in this moral work. In the early twentieth century, as it legislated, the Catholic Church and various Catholic social and charitable organisations worked to reinforce its efforts. For example, the St Vincent de Paul Society ‘expanded [its] membership and activities’ after Irish independence, and the Legion of Mary ‘dramatically asserted its Catholic social activist intentions’ in the 1920s, most notably when it targeted prostitution in the ‘Monto’ section of Dublin.105 While the state’s efforts to support married motherhood and curb sexual deviancy could only get underway in the early twentieth century after independence, the Church got a head start, beginning to attempt to implement Catholic morality and proper motherhood during the ‘devotional revolution’ of the late nineteenth century. Like the state, however, its efforts reached a pinnacle in the first half of the new century. Martyrdom and manipulation In Catholic tradition, suffering was not only gendered female but also was, at times, considered to be a privilege enjoyed by only a few. ‘A vocation to suffer’, writes Paula M. Kane, ‘was celebrated as the destiny of a few chosen victim souls’.106 Kane also argues that a ‘victim spirituality’ became prominent in early twentieth-century Europe and the United States, ‘inspired in part by the legacy of nineteenth-century devotional culture (especially the cults of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Passion of Christ, and Lisieux).’107 It is no accident that the majority of victim souls historically have been women; the embracing of pain and suffering allows women in a patriarchal system to lay claim to an emotional piety and therefore embrace religious power and leadership. In modern Ireland, Catholicism’s traditional understanding of gendered suffering was joined by its national discourse on sacrificial motherhood. As a result, Irish mothers were able to engage in a complex process of subjectivity around the notion of suffering motherhood. Women themselves also took on the notions of mothers’ suffering and sacrifice, so ubiquitous both in prescriptive literature and in adult children’s memories of their mothers, and sometimes in surprising ways. Some mothers actively used these constructions to better their own lives and the lives of their children, others to challenge Catholic

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patriarchy. The rest of this chapter focuses on the late nineteenth century, arguing that these were the decades when Irish Catholic mothers articulated their needs and wants and developed strategies for seeing them realised. In Carna, County Galway, 1879, for example, Father Patrick Greally recalled his interactions with local women on Christmas Eve. ‘Several poor, virtuous women’, he wrote, mothers with large, helpless families, came to me in tears asking for God’s sake to give them even the price of one meal for the starving children, that they had not even a morsel of the coarsest food for the little ones on that night of Universal Joy … that their husbands were gone for the last fortnight to England or Scotland to try and earn something to support their families at home.108 Greally’s words depicted these poor mothers as pitiful but also virtuous and sacrificing. Despite their hardships, the Carna women fulfilled their domestic duties and respected patriarchal authority, appealing to their priest for help when their husbands were away. How Greally described these mothers is interesting, but more fascinating are the ways in which they appeared to be constructing themselves. Although the mothers in Greally’s account likely were truly destitute, they also may have performed the roles of victims and martyrs, or at least emphasised these roles, to secure attention and assistance. Richard White, who documented his Irish Catholic mother’s life-story in Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories, claimed that his mother ‘learned to cast herself as a victim’, exploiting her own supposed powerlessness and submission to establish herself as an active agent in her stories and narratives.109 As White recognises, mothers positioned themselves as sacrificial martyrs not necessarily because they passively absorbed or internalised the ideal of motherhood, but because doing so afforded them some power and influence. Embracing sacrifice and suffering also may have allowed Irish Catholic mothers to identify more clearly not only with the Virgin Mary but also with the anguished body of Christ. The popular Irish Monthly published an article in 1873 on the Sacred Heart of Jesus in which the author, T.H.K., wrote with feeling: ‘Jesus is scourged at the

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pillar, and crowned with thorns. What writhing agony, what exquisite torture of His Sacred Heart under the cruel lash and blows!’110 Although certainly not the author’s intention, it is easy to imagine an Irish wife and mother reading this and thinking of her own agony, possibly under the ‘cruel lash and blows’ of an abusive husband or working-class poverty. What did the body of Christ in pain mean to Irish women and specifically mothers? In his 1904 discussion of the importance of holy images, Rev. D.I. McDermott writes that devoted Catholics who gazed at the crucified body of Christ frequently enough could not help but recognise His suffering: When we look upon the suffering son of God, when we see the most beautiful of the sons of men nailed to that unhewn tree, hanging on it for three hours; when we see that there is no soundness left in that miraculously formed body; that from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot it is covered with wounds … then we can, in a measure, realise that each wound inflicted on Jesus a pain so intensely excruciating as to be beyond the power of men to endure it.111 Although McDermott suggests that ordinary believers – men at least – could not fathom the pain that Jesus experienced, in fact Irish mothers often identified with the anguished Christ in a personal and even in a corporeal way. A case in point is Irish women’s particular devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This representation highlighted Jesus’s pain – the Jesus of the Sacred Heart always appears with a bleeding heart surrounded by a crown of thorns – reinforced the feminine, martyr-like image of Christ in Ireland, and affirmed the connections between women, Catholicism, pain, and suffering.112 Sociologist Mary Ellen Konieczny points out that ordinary believers use objects and possessions ‘intentionally and sometimes unintentionally’ to construct their own identities. This may have been especially true for Irish Catholic mothers, whose identities were inextricably bound with the domestic sphere, while venerating religious icons in their homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.113 Looking at the body of Christ in pain, they could interpret their own pain and suffering – whether in childbirth, as a mother facing loss, or from

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poverty – as religiously relevant. As they did so, they expressed their own martyrdom, but they also established personal and corporeal links with representations of the divine; the latter was, for some women, empowering. Meanwhile, in a culture that idolised the Blessed Virgin, they continued to construct their own identities as powerful holy mothers. The popularity of the Virgin Mary in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century Ireland tapped into a centuries-old devotion in Europe to the Pietà (an image or depiction of the Virgin holding a deceased Jesus) or Mater Dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows). In medieval and early modern Europe, the suffering Mother, the Mary in pain, linked motherhood with torment and grief. As Mother of God but also a suffering, broken-hearted mother of a martyred son, Mary embodies pain; as art historian Sari Kuuva posits, ‘pain is an essential part of the character of Virgin Mary’.114 In the views of some scholars, including Margaret Bruzelius, this notion is problematic, ensuring that in some traditions, ‘maternal speech exists only because it can be validated by maternal suffering: only the woman of sorrow, bound in a uniquely painful relation with her offspring, may give tongue’.115 Still, this association with anguish provides a space in which Mary the mother can assert a voice, and this reality may have provided Irish Catholic mothers with a similar space. Therefore, Irish Catholic motherhood, deeply intertwined with Marian belief, is analogous to constructions of motherhood in other Catholic countries. Scholars researching Mexican history, for example, have argued that ‘rather than oppressing women, marianismo gave Latin American women a certain social power through the manipulation of’ the martyr-like mother stereotype.116 Irish Catholic women’s use and sometimes manipulation of suffering, martyrdom, and motherhood is particularly clear in their correspondence with Catholic Church authorities. The rest of this chapter analyses letters that mothers wrote to their bishops in Dublin from 1879 to 1890, a key decade in the immediate aftermath of the ‘devotional revolution’.117 In the fashioning of modern Irish Catholic motherhood, the very late nineteenth century proved to be a central time of change. The economic and social effects of the famine, combined with Catholic Church reorganisation, the popularity of Marian devotion, and the infiltration of Victorian gender norms generated an increased

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focus on the paradigm of Irish motherhood. Letters written during this time thus allow us access to a moment when the ideal of motherhood was coalescing but had not yet become enforced by the nation-state. They also, however, testify to how Irish mothers defined, challenged, reworked, accommodated, and negotiated gender norms and Catholic patriarchy. Married or widowed mothers were the main female correspondents with Church authorities in the late nineteenth century. These, of course, were the women most able to present themselves as embodying Irish Catholic womanhood and suffering; they also were able to tap into long-held ideas about motherhood and the deserving poor when asking for financial assistance. When a wife and mother, Maria R., composed a letter to Cardinal Patrick McCabe in 1883, she claimed to be at her wit’s end. ‘With your Eminence’s permission I beg to send you the following statement of my present position’, she began, ‘and of the trials which I have endured for a long time past, and which after a lifelong struggle to rear my family Catholic, have resulted in leaving me penniless and without a home in the world’.118 Like this woman, many correspondents wrote to their bishops detailing the anguish of poverty. Maria R.’s letter, however, does more than describe destitution; in its rhetorical strategies and use of existing tropes, it helps to construct and define motherhood. Female Catholic letter-writers, mostly urban and literate, were conscious of the culture in which they lived. They claimed to embody the model of motherhood; they highlighted their close relationships with priests and their commitment to the Church. Maria R.’s letter, for example, began with a clear reference to her financial need but also, in the first few lines, evoked her attempts to retain her own faith and that her family and exploited respectful, deferential language when addressing the archbishop. Maria R. thus performed ideal womanhood for her archbishop even as she asked him for money. This particular missive also went on to outline Maria R.’s history as a Catholic wife and mother. She wrote how, decades earlier, she married a Protestant but convinced him to rear their children Catholic (in keeping with Church policy). Despite her best efforts, however, Maria’s attempts to remain faithful to her Church ran afoul when her husband ordered the children (now teenagers) to become Protestant. Here Maria described a painful conflict – how could she be both a dutiful wife and

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a devoted Catholic under these circumstances? But, being committed first and foremost to her Church and her children, Maria refused to bow to her husband’s demands; motherhood trumped marriage here. As a result, he ordered her and the children to leave their home. Homeless and poor, with three children and no income, Maria had only one hope left: the Church. She wrote to McCabe as a humble mother but also made it clear that because she had performed her role dutifully, the Church now had a responsibility to step in as a substitute patriarch.119 A few years earlier, another Dublin mother, Catherine K., also wrote to McCabe asking for his assistance. ‘It has come into my mind today to write to your Grace’, Catherine wrote, and to ask of you if you can conveniently, to do something for Charity’s sake [for my children] … . My salary is only twenty pounds a year. I have to pay for their board etc. … my salary is not able to meet all this. If the little boy were done for I could manage the girls. He is very far advanced for his age. The superior says he has a very high opinion of him and p.p. [parish priest] says he promises to be very good. I enclose too letters which your Grace will please return trusting your grace will pardon a broken hearted Mother.120 Catherine’s appeal to the archbishop is striking in both its humility and sense of entitlement. Catherine referred to her position as a mother to demonstrate not only her need for, but also her right to, intervention.121 She portrayed herself as fulfilling her duties as a Catholic mother: bearing and raising children and caring for their material and religious needs. She emphasised that the parish priest could vouch for her son’s worth, thus stressing that she had created close bonds between herself and her cleric. Catherine, who wrote her letter to McCabe on 17 March, also explicitly noted in her missive that it was St. Patrick’s Day. By doing so, she connected the importance of mothering to the Irish nation itself. After receiving an apparently disappointing reply, Catherine again wrote to McCabe on 27 March. She defended her initial missive, suggesting that McCabe likely criticised her after her first letter. She wrote that she did not think ‘that I had any claim whatever more than that I was poor had four children dependent on me that I wanted a

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little help.’122 Refusing to be cowed, Catherine relentlessly continued her attempts to win McCabe’s assistance, repeatedly calling on the trope of the poor, suffering Catholic mother to do so. She also reworked the image of the anguished mother; through her writing, she made herself into an advocate for herself and her children. In her careful analysis of the petitions that Irish Catholic women wrote to Dublin’s Archbishop Edward Byrne asking for assistance several decades later, from 1920 to 1940, Lindsey Earner-Byrne discerns ‘four of the main rhetorical strategies employed’ by these correspondents: ‘the direct appeal; stressing loyalty; the subtle challenge; and, finally, the overt protest or threat’.123 Earner-Byrne observes that female petitioners also, in many cases, transformed ‘motherhood into a potential act of sabotage’. They used their status as mothers, she demonstrates, to criticise their circumstances and to ‘bargain with their church’.124 Similar tactics were used by the late nineteenth-century women I have examined here, suggesting continuities in women’s strategies of representing motherhood and requesting assistance from their Church. That Irish women letter-writers employed similar tactics in the 1880s as their daughters or granddaughters did decades later corroborates the persistence of Catholic women’s agency across generations and the very real possibility that mothers passed on these strategies to their daughters. The following petition that Earner-Byrne analyses was written in 1934 to Archbishop Byrne: I, as a Poor Roman Catholic, make an Appeal to your Lordship, for aid … the last year has left us beggars, our rent unpaid, what a sad state for Poor, honest People, my Gracious Lord, at the last minute I am seeking aid from Catholic sources, as I want to make up the rent and get a little for the Children at Xmas.125 Its similarities to this next missive, composed in 1880 and meant for Archbishop McCabe, are telling: I humbly appeal to you again to assist me now in my hour of need … as my landlord has given me only until Monday as you will see by the enclosed note which I take the liberty of sending to your Lordship … I am sure he will not deprive myself and my

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helpless children from a home. If only [I] could pay him a part of the amount I owe him considering the circumstance I am placed in … . A kind answer to this I hope am your Lordships most devoted Servant Maria H.126 Both women mentioned concrete hardships, most notably lapsed rents and potential evictions, to appeal to their archbishop. They also underscored motherhood, mentioning the detrimental effects (potential homelessness, a lack of Christmas gifts) that poverty may have on their ‘helpless’ children. Letters and petitions written from the 1870s through 1940, then, provide evidence for some continuities in Irish women’s lives and Catholic culture and suggest that lay women may have learned letter-writing strategies from their mothers and grandmothers. In the letters written to Archbishop McCabe in the late nineteenth century, Irish Catholic mothers also called on the trope of abandonment. Women wrote of husbands who had died, had run away, or were too ill to work. Suffering widowhood was a popular theme. Here, correspondents exploited the idea of patriarchy and traditional gender roles. Without a husband, these women contended, they could not make ends meet or fulfil their roles as mothers. And, they asserted, as women, they should not be expected to be the family’s main providers. They demanded instead that the Church step in as a substitute patriarch. A letter from a Limerick woman to McCabe illustrates this: With a trembling hand as my only source under Heaven I appeal to you in my dire distress to help me. I am a widow with 6 children my husband died last Augt after 6 weeks illness. … I had 6 Cows & should sell one to pay my heavy tax and rates as you will see if I dispose of my few Cows what will I do with my young family when all failed me I wrote to a merchant in Cork who sent me a small sum in advance every year Revd Sir none for me to get seed or food. In Presence of the All seeing Being I have not one stone of potatoes nor corn of my own to sow Revd Sir I enclose my Poor Rate Ticket …. Your Humble Sevt Bridget C.127

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In this petition, Bridget called upon several of the strategies that ­Earner-Byrne lays out, including the direct appeal and stressing loyalty. She also highlighted her widowhood, laying claim to traditional membership in the ranks of the deserving poor and testifying to her obedience to Catholic ideology: she married, bore children, and raised these children in keeping with Church desires. Now, however, without a husband or father, the Church, she claimed, must intercede as the benevolent patriarchal authority responsible for helping women who have been abandoned. Similarly, a letter written just a year later in Dublin focused on widowhood as key to the need for assistance: I was left a widow with 4 little girls 6 yrs last March. My Husband died sudden in the … stoves in Talbot St when he was clark for 11 yrs and the company would not do anything for me as I would not give up the children to be put into a school by them 12 months after there father died I got my eldest girl into Wiliam St. convent she was 5 yrs there she came home to me last May and the ladies took the next in. I cannot get anything for her to do as yet and her boots is worn out now if I was working I would be able to get them repaired. I worked ever since my husband died at Hazeltons & Connors in Henry St. at the mantle-making but this year there was no trade but please God we expect it will be better in the winter. I was born in Marlboro St. Parish and married by the Revd. Nicholas O’Farrell and all my children baptised there and myself so that I am no stranger if I was a protestant I would be looked after but God is good when I go back to work I expect to get my oldest girl in along with myself she is past 13 yrs so that when she and myself would be working I could get on the last thing I had to part with was my boots I never was so badly off before I am staying with my brother in law but he cannot do anything for me his pay is small and he has a family of his own. May it please your Grace to do something for me as I never asked anything before and may God and his Blessed Mother grant that I never will again … The clergyman that is in the church are strangers to me if Father Donnelly or any of the gentlemen that was there a few years ago was in it I could get a character from them … I hope your grace will pardon the liberty

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I have taken to ask your charity but I have no one to give me one penny only what I can earn. May God help everyone that is left with a young family without means. I am sending you the first letter I received from the Revd. Mother after my little girl went into the convent the way you will see I am telling the truth. Sir I remain your most obedt. Child in God.128 There is much to unpack in this petition. The writer, Mary W., was deferential but demanding. She focused on the well-being of her children. She gave the archbishop specific evidence of her plight, most notably her lack of boots. Careful to mention her connections both to male relatives (who, she argued, were not able to serve as substitute patriarchs) and to nuns and priests, she also gave him evidence of her faith and access to potential character references. She maintained that her husband worked hard before his death and that she has done so since she was widowed. Her strategies focused on family, faith, and hard labour. Still, as Earner-Byrne notes, there are also threats in these pleas. By ‘either asking for advice about better “non-Catholic” offers of assistance, or hinting at desperation and the willingness of Protestant relatives to help out, or outlining how they could no longer fulfill their religious duties due to poverty’,129 women letter-writers demonstrated their awareness of the world in which they lived. Mary W., indeed, explicitly stated in her letter: ‘if I was a protestant I would be looked after’. Although Mary maintained her loyalty to Catholicism, the threat of conversion loomed large, and Mary W. used it strategically. While some Irish mothers manipulated their martyr-like image, others rejected the trope entirely. In 1878, a Dublin woman, Frances B., composed a missive to Archbishop Patrick McCabe, seeking his assistance with her disobedient daughter. ‘My Lord’, she wrote, My eldest daughter wishes to fast this Lent. I told her I did not consider her able to do so, and will you my Lord kindly write a line granting her a dispensation as she seems to think my authority should be ignored in this instance hoping my Lord you will forgive me for this troubling you. I am most respectfully Frances B.130

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In her letter, Frances highlighted her authority as a mother even as she recognised the wilfulness of her daughter. Frances was not a sacrificial mother, nor was she intimidated by McCabe. In fact, by writing to the archbishop of Dublin about such a matter, she demonstrated her confidence and her belief that, as an Irish mother, she had the right to ask for the intervention of one of the most prominent members of the Irish hierarchy. She underscored her maternal role to assert her authority over her daughter and to demand the bishop’s intervention. Irish mothers, therefore, employed a variety of strategies, from embracing martyrdom to overtly expressing discontent to demanding assistance, when they interacted with ecclesiastical authorities. Heather Ingman discusses the ‘silencing of the mother in Irish writing’, arguing that it paralleled women’s real lives in the twentieth century. ‘[F]ew Irish women’, she asserts, ‘spoke as mothers in popular culture, the church, or the state’.131 Women did speak – or at least write – as mothers, however, in their correspondence. These letters also complicate Taura S. Napier’s assertion that the Irish female life-writer has only written ‘deflected autobiography’, in which she ‘resists being identified as the heroine of her own work’, instead ‘privileging the journeys of others in articulating the self’.132 While this may be true for literary personalities, who often struggled to find their own voice within a genre dominated by male authors, real-life Irish mothers writing to their religious superiors placed their own experiences at the centre of their narratives and, indeed, cleverly crafted those narratives. In 1850, the ideal of Catholic motherhood was just emerging. By 1950, it had become entrenched in Irish society. What this meant for Irish women varied depending on circumstances: not only economic or regional, but also religious. In his 1912 pastoral letter, Limerick’s Bishop Thomas wrote that ‘[i]n the wives and mothers in this country, religion has a great mainstay. To them, under God, we owe much of the faith and piety of the people’.133 Writings like that of Thomas, who also wrote that the Irish mother was ‘like an air from heaven’, created a two-dimensional impression of motherhood. As this chapter demonstrates, however, motherhood was filled with complexities and subjectivities and also bore within it, even at its most traditional, the seeds of future female activism. Children’s recollections of mothers revealed affection and awe, but also guilt and fear, affirming that many Irish people

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wrestled with the influence of their mothers well into adulthood. And the self-representations of mothers themselves expose us to yet another reality: that women often called upon their roles as mothers to establish influence and to seek assistance from the highest members of the Church hierarchy. Dublin’s Catholic women continued to write to their religious superiors throughout the 1920s and 1930s, primarily asking for charity. As they did so, Lindsey Earner-Byrne reasons, they confirmed their keen awareness that ‘their greatest hold on the Church was their motherhood’.134 When they wrote their concerns and needs to their bishops, these mothers hardly appeared as caricatures of motherhood. Instead, they reminded us of their abilities to create opportunity and display agency, sometimes even by embracing suffering and victimhood. Notes 1 Walter MacDonald, Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor (London: J. Cape, 1926), p. 13. 2 Inglis, Moral Monopoly, p. 179. 3 For works that address motherhood in the twentieth century, see ­Maria de la Cinta Ramblado-Minero and Auxiliadora Perez-Vides, eds., Single Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Cultural, Historical, and Social Essays (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006); Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1922–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Caitriona Clear, Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland 1922–1961 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000); and Patricia Kennedy, ed., Motherhood in Ireland: Creation and Context (Cork: Mercier Press, 2004). On motherhood in fiction, see Tina O’Toole, The Irish New Woman (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 4 Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child, p. 2. 5 On the mother-and-child scheme, see Edward J. Coyne, ‘The mother and child scheme’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 87: 348 (winter 1998), pp. 402–5; Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland; and Noël Browne, Against the Tide (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986). 6 Margaret MacCurtain, ‘Towards an appraisal of the religious image of women’, The Crane Bag 4, 1: Images of The Irish Woman (1980), p. 28. 7 The changes of the 1960s, he writes, ‘dethroned Marianism from its central place in Irish Catholic devotion’. James S. Donnelly, ‘Opposing the modern world: the cult of the Virgin Mary in Ireland, 1965–

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85’, Éire-Ireland 40: 1–2 (spring/summer 2005), p. 183. See also Peter O’Dwyer, Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1988). 8 Memories of Neil Bean Uí Uigín in Bibeanna: Memories from a Corner of Ireland, ed. Brenda Ní Shúilleabháin (Cork: Mercier Press, 2007), p. 136. 9 Taylor, Occasions of Faith, p. 201. 10 Irish Catholic Directory, 1853, p. 323. 11 David Moriarty, Bishop of Kerry, sermon on Mary, 8 September 1859. Sermons by the Most Rev. Dr. Moriarty, Late Bishop of Kerry, new ed. (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1907). 12 Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, p. 24. 13 Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Marian shrine of Knock’, pp. 62–3. 14 Taylor, Occasions of Faith, p. 249. 15 Catherine Lawless, ‘Devotion and representation in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in Visual, Material, and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Catholic Ireland, ed. Ciara Bhreathnach and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), p. 93. 16 John Turpin, ‘Visual Marianism and national identity in Ireland: 1920–1960’, in Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths and Mother-Figures, ed. Tricia Cusack and Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2003), p. 73. 17 Catherine L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 41. 18 Innes, Woman and Nation. 19 Fitzpatrick, ‘“A share of the honeycomb”’, p. 168; Wolf, An IrishSpeaking Island. 20 Hill, Women in Ireland, p. 108. 21 Southern Star, 9 May 1931. 22 Mrs Thomas (Helena) Concannon, The Queen of Ireland: An Historical Account of Ireland’s Devotion to the Blessed Virgin (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1938), p. 28. 23 Turpin, ‘Visual Marianism’, pp. 70–1. 24 Concannon, The Queen of Ireland, 345. The handbook of the Legion of Mary describes its founding as follows: ‘Along with a group of Catholic women and Fr. Michael Toher, a priest of the Dublin Archdiocese, [Frank Duff] formed the first branch of what was to become the first praesidium of the Legion of Mary on 7 September 1921’. Concilium Legionis Mariae, The Official Handbook of the Legion of Mary, http://www.legionofmary.ie/. 25 O’Dwyer, Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland, p. 295. 26 Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change, p. 7. 27 Patrick Griffith, Christian Mothers (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1926), pp. 55–6.

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28 Innes, Woman and Nation, p. 40. 29 Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change, pp. 7–8. 30 Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Marian shrine of Knock’, p. 62. 31 Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans, ‘Introduction: the power of Marian Pilgrimage’, in their Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (London: Ashgate, 2009), p. 2. 32 Donnelly, ‘Opposing the modern world’. 33 Edith Turner, ‘Legitimization or suppression? The effect of Mary’s appearances at Knock, Ireland’, in Moved by Mary, p. 202. 34 See, for example, oral history, Jenny Kehoe, Wexford Town, 1920s– 1930s, in No Shoes in Summer, p. 205. 35 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, pp. 42–3. 36 Meaney, Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change, pp. 7–8. 37 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, pp. 42–3. 38 Catherine Rynne, Knock, 1879–1979 (Dublin: Veritas, 1979), p. 10. For analyses of the Knock apparition, see Hynes, Knock; Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Marian shrine of Knock’, ‘Opposing the modern world’, ‘Knock shrine: the worst of times: the 1940s’, pp. 213–64, and ‘The revival of Knock shrine’, pp. 186–200. 39 ‘The official testimonies of the fifteen witnesses to the Knock apparition on 21 August 1879’, Knock Shrine, www.k​nocks​hrine​. ie/w​p-con​tent/​uploa​ds/20​14/12​/Witn​ess-A​ccoun​ts.pd​f [accessed 10 September 2017]; Liam Ua Cadain, Knock Shrine (Galway: O’Gorman Printinghouse, 1935), pp. 31–2. 40 Rynne, Knock, 1879–1979, p. 10. 41 ‘The official testimonies of the fifteen witnesses’. 42 Ibid. 43 Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Marian shrine of Knock’, p. 67. 44 Morgan, The Embodied Eye, p. 66. 45 Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. 3. 46 Ibid., p. 7. 47 Ibid., pp. 7–14. 48 Andrew Louth, ‘The body in western Catholic Christianity’, in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 126; Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), pp.  48–69, 102–8. 49 Elaine Crowley, A Dublin Girl: Growing Up in the 1930s (New York, NY: Soho Press, 2003), p. 138. 50 Kevin Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines: Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2004), p. 67.

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51 Juliana Flinn, Mary, the Devil, and Taro: Catholicism and Women’s Work in a Micronesian Society (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), p. 2. 52 Commissioners of National Education, Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools (Dublin: Alex Thom and Sons, 1854), p. 15. 53 See also Delay, ‘Ever so holy’, pp. 10–30. 54 de Liguori, The Mission Book, pp. 288–9. 55 Mrs Nora Hanrahan, ‘What a mother may do,’ Catholic Bulletin 1: 3 (March 1911), p. 118. 56 See also Caitriona Clear’s discussion of motherhood as depicted in The Irish Messenger during the 1940s. Clear, Women of the House, pp. 46–7. 57 Cork Examiner, 22 November 1922, cited in Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, pp. 151–2. 58 Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, p. 151. 59 Heather Ingman, Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), p. 75. 60 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, p. 155. 61 McKenna, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress, p. 45. 62 O’Connor, Can Lily O’Shea Come Out to Play?, p. 12. 63 Murphy, Don’t Wake Me at Doyles, p. 29. 64 Moira Verschoyle, So Long to Wait: An Irish Childhood (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960), p. 10. 65 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, p. 1. 66 National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), Women’s Committee Northern Ireland. Women’s Voices: An Oral History of Northern Irish Women’s Health (1900–1990) (Dublin: Attic Press, 1992), pp. 90–1. 67 Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 58. 68 Ryan, Asking Angela Macnamara, pp. 128–9. 69 Inglis, Moral Monopoly; Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, pp. 47, 56. 70 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, 20th anniversary edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001 [1979]), pp. 178, 196. 71 For a discussion, see Delay, ‘Ever so holy’. 72 Mary E. Daly, ‘Marriage, fertility, and women’s lives in twentieth-century Ireland (c. 1900–1970),’ Women’s History Review 15: 4 (September 2006), p. 571. See also Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History, 1800–1925, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993 [1988]), pp. 195–6.

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73 Daly, ‘Marriage, fertility, and women’s lives’, p. 573, citing Timothy W. Guinnane, Carolyn M. Moehling, and Cormac Ó Gráda, Fertility in South Dublin a Century Ago: A First Look (Dublin: University College Dublin, Centre for Economic Research, working papers series WP01/26, 2001); Hill, Women in Ireland, p. 22. 74 Daly, ‘Marriage, fertility, and women’s lives’, p. 572. 75 See Dympna McLoughlin, ‘Women and sexuality in nineteenth-­ century Ireland’, Irish Journal of Psychology 15: 2–3 (1994), pp. 266– 75; and Linda-May Ballard, Forgetting Frolic: Marriage Traditions in Ireland (Belfast and London: The Institute of Irish Studies, the Queen’s University of Belfast, 1998). Ellen Ross has argued similarly in her work on motherhood in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London. See her Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 76 NUPE, Women’s Voices, p. 20. 77 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, p. 94. Emphasis in the original. 78 See Clear, Women of the House, pp. 122–5 and Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child. 79 White, Remembering Ahanagran, p. 24. Carr gave birth to her first child in 1870, County Kerry. 80 Murphy, Don’t Wake Me at Doyles, p. 43. 81 Memories of Eibhlín Bean Uí Shé in Bibeanna: Memories from a Corner of Ireland, ed. Brenda Ní Shúilleabháin (Cork: Mercier Press, 2007), pp. 57–8. 82 Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 46. 83 DDA, McCabe Papers, file 353/1, Jane O’Neill Powers to McCabe, Waterford, 28 January 1881. 84 Owens, A Social History, p. 286. 85 Earner-Byrne, Mother and Child, p. 60. 86 Elizabeth Prendergast and Helen Sheridan, Jubilee Nurse: Voluntary District Nursing in Ireland, 1890–1974 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2012), p. 120. 87 Clear, Women of the House, pp. 98–9. 88 Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘Twixt God and geography: the development of maternity services in twentieth-century Ireland’, in Western ­Maternity and Medicine, 1880–1990, ed. Janet Greenlees and Linda Bryder (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), p. 103. 89 Clear, Women of the House, p. 96. 90 Aileen Heverin, The Irish Countrywomen’s Association, A History 1910–2000 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000), p. 9. 91 Ibid., p. 13. See also James MacPherson, ‘“Ireland begins in the home”: women, Irish ­national identity, and the domestic sphere in

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the Irish Homestead, 1896–1912’, Eire-Ireland 36: 3–4 (fall/winter 2001), pp. 131–52. 92 Nichole Sanders, ‘Mothering Mexico: the historiography of mothers and motherhood in 20th-century Mexico’, History Compass 7: 6 (2009), p. 1547. 93 Linda-May Ballard, ‘“Just whatever they had handy’: aspects of childbirth and early childcare in Northern Ireland prior to 1948,’ Ulster Folklife 31 (1992–3), p. 61. 94 NUPE, Women’s Voices, p. 20. On the Magdalen laundries, see Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries. 95 Crowley and Kitchin, ‘Producing “decent girls”’, p. 359. 96 Rattigan, ‘What Else Could I Do?’ 97 Anne O’Connor, The Blessed and the Damned: Sinful Women and Unbaptised Children in Irish Folklore (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 29. 98 Sandra McAvoy, “Before Cadden: abortion in mid-twentieth-century Ireland,” in The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s, ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Cork: Mercier Press, 2004), pp. 147–63; Cliona Rattigan, “‘Crimes of passion of the worst character”: Abortion cases and gender in Ireland, 1925–50’, in Gender and Power in Irish History, ed. Maryann Gialenella Valiulis (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009), pp. 115–39. 99 See, for example, Anonymous, ‘To protect girl emigrants,’ Irish Monthly (1914), in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V, pp. 580–1. 100 Irish Independent, 8 February 1937, cited in Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, p. 111. 101 Redmond, ‘“Sinful singleness?”’, pp. 455–76; Ryan, Gender, Identity, and the Irish Press, p. 112. 102 Valiulis, ‘Virtuous mothers and dutiful wives’, p. 101. 103 Report of the Committee on Evil Literature (Dublin, 1927), pp. 16, 19. 104 McAvoy [Larmour], Aspects of the State, p. 223. 105 Michael G. Cronin, Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism, and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 49. 106 Kane, ‘“She offered herself up”’, p. 82. 107 Ibid., p. 86. 108 Gerard Moran, ‘The Catholic Church after the famine: consolidation and change’, in Christianity in Ireland: Revisiting the Story, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Dáire Keogh, p. 192. 109 White, Remembering Ahanagran, p. 111. 110 T.H.K., ‘The devotion of all devotions’, The Irish Monthly 1: 1 (1873), p. 44. 111 Rev. Daniel I. McDermott, ‘The use of holy pictures and images’, in Cabinet of Catholic Information: A Collection of Letters and

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­ ritings of Eminent Prelates and Priests of the Catholic Church in W America and Europe, ed. Charles Henry Bowden (Buffalo, NY: ­Duggan Publishing, 1904), p. 122. 112 Ann Taves, ‘Mothers and children and the legacy of mid ­nineteenth-century American Christianity’, The Journal of Religion 67: 2 (April 1987), p. 209. See also David Morgan, The Sacred Heart of Jesus: The Visual Evolution of a Devotion (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); and Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), Chapter 4. 113 Mary Ellen Konieczny, ‘Sacred places, domestic spaces: material culture, church, and home at Our Lady of the Assumption and St.  Brigitta’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48: 3 (2009), p. 421. 114 Sari Kuuva, ‘Metabolism of visual symbols: case Madonna’, The International Journal of the Image 7: 2 (2016), p. 12. 115 Margaret Bruzelius, ‘Mother’s pain, mother’s voice: Gabriela Mistral, Julia Kristeva, and the mater dolorosa’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18: 2 (autumn 1999), p. 217. 116 Sanders, ‘Mothering Mexico’, p. 1544. 117 Here, I have focused on letters written in Dublin from the 1870s to the 1890s. For other relevant analyses of Irish women’s letters, see Harris, ‘“Come you all courageously”’, pp. 166–84; and EarnerByrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family to another religion [?]”: Irish Catholic women, protest, and conformity, 1920–1940’, in Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950. 118 DDA, McCabe papers, File 360/3, Maria R. to McCabe, 18 January 1883. 119 Ibid. 120 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/3/II/26. Catherine K., The Infirmary, Carrick on Suir, to Archbishop McCabe, 17 March 1879. 121 See also a similar letter from Mrs Bridget C., Tarn Hiller Glin, Co. Limerick, to McCabe. DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/3/II/84, 9 March 1880. 122 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/3/II/29, Catherine K., The Infirmary, Carrick on Suir, to Archbishop McCabe, 27 March 1879. 123 Earner-Byrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family”’, p. 109. 124 Ibid., p. 90. 125 Mrs M. McG., X, Templebey, Co. Sligo, 19 December 1934. DDA, Byrne papers, CC: Box 4: 1932–1935; cited in Earner-Byrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family”’, p. 87. 126 DDA, McCabe papers, file III/337/5/59. Maria H., Dublin, to McCabe, 20 February 1880.

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127 DDA, McCabe papers, file III/337/5/84. Bridget C., widow, Tarn Hiller, Glin, Co. Limerick, 9 March 1880. 128 DDA, McCabe papers, file 353/1. Mary W. to McCabe, 10 September 1881. 129 Earner-Byrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family”’, p. 121. 130 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/3/II/24. Frances B., Clifton Lodge, to McCabe, 9 March 1878. 131 Ingman, Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women, p. 75. 132 Taura S. Napier, ‘Pilgrimage to the self: autobiographies of twentiethcentury Irish women’, in Modern Irish Autobiography, p. 70. 133 NLI, Pamphlet P1389. Bishop Edward Thomas, Pastoral Letter to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Limerick, For Quinquagesima Sunday, 1912. 134 Earner-Byrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family”’, p. 78.

4 The holy household In working-class, early twentieth-century Dublin, Elaine Crowley’s mother conserved resources by purchasing used furniture. She did not hesitate, however, to buy a new framed picture of ‘Our Lady of Good Counsel’, placing it on the most prominent spot on the wall.1 Another working-class Dublin woman remembered that her mother blessed the house each evening with holy water, which she applied with a feather.2 ‘Like every Catholic house in Ireland’, wrote Maura Murphy, who was a child in the 1930s, we had a holy water font by the back door near a picture of the Sacred Heart, which was permanently lit by a glowing red lamp. Our font was made from an old jam jar and a twig of box hedging, and Mammy would sprinkle holy water around the house with the twig every night to protect us from evil spirits.3 As these examples illustrate, women – grandmothers, sisters, daughters, and mothers – oversaw the material culture of the early twentieth-century Irish Catholic household. By creating holy households dominated by a devotional material culture, Irish Catholic women asserted their religious authority within the home. These women established themselves as managers and overseers of household religion and also as the family’s primary protectors, consumers, and managers. The Irish household was both the principal site of Catholic material culture and consumption and a feminised religious space; it became so in the post-famine decades and remained thus through at least the mid-twentieth century. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that the Catholic household became an adjunct of the new nation; this chapter, therefore,

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focuses on these key decades as well as the earlier pivotal years of the ‘devotional revolution’. From the 1850s to the 1940s, Irish women supervised home-based rituals and devotions, including family prayer and the recitation of the rosary, as well as the important yet understudied station-mass. Lay women across Munster, Connacht, and Leinster demonstrated their dominance over the holy household in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although distinct differences occurred in rural and urban areas. The station-mass, for example, was a central ritual of rural parishes. Although the idealised Irish Catholic home from 1850 to 1950 was a rural one, evidence from towns and cities demonstrates that domestic religion was equally important in more populous areas. Devotional material culture, meanwhile, pervaded homes in all areas but was most visible in the early twentieth-century working-class neighbourhoods of cities such as Dublin and Cork. Through their management of the household and the prayers and rituals that occurred within it, lay women made their homes unique devotional spaces. They also moulded their children’s Catholic world-views and instilled in their daughters the skills and confidence they would need to create their own holy households one day. Overall, through their management of the holy household, Irish women carved out a sphere of female power in the midst of growing patriarchy. Households and materiality In To School Through the Fields, her prized memoir of a rural Irish childhood in the early 1900s, Alice Taylor described her home as ‘the nest from which we learned to fly’. ‘An ivy-clad farmhouse surrounded by trees’, she continued, ‘it stood on the sunny side of a sloping hill at the foot of which the Darigle river curved its way through gold-furzed inches to disappear under a stone bridge into the woods beyond’.4 Marrie Walsh, whose autobiography detailed her childhood in 1930s and 1940s County Mayo, opened her narrative with a chapter entitled simply ‘Home’.5 These idealised depictions of the rural household, integral to national identity construction at the time, were echoed in contemporary Irish newspapers. Founded in 1895, the Irish Homestead became known for its attempts to glorify the Catholic home and

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for its household hints offered to farming women. Throughout the early twentieth century, it featured several columns, including ‘The Fireside’, ‘Household Hints’, and ‘Pages for Irish Country Women’, designed specifically for women.6 Similarly, in March 1936, the Irish Press described rural homes with ‘…  their cottages soft, warm-roofed, with love inside them. No wonder that the sweet scented smoke from the turf fire hovers like a halo overhead before it fades away to join the gently moving clouds.’7 In keeping with nationalistic goals, contemporary accounts of Irish homes emphasised their cleanliness, underscoring Irish women’s admirable housekeeping skills, displaying how capable they were, and, by extension, affirming why Ireland was fit for self-rule. Robert Lynd wrote in 1909 that the state of Irish homes would ‘strike’ any visitor, who, expecting dirt, would find only spotlessness.8 Ireland’s prescriptive literature left no doubt that it was women who were responsible for sanitation and indeed everything else related to the home. ‘The grandest, noblest women of to-day’, proclaimed the Homestead in 1895, ‘are those who nurse their own little ones, who do their own housework, who minister to the comforts of their own loved ones, who believe that the grandest blessings in the world are good homes, and help to make them’.9 Contemporaries viewed the Irish country home as the microcosm of the nation, and women’s household duties thus as both religious and political.10 ‘Now everyone knows’, wrote nationalist Mary Butler in 1903, ‘that woman makes the home atmosphere; therefore, women are the chief nation-builders’.11 For many Irish people, however, quaint depictions of home could not have been further from reality. Rural poverty persisted in the postfamine decades. Travellers and commentators remarked on the dismal conditions of some rural households; one woman who had thirteen siblings remembered of her early twentieth-century Galway childhood home: We lived in a cottage – it was my grandfather’s small farm. There were three rooms, one to one side and one to the other. The kitchen was in the middle. There was a place above the two side rooms, and you had to have steps to get up there. Three or four of the boys used to sleep up there. There were three girls in the bed,

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myself and two of my sisters. Then there would be smaller ones in cots, and beds here and there. It was very crowded.12 Similarly, both memoirists and social historians such as Kevin Kearns have highlighted the desperate conditions of the urban working-class home.13 The idealised Irish home, then, rarely resembled the actual living conditions of most Irish Catholics. Although notable for its sparse dé cor, the poor rural or working-class urban Irish home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also known for wives’ and mothers’ attempts to incorporate religious popular culture into the domestic sphere; indeed, these attempts traversed social class, region, and economic realities.14 Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, the most humble of rural homes exhibited devotional items. Even the most destitute homes in the nineteenth-century Irish countryside, writes Claudia Kinmonth, featured at minimum a rosary hanging on the wall or from a shelf.15 In George Washington Brownlow’s idealised portrayal of a fisherman’s cottage (1861), a rosary hangs clearly on the wall to the left of the family. Visible also is the spinning wheel to the right, which bears witness to women’s cottage industry; women’s religiosity and economic productivity together governed the household and ensured the family’s survival. Nineteenth-century artists such as Erskine Nichol placed religious artefacts in their works to mark their paintings as Catholic, to reflect real-life households, and to highlight the home as a feminised space.16 Such depictions continued through the first decades of independence: Christine Hurlstone Jackson’s Music on the Great Blasket (1933) illustrates a rural domestic scene with a ‘mass-produced print’ of the Virgin Mary and Child on a shelf next to a ‘red votive oil lamp’. In actual Irish homes, parents and children made such shelves, often decorated with flowers, the centre of family prayers.17 The representation of the home as a religious and female space only increased in the new century. Tony Farmar argues that the home was everything to Irish women by the early twentieth century, and that they did their best to make their ‘bleak’ households devotional spaces, placing religious statues in ‘even the poorest rooms’.18 In early twentieth-century middle-class Christian America, devotional items were

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featured in four particular rooms: the living room, dining room, bedroom, and entryway.19 In rural Ireland, however, particularly where there were more modest dwellings, holy artefacts appeared most commonly in the kitchen or bedrooms. Bridget Dirrane, who grew up on the Aran Islands in the 1900s and 1910s, recalled that her parents ‘had a big statue of Our Lady on a stand in the corner of their bedroom’, and ‘[t]he main statue was surrounded by some smaller ones.’20 When Protestant Lily O’Shea paid a visit to a deathbed in a Catholic friend’s home, she entered a bedroom in the home and became overwhelmed by its devotional atmosphere. ‘I followed [my friend]’, she later wrote, ‘and knelt down with her at the foot of the bed and tried not to look at the still, white face on the pillow or the hands with the rosary beads entwined around them. Instead, my eyes fixed on a large picture of the Sacred Heart, hanging over the bed.’21 When it comes to material culture and spectatorship, we must recognise that women’s responses to devotional items may represent both resistance to patriarchy and a reassertion of it.22 By creating holy households, Irish Catholic women both celebrated the divine feminine and asserted their religious authority within the home. Elizabeth L’Estrange, in her research on holy motherhood in the late Middle Ages, attempts to unpack and disrupt the ‘“empowerment” versus “victim” binary that has characterized …  studies of women’s engagement with religious texts and images’.23 Similarly, David Morgan writes that women in the modern United States decorated their homes with images of Christ as a subversive act, one that allowed them to claim that he was the head of the household in order to usurp their husbands’ patriarchal authority.24 The choices that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish women made as they adorned their households with religious objects were equally deliberate, designed to conform to Church expectations but also to establish, highlight, or augment their own authority. By featuring Catholic material culture in their bedrooms, rural lay Catholic women also personalised devotion, expressing their close relationships to the Virgin Mary and Christ. Irish culture from 1850 to 1950 consistently articulated that women were central actors in the home, maintaining that the home, as a religious space, was the domain of the bean an tí  (woman of the house). In the post-famine decades, however, as the rhetoric of idealised

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Catholic womanhood increased, so too did expectations for women in the domestic sphere. And by the early twentieth century, as print and material culture exploded and cities and suburbs grew, women’s responsibilities in the home intertwined with purchasing, consumerism, and the larger economy. More families lived in urban areas, where there were also increased opportunities for purchasing ready-made goods. Early twentieth-century Irish households in towns and cities thus were places where women not only managed devotional space but also made significant financial decisions. While scholars long have explored the connections between consumerism and secularisation, it is clear that popular Catholicism and modern consumerism were linked in Ireland and beyond. Vincent Miller writes that the consumption of religion is tied to the modern phenomenon of the single-family home and the nuclear family. In his view, the home became, by the late nineteenth century, the ‘fundamental unit of culture’ and thus the primary site of religious consumption.25 Acquiring devotional items for the home was a primary duty of Irish wives and mothers. Thus modern Irish Catholicism, with its visual and material culture, was deeply wedded to commercialisation and consumerism. Indeed, the rise of the middle classes in Ireland, as elsewhere, was accompanied by ‘the rise of commodity culture’.26 In Lisa Godson’s analysis, the late nineteenth-century ‘devotional revolution’ was ‘a phase that saw the mass consumption of mass-produced religious objects in Ireland, and the growth of wholesale and retail businesses dedicated to selling these objects’. Godson argues that the ‘scale of consumption of religious objects in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century was nothing short of a consumer revolution’.27 Godson also writes that the key era of change in terms of the production and distribution of devotional objects in Ireland occurred from the 1840s to the 1860s.28 It is important to go beyond this to explore the gendered dimensions of this phenomenon, however, as well as how this popular Catholic material culture and consumerism evolved as the twentieth century progressed. For the early twentieth-century woman of the house intent on making her home a space of tangible piety, inspiration could be found in lots of places, including newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, which advertised holy statues, religious pictures, rosary beads,

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repres­entations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and holy water fonts.29 Thousands of Irish Catholic women read these popular publications, which surged in the late nineteenth century and remained popular through most of the next century.30 Publications such as the Irish Catholic Directory printed advertisements for everything from devotional medals to altar plates that could be imported from all across Europe, and Irish Catholic women, even poor rural or working-class women, eagerly purchased such items for their homes.31 By 1896, according to Godson, more than 300 advertisements for devotional items (compared to just 30 about 60 years earlier) appeared in the Directory.32 In 1932, the year of the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland, the Directory featured companies such as Dublin’s James Duffy selling a variety of rosary beads, including ‘in Fancy Colours or in Mother of Pearl’ for between four and eight shillings, as well as brown scapulars, statues of St. Anne, Sacred Heart badges, hanging crucifixes, religious framed pictures, and holy water fonts.33 Newspapers, which grew both in number and in popularity throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, printed advertisements enticing women to spend money on religious paraphernalia. In 1904, The Connaught Champion ran a story on the annual Croagh Patrick pilgrimage. Prominently on the same page was a large advertisement for women’s accessories: ‘Straw and Fancy Hats, Bonnets and Toques, …  Ribbons, Velvets, Ladies’ Silk Skirts and Blouses, Feather Boas, …  Corsets, Umbrellas and Dress Trimmings … .’34 Even as the Champion demonstrated the importance of a gendered consumerism, it illustrated some of the conflicts that women, especially middle-class women in urban areas, faced when making consumer choices; available for purchase were not only devotional materials but also frivolous and even foreign items. The Church hierarchy took care to warn women against the latter. In 1935, Cork’s Bishop Cohalan wrote in the Southern Star that Irish Catholic women must combat modern evils such as immodest dress. He urged them to ‘band together into one in setting fashions and amusement which would elevate the young people who follow such fashions’.35 The Irish Homestead, which began publication in 1895, directed several columns, including ‘The Fireside’, ‘Household Hints’, and ‘Pages for Irish Country Women’ to women, in order to make them more

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industrious as well as ‘content with less finery, less hats, veils, gloves and neck garniture, and more self-respecting, decent inner garments and bed furnishings’.36 Prescriptive literature focused on proper behaviour, in an age when some women in cities had significant purchasing power, as well as proper consumerism. In modern Ireland, appropriate behaviour for women meant not only modest dress but also the consumption of properly Catholic goods. The advertisement of non-religious items, and notably modern fashions such as fancy bonnets and corsets, was troubling to Church authorities, who urged lay Irish women to focus their purchasing on respectable devotional items. Still, the Church was unable to stem the tide of secular consumerism. On the same page as one of the Southern Star’s 1931 articles on Catholic womanhood was an advertisement for Beecham’s Pills for ‘sick headache, indigestion, constipation’ and ‘biliousness’.37 Beecham’s Pills also were known popularly as a menstrual regulator or abortifacient.38 Well-off or middle-class Catholic women, then, read about proper consumption but also repeatedly faced reminders that the world had changed, and that they now could purchase not only devotional objects but also any sorts of ‘fripperies’ that their hearts desired and even medicines to control their fertility. Irish women were charged with making themselves into discerning and moral consumers by the early twentieth century, but they had other choices as well. When it came to finding places to purchase Catholic devotional items, urban Irish women also had several possibilities, including itinerant pedlars, local shops, and mission stalls. According to Sara Hyland of Dundrum in County Dublin, salesmen came around her childhood neighbourhood selling ‘ornaments, pictures, lengths of material and other goods’.39 As Godson reminds us, women could also acquire images and prints via ‘“ecclesiastical warehouses” that sprang up from the 1840s’ or ‘through religious orders importing statues and prints from abroad’.40 Assisted by mass production and the import of foreign-made items, shops across Ireland, even in some rural areas, began to carry various religious objects by the late nineteenth century.41 By the early twentieth century, Alice Taylor, discussing her local shop and Ned, the shopkeeper, observed: ‘High on the shelves behind him, flash lamps, bicycle repair kits, Sacred Heart lamps, alarm clocks and all

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sorts of things stood’.42 Some devotional prints also came free of cost in Catholic magazines and newspapers. Robert Lynd’s early twentieth-century description of poor rural Irish houses included the following: The turf fire burns on the floor against the wall furthest from the door … . High upon another wall rises the dresser … . Perhaps, there is a wooden bed in the corner of the room … . If there is a second room …  sometimes, in a room like this, you see crudely-coloured pictures of saints plastered all over the wall – ­pictures sold by pedlars or given away with religious papers.43 When Lynd remarked on ‘crudely-coloured’ images, he acknowledged the ways that economic transformations affected popular religion; by the new century, inexpensive, mass-produced prints had become readily available across Ireland, opening up material Catholicism even to the poor. Whether in the 1860s countryside or 1930s Dublin, when Irish women bought devotional items, they made the Irish Catholic household a primary site of economic activity, deepening the links between a feminised popular religion and feminised popular consumption. As they bought imported items to adorn their holy households, Irish Catholic women not only honed their purchasing skills; they also served to create material ties between Ireland and the larger Catholic world. Through home-based Catholic material culture, wives and mothers established themselves as the family’s primary consumers and money-managers. For poor women, these were not easy tasks; managing the household economy was a skill that sometimes required flexibility and ingenuity. Cork’s Eibhlí s de Barra wrote in her autobiography of a local woman who pawned her St. Anthony statue every Monday but always bought it back every Friday, once she got paid.44 This pervasive domestic material culture naturally had a profound impact on Irish Catholic children. Girls and boys who came of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gazed upon and interacted with a plethora of religious images in their homes, including pictures of the saints and the Virgin, the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, ‘plaster statues of Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima,

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St Anne, The Infant of Prague, …  framed papal blessings, rosary beads, reproductions of canonical Italian religious paintings, prayer books, pious medals and leaflets … ’.45 The Catholic Bulletin in 1911 published the following account of the effects of religious imagery in the home: Religious pictures in the home appeal strongly to the minds of children and convey a mute lesson. A little girl who had been gazing intently on a striking representation of the denial of St. Peter once asked her mother why was ‘poor St. Peter always crying?’ Then the patient mother, though busily occupied, took a great deal of pains to explain to her how sorry the great saint was for having denied his divine Master, and how much he loved Jesus ever after. ‘But he is not crying now’, she added; ‘he is in heaven, where there are no tears but all joy’. Some days after, this typical mother observed all her children grouped before a devotional print, just enthroned above the mantelpiece, in its new gilt frame. Its subject was our Saviour walking majestically on the waters of His favourite Sea of Galillee [sic] … 46 In this example, the mother’s careful tutelage merged with the children’s natural curiosity to create a fascination with devotional prints. Observing statues and religious pictures encouraged imaginations, and particularly those of children. When children engaged with the physical and tangible elements of devotion in the home, they romanticised domestic Catholicism. As the twentieth century advanced, household devotional items became cheaper and more readily available; therefore, children coming of age from 1900 to the 1950s had a greater exposure to these household items than did their nineteenth-century counterparts. Some of the earliest memories of Christina McKenna, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, situated her girlhood in the midst of the Catholic artefacts of the home: My life only begins to assume definition and colour for me when I turn four. I am standing on the kitchen floor, looking up at three pictures on a wall: the Sacred Heart with its burning candle and

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a portrait on either side: those of President John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII.47 For McKenna, looking at the three pictures burned into her memory the connections between religion and Irishness. Each image also declared her, and her family’s, Catholic identity. From the ‘devotional revolution’ years right through the middle of the twentieth century, Catholic children such as McKenna experienced their faith most concretely by interacting with religious items in the home. They thus learned to ‘encounter or interact with the sacred’ first in the household and indeed were first socialised into popular Catholicism in their own homes.48 As girls and boys learned ‘the discourses and habits of their religious community’ through places and things, the influence of their mothers loomed large.49 All of the memoirists studied here affirmed the pivotal roles mothers played in the domestic and devotional lives of Irish children. As women became more aligned with the home and the private sphere in the post-famine era, as Catholic devotions gained favour throughout Ireland, and as household prayers such as the rosary increased in popularity, Irish wives and mothers welcomed new influence as the guardians of religion in the home. They managed household devotional rituals and also created and nourished a ‘powerful visual cultural identity for generations of Irish Catholics’.50 Mothers taught both sons and daughters about Catholicism, but they placed a particular emphasis on educating girls, who later would create their own holy households. Even with the increases in formal schooling and chapel-based devotions in the late nineteenth century, Irish girls first learned religious discipline and Catholic gender norms at home. Recounting her childhood in County Clare in the 1920s, Dersie Leonard professed, ‘When the chores were done it was time to do our school exercise. This generally took about three hours. Each night we had to learn a few questions from the Catechism and the Bible had to be learned from cover to cover.’51 Well into the mid-twentieth century, some girls continued to learn their faith primarily at home. Nan Donohoe of County Longford, who belonged to the traveller community, attended school only sporadically, but her religious education was not neglected: ‘I used to stay home to help me mother’,

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Donohoe remembered, ‘and she teached me prayers and catechism. Me mother and her mother before her always got their own children teached – how to get their communion, how to receive, what to say and all like that …  I had it off by heart.’52 Donohoe’s memories demonstrate how religious education was passed on through the women of the family. Mirroring the curriculum in national schools, home-based religious instruction was gendered. In his treatise The Mirror of True Womanhood, Bernard O’Reilly guided mothers on the proper domestic education of Catholic children. He advised women to teach their sons courtesy, formality, and chivalry, and to make the home the ‘only centre of amusement’ for their sons so that they would overcome their natural impulses to ‘seek companionship and amusement outside of the home’.53 While O’Reilly highlighted the mother’s civilising influence on boys, his directives for raising daughters were far more specific. Of utmost importance, he asserted, was that girls be taught devotions and the use of devotional objects: ‘the sign of the cross, the use of holy water, of blessed candles, the devotion of the rosary, that of the way of the cross … ’. Mothers also, he wrote, should tutor girls on what to read (not ‘cheap novels’) and ensure that they dress properly and modestly.54 This education presumably would prepare girls to assume their future roles as Catholic wives and mothers and lead their own holy households. Margaret Cusack wrote in 1877 that Irish girls should help their mothers manage household Catholicism; this would keep them away from more damaging pastimes, such as fashion and fiction, while preparing them for their future domestic duties.55 She also discussed the delights of building a nativity scene, or crib, in one’s household. Her instructions advised girls: For a very trifling expense you can get the figures of Mary and Joseph and the little infant Jesus, and all you need then is a little straw to make your crib complete, and a few flowers or green leaves to put round it. Here you should make a little visit every day, and offer your heart to the Infant Jesus, begging of Him to bless you, and to make you one of the little children who shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.56

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We can view Cusack’s guidelines as an attempt to make religion more tangible and comprehensible for children. Cusack not only instructed girls on how to build a crib but also showed them how to treat the figure of the infant Jesus and how to comport their own bodies while near the crib. She thus linked the body of the infant Jesus with the body of the child worshipper in what Robert Orsi calls the ‘corporalization of the sacred’.57 As they got older, girls were expected to assist their mothers with teaching their siblings, or, if the mother died, to take over such responsibilities. Much of Ireland’s conduct literature thus not only highlighted mothers’ duties to their children but also very clearly laid out girls’ religious responsibilities to their families. As early as 1846, the Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools contained a prescriptive piece called ‘The Obliging Girl’, in which Lucy, …  knows how to make herself very useful to her mother and her older sisters. She is always ready to run for any thing that is wanted, whether it is up stairs or down … Very often she comes when her mother and sisters are sitting at work together, and asks if there is not something that they would like to have her do … 58 Lucy’s home was a world of women inhabited by her mother and sisters, and as the youngest, it was Lucy’s duty to assist them when necessary. Sixty-five years later, when the first volume of the Catholic Bulletin was published in 1911, it contained a story called ‘A Valiant Woman’. In it, eldest daughter Anne leads a motherless family in its religious instruction. Frustrated at her father’s lax attention to Catholic duties, Anne tells her priest that it is up to her to take over: ‘Who is to see that they attend Mass, instructions, and religious duties?’59 The Bulletin affirmed the piety and responsibilities of Irish Catholic girls, clarifying that their primary duties were to their faith and their families. This story highlighted duty but also control; here, again, conservative values fostered progressive thought and action. The similar messages of the 1846 Reading Book and the 1911 Bulletin illustrate that the ideal of womanhood that was advocated by the Church in some ways remained remarkably consistent across decades of economic, political, and social turmoil.

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Household devotions Prescriptive literature advised that lay Catholic women not only create a sacred family space but also actively direct the home-based prayers and religious rituals that defined Irish life in the century after the famine. In almost all Irish households, nightly prayers were led by women. By the late nineteenth century, as home life increasingly revolved around Catholicism, mothers’ and, sometimes, grandmothers’ supervision of household devotions, including family prayer, became more pronounced.60 The home would continue to be a feminised devotional space right through the middle of the twentieth century. When they led their families in prayer, Irish women created a domestic sphere of Catholic piety and family unity. They also established and maintained their authority within the holy household. In her account of her life on the Blasket Islands in the 1910s and 1920s, Má ire Ní  Ghuithí n privileged the role of prayer in her country household. In Ní  Ghuithí n’s girlhood memories, it was her mother who made the home a nucleus of prayer. Indeed, Ní  Ghuithí n’s mother prayed not only in the morning or evening, but throughout the day. She also taught her children to use prayer in daily life; Ní  Ghuithí n remembered that, in order to ward off bad dreams, her mother encouraged her to bless herself and say ‘May the son of Mary judge my dream to be good and may it please God and Mary today.’61 Sometimes grandmothers, when they were around, and particularly when they lived with their children and grandchildren, also led prayers. Alice Taylor described her childhood bedtime ritual with her grandmother in her early twentieth-century memoir Country Days. As her grandmother put Taylor to bed, ‘[s]he said the rosary and many prayers and taught me one of them. For many nights we laboured over that prayer, and I thought that it was the longest prayer I had ever heard.’ Taylor’s grandmother ‘drummed’ the prayer ‘into [her] sleepy head’; Taylor remembered it even decades later.62 Evening prayers, and the rosary in particular, formed the foundation of family devotion in modern Ireland.63 Publicised across Europe in the late fifteenth century, the rosary became popular between 1560 and 1600.64 The prayer itself, as Rev. M. D. Forrest describes in a 1926 treatise to encourage rosary devotion, entails the recitation ‘of fifteen

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decades, and each decade is made up of one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and one Glory be to the Father. Thus the complete Rosary consists of fifteen Pater Nosters and Glorias, and one hundred and fifty Ave Marias.’65 By about the year 1500, most Catholics recited their rosary prayers while using a string of rosary beads to count the prayers.66 Rosary devotions allowed ordinary Catholics to experience the verbal, aural, and tactile dimensions of popular Catholicism as well as to personalise piety and link the body with religious material culture. In the late nineteenth century, rosary devotions spread in popularity across Europe, especially after the Marian apparitions at Lourdes (1858), in which the Virgin allegedly appeared holding a rosary.67 Rosary beads had become prized possessions by 1858 across Ireland, from Dublin to Connemara. Beads meant so much to some people that pleas for help finding lost rosaries featured in contemporary newspapers. The Irish Examiner published the following in July 1867: ‘LOST – Dropped, a small Rosary Bead, of dark blue Stones – of no use to anyone but the owner. Anyone finding it and bringing it to Miss M.A. Skillen, 30 Great Parade, will be rewarded.’68 Decades later, in 1948, a similar post appeared in the Connacht Tribune: ‘Lost – Rosary Beads (Relic in Crucifix), outside Abbey Church, 18th May; reward; sentimental value.’69 Passing down cherished rosary beads from parent to child, and in particular from mother to daughter, became commonplace in Ireland. Evidence that the Irish Folklore Commission (IFC) collected in the mid-twentieth century asked people to remember how Catholics viewed and treated their rosary beads. According to one woman, in the late nineteenth century If a mother’s beads were kept (meaning not put in coffin when she died) they were given to a daughter and if a daughter were in a foreign land when the mother died, her beads were forwarded to that daughter.70 Another folklore informant told a similar story: Yes, the mother’s beads were given to the eldest daughter, and the father’s were given to the eldest son … . Beads handed down were

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regarded as a relic and were of sentimental value to the person who got them. Such beads also prompted prayers for the original owner.71 The fact that folklorists deliberately collected information on the rosary in the twentieth century illuminates the importance of the prayer, and the material culture of the rosary, in Irish culture and history. The questions specific to the rosary that IFC staff asked included the following: 10 c) Were beads handed down from one generation to another, e.g. from mother to daughter? Were each person’s beads buried with him (her)?72 By featuring women and girls in this question, the Irish Folklore commissioners revealed their confidence that women managed these deeply personal and sentimental devotional items, thus recognising the extent to which popular prayer and religious material culture remained feminised by the mid-twentieth century. Members of the Irish Church hierarchy invoked the popularity not only of rosary beads but also, especially, of the rosary prayer as evidence of Ireland’s commitment to religion. In a 1900 pastoral letter, the Irish bishops described their ‘special satisfaction’ with the growing prevalence of saying the rosary in Irish homes: We have observed, with special satisfaction, the renewal of the old fervour of our people in the recitation of the Most Holy Rosary … . With the unerring instinct of faith, the Irish people have ever cherished the Holy Mother of God, in their inmost hearts, with a particular and most tender love; and by some attraction, or rather some gift of God’s grace, they have found in the recitation of the Holy Rosary, as family prayer, something congenial to all their religious thoughts and feelings. In these Practices of piety, and in countless other ways, we find the evidences of our people’s spiritual progress.73 Similarly, Rev. Joseph Forrest’s 1926 pamphlet on the rosary praised the devotion for bringing together Catholic families: ‘The Rosary is

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especially popular as a form of family prayer, and no Catholic father or mother should allow a night to pass without assembling the children, and offering together to the Mother of God this tribute of praise and of supplication.’74 W. J. Lockington, a British Jesuit who lived in Ireland in the 1910s, also wrote of the people’s devotion to the rosary. His account, unsurprisingly, featured the household and placed the woman of the house centre stage: Look at eventide at the home hallowed by the presence of the Irish mother. Whether it be amid the long sea-arms of Kerry, the blue mountains of Donegal and Antrim, on the green pastures of Meath or the towering hills of Wicklow, all the members of each house go rapidly to where she sits waiting, rosary in hand, by the hallowed hearth. The father comes from the forge or the shop of the shoemaker, where he has been ‘colloguing’ with the elders, and  the boys leave their games. Round her they kneel, and she begins the evening prayer of Ireland – the rosary of their Mother, Muire.75 Linking the Irish mother, the home, rosary devotion, and the Virgin Mary, Lockington neatly summarised the main tropes of home-based Catholicism. He also carefully chronicled the reality that all parts of the island, urban or rural, made the rosary a central domestic ritual. Similarly, first-hand descriptions of rosary devotions from the 1870s through the 1930s placed the woman of the house at the centre of home-based religious practice.76 Rev. Joseph Guinan, well-known for his popular novels, observed in his 1903 Scenes and Sketches in an Irish Parish that the ‘simple’ and ‘child-like’ faith of the local people depended on the actions of Irish women, whose religious purity was demonstrated by their unwavering devotion to the saying of the rosary each evening.77 Writer John Healy described the women of his family in the early twentieth century as an inexorable force in the household’s religion. Healy’s grandmother, when it was time to say the rosary, put her sewing aside. From a nail on the wall she’d take the big Rosary beads, and without any more than her ritual ‘Let ye get down on yer knees, and we’ll say the Rosary in the name of God’, we got up from our seats, knelt down with our backs to

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the fire and one another, leaned our elbows on the seat or the form, and made the responses.78 Most descriptions of the rosary resemble that of Healy: a matriarch, moving easily from her domestic tasks to her religious duties, led the rosary, and the rest of the family ‘made the responses’. In prayer, Irish women led their families; men assumed a secondary role. Indeed, women memoirists and autobiographers remembered that, when it came to the rosary, the authority of their mothers was absolute. ‘She had streaks of uncompromising rigidity’, Alice Taylor of County Cork remembered of her mother. ‘The family rosary was one of these: sick, maimed or crippled, we were all on our knees for the rosary.’79 Historian Margaret MacCurtain asserts that household rituals and prayers throughout the twentieth century ‘reinforced the influence of the mother who assumed iconic stature’.80 Some Irish Catholics, particularly adolescents, came to resent the demands of household devotions and their mothers’ domestic authority. Reminiscing about the 1930s and 1940s, Siné ad of Dublin found the rosary boring and increasingly came to begrudge the evening prayer. ‘You know, kneel down after tea and you were dying to get out and we would have to say this awful rosary’, she claimed.81 A County Roscommon man told a similar story in which an adolescent girl and her mother battled over the rosary. ‘A girl home from England; she was a nurse, I think; She was McDonnell’, he said, ‘and they were at the Rosary this night & the mother was sayin’ the Rosary & she had a lot of prayers added on to it & this girl got up & said: “I believe in prayers & I believe in the Rosary, but I don’t believe in being all night on me knees”.’82 In the 1920s and 1930s, Maura Murphy’s family prayed every night in front of a makeshift altar, ‘knees chafing against the concrete floor’. ‘As we got older’, wrote Murphy of herself and her siblings, ‘we couldn’t wait for this nightly ritual to be over. When we got bored we would pinch each other’s heels and start giggling. If we were caught, we’d get a whack around the ear for making a mockery of the holy prayers.’83 These examples also testify to the centrality of prayer and the rosary in both urban and rural areas. During the rosary or ‘family prayer’, the space of the household, its layout, and the placement of objects and people in it mattered.

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Christina Brophy has shown how ‘what participants gazed upon while performing devotions’ changed in the late nineteenth century: As noted by an 83-year-Donegal farmer in 1961, when saying the rosary, every member of the family knelt facing away from the fire; he commented, ‘In olden times the’ was no holy pictures but when missions started all over the country people were asked to buy a picture of the Sacred Heart or Holy Family, and after that the person givin’ out the Rosary sometimes faced this picture.’84 Just like they were expected to do in the local chapel, Catholics had to carefully control their bodies during household devotions. Kneeling was, of course, required for the able-bodied. Those who needed support could avail themselves of a stool.85 Each family member remained close to the hearth, which was ‘the focal point around which [all] household activities revolved’,86 but ‘facing away from the fire’ and organised in a semi-circle.87 While some accounts claim that participants would turn towards a holy picture in the home, others reveal that they could also face the local chapel.88 Timing was also significant; almost all descriptions place the ‘family prayer’ in the evening, after dinner, when the entire family was most likely to be at home. ‘The rosary was always said directly after tea’, and before washing the dishes, remembered Mary Mulvey.89 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not uncommon for the prayer to be said around 11:00 pm, after dances and neighbourly visits. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, informants claimed, the rosary would be recited around 7:00.90 The waning of the nightly rosary recitation has been interpreted as one of the clearest signs of secularisation in late twentieth-century Ireland. James Donnelly maintains that Irish families mostly abandoned rosary devotions in the 1960s; some Catholic commentators at the time placed the blame for this decline on the attractions of television.91 By the 1960s and 1970s, remembered Maeve Flanagan, such household devotions were associated with older people and viewed as somewhat outdated. In Flanagan’s case, her grandmother’s piety was not something the rest of the family shared: ‘The most sacred spot in

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Granny’s corner was reserved for her prayer books and her rosary beads. I had to be very quiet every day when she said her prayers.’92 In Flanagan’s narrative, her grandmother, rather than being at the centre of the family’s devotion, prayed alone and on the periphery. Angela Macnamara’s advice column in the Sunday Press in the 1960s and 1970s revealed conflicts between mothers and children over family prayer. In a time when children were resisting family prayer such as the rosary, mothers were conflicted about how to proceed. Q: In your reply to the parent who wrote about the family rosary you said ‘let it be clear to your children that there is no obligation to join in family prayer’. …  firstly isn’t there an obligation on children to respect their parents. If they do respect them they won’t refuse to join them for ten minutes each evening for the family rosary …  I believe the family rosary should be said in every Catholic home daily. A: I certainly agree with you that from the earliest years families should pray together daily. But as children grow older I don’t think that they should be forced on their knees and I do think that they should have an opportunity to discuss their feelings on the matter.93 The waning of the rosary may have contributed to a concurrent decline in women’s religious authority. Still, some older women interviewed for oral histories in the 2000s asserted that their faith remained strong even in their twilight years, and several credited the rosary for this. By maintaining their commitment to the rosary and other devotions in the late twentieth century, Irish women could attempt to maintain religious authority as well as resist secularisation and modernisation. Between public and private: the station-mass In her best-selling To School Through the Fields (1988), Alice Taylor devoted an entire chapter to her memories of the station-mass, a household-based mass and confession, also colloquially known as the ‘stations’.94 According to Taylor, whose remembrances featured her County Cork parish in the 1940s and 1950s, the stations were a vital

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religious occasion, with all neighbours attending, the priest saying mass in the kitchen, the kitchen table serving as the altar, and confessions held by the fire in the parlour.95 The stations were one of the cornerstones of rural home-based Catholic devotion in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’, but their origins lay well before the modern era, and they had become somewhat controversial by the post-famine years. Before the mid-nineteenth century, many Irish villages lacked functioning chapels; in these places, Catholics tended to gather for mass outdoors or at chapel ruins. Even in parishes that had chapels, long distances between parishioners’ homes and chapels hindered regular attendance at mass and confession. Holding stations in parishioners’ homes, therefore, likely originated so that priests could offer people regular confession.96 And through the early nineteenth century, the stations provided some Catholics with the only religious instruction they received throughout the year. The station-mass became a regular practice throughout the south and west of Ireland by the middle of the century and became a forum in which all sorts of parishioners could participate in religious rituals; in 1856, for example, one Kerry parish held thirty-eight stations in one year.97 As was true of much associated with popular Catholicism in the post-famine decades, regional variation mattered when it came to the frequency of stations and their persistence within the new chapel-based landscape that began to discourage such home-based rituals. One family’s diary revealed that in parts of Tipperary, the stations already were moving from the home to the chapel in 1873. According to the diary, the last station was held in the parish that year; from then on, all masses and confessions were moved to the local chapel.98 Station-mass reforms were part of a larger dialogue about homebased religious practice that arose after the Great Famine. At the 1850 Synod of Thurles, Archbishop Paul Cullen’s attempts to reform Catholicism included eliminating private, home-based masses altogether. According to Cullen and some of his allies, holding the sacraments outside of the chapel represented problems for a Church whose goals included containing and controlling parishioners, enforcing priestly and male domination, and moulding devotion into a mechanism for peace and order. Particularly troubling to the institutional Church was the practice of confessions at the stations. Beginning in the late

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nineteenth century, as the legislation of the Synod Thurles decreed, penance was to occur only in the confined space of the confessional box, leading to some to question the possibility of continuing to hold stations.99 Some bishops, however, refused to allow the delegates at the Synod of Thurles to abolish the station-mass. Believing the stations to be the best chance for priests to connect with their people, bishops of the southern and western dioceses, where chapel-mass attendance was still difficult, attempted to convince Cullen and Roman authorities of their necessity. In January 1854, Bishop Keane of Ross wrote to Cashel’s Bishop Michael Slattery and reported that, unfortunately, the Roman officials ‘could not quite see their way to allow the widespread practice of saying Mass and hearing confessions in private houses’. Keane had tried to elucidate the stations’ origins and importance, but his explanation ‘appeared as a revelation to the authorities in Rome’. In another letter to Slattery, Keane claimed that the Roman hierarchy was satisfied with the legislation of the Synod of Thurles, with the exception of ‘the thorny question of the Stations’.100 In southern and western dioceses, like Keane’s Ross and Slattery’s Cashel, the station-mass was an essential element of local Catholic ritual. ‘With regard to the gentle practice of holding stations’, wrote Kerry’s Bishop David Moriarty in 1874, ‘we are convinced that its abandonment would lead to the total neglect of religion amongst the people’.101 For the Church overall, then, the stations represented a quandary in a time of religious change, and the very geography of parts of Ireland hindered the progression of Catholicism from a localised, feminised faith to a centralised, hierarchical, and male institution. The meaning of the stations could be equally as complex for parishioners. For some, predominantly in remote rural areas, the station-mass continued to be the only venue for their religious instruction. For others, the sense of parish community that it wrought was essential to local life. This may have been uniquely important to those with less access to official channels of power: women, children, and the elderly. ‘Many old people’, wrote Guinan of the parish of Doon, County Limerick: long since incapable …  of going to Mass at the Parish Church, managed, somehow, to come to the station house …  the lame, ...

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the blind and the deaf were there, as well as the young and ­vigorous; the smooth-cheeked, rosy-faced girl of eighteen side by side with the withered and wrinkled old grandmother of eighty ... Some mothers had brought their younger children with them, even babes in arms.102 Although sentimental, Guinan’s description nevertheless articulated a dynamic at work at the station-mass: it was perhaps the one occasion at which almost all parishioners, from ‘babes in arms’ to the ‘withered and wrinkled’, came together. The station-mass consequently became one of the most prominent and public community events in the parish. Stations persisted in some parts of Ireland through the twentieth century; where they lasted, stations were held usually twice a year in each parish. Annie Galvin of County Tipperary provided a detailed description of the stations in her early to mid twentieth-century parish: There would have been two services of the Stations a year, one in spring and the other in autumn. In the morning we used to prepare for the stations, inviting friends and neighbors. An altar was set up in the kitchen; it was a table and two chairs. Two local priests would have to come to the house, one saying Mass and the other hearing confessions in the living room. After Mass one of the priests would call out all the names of the families in the district and collect an offering. The priests would then be sent to the dining room and given breakfast, when the priests were finished then the people attending the Stations would be taken to the dining room for breakfast. Before the priests would leave they would ask whose turn it was to hold the stations the next time round and they would write that down in their diaries.103 More than a simple Catholic ritual, the stations grew into a prominent community event. For priests, the stations were an occasion to connect with parishioners in a more informal environment, and in a place less official than the local chapel. For those families that hosted them, they represented an opportunity to gain local respect and influence. Gathering together gave villagers who attended the stations a chance to

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catch up with their neighbours and to entertain each other, to affirm their commitment both to Catholicism and to their parish community. Readying a parish and a home for the station, however, required extensive planning, which was almost always women’s work. The clergy’s principal responsibility was spiritually instructing its parishioners for the occasion. In Praxis Parochi in Hibernia, his mid-nineteenth-century training manual for novice priests, Kenmare’s Father John O’Sullivan devoted dozens of pages to describing the important rules of behaviour – and the detailed preparations – necessary for the success of the station-mass. He urged other priests to make the stations the principal topic at mass for the few weeks preceding them. The clergy, he maintained, should stress that people must not only attend the stations, but should ready themselves spiritually. ‘[T]hose who would not go on their knees regularly morning and evening’, O’Sullivan warned, ‘who would not abstain from cursing and swearing, who would not divest themselves of all hatred and ill will of their neighbours’ should be barred from receiving communion at the station-mass.104 For ordinary parishioners, and particularly the family hosting the mass, the stations involved a ‘fortnight’s work’, featuring cleaning, painting, and even installing new cement floors in homes. In the early twentieth century, one Kerry priest reportedly demanded that his parishioners whitewash their houses, install bigger windows, and clear away manure piles from the front of their houses before a station-mass.105 ‘Broken walls in the yard were repaired’, remembered Taylor, ‘and any gate pillar that had lost its balance suddenly found itself standing erect. Gates that had sagged previously now swung with free abandon …  Muddy grey walls became virgin white overnight and dunghills disappeared out of sight.’106 Cleaning and whitewashing the home became a metaphor for the interior purification that O’Sullivan and other priests believed necessary for true devotion at the station-mass. The ‘virgin’ whiteness of the walls in Taylor’s homes was a sign that the parish, and especially the family hosting the stations, was spiritually cleansed and ready for the honour of mass and for the priest’s presence. Sarah White of Ahanagran, who later emigrated to America, recalled: ‘White marked the station. The neighbors would whitewash the entire house, outside and in. They would even whitewash the cow stalls, the pigpen, and the stables. The table would be covered with white cloth.’107

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Much of the preparation for stations, and actual work on the day itself, landed in the hands of lay Catholic women as part of their household duties. Alice Taylor’s memories of organising the stations detailed the careful preparations that the entire family, and above all her mother, made for the arrival of the priest and the parishioners.108 For women, then, domestic labour and an honoured household religious ritual were intertwined. Although priests technically oversaw the religious event, it was the woman of the house who took centre stage during the station-mass. This was an occasion at which Catholics revealed their commitment not only to ideas of social respectability and hierarchy, but also clear gender roles. The success of the stations depended on women fulfilling their idealised domestic roles. ‘Once when we had Stations at the house’, remembered Siobhan Lankford, ‘my mother had everything polished and shining, and us children all dressed up for, not only were the priests and neighbours coming, but Our Lord Himself.’109 Before the stations, women readied the home for the priest, the neighbours, and the day’s rituals; Alice Taylor’s mother, for example, entered into such a frenzy of cleaning that she barely slept the few nights before the stations.110 Here, women became main actors in creating devotional spaces and in making the private sphere suitable for the public stations. The accounts by Taylor and others maintain that hosting the stations was a ritual that was especially important to women. The home was woman’s sphere, and having the priest and the mass in it became a special honour for the parish’s women; the stations served as a symbol of the fruits of some wives’ and mothers’ devotion and their careful attention both to their religion and their homes. Local women sometimes competed to host the stations; as they did so, they compared each other’s housekeeping skills. ‘The Stations was a big day’, according to Cathy Bean Corduff, remembering her own parish in the early twentieth century. ‘Mass was at eleven in the morning, and you had to make a meal for the priests and for all your neighbours. And of course your house had to be spotless or everybody would be talking!’111 For poor women or women who did not conform to ideals of Irish domesticity, hosting the stations was an honour that likely was out of reach. County Cork’s Alice Taylor, however, remembered that an eccentric local woman, Old Nell, who was ‘often in

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trouble’ and ‘preferred to keep to herself’ decided one year to hold the stations. ‘She was not expected to have them but, contrary as she was, that was sufficient reason for Nell to do so.’ Yet none of the neighbours helped Nell prepare for the stations, and Nell herself prepared little, to the consternation of Taylor’s mother. On the day of the stations, Nell’s tablecloth was not quite white, and her candlesticks went unpolished. Nell refused to light a fire, and one of her hens pecked the priest during the mass.112 Still, these particular stations loomed large in the memory of the adult Taylor, who remembered that, despite Nell’s apparent shortcomings, the occasion allowed the religious community to gather and worship as one. And for Nell, the station-mass may have been an attempt to regain some local status in her twilight years as well as recapture or lay claim to a central place in the religious community of women. On the morning of most station-masses, the host family gathered to welcome both priests and people, showcasing their sparkling home and best clothing. ‘The man of the house’, according to a County Kerry man, ‘was waiting by the road, as was the custom’. ‘My father’, remembered Alice Taylor, ‘dressed in his best black suit and shining soft boots’, greeted his neighbours, who also were ‘all dressed up for the occasion’.113 The day began with breakfast, served, of course, by the woman of the house. After breakfast, the parish gathered for the serious business of the day: confession and mass. The clergy began by hearing confessions. As Brendan O’Sullivan recalled of the mid-twentieth century in Kerry: Those for confession made their way to the ‘room’ in an orderly manner just as they did in the chapel. The women went first, the men then coming in from outside. There was a silence except for the clock’s ticking and a couple of women whispering …  [when my turn came] I found Fr. Stack sitting beside the fire with his back to the door head propped on one hand the confession stole draped around his neck … .114 Then the mass itself took place in the kitchen, often the largest room in the house, where the congregation constructed a makeshift altar out of the kitchen table and chairs.115 The altar’s location in the kitchen

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also affirmed the religious and household authority of the woman of the house. For many people, the station-mass was not exclusively an occasion of faith, but also a reaffirmation of tradition, of community affections, and of celebration. In life-writings, Irish writers described the stations as both a religious and a social occasion; after the priests finished their duties and left, socialising continued well into the night, with young people ‘enjoy[ing] a little music and dance’.116 ‘Sometimes’, recalled a Kerry parishioner, ‘there used [to] be porter there too, and all the young people stayed around the house dancing, and when night fell the old people used [to] start telling stories.’117 ‘People came together’, Alice Taylor maintained, and ‘[g]reat talking was done. An impromptu concert often started up and anybody who could sing …  entertained the light-hearted gathering. This evolved into a dance.’118 The stationmass symbolised a meeting of the official and the popular, of modernity and tradition, of religious gravity and local amusements, of the household and the community. It was, according to Taylor, ‘three Christmases rolled into one’.119 An analysis of the station-mass complicates the public/private divide, revealing the Irish Catholic household to be not only a sphere of domestic religion but also a space of communal devotions. Women’s roles during the stations illustrate the ways that they made their households centres of religious devotion and the importance they placed on community, as well as the complex relationship between women, piety, and food. Fasting, preparing food, and eating food loomed large in twentieth-century Irish women’s life-stories. Thinking about their religious relationship with food was something that Catholic girls were encouraged to do from an early age. Born in 1935, Doris Fahy of Limerick later asserted that some of her earliest memories were associated with fasting: ‘There was fast and abstinence for the forty days of Lent, unlike today. Back then we were allowed to eat only one full meal during the day and eat up to two small meals known as ‘collations’. … We also took part in the Eucharistic Fast. This meant that when a person was receiving Holy Communion one fasted from midnight until Mass the following day.’120 Girlhood memories of first confession and First Holy Communion honed in on the hunger and distress associated with fasting; for some girls, such as Dublin’s Phil O’Keefe,

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fasting became intertwined with the fear and anxiety of the religious occasion.121 Of course, taking communion meant consuming the body of Christ, which led girls to ponder the intersections of food and corporeality during the occasion. Indeed, to be worthy enough to consume Christ, girls and women first had to deny their bodies sustenance.122 Historian Carolyn Walker Bynum’s research on the religious meanings of food and fasting for women in medieval Europe has broader applicability. Food, she argues, was spiritually meaningful for women. ‘Women all over Europe’, she writes, ‘served Christ by feeding others, donating to the poor the food that husbands and fathers felt proud to be able to save and consume. The Eucharist and related devotions, such as those to the body, wounds, heart, and blood of Christ, were at the very center of women’s piety … .’123 For some women, the fact that their bodies produced sustenance through breast milk linked them uniquely with the body of Christ, a body that was also consumed. Bynum asserts that these connections may have caused medieval women to identify more closely with the corporeal aspects of faith, including eating, than men did. ‘The flesh of Jesus – both flesh as body and flesh as food’, argues Bynum, ‘is at the very center of female piety’.124 For lay Catholic women in modern Ireland, particularly wives and mothers, food, similarly, held religious and social meaning. Most women’s relationships with priests were dependent on food and hospitality. The woman of the house fed the priest when the station-mass was held at her home, reserving for him the best available food, including eggs, butter, and bread. Sara Walsh remembered her mother’s efforts during the stations: ‘And on the table would be currant cake and raisin bread … .’ Years later, Walsh wrote, ‘the menu, not just cakes and breads but eggs, tea, and rashers of bacon in a room that usually held live animals not the flesh of dead ones … ’.125 Indeed, any time that a priest was present in a parishioner’s home, the woman of the house offered him refreshment. As she recalled one particular clerical visit, Edna O’Brien remembered in vivid detail the outlandish menu that her mother served, one that, we may assume, would not be given to the members of the family who ate in the house every day. My mother laid a tray for tea, and kept imploring of him to have two boiled eggs, because look, she had a colander full of them.

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At first he demurred, said he already had his tea, and must watch the avoirdupois. He put his pale hand across a chest that was clad with a beautiful black pleated shirt and where not a scrap of waste flesh lodged. So it was two eggs, a white and a brown, cooked to a T, and a special little egg spoon with a leaf motif on its handle, and salt from a cut-glass cellar, and freshly made mustard in the closet … . How we fussed over him, wheeling the tea trolley to the edge of the step, getting a second cushion for his back, asking if he liked milk first, calling him ‘Father, Father’ and later plying him with fruit cake, marble cake, and a slice of cold lemon meringue pie.126 A woman from the Irish Countrywoman’s Association in Longford told a story about her mother preparing a meal for her uncle, who was a priest, and his friends. ‘He went to America’, she claimed, We would all be cleaning and scrubbing, and painting and whitewashing because he was coming and there’d be preparations was being made. And the best …  we had chickens of course and hens at the time and the best chickens was kilt for him for his arrival. And they’d be put in the pot and the lovely chickens and the smell of them but we wouldn’t get a bit of them because they was for the priests coming …  My mother would cook, the creature, and the sweat rolling off her and the big red face on her, and she would be putting up this big spread.127 For women with fewer economic resources, entertaining the clergy could be a stressful event. Folklore informants from the Beara peninsula in West Cork described such a scene: ‘It was to his mother [that this happened] …  there was a priest at a station there … When she put breakfast before him [she said] “I don’t like the breakfast I have for you, I don’t like it, but I didn’t get the things I wanted”.’128 Other recollections detailed how women were ashamed if they had to serve their clergy bread that had inexpensive yellow meal in it.129 These narratives reflect the ways in which food remained a primary and daily concern for women, above all in rural areas, throughout the early twentieth century. They also tell us that Irish women’s experiences of hunger,

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food preparation, and food consumption were inextricably linked with Catholicism. Bynum asserts that ‘[f]ood is important to women religiously because it is important socially’.130 In modern Ireland, women’s social and religious roles intertwined with food and fasting. For Irish women, ‘food preparation and eating’ served as ‘highly meaningful spiritual practices’.131 The religious importance of food to women, especially in the decades following the Great Famine of the 1840s, may have been greater in Ireland than in other parts of Europe. For older Catholics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, memories of famine and food scarcity likely were raw and relevant, and younger parishioners would have heard tales of hunger. When they fasted, set their best table for priests, or gave away eggs and bread as charity, Irish women declared the religious significance of food. David W. Miller has asserted that the chapel-based landscape so dominated post-famine Catholicism that the home’s religious importance declined.132 Evidence to the contrary, however, abounds. In the home, generations of children learned to become Irish Catholics, and in the home, Irish women – grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and daughters – made their mark on religious practice. ‘In order to understand women’s lived religion fully’, writes Meredith McGuire, ‘we need to appreciate their ritual practices centered on the so-called private, domestic, familial sphere, where their roles are likely to be more active and expressive.’133 Despite the wealth, power, and reach of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutional Church, lay women retained significant control of the holy household. In the home, wives and mothers ruled over almost all religious and moral matters. Across Ireland, no matter what their economic status, women created a tangible Catholicism every day for their families; home-based religion thus came to represent a sphere in which they could exercise significant power. During the stations, Irish women catered to priestly authority while also asserting their power and laying claim to the home as a feminised religious space. In his work on twentieth-century Italian Harlem, Robert Orsi maintains that the domestic sphere was the foundation of Catholic religious life, a ‘theater of self-revelation’ supervised by women. It was, argues Orsi, where people learned ‘what was good and what was bad’; it ‘defined and determined who they

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were’.134 In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, the home was this and more: a space where Catholic women not only demonstrated their importance to the faith and the nation but also managed their families and constructed their own identities as home rulers. Notes 1 Crowley, A Dublin Girl, p. 6. 2 Oral history, Margaret Duffy, Dublin City 1920s–1930s, in No Shoes in Summer, p. 41. 3 Murphy, Don’t Wake Me at Doyles, p. 27. 4 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, p. 6. 5 Walsh, An Irish Country Childhood, p. 1. See also Crowley, A Dublin Girl, p. 1. 6 See, for example, ‘To the girls of the house’, a ‘Fireside’ column in The Irish Homestead, 16 March 1895. 7 Irish Press, 12 March 1936. 8 Robert Lynd, Home Life in Ireland (London: Mills & Boon, 1909), p. 15. 9 ‘Making home cheerful’, a ‘Fireside’ column in The Irish Homestead, 16 March 1895, p. 123. 10 Ingman, Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women, p. 11. 11 United Irishman, 3 January 1903; Biletz, ‘Women and Irish-Ireland’, p. 66. 12 Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), p. 21. 13 Kevin Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994); and Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997). 14 Nellie Ó  Clé irigh, Hardship and High Living: Irish Women’s Lives, 1808–1923 (Dublin: Portobello Press, 2003), chapter 10. 15 Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 67. 16 Ibid., pp. 67–8. 17 Ibid., p. 71. 18 Tony Farmar, Holles Street, 1894–1994. The National Maternity Hospital: A Centenary History (Dublin: A. & A. Farmar, 1994), p. 16. 19 David Morgan, ‘Domestic devotion and ritual: visual piety in the modern American home’, Art Journal 57: 1 (spring 1998), p. 47. 20 Bridget Dirrane, A Woman of Aran (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.

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21 O’Connor, Can Lily O’Shea Come Out to Play?, pp. 26–7. 22 Elizabeth L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty, and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 27. 23 Ibid. 24 Morgan, ‘Domestic devotion and ritual’, p. 49. 25 Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York, NY: Continuum Books, 2009), pp. 17, 46. 26 Stephanie Rains, Commodity Culture and Social Class in Dublin, 1850–1916 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), p. 3. 27 Godson, ‘Catholicism and material culture in Ireland’, p. 40. 28 Lisa Godson, ‘Charting the material culture of the “devotional revolution”: the advertising register of the Irish Catholic Directory, 1837– 96’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature (2015), abstract. 29 Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism’, p. 58. See also Godson, ‘Catholicism and material culture in Ireland’. 30 Taves, The Household of Faith, p. 4. 31 Godson, ‘Catholicism and material culture in Ireland’, p. 42. David Miller argues that post-famine chapel-based Catholic devotion depended in many ways on a new culture of consumerism. He does not, however, fully explore the gendered dimensions of Catholic consumerism. Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice’. 32 Godson, ‘Charting the material culture’, pp. 1–2. 33 Irish Catholic Directory, 1932, pp. 111–18. 34 Connaught Champion, 6 August 1904. 35 Southern Star, 5 October 1935. 36 Irish Homestead, 24 September 1898. 37 Southern Star, 9 May 1931. 38 Cara Delay, ‘Kitchens and kettles: domestic spaces, ordinary things, and female networks in Irish abortion history, 1922–1949’, Journal of Women’s History 30: 4 (winter 2018): 11–34. 39 Hyland, I Call to the Eye of the Mind, p. 25. 40 Lisa Godson, ‘Display, sacramentalism, and devotion: the medals of the Archconfraternity of the Holy Family, 1922–39’, in Confraternities and Sodalities in Ireland, p. 113. 41 Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism’, p. 58. 42 Taylor, Quench the Lamp, p. 12. 43 Lynd, Home Life in Ireland, p. 17. 44 de Barra, Bless ‘em All, p. 150. 45 Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism’, p. 58. 46 Moi-Meme, ‘The family circle’, Catholic Bulletin 1: 7 (July 1911), p. 322.

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47 McKenna, My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress, p. 10. 48 Morgan, Visual Piety, 57; Konieczny, ‘Sacred places, domestic spaces’, p. 440. 49 McDannell, Material Christianity, p. 1. 50 Turpin, ‘Visual culture and Catholicism’, p. 58. See also Godson, ‘Catholicism and material culture in Ireland’. 51 Oral history, Dersie Leonard, b. 1918 (Burren, County Clare, 1920s), in No Shoes in Summer, p. 13. 52 Interview with Nan Donohoe, 2006, in Donohoe, ed., Longford Women’s Voices, p. 63. All spelling mistakes in original text. 53 Rev. O’Reilly, The Mirror of True Womanhood, pp. 254–68. 54 Ibid., pp. 246–7, 238. 55 Clare (Mary Francis Cusack), Good Reading for Girls, pp. 112, 181. 56 Ibid., pp. 112–13. 57 Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, p. 74. 58 Commissioners of National Education in Ireland, Reading Book for the Use of Female Schools, p. 314. 59 Nora Hanrahan, ‘A valiant woman’, Catholic Bulletin and Book Review 1 (July 1911), pp. 331–2. 60 Margaret MacCurtain, ‘Religious conviction: women’s voices, 1900– 2000’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume IV, p. 602. 61 Má ire Ní  Ghuithí n, Bean an Oileá  in (1986), in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume IV, pp. 1406–7. 62 Alice Taylor, Country Days (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993), pp. 12–13. 63 Wolf, An Irish-Speaking Island, pp. 220–1. 64 O’Dwyer, Mary: A History of Devotion in Ireland, p. 210. 65 Rev. Michael D. Forrest, M.S.C, The Rosary (New York, NY: The Paulist Press, 1926), p. 13. Patricia Lysaght, ‘Attitudes to the rosary and its performance in Donegal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Bé aloideas 66 (1998), p. 10; The Rosary Centre: The Rosary Apostolate in Ireland website, www.rosarycentre.com/confraternity. htm [accessed 23 December 2013]. 66 Lysaght, ‘Attitudes to the rosary’, p. 12; John D. Miller, Beads and Prayers: The Rosary in History and Devotion (London: Burns and Oates, 2002), p. 141. 67 Lysaght, ‘Attitudes to the rosary’, p. 18. 68 Irish Examiner, 19 July 1876. 69 Connacht Tribune, 27 March 1948. 70 Recollections of Cá it bean Ní  Ciará n, 60 years old. NFC 1610, p. 69. 71 Recollections of Tomá s Coscair, NFC 1610, p. 25.

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72 Folklore questionnaire, NFC 1610. 73 Pastoral Letter of the Archbishops and Bishops Assembled in the National Synod at Maynooth to the Clergy, Secular and Regular, and the Laity of the Catholic Church in Ireland (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1900), p. 8. 74 Forrest, The Rosary, p. 10. 75 Lockington, S.J., The Soul of Ireland, p. 115. 76 Although folklorist Patricia Lysaght claims that, for the most part, men led the family in the prayer, evidence suggests the opposite, with women taking the lead in many areas. Lysaght, ‘Attitudes to the rosary’, p. 36. 77 Rev. Joseph Guinan, Scenes and Sketches in an Irish Parish; or, Priest and People in Doon, 4th ed. (Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1906 [1903]), p. 71. 78 Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, pp. 47–8. 79 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, p. 110. 80 MacCurtain, ‘Religious conviction’, p. 602. 81 Quoted in Lyder, ‘“Silence and secrecy”’, p. 78. 82 Recollections of John Gately, Castletown, Curraghboy, Co. Roscommon, NFC 1610, pp. 195–6. 83 Murphy, Don’t Wake Me at Doyles, p. 27. 84 Brophy, ‘Keening Community’, p. 292. 85 Lysaght, ‘Attitudes to the rosary’, p. 36. 86 Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art, p. 7. 87 Lysaght, ‘Attitudes to the rosary’, p. 36. 88 Tomá s Coscair, NFC Schools Project, 1610. 89 Interview with Mary M. Mulvey, 2006, in Longford Women’s Voices, p. 55. 90 Cá it bean Ní  Ciará n, 60 years old, NFC Schools Project, 1610. 91 Donnelly, ‘Opposing the modern world’, p. 184. 92 Maeve Flanagan, Dev, Lady Chatterley and Me (Dublin: Marino Books, 1998), p. 23. 93 Ryan, Asking Angela Macnamara, p. 139. 94 The station-mass or stations were entirely distinct from the stations of the cross, which occurred primarily in chapels, not in homes. 95 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, pp. 10–11. 96 Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, p. 108; Liam Swords, A Hidden Church: The Diocese of Achonry 1689–1818 (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: The Columba Press, 1997), p. 244. 97 Entry from Dunerlin, 10 August 1856. Kieran O’Shea, ‘Bishop David Moriarty’s diary, 1856’, Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 17 (1984), p. 121.

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98 NLI, Ms. Ms. 31,768. (Unknown author), Diary of events occurring in the Kyleagarny, Solohedbeg, Cappawhite and Newtown area of County Tipperary, 1871–81. 99 Ahern, ‘The plenary synod of Thurles’, pp. 1–20; and Barry, ‘The legislation of the synod of Thurles, 1850’, pp. 131–66. 100 Peadar Mac Suibhne, Paul Cullen and His Contemporaries: With Their Letters from 1820–1902, vol. 5 (Naas, Ireland: Leinster Leader, 1961–77), p. 55. 101 KDA, Lenten pastoral, Bishop Moriarty quoted in Bishop Eamonn Casey, ‘Our stations’, c. 1969–1972. 102 Guinan, Scenes and Sketches, p. 64. 103 Cashel Community School, A Blast From the Past, Compiled by Transition Year Students, 2009/2010 (Cashel Community School, Tipperary, 2010). 104 O’Sullivan, Praxis, 1850–2, p. 15. 105 Murphy, When Youth Was Mine, p. 54; Recollections from Iniscean, Co. Cork, NFC 437, p. 367 and from Anascaul, Co, Kerry, NFC 782, p. 296. 106 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, p. 8. 107 White, Remembering Ahanagran, p. 108. 108 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, pp. 6–10. 109 Siobhá n Lankford, The Hope and the Sadness: Personal Recollections of Troubled Times in Ireland (Cork: Tower Books, 1980), p. 59. 110 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, p. 10. 111 Memories of Cathy Bean Corduff in Bibeanna: Memories from a Corner of Ireland, ed. Brenda Ní  Shú illeabhá in (Cork: Mercier Press, 2007), p. 74. 112 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, pp. 13–18. 113 Reminiscences of Brendan G. O’Sullivan in Glengarriff Sacred Heart Church 1902–2002: A Centenary Celebration (Glengarriff: Leinster Leader, 2002); Taylor, To School Through the Fields, p. 10. 114 O’Sullivan, Glengarriff Sacred Heart Church, p. 96. 115 Recollections from Anascaul, Co. Kerry, NFC 782, p. 296 and from Iniscean, Co. Cork, NFC 437, p. 369. 116 Murphy, When Youth Was Mine, p. 54. 117 Recollections from Anascaul, Co. Kerry. NFC 782, p. 297. 118 Taylor, To School Through the Fields, p. 11. 119 Ibid., p. 8. 120 Mary Antoinette Moloney, Down Memory Lane: A Collection of Personal Stories and Memories from the Past (Ahane, Co. Limerick: Mary Antoinette Moloney, 2010), p. 157. 121 O’Keefe, Down Cobbled Streets, pp. 53–6.

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122 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 3. 123 Ibid., p. 4. 124 Ibid., pp. 245, 261. 125 White, Remembering Ahanagran, p. 108. 126 O’Brien, Mother Ireland, pp. 70–1. 127 Irish Countrywomen’s Association interview cited in Longford Women’s Voices, p. 68. 128 Martin Verling, ed., Beara Woman Talking: Folklore from the Beara Peninsula (Cork: Mercier Press, 2003), p. 45. The narratives in this text were collected by Tadhg Ó  Murchú  in the 1950s from ­informant Peig Minihane, who was in her nineties at the time. 129 Verling , ed., Beara Woman Talking, p. 45. 130 Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 189. 131 Meredith B. McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 106. 132 Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice’, p. 106. 133 McGuire, Lived Religion, p. 108. 134 Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, second ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 [1985]), pp. 85, 75.

5 Gender and space In 1880, the Munster News featured a miracle cure. A woman’s ­blindness allegedly was reversed after she walked five miles to the church at Knock, site of the famous 1879 Marian apparition, every day for a week. ‘She circled the church three times’, the article ­described, ‘praying fervently to God and the Blessed Mother for relief. She e­ ntered the church and made the rounds of the Stations of the Cross on her knees thrice every day.’1 This anecdote complicates the historiography of modern Irish women. According to most scholars, after the Great Famine, Irish women either retreated from or, in some cases, were pushed out of, the public sphere, forced to accept an essentially domestic life within the home. Several decades later those women in institutions – from workhouses and hospitals to convents and Magdalen asylums – were controlled and contained within these spaces and thus trapped within Ireland’s larger Catholic and patriarchal culture.2 As Clara Fischer writes, Irish women’s presence in public space by the early twentieth century ‘came to be seen as a dereliction of their ­domestic duty and potentially subversive of their symbolic caché as virtuous and pure bearers of the nation.’3 At first glance, it appears that women’s removal from the public sphere and containment was evident in the spaces of Catholicism. Before the famine, a weak Church failed to take control over religious practice; as a result, Catholicism remained essentially local, revolving around a sprawling sacred vernacular landscape. Lay women, who held key responsibilities in popular rituals such as wakes and childbirth customs, often managed this pre-famine religious system, centred on the human lifecycle.4 Yet when Ireland experienced a ‘devotional revolution’, Catholic religious practice moved away from the landscape

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and into the disciplined space of the Catholic chapel.5 As the Catholic Church organised and reformed, a trained clergy gained control over local religion and ritual, much of which women had traditionally overseen. Accompanying this religious shift, then, may have been a decline in public religious activity for lay women.6 As Maria Luddy has pointed out, by the late nineteenth century, most Irish bishops and priests were hostile to lay women’s public activities, including charitable ones, preferring to leave this work in the hands of nuns, whom the Church hierarchy could control more closely.7 The Munster News’s observations, however, affirm that women continued to be found in public Catholic spaces and testify to the ways in which Irish women in fact assumed central roles in religious life after the famine. Although the Church certainly contained and regulated women, these same women often found room to manoeuvre and lay claim to public space. This chapter explores the relationship between women and religious spaces. Moving between rural and urban worlds, with a focus on a sacred and feminised rural landscape in the late nineteenth century and popular Catholic devotions in urban areas in the early twentieth century, it explores women’s central roles in the chapel, parish, and landscape. Here, we see clear effects of Ireland’s patriarchal civilising mission. The newly disciplined space of the parish chapel in particular provided Ireland’s clergy with a powerful tool to contain and control the female body. Many priests were indeed hostile to women taking an active role in the chapel or in public devotions. Yet some lay women virtually invaded public space during devotions, thus complicating the divide between private and public and troubling the gendered goals of the ‘devotional revolution’. The landscape and religious syncretism Scholars including James Smith and Clara Fischer have analysed how the modern Irish state and Catholic Church controlled and contained women, particularly deviant or disruptive women. Smith posits that by the early twentieth century, an ‘architecture of containment’ isolated the sexually dangerous female body and thus kept the nation pure. Through Church- and later state-sponsored institutions, this architecture effectively removed deviant or troublesome women from

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society and even Ireland’s national memory.8 As Fischer demonstrates, the project of Irish nation-building was founded on purity and women’s ‘assumed shame’, which the Church and state managed ‘by hiding and physically containing women in institutions during the twentieth century’.9 Other scholars have explored the ways in which the independent Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s utilised a historical connection between women and the land to implement a supposedly ‘native’ patriarchy. According to Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, the patriarchal nationalist domination of the feminised Irish landscape in the early twentieth century helped consolidate gender norms, affirming that women were ‘the passive and voiceless embodiment of nature’ who must be controlled by men.10 The regulation of the landscape thus bolstered the new independent and Catholic state seeking to deny most Irish women a significant active or public role.11 Yet the containment of the sexualised female body and the associations between women and the landscape pre-dated the 1920s and 1930s. While it is nearly impossible to trace the origins of the land-aswoman trope, scholars often place such connections within patriarchal traditions articulating that the feminised land, like woman herself, was to be surveyed, plundered, and controlled by men.12 In the modern era, vernacular traditions such as fairy belief, as well as later colonial and Catholic discourses, all made use of such representations.13 Existing alongside the construction of a feminised landscape in Irish history was an effort to constrain the female body in space and place. In the nineteenth century, people in Ireland and in the Irish Diaspora called on long-standing beliefs and oral traditions to map bodies and landscapes. Before the advent of a strong institutional Church, they also used beliefs about the landscape to regulate female sexuality. Fairy belief was one of the strongest oral traditions upholding gender norms and dictating female behaviour. Popular subjects in storytelling, the fairies were mischievous beings that took human form and meddled in human life. When Ireland’s people told stories of fairies, they did more than entertain. Storytelling was also a system of education, informing and instructing people on customs and norms as well as proper behaviour. It regulated family and community life.14 It is no surprise, then, that gender is a primary theme in many fairy legends.

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Fairy legends frequently place the female body in marginal l­andscapes and in danger. Within oral traditions, women proved especially susceptible to fairy-changeling abduction. Fairies could steal away or ‘take’ unsuspecting mortals (almost always women or children); supernatural imposters, or fairy-changelings, then took their place in the human world. Irish people commonly associated fairywomen with ‘specific places’;15 as they did so, they mapped meaning onto the female body and the Irish topography. Women who wandered in forbidden or profane places were particularly likely to be ‘taken away’.16 Fairy belief, therefore, reflected realities while it cautioned ‘deviant’ women and constructed an ideal world of gender segregation. It consistently advocated that women remain at home, safely enclosed within the domestic sphere. In a legend that Lady Gregory collected in Galway in the early twentieth century, the dangers facing women who strayed from home are evident: An old woman from Loughrea told me that a woman … was taken away one time for fourteen years when she went out into the field at night with nothing on but her shift. And she was swept [abducted] there and then, and an old hag put into the bed in her place, and she suckling her young son at the time.17 This young woman wandered into dangerous space while improperly dressed. She thus violated social norms and gendered codes of behaviour.18 The suggestion that she may have committed a sexual transgression is also present. This legend’s complex message includes the assertion that young wives and mothers must remain safely at home, their bodies and sexuality successfully contained within patriarchy. In the nineteenth century, fairy belief came to coexist with modern colonial and religious structures and systems. By the early 1800s, the reworking of the Irish landscape and the movement of people into enclosed, controlled spaces figured prominently within the colonial mission.19 The British state conducted a massive project to map Ireland through the ordnance survey in the early nineteenth century. This project, as Angèle Smith explains, ‘was an act of colonial domination – mapping was a means for Britain to maintain colonial control over Ireland, making the landscape, its people and past known and

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quantifiable’.20 Victorian Britain also constructed an architectural system to contain the outcast, disruptive, or transgressive body. Workhouses, prisons, hospitals, and asylums became common throughout Ireland, striving to remove deviants physically and symbolically from the social fabric. Space became demarcated based on behaviour, status, and gender. The workhouse, designed to control poverty through containment, serves as an effective example.21 Authorities carefully designed and monitored the space of the workhouse: everyone had his or her designated space, and men and women were kept apart. Regulating outcast women was a central goal here: unwed pregnant women were separated from other women and children. A ‘moral classification of females’ thus ensured that virtuous women would not encounter ‘fallen’ women within the space of the workhouse.22 By the 1850s, Church officials and Irish nationalists attempted to offset the colonial domination of space by constructing an alternative Catholic infrastructure consisting of cathedrals and chapels, convents, and schools. These nationalists also appropriated representations of the Irish nation, women, and the feminised Irish landscape. Now, the wild, rugged, uncivilised landscape represented the ‘real’ (Gaelic, pre-colonial) Ireland; it, like Ireland’s women, needed to be reclaimed and dominated by nationalist men. Nationalists, argues Nash, clearly linked the landscape and the female body.23 Irish nationalism and, ultimately, the independent Irish state, subjected both the land and the female body to increased patriarchal control.24 Here, as in many things, the Church and the nationalist movement worked in tandem. Tom Inglis has shown that the regulation of the body within space was a central concern of the late nineteenth-century Church, immersed in a civilising mission. This mission endeavoured to bring ‘manners, discipline, and civility’ to Ireland’s laity.25 One way that bishops and priests sought to accomplish this goal was by enclosing the body within a new religious landscape. The Church busily constructed new chapels, creating what David Miller has called a centralised ‘chapel-based’ religious landscape.26 Alongside chapels and cathedrals, convents and schools also became symbols of the Church’s regeneration. These building projects allowed Irish Catholics to map their own landscape, asserting the dominance of their faith while challenging the power of the Anglican colonial state.27

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Here, too, we see continuities: women’s bodies remained contested spaces throughout these transformations. The real-life communities of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland not only used stories and legendry to control young women; they also employed physical isolation. Similarly, Ireland’s ‘chapel-based’ religious landscape had as one if its main goals gender separation: in newly built chapels, women and men sat separately. Victorian bourgeois norms also revealed themselves in nationalist and Catholic discourse: ideally, men inhabited the public sphere while women dominated the home.28 At the insistence of the clergy, labourers’ cottages that the government built in the second half of the nineteenth century contained separate sleeping areas for girls and boys.29 The legacies of this focus on space, gender, and geography were significant indeed. The notion of the polluted female body that could be dominated and mapped like the landscape itself persisted through independence and well into the twentieth century, when the newly strengthened Catholic Church, supported by an Irish state, employed new tactics to control landscapes and bodies. Despite the power of the modernising state and Church, however, Irish people persisted in negotiating and contesting that power. One way they did so was by following their traditional beliefs to thwart the cultural domination of both the Church and the state.30 For lay Catholics, these beliefs and rituals, including fairy belief, were an integral and essential part of social and cultural life, and many turned to their parish traditions to recover after the starvation, disease, and emigration of the famine years, as well as to resist the new colonising and civilising power of the reforming Church. Here, lay Catholic women took centre stage. By retaining connections to vernacular traditions and the landscape, they managed the passages that were central to their lives, well-being, and autonomy. They resisted change and modernisation. Over time, Catholic women also blurred the lines between official Catholicism and popular vernacular beliefs, helping to create a religious syncretism that persisted in rural Ireland into the first decades of the twentieth century. For example, Catholic women in rural areas sprinkled holy water on cattle and crops to protect them from curses or the evil eye. In County Cork, when rural women set eggs to hatch, they marked each with a black

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cross to ‘keep away’ misfortune.31 In a County Sligo parish, women decorated a pre-Christian site of pilgrimage ‘with little statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, … [and] a crucifix and beads.’32 Women, then, found ways to map their own landscapes despite the encroaching reach of the institutional Church. By blending older practices with Catholicism, lay women also helped to create a uniquely syncretic, and feminised, popular religion. Class and region, as well as gender, dictated one’s participation in or attitude towards this syncretic system. In the late nineteenth century, Mary O’Brien Fogarty, daughter of a prosperous Limerick farmer, described her childhood in her memoir, The Farm by Lough Gur. Fogarty’s father was an esteemed Catholic who crossed paths with many of Ireland’s prominent men; Fogarty, in fact, remembered when she and her sister once met Charles Stuart Parnell.33 As respectable Catholics, the Fogartys faithfully attended mass, said the rosary every night, and dismissed fairy belief and other vernacular customs as peasant superstitions. Those who worked for the family, however, upheld a different belief system. On May Eve, the family’s dairywomen, in order to protect themselves from the fairies, ‘would go into the cowsheds, yards and fields, sprinkling holy water … from the chapel after the priest had blessed it’.34 The young Fogarty and one of the family’s servants, Dooley, often argued over the validity of the fairies, as Fogarty attempted to convert Dooley and others to a more orthodox Catholicism, dismissing the fairies as ‘wicked Sassenach[s]’. Dooley, however, remained firmly committed to her own beliefs, defending the fairies against such attacks. ‘The Little People may be playful … and a throuble [sic] at times’, she told Mary, ‘but we wouldn’t be without them after all the hundreds o’ years they’ve been livin’ beside us in these same hills!’35 Fogarty’s memoirs illustrate that post-famine Catholic Ireland supported a variety of religious beliefs and experiences; they expose the different layers of spirituality that existed in rural communities. And such apparently divergent belief systems overlapped during occasions such as the dairywomen’s use of holy water to ward off the fairies, an intermingling of official and alternative beliefs that would have troubled the Church hierarchy (and disturbed the respectable, middle-class Fogarty) but made perfect sense to Dooley

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and the other dairywomen, whose worldview continued to revolve around a local and rural understanding of religion. As The Farm by Lough Gur demonstrates, Irish Catholic women demonstrated a variety of responses to the resurgence of orthodoxy, sometimes reshaping or modifying the changes that the Catholic Church demanded. Fogarty’s memoirs describe both official religion and ‘superstition’ as the purview of women; Fogarty’s mother was clearly the guardian of the faith within the home, and the dairywomen were in charge of warding off danger on the land. Here, economic and social differences, not gender, led to differing cultural views. And, while the words and lives of well-off Catholic families, such as that of Fogarty, have more commonly made it into the historical record, evidence from both official and popular sources reveals that the vast majority of rural Irish women and men – those who had yet to benefit from the economic changes of the famine era – like Dooley, created their own religious system, combining both Catholic ritual and alternative customs into a local religion, one that reflected the popular piety of the ‘devotional revolution’ yet remained closely tied to the landscape and daily life. Birth and death Pregnancy and childbirth were particularly important sites of the syncretism that lay Catholic women created. Again, however, the lines between official and alternative beliefs and practices blurred. Some women used Catholic material culture and devotional items in ways that often unsettled members of the institutional Church. In his mid nineteenth-century training manual for Irish priests, John O’Sullivan described an incident in which a ninety-five-year-old woman, ‘in an evil hour’, placed the scapular of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the neck of a younger woman who was ‘dangerously ill in childbirth’.36 The older woman’s act is perhaps not surprising: birth in nineteenth-century Ireland was often dangerous; it thus warranted rituals and devotional objects designed to ward off death and secure the health of both mother and infant. The example of the old woman and the scapular reveals a world that remains hidden from us today, in which childbirth was still a female-centred ritual, where communities of women worked together

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towards successful births. Its mention in O’Sullivan’s diary, however, also demonstrates that childbirth was of concern to ecclesiastical authorities, earning a place in the official religious discourse of the age. Some members of the clergy found the elderly woman’s seemingly simple act of devotion problematic: she used the scapular in a ­quasi-magical ritual that, to the institutional Church, drew more upon ‘superstitions’ than on accepted Catholic devotional practices. She muddled the lines between official Catholicism and popular vernacular beliefs, demonstrating women’s stubborn commitment to an older, less civilised worldview. In fact, the woman’s priest was so incensed that he ordered her to fast for three mornings and do penance at a chapel located two miles away, not an insignificant punishment for a ninetyfive-year-old woman.37 Nearly a century later, in 1948, Blasket Islands storyteller Peig Sayers related the following to a folklore collector: There was a woman in labour in Dunquin a while ago. Neil Pheig was there. She was the midwife. The woman was in a very serious condition and the doctor was summoned. He was Doctor Hudson. He came. He bound the woman and told her not to make any turning movement until eight o’clock the following morning. A while after he left the poor woman was in trouble. ‘Yes! Whatever the doctor will say,’ said Neil Pheig, ‘I will not be here looking at her in the distress she is in; I will loosen the bindings.’ She undid them, and she got a scapular of a woman that was there, and she placed it on the woman in labour, and without much delay the child was born.38 This narrative demonstrates how continuities sometimes characterised Irish women’s lives even across a century of enormous political and economic change. Just as O’Sullivan’s parishioner had in the mid-­ nineteenth century, Neil Pheig utilised the scapular to protect a woman in childbirth. And she too defied a patriarchal authority: in this case, the doctor. When faced with difficulties such as childbirth, Irish women blended Catholic practice into their vernacular customs, making Irish Catholicism more tangible and tactile in the process, and aligning it with much older systems of belief.

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Throughout the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth century, popular views decreed that pregnancy and childbirth not only left women open to danger but also left their bodies polluted. New mothers were considered unclean until they were ‘churched’ or purified by their parish priest, usually several weeks after they had given birth.39 Catholic women continued to view churching as ‘a cleansing process’ well into the twentieth century.40 Failing to get churched was a local offense; the bodies of unchurched women, tradition claimed, were dangerous. Legendry and stories that circulated from 1850 to 1950 admonished new mothers, especially women who had not yet been churched, to stay at home. Traditions also cautioned unchurched women not to enter other people’s homes. Kept isolated and insulated from the daily workings of parish life, confined to their homes, limited to interacting only with their immediate family, and forbidden from taking part in local rituals, unchurched women were marked as others, as beings whose experience of birth made them threatening, infused with an aura of danger and thus best kept away from the larger community.41 Churching reminded Irish women that their position within the parish community was itself vulnerable and uncertain; because they were female and tainted by the process of birth, women were, at times, ejected from parish life, returning only because the Church, priest, and community allowed it. Lay people attributed different meanings to churching. At times, churching was about pollution and purification, serving as evidence of women’s inferior historical status, contemporary beliefs that intercourse was sinful, and views that women, who took on the dangers associated with birth, were both threatening and vulnerable. Yet we can view churching in a more positive light, as a female-centred celebration that women controlled and claimed ownership of. David Cressy maintains that churching was a ritual that early modern English women demanded and viewed as a ceremony of thanksgiving, not purification; similarly, theologian Natalie Knödel argues that ‘the practice of churching was by far not an imposition of the male church on women, but something sought after by women themselves’.42 In the work of Adrian Wilson, churching in early modern England becomes the site of ‘a zone of sexual politics and gendered conflict,’ where ‘women took initiatives and achieved victories’.43

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While the evidence on churching in modern Ireland is far from abundant, oral histories describing lives in the first half of the ­twentieth century affirm that lay women interpreted churching in different ways. For most, being unchurched signified being unclean and isolated. As revealed in the work of social historian Kevin Kearns, Dublin women remembered that they could not wash or comb their hair or even make a cup of tea until they were churched.44 A Dublin woman’s recollections clearly demonstrated her feelings about being unchurched: You weren’t clean, not fit to do anything, to cook … you were taboo, like a leper. Nobody then had the courage to stand up and contradict the priest, or what he was saying. There were a lot of things then that we went along with.45 Churching provides a window into Irish people’s sentiments about the dangers of birth, the uncertainty of the lifecycle, and the connections between gender, purity, and pollution. The movement of pregnant women, unchurched women, or unbaptised infants in public space was viewed as threatening to the community. Polluted bodies could pollute the landscape; at the same time, the landscape was a mechanism for controlling the tainted body. The ideas of pollution associated with pregnancy and childbirth fundamentally served to marginalise women, regulating their actions, keeping them inside certain spaces and out of others. However, the physical and social isolation that post-parturient Catholic women experienced should not be read exclusively as control and containment. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, churching became the focus of disputes between priests and women, demonstrating that each group considered it vitally important. Priest John O’Sullivan described in his diaries the conflicts that developed between priests and their female parishioners over churching. Early in his career, for example, local women had tricked O’Sullivan, as a young curate newly arrived in his parish, into churching them all for free. Apparently working together, the women surrounded O’Sullivan on his very first day in the parish, asking to be churched. The parish priest was out of town on this particular day and the inexperienced O’Sullivan churched the women, never thinking to ask for the required payment. One of

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O’Sullivan’s parishioners even ‘threw herself on her knees’, kissing his feet, appearing to be thankful and subservient even while she was swindling him.46 O’Sullivan’s anecdote points to the resourcefulness and agency of mid nineteenth-century Catholic women and to the frustrations of the clergy, who sometimes came up against women’s local networks. It also reminds us that churching, like other lifecycle rituals, was fraught with tension and hidden meanings. Here, Irish Catholic women manipulated their new cleric to avoid paying for the ritual that ‘cleansed’ them, but they also affirmed that churching was important to them. Even into the late twentieth century, some women continued to view churching as an essential step in the lifecycle. Women in rural County Kerry in the 1970s told anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes that they opposed the Vatican II changes to churching, which made it a part of the ceremony of baptism, and wished to be churched the old way.47 Just as the realities of childbirth deviated from the ideal of Irish motherhood, there were discrepancies between the understandings and expectations of the Church hierarchy and women when it came to the rituals that marked birth. Birth customs were sites of struggles between official views or practices and women’s ways of knowing and experiencing religion. Sometimes within this struggle, the apparently insurmountable authority of the Church was vulnerable. Like pregnancy and birth, death was a passage that had long been under women’s control but was increasingly coming to the attention of Catholic Church authorities in the post-famine decades. In the early nineteenth century, death had, as Nina Witoszek describes, ‘an almost tangible existence which [bore] upon the life of the living’.48 The physical symbols of death, particularly in rural areas, were everywhere across the Irish landscape: in graveyards, on crosses, in fairy-inhabited areas, in dangerous sea-cliffs and heavily wooded areas. Death was also prominent in story and legend and through beliefs in death-signs and -omens. Death only too often directly affected parishes by taking away loved ones, sometimes suddenly and almost always traumatically. Communities’ death customs thus were among the most important local religious events. The customs that followed death were complex and carefully organised: traditionally, women cleaned and laid out the body, and the corpse remained in the home for several

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days. During those days, the grieving family and neighbours followed a vigilant ritual. In County Roscommon, for example, [e]nds of candles were brought home as they had a cure. When the cows were milked the milk was given to the pigs or left out in the straw. If butter was made from the milk it was inedible. People did not eat eggs while the corpse was in the house. The immediate family of the dead person was not allowed to do any work. Neighbors did the milking and foddering while relatives looked after those who called to the house. No unnecessary work was done in the village during this time.49 In the days after a local death, supernatural forces endangered the human world; the boundaries between life and death became slippery. If they failed to follow parish norms carefully after a local death, Catholics exposed themselves to the threat of further disaster.50 In rural areas, mostly in the island’s south and west in the nineteenth century, the wake was one of the most central community rituals. It too blended Catholicism and less official traditions. At the Irish wake, both mourning and merrymaking dominated.51 Some said the rosary and prayed for the departed soul. Almost everyone attending a wake, however, also drank, danced, joked, and played games. Some of these ribald and rowdy wake-games contained blatant sexual overtones; indeed, travellers and outside observers were shocked by these games. In one wake-game, ‘Bout,’ both women and men ‘all acted a very obscene part which cannot be described’. Another, ‘Drawing the Ship out of the Mud’, required the men to appear nude in front of the women.52 During the Irish wake, according to Narelle McCoy, ‘death and sexuality were bound closely together for the mourning period’.53 By turning their most sombre occasions into a time of celebration, Catholics released stress and sexual tensions, reaffirmed life in the face of death, solidified their neighbourly and community ties, and, to a certain extent, defied the reforming agenda of the institutional Church.54 The wake was also the site of the caoineadh or keen. In Irish tradition, lasting through the early twentieth centuries in some remote parts of the north, south, and west, keening (an oral lament) was an essential component of the wake. Practiced exclusively by women, keening epitomises

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Irish women’s traditional autonomy and power in death rituals. Not only in Ireland but also across time and space, ‘ritual lamentation has been part of the role performance of women and a central element of their culture’.55 In Ireland, keening, which anthropologist E. Moore Quinn calls a ‘form of verbal explosiveness’, allowed women to speak and even shout.56 As they keened the dead, Irish women ‘incorporated extemporaneously composed, sung, oral elegiac poetry, interspersed with choruses of loud, wailing cries’.57 In Irish tradition, keening also was bound to the image of powerfully supernatural women: the goddess Brigid and the Banshee or otherworldly death messenger.58 In 1907, John Millington Synge, while visiting the remote Aran Islands, observed the keen as follows: After Mass this morning an old woman was buried. … While the grave was being opened the women sat among the flat tombstones, bordered with a pale fringe of early bracken and all began the wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative, seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead with a perpetually recurring chant of sobs. All round the graveyard other wrinkled women, looking out from under the deep red petticoats that cloaked them, rocked themselves with the same rhythm, and intoned the inarticulate chant that is sustained by all as an accompaniment. 59 Synge’s description mirrors those of other observers who depicted keening women as powerful and rather threatening. Through keening, Irish women claimed public authority during one of life’s key passages and during a central community ritual. These women, or mná caointe, as Christina Brophy explains, ‘managed grief for their communities, mediated between the living and the dead, effected the transfer of the deceased to the afterlife by impersonating supernatural females, and provided women and colonized Irish with tools to rhetorically resist domination’.60 Keening was exclusively women’s work, and it allowed Irish women to display their autonomy in the parish community. As early as the seventeenth century, however, the Irish

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episcopate tried to eliminate the vices associated with the merry wake, including women’s keening. By the nineteenth century, during the age of Catholic reform, attempts to undermine traditional, quasi-magical observances like keening took on a new urgency.61 As Brophy and Quinn have noted, however, rural women often resisted attempts to curtail keening; the practice persisted in remote areas through the early twentieth century. Indeed, rural women sometimes used keening to ‘speak back’ to priests and thus defy clerical and patriarchal authority.62 In the analyses of Angela Bourke and Narelle McCoy, the links between the overt sexuality of the merry wake and the keening woman are evident. McCoy writes that the keening woman, ‘with her unbound hair and bared breasts challenged the accepted norms of the woman in Irish society and this was further reinforced by references in laments to sexual pleasure, or the lack of it, with husbands, as well as comments on pregnancy and childbirth’.63 The mná caointe, then, with her voice and her body, overturned patriarchy, at least temporarily. Other Irish death rituals, however, tell a story not of female empowerment but of containment, particularly in the late nineteenth century. Like churching, burial was a ritual of importance for a Catholic community. Most evidence is associated with rural areas of Ireland. Christian burial allowed for closure upon death, bringing together the human body and the sacred landscape. As Irish bishops made concerted efforts to eliminate the merry wake and to impose order and discipline on the rituals surrounding death, the consecration of graveyards became an important ceremony for many local communities. In 1859, Bishop Keane of Cloyne reported in his diary that he consecrated the cemetery in Donoughmore while on visitation. Four years later, during the summer visitation of 1863, Keane ended his trip to Donoughmore by returning to the graveyard ‘in processional order, kneeling in its centre, and there praying for the Dead, in union with the Priests and all the People’.64 By emphasising burial lands as sites of official Catholic rituals, bishops such as Keane played to lay Irish women’s and men’s pre-existing connection with a sacred landscape. They also lessened the effects of reforming beloved customs, such as the wake, by focusing on a locally useful system of beliefs and practices that fit well with the landscape-based traditions of rural Ireland.

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When those who died were polluted or impure, however, proper Christian burial became impossible. Stillborn or unbaptised children could not be placed in holy ground and commonly were buried in cillíni, graveyards specifically for unbaptised children outside of the Catholic cemetery.65 Similarly, women who committed sexual transgressions were denied entry to hallowed ground upon their deaths. In an 1857 account, a women’s cemetery or Rellig-na-man was rumoured to be where women ‘of bad character’ were interred.66 In burial rituals, then, we find additional evidence of the containment and isolation of the female body, and above all the sexualised female body, at the hands of the modernising Church and traditional rural communities. Some late nineteenth-century accounts maintain that in certain areas, all women and men had separate burial areas as well as separate church spaces. In one Sligo parish, it was ‘universally believed that … if a woman be buried in the men’s ground the corpse will be removed, during the night, by unseen hands, to the woman’s [sic] cemetery, and vice versa’.67 Other cases from rural Ireland shed additional light on attempts to control the female body even after death. David Moriarty, the Catholic bishop of Kerry, wrote in his diary of such a case while touring his parishes in the summer of 1875.68 Moriarty described a horrific murder in Kiltomey. A local man, John Quilter, beat to death his mother and his paternal uncle (his dead father’s brother). Quilter’s mother, Honoria, and his uncle Thomas had been living together, not as brother-and-sister-in-law, but as husband and wife, for nearly twenty years. This violated Catholic prohibitions against consanguinity. The local priest, the Franciscan missionaries, and even Bishop Moriarty himself urged the couple to separate, to no avail. Eventually, the Franciscan missionaries convinced Thomas Quilter to move out of the couple’s home. Still, Honoria attempted to reconcile with Thomas, and he seemed vulnerable to her pleas. The couple remained together even after Bishop Moriarty excommunicated them. Only death would sever the ties between Thomas and Honoria: John Quilter, recently arrived home from an extended stay in America, murdered his mother and his uncle in 1875. In his diary, Bishop Moriarty explained that John Quilter murdered Thomas and Honoria because of the scandal and shame that surrounded their sexual relationship. More interesting to Moriarty,

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however, was how the community of Kiltomey dealt with the Quilters after their deaths. Thomas and Honoria Quilter were both buried in the local Catholic cemetery. Honoria Quilter’s remains, however, were quickly unearthed and, according to Bishop Moriarty’s diary, ‘deposited elsewhere’.69 On 13 October 1875, the Nenagh Guardian picked up the story, reporting that ‘The charred fragments of the body of the murdered woman Honoria Quilter have been refused Christian burial by the people in Kerry.’70 The community’s treatment of Honoria Quilter’s body brings up intriguing questions: why was she denied a Christian burial while Thomas was allowed to remain in the graveyard? In his diary, Moriarty consistently described Honoria as stubborn and persuasive, suggesting that she, not her lover, refused the dictates of Church and community. By rejecting both the advice of the Catholic clergy and local norms, Honoria severed her connection with her community. Her friends and neighbours uttered the last word in the matter when they unearthed Honoria’s bones. Not content to let her death be punishment enough, they permanently ejected her from the community, displaying her body in a way that shamed her, damned her, and publicised her sins. The 1895 murder of Bridget Cleary, analysed by Angela Bourke, also exposes the connections between women’s sexual behaviour and the treatment of their bodies after death. Bridget Cleary, who was murdered by her husband, father, and cousins in rural County Tipperary, was a glamorous, alluring, stubborn, and wilful woman. Bourke argues that Cleary may have been infertile and was rumoured to be having an extra-marital affair.71 Bridget Cleary, like Honoria Quilter, transgressed local norms, and particularly sexual norms. After Bridget Cleary’s death, her husband, Michael Cleary, buried her body in a shallow grave, where the police discovered it several days later. Michael and several of Bridget’s relatives who had been involved in the murder were arrested and brought to trial. Local authorities, however, faced a dilemma: with Bridget’s family in prison, they did not quite know what to do with Bridget’s body. No one in the village would come forward to claim her body or to arrange for her burial. The community, after this woman’s death, made a statement about her scandalous life. The police finally buried Bridget Cleary on the very edge of the cemetery, just beyond the consecrated ground.72

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The legacies of these burial traditions endured. In November 1984, the Catholic parish of Tynagh, County Galway gathered for a unique ritual: the exhumation and reburial of a woman who had been dead for 150 years.73 Local tradition asserted that the woman, Áine, gave birth to three illegitimate children in the 1830s or 1840s and then became gravely ill. Citing her sexual transgressions, Áine’s parish priest would not help her or give her the last rites. Áine soon died, cursing her priest to the very end. After Áine’s death, her priest refused to have her buried in consecrated ground. Áine’s neighbours then placed her remains in a ‘little … plot’ outside of sacred land.74 According to local tradition, over the years and then the decades following her death, the spirit of Áine haunted the Tynagh priests, who faced bad luck and met early, sometimes mysterious deaths. Many in the community interpreted these strange occurrences as Áine’s revenge. Residents of Tynagh preserved the memory of Áine by telling stories of the ‘curse of Áine’ and thus reminding each other of the importance of treating the body, even the deviant female body, properly after death. They also sealed the place of her burial in their collective memory. When the Galway community reburied Áine in consecrated ground in November 1984, it attempted to put things right, thus restoring order to the Irish landscape. It also recognised the long-standing relationship between the land and the restraint of the deviant female body. Women and the chapel Lay women, who had key responsibilities in popular rituals, such as wakes, patterns at holy wells (where they conducted a series of rounds, moving around the well), and prayers and childbirth customs, managed Ireland’s pre-famine religious system, a unique mingling of official and alternative practices centred on the lifecycle.75 The advent of the chapel as a disciplined religious space, however, loomed. Since the sixteenth-century Council of Trent, Catholicism on the European continent placed an emphasis on weekly attendance at Sunday mass in a local parish chapel. This model remained out of reach for most in early modern Ireland, however, where colonialism and conquest destroyed the Church’s infrastructure. Most Irish Catholics remained without functioning churches through at least the early nineteenth century.76

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As a result, open-air masses, ceremonies at mass-rocks, and the ­station-mass predominated in rural areas. As the Irish bishops entered into the age of the ‘devotional revolution’, however, they sought a controlled space for religious occasions. The parish chapel was the clear solution.77 When the Irish Catholic bishops met at Thurles in 1850 for their first synod in centuries, they affirmed one goal of the ‘devotional revolution’ by declaring the Catholic chapel to be the only suitable and sanctioned centre of religious practice.78 Masses, baptisms, confessions, and marriages were now to take place strictly within the local chapel, not in private homes.79 This contest was also gendered, marking the dominance of modern, rational, and masculine church building over the feminine vernacular landscape. Yet many Irish Catholic chapels were either non-existent or in a deplorable state in the early nineteenth century. Following Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and led by a powerful and reorganised Church bureaucracy, Irish bishops, priests, and parishioners began repairing and building chapels, with great successes. In a generation or two, the majority of Catholics moved from worshipping in a home, in the open air, or not at all to attending Sunday mass in a newly built chapel. In 1752, there were 832 ‘simple Mass houses’ in Ireland, which were ‘little more than thatched sheds with clay floors’.80 Within a few decades, ‘barn chapels’ had been built; these were ‘large, slated, stone or rubble built, had flagged or tiled floors; normally they had a gallery or galleries to cater for increased numbers; [and] they were undecorated in the interior, and without pews.’81 By the early twentieth century, at least twenty-four major cathedrals and over three thousand ‘substantial churches’, complete with altars, pews, and even decorative windows, dominated the Irish landscape.82 When Dublin hosted the Eucharistic Congress in 1932, chapels and cathedrals were resplendent with riches and décor. As chapels emerged on the landscape, mass attendance levels rose consistently. By the 1860s and 1870s, a smaller population, combined with the construction of more spacious chapels and cathedrals, meant that most Catholics could, and did, attend Sunday mass in their local parish church.83 Once the buildings were up, parishioners could congregate in them – something that had been impossible a mere few decades before. The clergy therefore could have more contact with parishioners and could focus their efforts on using the chapel space to

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instil civility and discipline in them. Chapels also made it easier for the clergy to keep track of attendance at mass and the sacraments. Building new churches also proved central to the revival of Catholic community life: when many rural parishes remained scattered and when organised villages did not even exist in some places, a new chapel created a physical and psychological community centre. For example, in Drangan, County Tipperary, the Catholic chapel, which had been built in the 1850s, was ‘[b]y far the most imposing building’ in the area, located in the centre of the village; this particular chapel’s place at the heart of the village was not unique.84 Once priests and people finished building or repairing a local Catholic chapel, other structures were built around it: parochial housing, convents, and schools all appeared in a radius surrounding the chapel. Even some government buildings, such as the post office and the police barracks, arrived in villages only after the construction of a new Catholic chapel. Kevin Whelan, who has identified this pattern of development in over 400 Irish villages, calls the resulting community the ‘chapel-village’.85 By creating a new religious landscape based on the chapel, the Irish hierarchy not only reclaimed space; it also defined the new civilising agenda of the Church. The spatial elements of the ‘devotional revolution’ had a clear impact on Irish Catholic women’s lives; indeed, the ordering of chapel space resembled the regulation of the female body in traditional Irish culture. At times, certain women were banned from religious occasions or mass on Sunday. In her nineties, Peig Minihane of Kerry remembered of her childhood that ‘it was not right for the mother to go to her daughter’s or her son’s wedding, or to go to the funeral of the first child’.86 Since many priests discouraged women from bringing young children to the chapel, those women who cared for the young rarely presented themselves at mass. In West Donegal, local tradition had it that, through the early twentieth century, the presence of pregnant women at mass was ‘socially unacceptable’.87 And, as we have seen, after giving birth, women could not enter the chapel or receive the sacraments until they had been churched. These views marginalised women, regulating their actions, keeping them out of sacred space, and ejecting them, at certain times, from the religious community. Even with the shift from vernacular practice to ‘official’ Catholicism, then, women’s lives witnessed continuities.

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When women did attend mass, they found that Catholic chapels were gendered spaces, designed to contain, control, and segregate. Archaeological investigations have shown that the tradition of keeping men and women separate during church services and ceremonies likely dates to the pre-Norman era.88 By the nineteenth century, women and men attended the same chapel but sat in different spaces within it. In a County Tipperary parish in the 1880s, a priest recorded the parish’s rules on seat ownership. He claimed that while ‘[a]ll seats’ were ‘common’, meaning not privately owned, ‘one side was reserved for men and ‘the other for women’.89 And here, again, traditions persisted; as late as 1952, a folklore questionnaire revealed that, in Counties Meath and South Donegal as well as in Grange, Clonmel, men generally sat on the left of the chapel and women on the right.90 American anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, who travelled throughout Ireland in the 1930s, described in detail the ways in which women and men kept apart before, during, and after religious occasions: When the whole population of a country district is on the move on Sunday, the groupings are especially noteworthy. … The young men walk together by themselves and the young women by themselves. On Sunday afternoons the young men can be seen at the nearest crossroad standing together in groups of ten to thirty, while the older men keep more to their houses or visit one another. Before mass, when the weather permits, the men congregate outside the church and do not move in until all the women have entered and the priest has arrived.91 Although mass and other religious occasions ideally represented the coming together of the entire parish, they also exhibited the reality that women and men rarely mixed in public space. The custom of seating women and men apart in the chapel was a long-standing one in Ireland and not unique to Catholicism at the time, but it was underscored as integral to Irish Catholic civility in the modern age. Regulating the bodies of women at the chapel and during religious rituals were paramount concerns of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. Women’s confessions became a particular subject of discussion around 1850. All confessions, the episcopate decided, should be ‘held in the

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[church] whenever possible’, but women’s confessions ‘[s]hould be held in the church and in a confessional except in cases of necessity’.92 Roman Church leaders even proposed that Irish dioceses should have portable confessional crates available so that women could be confessed privately even at the stations.93 Its focus on women’s confessions testified to the Catholic hierarchy’s concern with women’s roles in the new world of the ‘devotional revolution’. In part, their anxiety over women’s confessions related to the private things about family and sexuality that women might reveal in the confessional (and thus which may have been overheard by neighbours in a more public setting). Such regulations also may have been designed to prevent sexual contact between priests and women or even rumours of such activities. Anxieties about what was said between priests and women in the confessional were not confined within the borders of Ireland: Eli Zaretsky has shown that in 1910s Poland, women brought questions about sexuality into the confessional, and priests in turn used the confessional to monitor sexual abuses, encourage fertility within marriage, and even qualify the patriarchal power of husbands.94 Protestant groups throughout nineteenth-century Europe, meanwhile, used the relationship between the priest and the woman in the confessional – which they viewed as disruptive to the husband’s power in the home – to denigrate Catholicism.95 Journalist Mary Kenny recounts what she calls a popular ‘Orange’ joke about priests and women in the confessional: a woman married for about six months goes to confession. ‘The priest says to her, “Are you in the family way yet?” The woman says, “No, father. Not yet.” The priest replies, “Is he not up to it? Do you want me to come around and do the job myself?”’96 Anxieties about sex and sexuality pervaded many of the spatial regulations of the ‘devotional revolution’. When women did attend mass or other religious events at the chapel, they were instructed on how to manage their bodies. Edna O’Brien told of a visit to a Limerick chapel in the 1930s: ‘At ten or eleven years’, she wrote, ‘… you sat in a chapel with your legs crossed and were asked by an incensed lady to please uncross them at once. “Did you know,” she said, “that Our Lady blushes whenever a woman does such an indecent thing”.’97 For girls and women, managing their bodies also meant paying close attention to what they wore. In 1928,

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regulations were posted outside of Catholic chapels in Ennis. These regulations required Irish women to wear dresses that were at least ‘four inches below the knee’ as well as forbidding ‘dresses cut lower than the collar bone, dresses without sleeves sufficiently long to cover the arm as far as the wrist, and dresses of transparent material’.98 In an age when the Church expressed concerns over the damaging effects of modern fashions, what Irish women wore mattered. In 1874, the Nun of Kenmare warned women not to dress ‘like a Christian woman’ at mass only to become a ‘shameless heathen’ in the evening.99 Most women saved their best and most respectable clothing for Sunday mass. Describing mass on the remote Aran Islands, Bridget Dirrane remembered that ‘[a]ll the women wore their best shawls and the men their best waistcoats’.100 How women clothed themselves was the subject of local gossip. In the following account, parishioners are entertained by the wardrobe of an uppity returned emigrant: the whole parish would be turnin’ out at … Mass for to see what she’d be wearin’ and they’d be talkin’ about it for a week. And the next Sunday they’d all be waitin’ again to see the new frock for she’d be wearin’ a new frock each Sunday.101 This narrative highlights the connections between gender, space, and class; for less prosperous or less-travelled parishioners, what returned emigrants wore to mass symbolised their connection with a wider modern world based on middle-class respectability and consumerism. Clothing the body for mass was a particular concern for middle-class women. David W. Miller links the post-famine chapel-based landscape with the new commercial and retail space of the market town. Now, he argues, Irish parishioners needed respectable clothing to attend religious rituals; thus, the ‘devotional revolution’ intermingled with shopping and commerce.102 Although Miller does not discuss the class or gender implications of this, it is clear that Irish women felt increased pressures in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’ to perform their gender and their status while in the chapel. Eric Cross’s classic The Tailor and Antsy describes how Antsy, the woman of the house, prepared for mass: ‘She combs up her Medusa-like hair, and puts on her black West Cork cloak with the hood thrust back.

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Then you realize that she was once the beauty of the neighborhood … Sunday is her high day.’103 Louise Ryan’s research on Irish female emigrants revels the ways that clothing represented status and mobility for women. For early twentieth-century Irish women, Ryan argues, clothing was ‘an expression and symbol of complex relationships’.104 When Irish women dressed, they put their gender and their class on display; when they dressed for mass, they also made a statement about their commitment to religion and their ability to appear respectable and modern in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’. As discussed earlier, however, some women’s poverty made it difficult to live up to expectations, reminding us of the regional and class diversity of the ‘devotional revolution’. For the poor, a lack of respectable clothing could preclude attendance at mass. In Killaloe in the nineteenth century, two sisters attended separate masses so that they could arrange to meet in between and exchange the one suitable coat they owned.105 By the mid-nineteenth century, wearing decent clothing to mass was a necessary component of Irish Catholic womanhood. That many did not have the means to present their bodies in a certain manner demonstrates the difficulties some women had in conforming to the ideal. Mass was also an essential social event. Many people travelled several miles to attend mass in a newly built or renovated chapel. Cloyne’s Canon Patrick Sheehan maintained that some of his parishioners, who lived seven miles away from the chapel in an area without roads, nonetheless trekked down the mountain to mass every Sunday, arriving promptly at 7:30 in the morning.106 Ireland’s Catholic laity placed much importance on mass, not just for religious reasons but also for social ones. As the parish gathered for mass, the atmosphere was often social and lively, as a description from an early twentieth-century Cashel parish illustrates: ‘From early morning farmers were seen rushing to the Creamery with their horses and carts in an effort to make Mass in the one journey. Their animals were tied to a tree while they attended Mass. Others travelled in ponies and traps and many walked and cycled.’107 These parishioners made mass attendance a priority, carefully balancing their religious and secular lives and creating a sense of community. Mass attendance thus helped create and reinforce a modern Catholic identity, and it also

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illuminates the key role of not only the clergy but also the laity in the formation of that identity. Catholic memoirs and diaries from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described how the chapel had become a place not just for mass, but also for the community to gather as one.108 On Easter Sunday, as the middle-class Mary Fogarty remembered in the 1850s, mass was an occasion for socialising and for impressing one’s neighbours. After Mary and her sisters prepared their ‘pretty new dresses of brown lustre and [their] gypsy bonnets trimmed with brown ribbon to match’, the family proceeded to the chapel, which ‘was packed to ­overflowing’ with all the local characters: ‘old Malachy was there, the Murnanes, the Heffernans, poor Biddy, … Tom Hickey, Con the ploughman, … and many more.’109 As neighbours gathered outside the chapel, as they walked to and from mass, they re-established local  ties and reinforced the connection between their landscape, Catholic ritual, and community life. A County Longford woman remembered: I mean the Church was the center of your day – of your life – and nobody would ever think of missing Mass and then where there would be a houseful, one would stay at home to mind the house and do the things … You walked to Mass, everybody walked to Mass. But the people was used to walking and they were good at it – people wouldn’t bring a bicycle to Mass. They liked … ­especially the coming home part, they liked the chat …110 Mass attendance also emerged as central to women’s communities. Gathering at the chapel provided women with opportunities for communication and socialising. In her memoir, Marrie Walsh recalled that her mother would ‘dally’ and gossip on her way home from mass in the early twentieth century.111 Róise Rua, who grew up in remote ­Donegal, was hired out as a domestic servant when she was a teenager. There, she and her sister, who worked nearby, continued to go to mass. ‘It goes without saying’, wrote Rua, ‘we were delighted to get a chance to talk to each other and chew over any news we might have heard from home.’112 Women also, by the late nineteenth century, became the principal occupiers of the chapel. In her diaries, which cover twenty-five years,

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middle-class Catholic Mary Hayden described profound life-changes. The one constant of her life, however, was her faithful attendance at mass each and every Sunday.113 Descriptions of Catholic churches from 1850 to 1950 affirm that they were feminised spaces. In Cork Cathedral, for example, over 3,000 women received communion on one day in the 1870s.114 June Levine, who came of age in the early to mid-twentieth century, remembered of her childhood: ‘When I was growing up there were always women in the churches … . If you were sent to deliver something to a neighbor, her family member might tell you: “she’s just gone down to the church for an hour” or “she’ll be back soon, she only went for Confession”.’115 The memories of a Protestant growing up in early twentieth-century Catholic Dublin reveal something similar: The doors of the many chapels on Dublin streets were open seven days a week and at all hours. People streamed in and out continually to attend mass or just to say a prayer. As we passed the open doors of the chapels we could see line after line of women kneeling in devotion before pale waxen statues (idols to protestants). They crossed themselves reverently and lips moved silently as they passed the rosary beads one by one through their fingers.116 Churches allowed lay women to get closer to God and enjoy some quiet time away from their hectic lives but also to showcase their piety. That women frequently occupied chapel space and became the primary attendants at weekly mass challenges the notion that lay Catholic women uniformly lost access to public space in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’. By physically occupying their parish’s central religious spaces, Irish women declared their commitment to their faith while also asserting that they had key roles to play in the new landscape of the modern Church. Women even managed the space of the chapel; writer Alice Taylor remembered that a local woman, ‘Old Mrs. McCarthy’, was the ‘chapel-woman all her life’, meaning that she scheduled marriages, baptisms, and funerals and oversaw any chapel-related event. After Mrs McCarthy died, her daughter Nonie took over the job.117

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Women also assumed key roles in chapel-building. Raising funds was the first step towards the building of a new chapel or the renovation and modernisation of older buildings, and lay Catholic women had a key role here, through both fundraising and personally contributing funds to chapels.118 For those who could afford them, contributions to the Church became a way for women to demonstrate their commitment to religion; this, according to Diane Hall, was also the custom in medieval Ireland, where lay women patrons also donated to their chapels.119 In 1873, when Dublin’s Kate Shine died, she left almost all of her estate to the Church. To the Presentation Convent in Cork, Shine bequeathed £70, with £20 more for the Sisters of Mercy in Sligo and the Presentation Convent in Cashel. A further £20 was set aside for the Magdalene Asylum in Limerick.120 Bequeathing money to the Church was not only an overt sign of piety; it also gave Catholic women a sense of pride and local notability. Lay Irish women’s chapel-building efforts were noted throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In May 1880, when Andrew O’Connell, a Dublin-area priest, put together a committee to oversee the construction of a new parish chapel, he turned to 45 local men – and no women. Quickly, however, the priest realised the error of his ways and appointed a special ‘Ladies’ Committee … formed for the purpose of collecting subscriptions’. These efforts paid off: with local women in charge of amassing money, the fund ‘swelled to a very considerable amount, while the weekly penny collections added to the fund’. In the end, more than half of those who gave money to the cause were women. The spectacular ‘triple mullioned window … filled with stained glass’ that claimed a space over the altar was donated by a Mrs Morris.121 In 1850, Miss O’Sullivan of Thurles bequeathed money to several local convents as well as £5 to the Thurles chapel in her will.122 According to Bridie O’Brien, her own grandmother single-handedly planned and oversaw the construction of a new chapel in Terryglass, Tipperary, in 1873.123 And women also took charge of decorating the interior of the chapel. In Kilbarron, County Tipperary, when a new chapel was constructed, [a young woman,] Ellie Esmonde, … presented £100 for the erection of a sanctuary lamp in memory of her parents and ­

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brothers … Mrs. Mary Clancy, Newlawn, donated the altar rails in memory of her husband … at a cost of £150. [A] Mrs. ­O’Connell … presented the side altar and statue in honour of the Immaculate Conception … at a cost of £126. The handsome vestment bench in the sacristy was donated by [a] Mrs. Daniel Hough.124 In Drogheda, when the Poor Clares, an order of Franciscan nuns, arrived, local women helped the nuns get settled. One benefactor, Mrs Governey, bought a plot of land so that the Poor Clares could build a new convent and also for the construction of a new parish chapel.125 Although donating money was possible only for women of a certain status, poor women also contributed to chapel-building. The Freemans Journal of 1864 published a list of parishioners who gave money towards the building of a new chapel in Monkstown; among them was ‘a Poor Woman, per the Parish Priest’.126 If we take these examples of lay women’s actions alongside clear evidence that nuns were, at the same time, constructing buildings such as orphanages, Magdalen asylums, and hospitals (for example, as early as 1834, the Sisters of Charity, led by Mary Aikenhead, built St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, the first Catholic hospital run by Catholic nuns in Ireland127), we must recognise the central role women played in the construction of a Catholic architecture. Perhaps there was an architecture of containment that served to mark out women’s place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; if so, however, women themselves helped construct it. And if, as scholars such as Kevin Whelan have argued, chapel-building in particular was key to the development of a modern Irish Catholic identity, then women’s roles in the formation of this identity warrant further exploration and analysis.128 Despite the wealth, power, and reach of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutional Church, lay women retained some control over some aspects of religious parish life. Women often proved to be Ireland’s most staunchly devout and observant Catholics. In the home, they ruled over almost all religious and moral matters. Nuns and influential lay women displayed significant power in parish life through their charitable endeavours. Meanwhile, many ordinary Irish women embraced the popular Catholicism that spread throughout Ireland in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’. These women stamped Catholicism with

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their traditional and local worldview. They adapted the new popular Catholic devotions to daily life, integrating them with vernacular customs, such as fairy belief and a sacred landscape. This was an age in which Catholic rhetoric placed Irish women firmly within the home, and in which their religious roles were constructed as essentially domestic and private. Women’s responsibilities in chapels and in parish rituals, however, testify that lay Catholic women did not retreat from the public sphere in all cases but instead actively contributed to their religious spaces and the evolution of a distinctly modern Irish Catholic topography and culture. Notes 1 Munster News and Limerick and Clare Advocate, 5 June 1880. 2 Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries. Dympna McLoughlin and Maria Luddy, however, argue that some ‘deviant’ women, such as paupers and prostitutes, maintained control over their own lives. See McLoughlin, ‘Workhouses and Irish female paupers, and Maria Luddy, ‘Prostitution and rescue work in ­nineteenth-century Ireland’, in Women Surviving, pp. 51–84. 3 Fischer, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame’, p. 822. 4 Patrick J. Corish, ‘Women and religious practice’, in Women in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 214. 5 For a discussion of the nineteenth-century religious landscape, see Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice’, pp. 90–106. 6 Lee, ‘Women and the Church’, pp. 37–8. 7 Luddy, Women and Philanthropy, pp. 2, 44. 8 Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, p. xiii. 9 Fischer, ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame’, p. 824. 10 Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Ireland’s Art Ireland’s History: Representing Ireland, 1845 to Present (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2007), p. 88. 11 Bhreathnach-Lynch, Ireland’s Art Ireland’s History, p. 96. 12 Gillian Rose, ‘Looking at landscape: the uneasy pleasures of power’, in Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, ed. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 193. 13 Rose, ‘Looking at landscape’. See also Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 10–11 and 28–9.

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14 For an analysis of the many functions of fairy belief, see Angela Bourke, ‘The virtual reality of Irish fairy legend’, Éire/Ireland 31: 1–2 (spring/summer 1996), pp. 7–25. 15 Hynes, Knock, p. 3. 16 For an example, see Linda-May Ballard, ‘Fairies and the supernatural on Reachrai’, in The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, ed. Peter Narváez (New York, NY: Garland, 1991), p. 55. 17 Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland: Collected and Arranged by Lady Gregory (London: Colin Smythe, 1970), p. 109. For a similar example from Newfoundland, see Rieti, Strange Terrain, p. 45. 18 Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (­London: Pimlico, 1999). See also Richard P. Jenkins, ‘Witches and fairies: supernatural aggression and deviance among the Irish peasantry’, in The Good People, p. 316. 19 Taylor, Occasions of Faith, p. 58. 20 Angèle Smith, ‘Landscape representation: place and identity in nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey Maps of Ireland’, in Landscape, Memory, and History, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (London: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 71. 21 McLoughlin, ‘Workhouses’, in The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing: Volume V, p. 722. 22 Ibid., pp. 722–3. 23 Catherine Nash, ‘Remapping and renaming: new cartographies of identity, gender and landscape in Ireland’, Feminist Review 44 (1993), p. 50. 24 Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries. 25 Inglis, Moral Monopoly, pp. 102–3,118. 26 Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice’, p. 102. 27 Kevin Whelan, ‘The Catholic Church in County Tipperary, 1700– 1900’, in Tipperary: History and Society: Essays on the History of an Irish County, ed. William Nolan (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1985), pp. 215–55; and ‘The Catholic parish, the Catholic chapel and village development in Ireland’, Irish Geography xvi (1983), pp. 1–15. 28 Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice’. 29 Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, p. 46. 30 Evans, ‘Peasant beliefs in nineteenth-century Ireland’, p. 54. 31 Recollections of Mrs M. Breen, Fermoy, Co. Cork, NFC 132, p. 119. 32 NLI, Ms. 18869. Description of Tobernaltha Well, Sligo. Lord Walter Fitzgerald papers. 33 Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, p. 69. 34 Ibid., p. 4. 35 Ibid., pp. 56–7.

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36 O’Sullivan, Praxis, vol. 1, p. 150. 37 Ibid. 38 NFC 1143, p. 208, cited in Patricia Lysaght, ‘The uses of sacramentals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland with special reference to the brown scapular’, in Religion in Everyday Life: Papers given at a Symposium in Stockholm, 13–15 September 1993, arranged by the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities along with the Foundation Natur Och Kultur, ed. Nils Arvid Bringéus (Stockholm: Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1994), p. 216. 39 Cara Delay, ‘Women, childbirth customs, and authority in Ireland, 1850–1930’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 21 (July 2015), pp. 6–18. 40 Ballard, Forgetting Frolic, p. 134. 41 For a comparative analysis, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the ­Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 42 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Lifecycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 110; Natalie Knödel, ‘The thanksgiving of women after childbirth, commonly called the churching of women’, University of Durham, April 1995, http:​//use​rs.ox​.ac.u​k/%7E​mikef​/chur​ch.ht​ ml#in​tro [accessed 12 December 2010]. 43 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, p. 110. 44 Ballard, Forgetting Frolic, p. 135. 45 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, p. 172. 46 O’Sullivan, Praxis, p. 7; Cara Delay, ‘Confidantes or competitors? Women, priests, and conflict in post-Famine Ireland’, Éire-Ireland 40: 1 & 2 (Earrach/Samhradh / Spring/Summer 2005), pp. 107–25. 47 Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics, p. 235. 48 Nina Witoszek, ‘Ireland: a funerary culture?’ Studies (summer 1987), p. 207. 49 Clonown: The History, Traditions and Culture of a South Roscommon Community (Clonown Community Centre, 1989), p. 158. 50 See, for example, the legends in Seán Ó hEochaidh, Séamus Ó Catháin, and Máire MacNeill, Fairy Legends from Donegal (Dublin: Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1977). 51 For more on the Irish wake, see Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, ‘The “merry wake,”’ in Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850, ed. James S. Donnelly Jr. and Kerby A. Miller (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), pp. 173– 200; E. O’Muirgheasa, ‘Irish wake games’, Bealoideas 8 (1938), pp. 121–41; and ‘Further notes on wake games’, Bealoideas 10 (1940), p. 285, as well as Seán Ó Súilleabháin, Irish Wake Amusements, translated by the author (Cork: Mercier Press, 1997 [1961]).

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52 Connolly, Priests and People, p. 154, citing J. G. A. Prim, ‘Olden popular pastimes in Kilkenny’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland II: 1 (1852–53), pp. 333–4. 53 Narelle McCoy, ‘The quick and the dead: sexuality and the Irish merry wake’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26: 4 (August 2012), p. 615. 54 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Some tasks and themes in the study of popular religion’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol.  10, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman (Leiden: J. Brill, 1974), pp. 332–3. 55 Patricia Lysaght, “‘Caoineadh os cionn coirp”: the lament for the dead in Ireland’, Folklore 108 (1997), p. 65. 56 Quinn, ‘“All I had left were my words”’, p. 214. 57 Brophy, ‘“What nobody does now”’, p. 186. 58 McCoy, ‘The quick and the dead’, p. 618. 59 John Millington Synge, The Aran Islands (London and Dublin: Elkin Matthews/Maunsel and Company, 1907; reprint Harmondsworth: Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1992), pp. 30–3, cited in Lysaght, “‘Caoineadh os cionn coirp”’, pp. 65–6. 60 Brophy, ‘Keening Community’, abstract. 61 Ó Crualoaich, The Book of the Cailleach, pp. 174–5; Taylor, Occasions of Faith, p. 53. 62 See Brophy, ‘Keening Community’ and ‘What nobody does now’, and E. Moore Quinn, ‘Non-sacred no more: the pilgrimage path Crucán na bPáiste and the re-valuation of Irish cultural practices’, unpublished paper. 63 McCoy, ‘The quick and the dead’, p. 622. See also Angela Bourke, ‘The Irish traditional lament and the grieving process’, Women’s Studies International Forum 11 (1988), pp. 287–91. 64 CDA, Bishop William Keane’s visitation notes, 5 July 1863. 65 Ballard, Forgetting Frolic, p. 136; Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 130–1. 66 Ann Hamlin and Claire Foley, ‘A women’s graveyard at Carrickmore, County Tyrone, and the separate burial of women’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Third Series, 46 (1983), p. 42. 67 Hamlin and Foley, ‘A women’s graveyard’, p. 44, citing W. F. Wakeman, ‘Inis Muiredaich, now Inismurray, and its antiquities’, Royal Society of Antiquities of Ireland 17 (1885–6), note 11, pp. 223–4, 230–2. 68 KDA, Bishop David Moriarty’s Diary, entry from 7 October 1875. 69 Ibid. 70 Nenagh Guardian, 13 October 1875.

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71 Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary. 72 Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates, The Cooper’s Wife is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), p. 352. 73 Connacht Tribune, 9 November 1984; Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran, Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions, Amsterdam, Editions Rodopi B.V., 1998, p. 23. 74 Connacht Tribune, 9 November 1984. 75 Corish, ‘Women and religious practice’, p. 214. 76 Donal Kerr, ‘The Catholic Church in the age of O’Connell’, in Christianity in Ireland, pp. 166–7. 77 Taylor, Occasions of Faith, p. 54. 78 Ahern, ‘The plenary synod of Thurles’, pp. 1–20. 79 For another example, see CEDA, Archbishop Thomas William Croke papers, 3 October 1899. File 1899/3, microfilm reel 6013. 80 Thomas Kennedy, ‘Church building’, A History of Irish Catholicism, Vol. 5: The Church Since Emancipation, no. 8, ed. Patrick Corish (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970), pp. 1–2. 81 Whelan, ‘The Catholic parish’, p. 7. 82 Kennedy, ‘Church building’, pp. 2, 8. 83 Most historians agree that chapel-building began before, not after, the Famine, but regional differences must be taken into consideration. Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland; Miller, ‘Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine’, pp. 81–98; and Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience. 84 Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, p. 5. 85 Whelan, ‘The Catholic parish’, pp. 12, 10. 86 Verling, ed., Beara Woman Talking, p. 48. 87 John Coll, ‘Continuity and change in the parish of Gaoth Dobhair, 1850–1980’, in Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland, ed. William J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988), p. 285. 88 Hamlin and Foley, ‘A women’s graveyard’, p. 45. 89 Bridie O’Brien, How We Were – In the Parish of Kilbarron-Terryglass, Co. Tipperary (Tyone, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary: Relay Books, 1998), p. 53. 90 Schools Questionnaire, NFC 1305, pp. 60–4. 91 Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 132. 92 Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, p. 197. 93 Propaganda to Cullen, 17 May 1854, file 449/7, DDA, cited in Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience, p. 211. 94 Ibid. 95 Brożyna, Labour, Love, and Prayer, p. 22.

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96 Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, p. 32. 97 O’Brien, Mother Ireland, p. 45. 98 Limerick Leader, 2 May 1928. 99 Cusack (The Nun of Kenmare), Woman’s Work in Modern Society, p. 322. 100 Dirrane, A Woman of Aran, pp. 20–1. 101 Arnold Schrier, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1997), p. 133. 102 Miller, ‘Landscape and religious practice’, pp. 104–5. 103 Eric Cross, The Tailor and Antsy (Cork: Mercier Press, 1999 [1942]), p. 20. 104 Louise Ryan, ‘“I’m going to England”: women’s narratives of l­ eaving Ireland in the 1930s’, Oral History 30: 1 (spring 2002), p. 49. 105 Ignatius Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe 1800–1850 (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1992), pp. 346–7. See also O’Sullivan, Praxis, vol. 1, p. 216. 106 Herman J. Heuser, Canon Sheehan of Doneraile: The Story of an Irish Parish Priest as Told Chiefly by Himself in Books Personal Memoirs and Letters (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), p. 283. 107 A Short Ecclesiastical Survey of Golden/Kilfeacle, p. 70. 108 See, for example, Murphy, When Youth Was Mine; Ó Síocháin, The  Man from Cape Clear; and Taylor, To School Through the Fields. 109 Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, p. 109. 110 Interview with Molly Hartin, 2006, in Donohoe, ed., Longford Women’s Voices. 111 Walsh, An Irish Country Childhood, p. 42. 112 Ua Cnáimhsí, Róise Rua, p. 76. 113 Hayden, The Diaries of Mary Hayden, 1878–1903. See, for example, vol. 1, p. 10. 114 Evelyn Bolster, A History of the Diocese of Cork: The Episcopate of William Delany: 1847–1886 (Cork: Tower Books of Cork, 1993), pp. 210–11. 115 Levine, Sisters, p. 252. 116 Devlin, Speaking Volumes, pp. 135–6. 117 Alice Taylor, ‘The chapel-woman’, in Ireland’s Women: Writings Past and Present, selected by Katie Donovan, A. Norman Jeffares, and Brendan Kennelly (New York, NY: Norton, 1994), pp. 322–3. 118 See, for example, The Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore, June 1913, pp. lvii–lviii and October 1913, pp. cxxxvii–cxxxviii. 119 Diane Hall, Women and the Church in Medieval Ireland, c. 1140–1540 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), p. 23.

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120 CEDA, Archbishop Patrick Leahy papers, Will of Kate Shine of Dublin, 1873. File 1873/10, microfilm reel 6010. 121 History and Description of St. Mary’s Church, Star of the Sea, Irishtown: Report of the Committee Appointed to Erect the Dean O’Connell Memorial (Dublin: Irish Builder, 1884), pp. 7–17. 122 CEDA, Slattery Papers, Extract from the will of Miss O’Sullivan, 14 February 1850. File 1850/2, microfilm reel 6003. 123 O’Brien, How We Were, p. 7. 124 Ibid., p. 53. 125 Poor Clares, Poor Clare Convent Craiguecullen, 1893–1929. From the Diary of A Member of the Community (Carlow: Nationalist and Leinster Times, n.d.). [pamphlet] 126 Freemans Journal, 14 June 1864, p. 2. 127 Inglis, Moral Monopoly, p. 126. 128 Whelan, ‘The Catholic Church in County Tipperary, 1700–1900’, and ‘The Catholic parish’.

6 Women, priests, and power From January 1879 through December 1880, Edward McCabe, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, received eighty-three letters written by lay Catholic women.1 In their letters, Dublin’s Catholic women wrote of poverty, family, and politics. They requested McCabe’s assistance with making ends meet and mediating neighbourly conflicts. Many sought their archbishop’s help in negotiating their relationships with their priests.2 These women also, however, asserted their own wishes and desires, declaring that they were in fact central actors in the drama of modern Irish Catholicism. In their petitions to their religious superiors, lay Catholic women often referred to their relationships with their parish priests and curates.3 This correspondence thus provides a window onto both women’s agency as letter-writers and petitioners and the complex relationship between women and the clergy from 1850 to 1950.4 For some women, in an age of Church revival and renewal, the priest came to represent a caring and trustworthy authority figure, even a confidant. The relationship between women and priests, however, was contested, sometimes marked by struggles for power and influence. In the close-knit world of the Irish Catholic parish, conflicts between priests and women were as common as examples of trust and support. These lay–clerical struggles demonstrate how Irish Catholic women sometimes successfully negotiated patriarchal clerical power in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’ and well into the mid-twentieth century.5 Intimates By the post-famine era, Irish Catholic priests were, as one Galway cleric explained, ‘Judge, Jury and Secretary’ in their parishes.6 They not

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only said mass, heard confessions, and attended to other religious duties, but also maintained order and peace, alleviated poverty, and managed parish finances.7 The Irish priest became a mediator not only between the people of the parish and the outside world but also between rival parishioners.8 Several incidents from the late nineteenth century in which women confided in their priests affirm the connections between lay women and priests. Women reported abuse and divulged painful secrets; they sought advice. In an 1858 letter to Bishop William Keane, a Cloyne parishioner, Eliza Holmes, praised her priest, who was ‘acting most kind’ to her daughter, a rape victim.9 Holmes, like the Limerick mother, chose to trust her priest with a personal and painful matter. Both women may have sought the clergy’s help in their daughters’ cases because of priests’ local influence; perhaps they hoped that their priests would broker a marriage for their daughters or assist with employment or emigration. Whatever their ultimate goals in approaching their priest with their predicaments, Eliza Holmes and the Limerick woman revealed their connection to their priests when they chose to entrust them with their most private secrets. Still, serving as women’s confidants could cause priests trouble, inserting them into familial and communal rows. Kenmare’s John O’Sullivan, whose diaries and unpublished manuscripts described life in the 1840s and 1850s, remembered a ‘curious case’ about a fellow priest’s dilemma, which arose when a local woman confided a long-held secret. Years before, when the young woman was newly married, she was unable to conceive a child. In a world in which infertility was stigmatised and almost always blamed on women, she deliberately became pregnant by a neighbour and bore a son.10 When her son was old enough to be married, a match was made between him and said neighbour’s daughter – who was, of course, his half-sister. When her son’s match was announced, the woman confessed her actions to the priest and begged for his help. The priest remained baffled about how he could fix the problem while maintaining the confidentiality of the confessional and keeping the peace in the parish. Then the young man chose to emigrate rather than marry, and it seems likely that the priest was instrumental in producing this outcome.11 Although this mother’s confidence revealed her faith that

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her priest was a supporter and a potential ally, it also placed the priest in an unenviable position. When analysing the relationship between the clergy and women, we must also recognise that clerics often cohabited with women, usually housekeepers, who sometimes became de facto wives or partners. Women and priests lived together in the same household, and some fashioned alternative families. When a local priest, Father Ryan, died in the early twentieth century, Signe Toksvig visited his housekeeper. After the visit, she realised that, in every way except ‘for the carnal part’, the housekeeper served as the priest’s wife. ‘[S]he ordered him about’, wrote Toksvig, ‘and did for him in the sort of humbly commanding way of the Irish wife’.12 Some suspicion of these relationships certainly existed. Fellow clerics and their Catholic parishioners noticed apparently inappropriate contact between a priest and a lay woman. In the 1850s, a curate wrote to the new bishop of Cloyne, warning of rumours that the parish priest was having an affair with the local teacher. The parishioners, according to the curate, now referred to the school as ‘School of Scandal’. ‘It is useless for my fellow curate and me to endeavor to inculcate virtue’, the frustrated cleric wrote, ‘… for the people will say as they have before, “the priests themselves are worse”’.13 The frequency of sexual relationships between priests and lay women remains unknown to us, but bishops’ diaries and clerical correspondence reveal that such cases were not unheard of. Sexual scandals appear in diocesan correspondence in veiled and coded language. When Cloyne’s Bishop Murphy wrote to Rector Tobias Kirby at the Irish College Rome in 1856 with the claim that a parish priest in Kanturk had been denounced four times for soliciting in the tribunal and violating two penitents, he framed the missive as a general ‘scandal’ but appeared to be describing abuse and coercion.14 Other parishioners remarked on close contact between women and priests, as in the scandalous cases just mentioned. Rumours of closeness between women and priests could also cause concerns that they were conspiring to challenge the authority of husbands, particularly after the publication of historian Jules Michelet’s anti-clerical Priests, Women, and Families (1845). Focusing on the French case, Michelet denounced the camaraderie between women and Catholic priests,

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arguing that when women confided in their clergy while in the confessional, they undermined the power of their husbands. In Michelet’s view, the connections between women and priests threatened patriarchy and thus the natural order of the family. He feared that women would use their bonds with their clergy to their own advantage, usurping their husbands’ power.15 Letters written during the 1850s affirm that women did seek help from their clergy, and especially when there was trouble with their husbands at home. Indeed, women sometimes viewed their priests as substitute patriarchs, and priests stepped forward to assume such roles by helping or defending wives; together, then, lay women and their clergy sometimes did challenge the patriarchal consensus within the home. In 1859, Ellen Walden of Queenstown composed a letter to Keane, asking him for help as her marriage was breaking up.16 One year earlier, a man named Philip O’Neill wrote to Keane to complain that his parish priest and curate were interfering in his marriage. One of the priests also wrote to Keane, however, claiming that O’Neill was ‘very harsh to [his] good wife’ and that that was the cause of the dispute.17 In this instance, the priests supported a woman against her abusive husband, and the husband resented their interference enough to contact his bishop. Catholic women in bad marriages, however, may have had little recourse other than confiding in their priests and asking them for assistance. Women who were widows may have had uniquely intimate relationships with their clerics, with priests frequently stepping forward to give them particular assistance. In 1883, two Clare clerics took it upon themselves to write to the local newspaper asking for public assistance in the troubling case of a destitute widow. The parish priest wrote that the woman was ‘in a most distressed condition; she has five young helpless children, the eldest only seven years old, and has hardly anything to give them to eat. Her husband died in America two years ago.’ The curate also petitioned for help, explaining ‘I am perfectly aware of her very pitiable condition, and I believe those who would wish to give in real charity could not easily find a more deserving object.’18 Depicting this widow as a woman alone whose husband had died tragically, these priests stepped forward to aid her. In doing so, they also helped construct the idea of the deserving poor and affirmed

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the helplessness of widows with children, a theme that appears repeatedly in the correspondence held in Catholic diocesan archives. In addition, widows may have played on that stereotype, using it to manipulate their clergy or, at the very least, to win them as allies. While the closeness between women and priests could be beneficial to all involved, some relationships proved troubling to both Irish and Roman Church authorities, particularly in the era of the ‘devotional revolution’, when the Church sought to rework the image of Irish priests. The Irish clergy was itself in desperate need of reform earlier in the century. The early nineteenth-century Catholic Church found its clergy’s almost too-intimate relationship with the laity disconcerting. Although the priest was a respected and effective community leader in the pre-famine era, his role seemed more secular than religious; his relationship with his parishioners was often one of trusted peer rather than respected leader.19 Lax in their duties, some priests even behaved as badly as their parishioners: reports of clerical drinking, gambling, and promiscuity consistently embarrassed Church authorities.20 The Church’s mission to reform Catholicism also was hampered by some priests’ failure to execute even rudimentary duties, such as preaching sermons, catechising children, and ensuring that their parishioners attended the sacraments regularly. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several bishops demanded that their priests reform their behaviour and instruct their parishioners regularly, limit their fees, and attend retreats and conferences. Over several years, different bishops forbade their priests from attending ribald community events, attempted to curtail priests’ drinking, and insisted that priests appear in clerical dress at all times.21 The ‘devotional revolution’ featured as one of its main goals a reconstruction of priestly masculinity. ‘This new priest was, above all else’, argues Joseph Nugent, ‘to be an object of emulation, to be the model for a new refined type of Irish manliness. For if the wayward Irishman was to be civilized, the Catholic priest as emblematic of, and representative of, the newly-respectable Church had himself to be the exemplar of modern propriety.’22 The new priest was to be professional and courteous at all times, must comport himself with decorum, should not be too familiar with his parishioners, and would not give off the slightest whiff of impropriety. Reports of too-close relationships

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between priests and women, then, became especially troubling to Church authorities and outside observers by the late nineteenth century. In their analyses of the connections between Irish women and priests, some scholars seem to echo the sentiments of Michelet. Tom Inglis describes a disturbingly cosy relationship between priests and women, chiefly mothers, in his Moral Monopoly. Beginning in the post-famine decades, he maintains, the wives and mothers of middleclass farming families teamed up with Ireland’s newly powerful Catholic priests, bringing the Church’s message into homes and thus instilling it in future generations. Like Michelet, Inglis emphasises the power and control that Irish women gained by combining forces with the Catholic clergy. In exchange for supporting the Church, he asserts, women secured private authority within the home.23 Journalist Mary Kenny goes further as she explores the effects of the bonds between mothers and priests. Kenny argues not only that mothers willingly supported priests’ power, but also that the consequences for Irish society were profound. The priest–mother alliance, she writes, caused both anti-clericalism and misogyny when adult Irish men came to resent the powers of both. According to Kenny, men rejected both the ‘feminised’ priest and the overbearing mother. Anti-clericalism, then, argues Kenny, sometimes signified an ‘Oedipal struggle of cutting the umbilical cord’.24 Kevin Kearns also explains the relationship between women and priests; his views differ from those of Inglis and Kenny. By the early twentieth century in working-class Dublin, according to Kearns, priestly power and female subordination – not collusion – were the norm, and the confessional became the site of priestly dominance. Kearns’s female oral history subjects revealed that their priests ‘interrogated’ them in the confessional, particularly about sexuality. ‘You’d be asked in confession’, remembered one woman, ‘why you weren’t having more family, “why haven’t you more children?”… Didn’t matter if you had the wherewithal or not to feed or rear them. You just had to keep populating the country.’25 Another Dublin woman’s life-story also featured her authoritarian cleric: He knew what was right for each and every one of his parishioners in their daily lives … . Women were a particular irritation

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to him, we knew from the regular spates of torrential invective aimed at these imbecilic irrationals, and none of them knew how to treat their Lords and Masters whom the Good God had deemed fit to provide them with, their husbands.26 In the remembrances of these women, the significant alliances that priests formed were not with women but with other men; priests here unquestionably supported the rule of husbands. That Kearns’s oral history informants were asked to recall the distant past in an age (the 1980s and 1990s) when the Church coming under unprecedented scrutiny and reeling from scandals may help explain their more bitter memories.27 Still, these conflicting examples also reveal the complexities of the relationships between women and priests and the variety of responses to them. Rivals The late nineteenth-century Catholic priest worked hard to establish and maintain authority as he brought the messages of a revitalised Church and new ways of understanding and practicing religion to a laity who was sometimes suspicious and wary of his modern ways. For priests working in the post-famine decades, the world of the rural Irish parish could be unfamiliar and strange. Many priests came from middle-class families and were accustomed to middleclass ways, including English-language literacy.28 Indeed, the post-famine clergy was wedded to a culture of literacy. In parish life, the priest consistently wielded his pen as a civilising tool: he kept records of marriages and baptisms and detailed lists of those who attended mass and catechism classes; he recorded the names of dues-paying defaulters. A substantial amount of a priest’s time, meanwhile, was spent engaging in reading or writing, including managing correspondence: priests wrote letters to each other, to newspapers, and to their superiors.29 Although a significant number of Irish women increasingly gained access to this literate Catholic culture, others remained more firmly entrenched in the world of orality. Still, they retained their abilities to use their words as a counter to clerical authority.

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Even in an age of increased literacy, parish life continued to revolve around the spoken word, and both women and priests employed their words as weapons against each other. Indeed, the clergy worried over women who used their powerful spoken words and their dangerous influence to wreak havoc on the peace of the community. John O’Sullivan, for example, asserted that the local station-mass often ­ erupted in violence due to the ‘clamour of the women’, which ‘excite[d]’ male parishioners to ‘[b]loodshed and riot’.30 The Waterford News reported in 1885 that the magistrates were charging a local woman, Bridget McDonnell, with disorderly conduct – in the local parish chapel. After ‘forcing herself into the sanctuary’, McDonnell ‘made use of very bad language, and abused two women and Father Dooley, who were there’.31 In the 1910s, several Galway clerics wrote to their religious superiors complaining of local women’s ‘uncharitable tongues’.32 Women thus called on their voices, and possibly female traditions of outspokenness, not just in their daily lives but also in their interactions with priests.33 Priests, however, often found troublesome women threatening to their own authority and to the order of the parish. Legends and stories were part and parcel of the oral life of the laity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they provided rural Catholics with rich material for their powerful rhetorical performances.34 Oral narratives document the local effects of the ‘devotional revolution’, testifying to the resistance and thus lay–clerical conflicts that resulted from the Church’s reorganisation and reform. Bríd Bean Uí Cheallacháin, born in 1929 in the Dingle Gaeltacht, remembered the following about her childhood: at that time, the priests gave the young people a very hard time for dancing and for going to Ball Nights. There was one night we were at a ball and the priest came. All the girls took fright and ran upstairs. The priest was on his way up after them, with his book open, when one of the girls accidentally kicked the chamber pot that had been left upstairs for the ladies’ convenience, and down the stairs it went, with its contents, straight in the priest’s face.35 Uí Cheallacháin’s amusing story reflects the opposition that priests faced when trying to regulate morality. The teenage girls’ rebellion,

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resulting in the seemingly accidental, albeit public, humiliation of their cleric, provided humour for decades to come. By telling and retelling this story, women such as Uí Cheallacháin documented the often contentious relationships between priests and people and poked fun at the authoritarian priest, reminding listeners that priests too could sometimes get their comeuppance. Although clerical power over adolescent girls in real life was almost absolute, the tables were turned within the fiction of the narrative. For Ireland’s people, oral traditions, ballads, songs, fairy belief, and folklore had long provided an alternative discourse of sorts, functioning to counteract the power of the British state and serving as a form of expressing colonial resistance.36 Developing tensions between lay women and priests are reflected in these narratives as well. This was an age in which priests attempted to regulate female behaviour and sexuality, encouraged them to exit the public sphere, and increasingly managed religious and lifecycle rituals, thus displacing women’s traditional customs. Some lay women, however, resisted these intrusions through storytelling. In legends told in rural areas through the early twentieth century, priests and lay women often battled for supremacy. Eugene Hynes has analysed narratives focusing on priests turning people into animals; stories of the magical drunken priest with ‘special curative powers’ have been discussed by anthropologist Lawrence Taylor.37 In narratives, clerics possessed supernatural powers, sometimes using these powers to punish wayward parishioners; others, however, were bested by parishioners, their attempts at asserting authority mocked.38 Legends about priests and wise women are particularly revealing. A  thorn in the side of the institutional Church, the wise woman or healer stood as the priest’s main parish enemy. In reality, both priests and wise women were traditional local authorities who sometimes competed for the loyalty of parishioners. In oral tradition, this struggle for power is displayed through a confrontation between the two. According to Erin Kraus, nineteenth-century Kildare wise woman Moll Anthony frequently confronted clerical authority: Once a new parish priest came to Allen and soon after his arrival he denounced Moll from the pulpit, on a certain Sunday during Mass. After this performance, he returned home to find his

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beautiful horse on death’s doorstep. He tried everything to cure the horse, but was eventually convinced by his parishioners to go to Moll Anthony for help. When he arrived at her door, ‘she received him rather coldly at first, but in the end she said, “Your horse is cured go home, and in future let me alone, and I will leave you in peace”.’39 This narrative details the stricken-horse legend, a popular trope involving the priest, the wise woman, and a horse, the last of which was symbolic of clerical power and mobility in the late nineteenth century. The legend begins with descriptions of the acrimonious relationship between the local priest and the wise woman. The priest vehemently denounces the wise woman, forbidding his parishioners to visit her. Soon, however, the priest’s horse becomes ill, stuck in the mud, or somehow otherwise disabled. The priest, himself stuck without his horse, is forced to turn to the wise woman for help. After some negotiating, she cures the priest’s horse; he, in turn, acknowledges her powers and her role in the community. Most of the stricken-horse narratives end with the wise woman treating the cleric respectfully and the priest rewarding the woman with great praise. ‘“Continue with your work”’, one priest tells the wise woman, ‘“for as long as you live you won’t hear me mention your name from the altar”.’40 In other versions of the legend, the priest apologises to the wise woman for doubting her benevolent work in the parish community. Such narratives construct local ideas of the priest’s proper place; they denounce modern acrimonious priests and instead support a ‘mild-mannered and devout’ Irish clergy.41 These tales also support female power and challenge patriarchal authority. The following legend, told by ninety-year-old Peig Minihane in the 1950s, depicts the conflict between the priest and the wise woman slightly differently. It retains the horse in the narrative but features the cleric himself as the injured party: Father Larkin … his horse got its head, and if it did, it knocked him off its back and something in his shoulder was broken. Well, he walked from here, I suppose to the north of Ireland … to doctors, and he met no doctor in his travels who did him any

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good, and his shoulder was not healing. There was a woman in Kilcatherine, the mother of the priest’s clerk, and it’s many a good plaster she made, and it’s many a bad thing she healed too. She herself made the plaster … That cured the priest, and you may say that the priest payed [sic] her well! It healed the shoulder, the plaster she made.42 Narratives such as this symbolically demonstrate a commitment to local and informal powers (those of the rural parish, those of women), while undermining centralised, bureaucratic authority (that of the institutional Church, that of the middle-class male clergy). Post-famine legends thus reflect the real-life power contests between priests and women, and they also propose an outcome that may not have been possible in reality.43 Additionally, the telling of such legends may have allowed some less privileged women to use their words to qualify their clergy’s power and assert their own cultural authority.44 Gossipers Within fantasy and in reality, disputes between lay women and their clerics featured prominently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Priests and women battled over much, including priests’ duties, their management of parishes, and women’s reputations in the parish. As the previous section revealed, these conflicts sometimes involved tense verbal exchanges. Even those who often seem powerless, as James C. Scott’s work has demonstrated, have powerful verbal weapons at their disposal, including ‘slander, gossip, [and] character assassination’. These are weapons that even the rich or authoritative, in some cases, cannot avoid,45 and that the dispossessed, including women, can use. For Catholic women, gossip and slander were potent tools indeed.46 Recently, scholars have demonstrated how rural Irish women used their words, often imaginatively, to rework and resist patriarchy, even well into the twentieth century.47 Priests’ diaries and correspondence expose the potency of gossip and rumour at the local level and how Ireland’s Catholic laity could use such weapons to modify the authority of the priests. John ­O’Sullivan, parish priest of Kenmare, wrote of gossip in his mid-nineteenth-century

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training manual for priests. ‘If we have the misfortune to be given to overindulgence in drink’, O’Sullivan explained, ‘there will be scarcely one in the parish that will not be able to tell how many gallons of whiskey are annually consumed in the Priest’s house.’48 Clerics such as O’Sullivan revealed their concerns that gossip was damaging the lay– clerical relationship and that parishioners could use it to manoeuvre against their clergy. Lay women led the way in managing local gossip. John O’Sullivan problematised women’s unruly words and actions during the 1840s and 1950s. His unpublished diaries and writings, including a training manual for novice priests, relate numerous instances of female gossip and what he liked to categorise as disorderliness.49 Although women gossiped about almost every aspect of parish life, they sometimes targeted other parishioners, and even other women, with their words. In 1890s Dublin, a parishioner named Mary Flanagan wrote to her parish priest to inform him of the local schoolteacher’s transgressions: ‘I beg to inform you that almost daily during school hours for a long time past, Miss Minnie was in the habit of standing at one of the class room doors talking to Mr. Hayes.’50 Rumours about women who were not living up the ideal of womanhood, mainly in terms of sexual conduct, often made their way to priests and even bishops, thus further complicating the relationship between clerics and women. Gossip about and by women became a troubling issue for some bishops and archbishops. In an 1878 letter to Archbishop McCabe, a Dublin man sought advice about the local gossip surrounding his wife: Sir I hope you will Exkuse me for the liberty i take in Wrighting to our lordship it may not seem in contrast with your digtney but it is with all respect sir the case may seem of little importance but it is of the greatest truble to me and my faimley to think anney one would tell such a falsehood as was told to Father O’sillivan that my wife was the most scandles woman in the street for it is a deliberate falsehood that is long working against me and my family.51 This letter is rare in that, in this particular case, a man wrote to the bishop to defend his wife’s reputation. More commonly, women

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themselves took up their pens in their own defence. This correspondence reveals the potency of gossip networks as well as how orality continued to be used to monitor women’s sexual reputations and modify their behaviour.52 Newly dominant priests, then, were being incorporated into a centuries-old, woman-dominated system of social control. Some parish disputes began with gossip but ended with more vocal, and visible, conflicts. Here, disputes between women and priests take centre stage. A scathing exchange in the Templenoe chapel in 1913 demonstrates the ways in which tensions between women and priests could erupt into public verbal battles. The conflict began when a female parishioner asked her priest, Father Moriarty, to address the congregation at mass for her to help identify who had stolen her shawl. Moriarty refused her request. The woman then confronted him at mass, publicly announcing that, in days past, the local clergy not only would have helped her but also ‘would have been more deferential to one of her family’. Father Moriarty responded with his own denunciation: I perceive … you claim to be a gentlewoman! … Tell me, Madame, … have you cups and saucers on your table? … Have you asparagus for dinner? Have you cucumbers in your garden? Have you a privy house in your garden? If you have not all those appendages you are no gentlewoman.53 Moriarty maligned his disruptive parishioner in an explicitly public way. To accomplish this to greatest effect, he attacked the woman’s reputation and her housekeeping abilities. In the nineteenth century, ideas of respectability were changing: in an age that was increasingly defined by middle-class values, some notable Catholics began demonstrating their social status not by calling upon tradition or reminding others of their family honour, as Moriarty’s parishioner tried to do, but through material items such as cups and saucers, asparagus, gardens, and outhouses. In some ways, priests were representative of such changes; they came largely from the middle classes themselves and were instrumental in instilling middle-class ideals of respectability across Ireland.

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Respectability was also inextricably intertwined with gender, and Moriarty’s words clearly reference proper gender roles. By focusing his verbal attack on the material items (or lack of material items) in his parishioner’s home, Moriarty suggested that good Irish women, instead of bothering their priests, should focus their attentions on the domestic sphere. By publicly challenging her priest, this particular parishioner clearly stepped outside of her proper role. According to Father Moriarty, she therefore earned his equally public rebuke. After such a display, Moriarty may have hoped that his flock – especially the women – would hesitate to collide with him in the future. Yet censure from priests appeared to have little effect on women’s outspokenness. In 1873, Archbishop Leahy of Cashel mediated a dispute between a priest and a female parishioner in Cappamore. When Mrs Cornelius O’Brien charged her priest, Father Fitzgerald, with ‘unpriestly language’, Fitzgerald responded that Mrs O’Brien was a drunk. After being informed of one of her drinking sprees in a local pub, Fitzgerald claimed, he preached on the topic at mass, saying that ‘[t]his class of persons have money enough to purchase nasty whiskey. They have money enough to give to the God Bacchus but not one penny to give to the priest of God.’54 Apparently Mrs O’Brien was proving herself to be troublesome. She offended her priest twice, first, by publicly appearing drunk in Fitzgerald’s jurisdiction, and again, by failing to pay parish dues. During her very public binge, Mrs O’Brien stayed in the pub ‘until late in the evening’, not just drinking, but ‘singing a verse of a well known song’.55 Appearing intoxicated in the male space of the pub was harmful enough, but by singing, Mrs O’Brien became a spectacle. She brought unwelcome attention on her parish and her priest, and she demonstrated the fragility of Ireland’s construction of ideal Catholic womanhood. The outcome of O’Brien’s case reveals the power that priests could wield over the rural parish, and against vexatious women, when they chose to do so. Although Father Fitzgerald may not have referred to Mrs O’Brien specifically from the pulpit, his likely intentions in telling the story – to expose and shame the family – must have seemed clear to nearly everyone in the chapel that day. The O’Briens defended themselves against Fitzgerald’s charges by claiming that the priest had mistaken another woman for Mrs O’Brien. Fitzgerald, in turn, argued

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that he never had denounced her specifically but merely had warned his congregation about the evils of drunkenness. Fitzgerald also produced several parish witnesses who supported his claims. In the end, the O’Briens shied away from further conflict and asked for Fitzgerald’s pardon. He refused, and the O’Briens switched parishes.56 The absence of the family from mass on Sundays would send a signal to the people of Cappamore: angering or challenging Father Fitzgerald could threaten not only their reputations, but also their very membership in the parish community. For women especially, Mrs O’Brien’s fate could have been evidence of their clergy’s potency. The Cappamore case also reminds us that priests had their own powerful verbal weapons, most notably through the altar denunciation. In my article ‘“The Gates Were Shut’”, I provide numerous examples of nineteenth-century priests using the altar denunciation to shame, correct behaviour, and assert their clerical authority.57 Still, Mrs O’Brien’s trouble-rousing activities suggested the vulnerability of the patriarchal system in post-famine Ireland. Throughout the next few decades, Ireland’s Catholic women continued to engage actively in disputes with priests. In 1882, a Dublin woman, Mary, described her contentious relationship with her local priest in a letter to Archbishop McCabe. ‘I determined while you were in your retreat to leave nothing undone on my side to bring about a good feeling here & to save you any further trouble so I wrote myself to the P.P. [parish priest] a very nice letter …’ she wrote. She had apparently tried to make peace; as she described to McCabe, she appealed to the priest: ‘under the circumstances did he not think peace & a return to the old relations between us would be well. I was ready on my side & I wrote to him as an old friend of my boy’s father and grandfather – I should be glad to see him at dinner the day of our arrival – .’ The response from the priest, however, was ‘curt’. He declined the dinner invitation and rebuffed the woman’s attempts to make peace. Next, she informed McCabe that this same priest was equally unpopular in a neighbouring town and that the parishioners there were organising to boycott him.58 The public and divisive parish conflicts pitting priests and women against each other suggest new interpretations of the relationship between the Irish clergy and lay women. They also demand a re-examination of women’s status and a re-appraisal of the clergy’s role in the

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post-famine decades. Most historians have argued that the authority of the clergy increased during Ireland’s ‘devotional revolution’, and others have described a post-famine decline in Irish women’s social and economic status alongside their enclosure in the private sphere.59 In reality, however, many priests found their positions more tenuous, and some women retained more of a prominent public voice than we previously thought. Writers and meddlers By now the image of the poor, suffering woman in famine-era Ireland is only too familiar. Both contemporary accounts and more recent historiography have highlighted the plight and distress of Irish women in the mid-nineteenth century. During the famine crisis, images such as that of Bridget O’Donnell represented suffering womanhood, particularly suffering motherhood, and, on the larger level, the suffering Irish nation.60 As Margaret Kelleher and Stuart McLean have argued, during the Great Hunger, Irish women came to ‘personify the worst ­depredations of famine’.61 The years following the famine did not appear to improve women’s status much. Dympna McLoughlin writes that ‘[l]abouring women and their children were especially hard hit by the famine and those that [sic] survived it faced extreme prejudice that militated against them.’62 Economic distress, meanwhile, was matched by an increasing restrictive and religious patriarchy, when newly disciplined Catholic clergy and an organised and powerful Church bureaucracy systematically disempowered women in the post-famine decades. Women, as a result, allegedly became mere pawns of the Church and mere objects within a newly patriarchal and repressive rural society.63 The prevalence of female suffering during the famine and post-famine eras is based in reality and certainly should not be undermined. In recent years, however, research has revealed that some Irish women were far from passive during the Great Hunger. From lamenting the dead to engaging in philanthropy to heroically burying family members, women acted, as best they could, to help themselves and their families through the crisis.64 And another representation of Irish women in the famine era has also gained currency recently: that of the unruly, disorderly woman, most commonly found in studies of the

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workhouse.65 While nineteenth-century officials viewed such women as ‘a potentially disruptive force in need of supervision, management, and regulation’,66 Anna Clark argues that these women’s acts of violence and resistance provide clear evidence of their agency and determination.67 It is my contention here that this agency based in deliberate unruliness persisted throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Evidence of it can be found not only in oral tradition and local disputes but also in letters written by women. Oral traditions such as the stricken-horse legend persisted in Ireland well into the early twentieth century in some remote areas. In many parts of the country, however, the nineteenth century was an era of change. Fairy belief, legendry, and the Irish language were waning in the face of both a powerful colonial state and a strengthening Catholic Church, both of which imposed a literate, linear, and essentially modern world-view on Ireland’s people. Angela Bourke has explored the cultural and religious consequences of this transformation, maintaining that the result was a ‘cultural cataclysm’, in which patterns not only of behaviour but also of thought were transformed. Gone, she argues, were the ‘imagination, memory, creativity and communication’ of the vernacular system, and in their place came ‘linear and colonial thought-patterns’.68 These transformations were also gendered: Bourke, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, and others have interpreted the modern, literate world’s overtaking of ‘creative’ oral traditions as a victory of the masculine over the feminine, the triumph of the male-led ‘devotional revolution’ over the more fluid and thus feminine system of alternative beliefs.69 That some women continued to tell stories depicting their own powers and priests’ weaknesses testifies to the complexities of these cultural changes in rural Ireland. Those women with access to education also, however, availed themselves of Ireland’s new literate culture, using the written word to confront clerical authority. Notably, most of the conflicts involving priests and women entered into the historical record because women, not their husbands or their priests, brought them there. Hundreds of Catholic women composed missives to their religious authorities from 1850 to 1950. By writing to their bishops, lay women brought their personal concerns and conflicts

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outside the walls of their parish community, thereby publicising issues and disputes that many, perhaps most notably their priests, would have preferred to stay local. Through their words, both spoken against their priests and written to their bishops, women thus claimed a place in the public sphere. Ireland’s Catholic women wrote to their religious superiors for various reasons. Commonly, they requested their bishop’s and priests’ help with making ends meet and assisting family members. They also, however, fiercely defended their rights and reputations. Many also sought or even demanded help negotiating their relationships with their priests.70 No matter what the subject of their letters, when Irish women wrote to bishops, they demonstrated their agency. Petition letters asking for help were most common. The work of Lindsey Earner-Byrne has demonstrated that lay women requested financial help from their bishops well into the 1920s.71 My research, which focuses on an earlier period – the 1870s and 1880s – shows that similar concerns dominated women’s correspondence in the age of the ‘devotional revolution’. When several Dublin women wrote to Archbishop McCabe in the 1870s and 1880s, they sought, among other things, financial assistance. Anne Mordant, for example, asked Archbishop McCabe for two pounds to help pay her rent: Most Rev. Dr. McCabe Pardon me again, the great liberty I take in troubling you this day I offered half years rent. £2 – it would be not taken from me will you please send me £2 by return of post + I promise never again to trouble you for one shilling. Humbly I wait your answer. Anne Mordant PS: a thousand pardons I ask it is the last time I will trouble you may ‘God’ assist me.72 Mordant’s letter-writing strategies are intriguing. Her missive, although direct, is also self-effacing and apologetic; when she repeatedly asks McCabe for pardons, she positions herself as a woman who appropriately bows to the authority of her religious superiors. In effect, however,

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she is doing something more subversive, consciously performing ‘proper’ gender roles in their letter writing. Women correspondents used their status as wives, mothers, widows, or daughters to assume the ideal of Catholic womanhood and thus appeal to their bishops. How could a bishop refuse a good Catholic woman who was living up to what the Church prescribed for her? Seeking to redeem a sewing machine that she had pawned for £2, C.  Hodgens highlighted her orphan status when she sat down and wrote to Bishop McCabe in 1879: I am an orphan my mother died two years ago leaving me destitute & solely dependant on my own exertions. I live with my aunt and she and I earn our living by doing dressmaking and plain work of the shops all the summer business was so bad we could get no work, therefore was reduced to the greatest poverty, as a last recourse to prevent us of dying from starvation, we had to pledge the sewing machine for £2.73 Should Your Grace doubt this statement there is a girl belonging to the Sodality of Women attached to St. Andrews she is head over St. Michaels Guild her name is Lee. She will certify what I say is true. She knows me since I was born.74 Referring to her female-only household, Hodgens presents herself as a woman who lacks the protection of a patriarchal male figure. Hodgens and her aunt also depict themselves as hard-working and industrious, and Hodgens asks only for enough money to retrieve her sewing machine – and thus, she suggests, get back to work. Almost as an afterthought, she provides McCabe with a character reference – another woman with local religious credentials. Her letter is a clear example of how women thought carefully before approaching their religious superiors and strategised about how best to achieve success. By writing letters to their bishops, lay women demonstrated that, despite their poverty and need, they could interact on the Church’s modern terms; they successfully negotiated Ireland’s newly literate culture and asserted lay Catholic agency. They also capitalised on increasing literacy rates. The nineteenth century transformed Irish women’s educational experiences. Thousands of Irish girls learned to

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read and write after the establishment of the national school system in 1831; by the late nineteenth century, Irish girls were more likely than boys to be literate.75 The effects of girls’ and women’s rising literacy rates remain contested: on the one hand, as Joe Lee has argued, literacy could be ‘another instrument for stifling independent thought’ and instilling proper gender roles in girls.76 Yet for many women, literacy brought opportunity, preparing them for emigration and successful lives abroad.77 Letters in Ireland’s Catholic diocesan archives add another dimension to these debates, testifying that many women who remained in Ireland used their newfound literacy to gain access to the highest levels of the Church hierarchy. Even women from the most destitute regions of Ireland demonstrated their agency and literacy. Writing in 1882 from Dublin’s North Strand, an unknown woman not only asked McCabe for financial assistance but also revealed that this was her eighth attempt to do so. Her missive was respectful but also defiant. ‘I also consider it my duty’, she wrote, ‘to state that I am living with a protestant family and certainly it is a scandal to say that my adversity is so great that for the last 5 Sundays I have not been able to go to Mass in fact out at all until after dark. As far as I am concerned there is not the slightest shadow of a venial sin attached to this unavoidable fate. How can I help these things can I work miracles.’ In order to get McCabe’s attention, this woman speaks of her desire to attend Catholic services and her reluctance to live with Protestants. However, she also declares that she is powerless to change her situation and thus will not be a good Catholic until she receives assistance. This particular letter ends with the woman complaining about an unsympathetic priest and possibly McCabe’s earlier negative responses to her requests: Your Eminence I wish to say that I hope you will not send again my priest to scold me. I am not able to meet anyone who is either naturally so assumingly given to anger what I want is kindness of manner, a respectful appreciation of my sorrows, not words which add greater weight to suffering already too great.78 Far from assuming the docility expected of late nineteenth-century Irish women, this writer uses expectations of women’s religious duties to demand action from her superiors.

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Numerous Catholic women’s letters expressed discontent or even outrage that their clerics neglected their duties or treated their parishioners unjustly. In 1852, Mrs G. Ryan from County Tipperary composed a letter to Archbishop Michael Slattery. In it, she informed Slattery of troubles in her parish where, she asserted, the local priests did not administer the sacrament of penance regularly. Meanwhile, Ryan wrote, the number of parishioners receiving communion was declining sharply. ‘I shall humbly state’, Ryan wrote, ‘that I conceive it my duty as the mistress of a large family to make known to your Grace the neglected state of the parish.’79 She complained that the current clergy was not performing their duties as those in the past would have; here, Ryan defended tradition and custom even as she reprimanded the newly trained professional priesthood. Ryan was not an insignificant parishioner: as mistress of Inch House, she oversaw one of the most wealthy and long-established Catholic estates in Ireland. Less notable women, however, also criticised their clergy. In 1890, a Dublin woman of lesser status wrote to Archbishop Walsh because, as she explained, she was ‘more than fretted to see the unjust act the Priests of the Parish are after doing on me.’80 According to the parishioner, Susan Doyle, the local clergy had allowed her fiancé to marry another woman. The case was more than a mere lovers’ triangle, according to Doyle, who indicted her priests for interfering in the case. Doyle claimed that ‘[t]he Priests were never very just to me always wanting to take my right from me and threatening you my Lord on me that I would have to give up Byrne…’ She accused the clergy of deception and charged it with making her ‘a criminal and a liar in the parish’.81 Clearly, the parishioners in the above cases were not representative of most Irish women. They appear to have been from urban areas, all were literate, and most seemed confident of their position in their communities. What of those women who may have been rural and poor, those who could not compose letters to their bishops? Although the records on such women are scarce, we know that less privileged women too attempted to gain access to the Church hierarchy. A halting, barely legible letter from a Dublin widow reveals that women with less education also sought recourse from their religious superiors. When M. Larkin wrote to her archbishop asking for funds, her shaky writing betrayed not only her age but also her discomfort with literacy. Yet

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write she did, and she used her poverty and widowed state to gain sympathy.82 Another woman sought help from her relatives when she sought to bring a dispute with her priest to the attention of her bishop. This woman, Mary Neylon, was at the centre of a row over chapel seating in Kilfenora, Galway. In 1913, Neylon claimed that her neighbours had recently stolen her family’s seat in their local chapel. After her neighbours seized her chapel seat, Mary Neylon went to a logical source for help: her priest, Father Cassidy. Cassidy, however, not only refused to help her but also informed her that if she wanted a good seat in church, she should talk to the local Protestant minister; he had plenty of seats available.83 Neylon, however, instead decided to take the matter to her bishop. She could not write, so she asked her younger male family members to help her with the actual writing. In her letters to Bishop O’Dea, Neylon articulated that she was less upset at the theft of her seat than at her parish priest’s refusal to intervene on her behalf. She even threatened to follow through with her priest’s suggestion: I am a poor Widow woman … I always paid every offering called on me and a big offering … If I dont get back my seat now I and my family will walk into the protestant church … I would not ever think of doing such a thing but I am fairly wronged in the sight of people … I will leave it in your own hands to show me justice when I wouldent get it from Fr. Cassidy. I expect an account of my own seat now before long … if I dont get satisfactown from you … I will surely turn.84 By refusing to help her, Cassidy, according to Neylon, failed to fulfil an obligation to a local family and refused to show respect to a widow. As a parishioner who had paid her dues (literally) to the Church and to her priest, Mary Neylon expected something in return. In her view, the theft of her chapel seat, and, more significantly, her priest’s refusal to help, undermined her position in the parish – a position that, as an older, widowed woman, already may have been precarious. After the death of her husband, the ageing Neylon may have felt keenly her own declining status; her family’s chapel seat thus may have been one of her last representations of status. Neylon’s correspondence also affirms lay

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women’s initiative and agency. By appealing to her bishop, Neylon bypassed the authority of her priest and thereby worked her way around the local patriarchal system. And by turning her priest’s scathing dismissal into an actual conversion threat, she rubbed salt into one of the Church’s most open wounds. Unfortunately, the outcome of Mary Neylon’s case, as well as the other requests and disputes analysed here, remains unknown. That Neylon did get ‘some recourse’, though, seems probable. Irish Catholic women demanded much of Church authorities throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One Cloyne parishioner even begged Bishop William Keane to intervene in an unusual, but most troubling case: the disappearance of her watchdog. Keane, the woman claimed, was the only person she could turn to.85 In Killaloe, after a dispute between a west Clare parishioner and her local priest, the female parishioner complained directly to the pope. Her priest, claimed the woman, had refused to visit her while she was ill. The Roman hierarchy asked Killaloe’s Bishop Ryan to investigate the matter personally, which he did, ultimately settling the argument. Ignatius Murphy claims that this particular incident ‘shows how close the ordinary parishioner had come to the central authority in Rome’.86 It also, however, illustrates, first, that the upper levels of the Church hierarchy were, at times, becoming involved in conflicts that many felt should have been handled locally by priests; and second, that women repeatedly demanded services and support from their priests. When priests disappointed them, lay women exercised what they viewed as their right to appeal to a higher authority. Thus, the newly organised Irish Church hierarchy, combined with rising female education and literacy, afforded some Catholic women a new influence over their religious and social lives. By writing to bishops and even the pope, women demonstrated their belief in their right to respect and support from their clergy. As correspondents and as active participants in parish disputes, they also demanded a role in the public sphere and a voice in their own social and religious lives. These women, however, also built on much older traditions of resistance, following in the footsteps of others who had long used the spoken word – storytelling, narrative, and legendry – to temper the power of both the colonial state and the Catholic Church.

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1 Edward McCabe was archbishop of Dublin from 1878 to 1885; he became cardinal in March 1882, www.d​ublin​dioce​se.ie​/inde​x.php​ ?opti​on=co​m_con​tent&​task=​view&​id=59​9&Ite​mid=2​92 [accessed 8 June 2009]. 2 DDA, McCabe papers, File II: Laity, July–December 1879 337/6/15, Teresa J. Rooney, Dublin to Bishop Edward McCabe, 12 August 1879. 3 Here, I have focused on letters in the Catholic diocesan archives of Dublin, Cloyne, Limerick, Kerry, Cashel and Emly, and Galway from 1850 to 1920. 4 For an analysis of Dublin Catholic women in the early twentieth century, see Earner-Byrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family”’. 5 See also Delay, ‘Confidantes or competitors?, pp. 107–25. 6 GDA, Bishop Francis McCormack papers, file P/15/1, Rosmuck, Joseph O’Cassidy, Rosmuck, to Bishop McCormack, 19 October 1899. 7 Inglis, Moral Monopoly, pp. 46–50, p. 128. 8 Whelan, ‘The Catholic parish’, p. 9. 9 CDA, Bishop William Keane papers, file 1796.07/37/1858, Eliza Holmes, Ballymacoda, Ladysbridge, to Bishop William Keane, 13 ­September 1858. 10 On infertility, see Owens, A Social History, p. 165; Fionnuala Nic Suibhne, ‘“On the straw” and other aspects of pregnancy and childbirth from the oral tradition of women in Ulster’, Ulster Folklife 38 (1992), p. 13; and Hill, Women in Ireland, p. 25. 11 O’Sullivan, Praxis, vol. 2, p. 696. 12 Entry from 19 March 1929. Signe Toksvig, Signe Toksvig’s Irish Diaries, 1926–1937, ed. Lis Pihl (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1994), p. 60. 13 CDA, Keane papers, file 1795.05/66/1853. W. McCarthy, Curate of Newmarket to Keane, 5 December 1853. 14 CDA, Bishop Timothy Murphy papers, file 1795.02/1/1856. Bishop Timothy Murphy to Tobias Kirby, Irish College Rome, 31 July 1856. 15 Jules Michelet, Priests, Women and Families, 3rd ed., translated by C. Cocks (London: Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846), p. 116. 16 CDA, Keane papers, file 1796.07/11/1859, Ellen Wadden, Queenstown, to Keane, 31 January 1859. 17 CDA, Keane papers, file 1796.07/7/1858, Philip O’Neill, Ballymacoda, to Keane, 24 February 1858; and CDA, Keane papers, file 1796.07/8/1858, Rev. Thomas Murray to Keane, 3 February 1858.

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18 DDA, McCabe papers, file 1883 360/2, P. Nagle, Ennis, to McCabe, 18 March 1883. 19 See O’Shea, Priests, Politics and Society in Post-Famine Ireland for a further discussion. 20 Connolly, Priests and People, pp. 78–90. 21 Sean Connolly, Religion and Society in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Studies in Irish Economic and Social History 3 (Dundalk: Dun Dealagan, 1985), pp. 10–12. 22 Nugent, ‘Producing priestliness’, p. 17. See also Cara Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”: priests, people, and speaking power in modern Catholic Ireland’, Journal of British Studies 53: 2 (2014), pp. 426–52. 23 Inglis, Moral Monopoly, pp. 188–9. 24 Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, p. 46. 25 Kearns, Dublin’s Lost Heroines, p. 99. 26 Oral history, Patricia Kelly, born 1916, North Circular Road, Dublin, in No Shoes in Summer, p. 34. 27 Broughton and Andersen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–8. 28 Whelan, ‘The Catholic parish’, p. 9; Taylor, Occasions of Faith, p. 117. 29 See Delay, ‘“Language which will move their hearts”’. 30 O’Sullivan, Praxis, vol. 1, p. 108. 31 Waterford News, 27 March 1885. 32 GDA, file P/15/1 Rosmuck, Rev. John Francis, Rosmuck, to Bishop Thomas O’Dea, May 25, 1914, and GDA, file P/12/1 Beagh, Rev. A.J. Nestor to Bishop O’Dea, May 1915. Bishop Thomas O’Dea papers at the GDA. 33 Delay, ‘Uncharitable tongues’, pp. 628–53. 34 Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literature Culture 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 2. 35 Bríd Bean Uí Mhuircheartaigh in Bibeanna: Memories from a Corner of Ireland, ed. Brenda Ní Shúilleabháin (Cork: Mercier Press, 2007), p. 36. 36 Raymond Gillespie, Reading Ireland: Print, Reading, and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary. 37 See Taylor, Occasions of Faith, Chapter 5. 38 Eugene Hynes argues: ‘Whether it is with the proselytizers, the fairywoman or believers in fairies, the irregularly married, or revelers at the pattern, the priest is engaged in constant battle’ within stories. Hynes, Knock, p. 42. For more examples of the priest’s power and

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vulnerability in legendry, see also Taylor, Occasions of Faith, pp. 149 and 161. 39 Erin Kraus, Wise Woman of Kildare: Moll Anthony and Popular ­Tradition in the East of Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), p. 37. 40 Pádraig Ó Héalaí, ‘Priest versus healer: the legend of the priest’s stricken horse’, Béaloideas 62–63 (1995), p. 183. Thanks to Angela Bourke for this reference. 41 Ó Héalaí, ‘Priest versus healer’, p. 185. 42 Verling, ed., Beara Woman Talking, p. 69. 43 The relationship between Ireland’s most famous wise woman, Biddy Early, and the clergy remained strained for decades. See Edmund Lenihan, In Search of Biddy Early (Cork: Mercier Press, 1987); and Meda Ryan, Biddy Early (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1978). 44 Taylor, Occasions of Faith, pp. 161, 149. 45 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. 25. 46 Rosaleen Fallon, A County Roscommon Wedding, 1892: The Marriage of John Hughes and Mary Gavin. Maynooth Studies in Local History, no. 53 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 21. 47 Brophy, ‘“What nobody does now”’; Moore Quinn, ‘“All I had left were my words”’. 48 KDA, O’Sullivan, Praxis, vol. 1, pp. 187–8. 49 KDA, O’Sullivan, Praxis, draft and two volumes, 1850–52. 50 DDA, Archbishop William Walsh Papers, File 404/405, shelf 362 I, Mary Flanagan to Rev. M.A. Canon Fricker, P.P., 12 August 1890. 51 DDA, McCabe Papers, File 337/3/II/35, William Watson, Kingstown, to McCabe, 11 April 1878. All spelling errors in original. 52 Women’s sexual transgressions also were a central topic in fairy legends. See Delay, ‘“Deposited elsewhere”’, pp. 71–86. 53 KDA, John O’Sullivan’s Papers and Diaries, 1840s–1850s, p. 39. 54 CEDA on microfilm at the NLI, file 1873/49, microfilm reel # p. 6010. Father Daniel Lanigan to Archbishop Leahy, 22 December 1873. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Cara Delay, ‘“The gates were shut”: Catholics, chapels, and power in late nineteenth-century Ireland’, New Hibernia Review 14: 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 29–34. 58 DDA, McCabe papers, file 353/6, Mary Power Laher to McCabe, 17 July 1882. 59 On the increasing power of the Church, see Larkin, ‘The devotional revolution’, pp. 625–52; Corish, The Irish Catholic Experience; and Keenan, The Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.

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60 Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 130. Midnineteenth-century Irish poetry, literature, and imagery solidified the woman- (and often mother-) as-victim trope; see McLean, The Event and Its Terrors, p. 134. Descriptions of the famine-related deaths of old women can be found in Freeman’s Journal, 4 January 1846. 61 McLean, The Event and Its Terrors, p. 137. 62 Dympna McLoughlin, ‘The impact of the Great Famine on subsistent women’, in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52, ed. John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), p. 255. 63 Lee, ‘Women and the Church’, pp. 37–45. 64 Cara Delay, ‘“Meddlers amongst us”: Catholic women in famine-era Ireland’, in Women and the Great Hunger in Ireland, ed. Christine Kinealy, Ciarán Reilly, and Jason King (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), pp. 71–82. 65 Clark, ‘Wild workhouse girls’, pp. 389–409. 66 McLean, The Event and Its Terrors, p. 136. 67 Clark, ‘Wild workhouse girls’, p. 392. 68 Angela Bourke, ‘The baby and the bathwater: cultural loss in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), p. 79. 69 Bourke, ‘The baby and the bathwater’; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, ‘A  ghostly Alhambra’, in Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine, ed. Tom Hayden (Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart, 1997), pp. 68–78. 70 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/6/II/15, Teresa J. Rooney, Dublin to Bishop Edward McCabe, 12 August 1879. 71 See Earner-Byrne, ‘“Should I take myself and family”’. 72 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/6/I/5, Anne Mordant, Arklow to Archbishop Edward McCabe, 16 December 1879. 73 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/6/I/23. C. Hodgens to McCabe, 10 September 1879. 74 Ibid. 75 Owens, A Social History, p. 24. 76 Lee, ‘Women and the Church’, pp. 41–2. 77 Owens, A Social History, p. 24. 78 DDA, McCabe papers, file 353/6, Letter from unknown woman, North Strand, Dublin, to McCabe, 20 October 1882. 79 CEDA at the NLI, Archbishop Michael Slattery Papers, file 1852/6, microfilm reel p. 6004, Mrs G. Ryan to Archbishop Slattery, 4 March 1852.

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80 DDA, Walsh papers, file 404/4–6, 405/1, 2, shelf 362 II, Susan Doyle, Ballycorns, to Walsh, 16 June 1890. 81 Ibid. 82 DDA, McCabe papers, file 337/6/I/40, M. Larkin to McCabe, 29 September 1879. 83 GDA, O’Dea papers, file P/2/1 Kilfenora, Mrs M. Neylon, Kilfenora, to Bishop O’Dea, 11 and 25 September 1913. All spelling mistakes in original. 84 Ibid. 85 CDA, Keane papers, file 1796.07/33/1858, J. Cassin, Cloyne, to Bishop Keane, 1858. 86 Murphy, The Diocese of Killaloe, 1850–1904, pp. 27–8.

Conclusion When Minister of Health Dr. Noë l Browne sought to implement state maternity-and-child health services in 1950–1951, Ireland’s Catholic bishops protested. Led by Dublin’s Archbishop John Charles ­McQuaid, they staunchly opposed the health provision proposal, arguing that through it, the state intended to infringe upon the essentially private rights of the family. The bishops also resisted the maternity scheme because they feared that Ireland, following other welfare states, might not adhere to ‘Catholic moral teaching’ under the new plan.1 In late 1950, the Irish Catholic hierarchy expressed its particular concerns that the plan potentially would be ‘interpreted to include provision for birth limitation and abortion’.2 Ultimately, the Catholic bishops successfully halted Browne’s proposed reforms, which came to be known as the Mother and Child Scheme. The hierarchy thus effectively not only prevented maternity services from becoming a reality in 1950s Ireland but also publicly declared that, when it came to health care and the management of women’s bodies, a Catholic ethos would continue to dominate the Irish state and its people. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, massive social and cultural changes were already underway, and soon Irish society could no longer ignore them. The 1956 murder trial of midwife-turnedillegal-abortionist Mamie Cadden publicised the realities of reproduction for some women, betraying the constructed ideal of national motherhood and exposing the myth of Irish sexual purity. Women’s emigration, meanwhile, continued to be endemic; from 1951 to 1961, over half of all Irish emigrants were female, and the travels of many were framed as an explicit rejection of women’s roles at home. One woman who left for America in the 1950s later recalled: ‘America

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seemed to be offering the golden opportunities …  [to] become a whole person’.3 With the advent first of radio and then of television in the 1960s, secular European and American culture and values inundated Ireland. At the same time, Marianism, as Donnelly argues, declined sharply; the rosary devotion ceased in many areas.4 By the late 1960s, Vatican II shook Irish Catholic traditionalists, who also perceived that their faith was under siege at the hands of new feminist and social protest movements. The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s bore witness to an unprecedented polarisation of Irish society via debates about divorce, contraception, and abortion.5 The Council for Research and Development in ­Maynooth conducted surveys on changing attitudes towards religious beliefs in Ireland from 1974 to 1984; it found that opinions were changing, and that the increasingly ‘less well-accepted’ Catholic teachings were those related to family planning and divorce.6 Ireland’s entry into the European Community in the early 1970s also challenged the sense that Ireland was one of the last bastions of cultural isolation and religious devotion on the continent. Of course, the most significant developments regarding the Catholic Church’s place in Ireland came in the 1990s and early 2000s, with the clerical sexual abuse scandals and controversies over the Magdalen laundries and industrial schools. These controversies led to an unprecedented questioning of the moral authority of an institution that, just a few decades earlier, wielded enormous cultural control. And these scandals placed Irish Catholic women, for the first time, at the centre of public discussion and analysis. As always, lay Catholic women responded to the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century transformations in myriad ways and, as they had done for over a century, made significant contributions to the new Ireland that was emerging. The Irish feminist movement flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and has become more visible again in recent decades, particularly in the fight for abortion rights. Through it, an unprecedented number of Irish women activists have called for fundamental changes to the ‘traditional’ Catholic ethos and religious gender norms. When Carol Coulter, in The Hidden Tradition: Feminism, Women, and Nationalism in Ireland, asked where Irish women learned their modern feminist activism, she argued that they must have found

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some inspiration for it from existing women’s communities and organisations.7 Indeed, although there certainly were seismic shifts in recent decades, Irish women’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century activism did not come out of nowhere. As this book has attempted to show, Irish Catholic women were far from passive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite an intensified Church-led Catholic patriarchal culture, lay women did what they could from 1850 to 1950 to maintain autonomy and influence their faith. Those women who would go on to lead post-1950 feminist movements may have gained inspiration not only from first-wave feminists but also by observing their far-from-passive mothers and grandmothers, who managed domestic and local religion and did not hesitate to challenge their priests. Nuns also provided models for girls as leaders in education and philanthropy. As this book has argued, Catholicism was not a uniformly oppressive and disempowering force for lay women, and it was not dominated exclusively by the male hierarchy. Through an examination of Irish Catholic lay women’s lives and actions from the famine era to the middle of the twentieth century, this book set out to illuminate a topic that has been virtually ignored in the historiography not only of Irish Catholicism but also of Irish women’s history. It also sought to disrupt the overly simplistic interpretations of Irish Catholic women’s roles in the past. It has revealed that the key century from 1850 to 1950 was a complex one, one that brought for women losses, gains, and, significantly, continuities. This book thus complicates narratives of modern Irish history that privilege change only; for many Catholic women, continuities in their religious faith, activities, and influence characterised the century from 1850 to 1950. Irish Catholic women, however, had never quietly accepted the roles that Church, state, or community authorities scripted for them. Even during periods of increased Church control and surveillance, notably from the 1870s to 1890s and then again in the 1920s and 1930s, they proved themselves to be important and powerful actors in local life. The post-famine era began with a flourishing of literacy and a corresponding prescriptive print culture that impressed on lay Catholic women the significance of piety, purity, and respectable motherhood. This literature, however, did not reflect reality as much as it attempted

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to construct an ideal, and lay women negotiated its tenets even as they helped produce it. One of the key themes of this print culture – motherhood – became increasingly politicised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and notably in the 1920s and 1930s. Although some scholars have chastised Ireland’s mothers for colluding with priests and indoctrinating children with a newly repressive Catholic ethos, this exploration has revealed a more nuanced reality. Catholic mothers did claim influence in the household, but they also used their role as mothers to challenge priests and demand some autonomy. The children of these mothers, chiefly girls, came of age in a world characterised by a popular and feminised Catholic devotional culture, one that showcased feminine strength as well as sacrifice. In the home and in school, girls learned from an early age to identify with the Virgin Mary and a suffering Christ, and they also learned, through their interactions with their holy households as well as mothers, grandmothers, and teachers, how to claim authority through their commitment to their religion. As space became more controlled and women’s bodies more contained from 1850 to 1950, Irish women certainly were more constrained. In some cases, however, Catholicism actually created places for women to engage with the public sphere and blur the public/private divide. By resisting the ‘civilising’ practices that were forced upon them and preserving traditions such as keening, lay women helped to maintain elements of the popular and even magical in popular Catholicism. When they made themselves central actors in newly built chapels and in public parish rituals and when they wrote to bishops or spoke back against their priests, women made clear statements that they would not be sidelined so easily in the new Catholic Ireland. From famine to Republic, Irish society and culture grew increasingly Catholic and patriarchal. Still, however, lay women succeeded in influencing, shaping, and even challenging this new culture. By moulding Ireland’s new popular Catholicism, by ruling the domestic sphere, by actively participating in life outside the home, and by skirting patriarchal authority, women proved time and again that they had significant influence in both the religious and the secular worlds. What some scholars have not yet recognised, and which this book reveals, is that Irish women – rural and urban, lower-class and

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middle-class, and across a century of unprecedented political and economic change – were consistently active in the creation of modern Catholicism, emerging, in the process, not as mere symbols but also key contributors to the family, community, faith, and future. Notes 1 Eamonn McKee, ‘Church-state relations and the development of Irish health policy: the Mother-and-Child Scheme, 1944–1953’, Irish Historical Studies 25: 98 (1986), p. 171. 2 Letter from Catholic hierarchy to the Taoiseach, 10 October 1950, ­cited in Browne, Against the Tide, pp. 158–9. 3 Meaney, O’Dowd, and Whelan, Reading the Irish Woman, pp. 107–10. 4 Donnelly, Jr, ‘The peak of Marianism in Ireland, 1930–60’, pp. 252–83. 5 A poll taken in Ireland in 1971 showed that 63 per cent of Irish adults were opposed to the sale of contraceptives, with 34 per cent in favour; six years later, in 1977, the figures had changed to 43 per cent in favour for married couples, 21 per cent for all adults, and 23 per cent opposed. Contraception was decriminalised in the Republic of Ireland in 1979. Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland: Nation and State (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), p. 334. 6 Tim Pat Coogan, Disillusioned Decades: Ireland 1966–87 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), p. 75. 7 Coulter, The Hidden Tradition.

Select bibliography Archival documents Dublin National Archives Department of Justice Evil Literature Committee Files National Folklore Collection (NFC) at University College, Dublin Folklore interviews, collected in the 1930s School questionnaires, 1960s Dublin Diocesan Archives Archbishop Edward McCabe Papers Archbishop William Walsh Papers National Library of Ireland Cashel and Emly Archdiocesan Archive on microfilm Archbishop Michael Slattery papers Archbishop Patrick Leahy papers Archbishop Thomas William Croke papers Manuscript sources Recollections of Sarah Selina Blakeney, Co. Galway, 1888 Diary of events, Kyleagarny, Solohedbeg, Cappawhite and Newtown area of County Tipperary, 1871–1881 Diaries of John Trant of County Tipp, 1851–58 Mrs McHugh’s memoirs. Childhood memories of life in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal Diary of Patrick J. Dillon, Ennis, 1861–1869

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Cobh Cloyne Diocesan Archive (CDA) Bishop Timothy Murphy papers Bishop William Keane papers Killarney Kerry Diocesan Archive (KDA) Archdeacon John O’Sullivan, parish priest of Kenmare. Praxis Parochi in Hibernia (unpublished manuscript, 1850–52), 2 vols Archdeacon John O’Sullivan, parish priest of Kenmare. Diaries and papers Bishop David Moriarty papers Galway Galway Diocesan Archive (GDA) Bishop Francis J. McCormack papers Bishop Thomas O’Dea papers Limerick Limerick Diocesan Archive (LDA) Bishop Edward Thomas O’Dwyer papers Newspapers and periodicals Catholic Bulletin and Book Review Catholic Penny Magazine Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore Clare Champion Clare Examiner Clare Independent and Tipperary Catholic Times Clare Journal and Ennis Advertiser Connacht Tribune Connaught Champion Cork Examiner Freeman’s Journal Galway Pilot and Vindicator Irish Catholic Directory

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Irish Ecclesiastical Record Irish Examiner Irish Homestead Irish Independent Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart Irish Monthly Irish Rosary Irish Society Irish Times Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator Munster News and Limerick and Clare Advocate Southern Star Waterford News Published primary sources Carbery, Mary. The Farm by Lough Gur: The Story of Mary Fogarty (Sissy O’Brien). Cork: Mercier Press, 1973 [1937]. Concannon, Mrs Thomas (Helena). The Queen of Ireland: An Historical Account of Ireland’s Devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Dublin: M.H. Gill and Son, 1938. Crowley, Elaine. A Dublin Girl: Growing Up in the 1930s. New York, NY: Soho Press, 2003. Cusack, Margaret Anna. Good Reading for Girls: Good Reading for Sundays and Festivals. Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1877. Cusack, Margaret Anna. Woman’s Work in Modern Society. London: Kenmare Publications, 1874. de Barra, Eibhlís. Bless ‘em All: The Lanes of Cork. Cork: Mercier Press, 1997. Devlin, Edith Newman. Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2000. Dirrane, Bridget. A Woman of Aran. Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1997. Dolan, Mary T. Prayers of an Irish Mother. Dublin: Brian O’Higgins, 1930. Flanagan, Maeve. Dev, Lady Chatterley and Me. Dublin: Marino Books, 1998. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. Collected and Arranged by Lady Gregory. With two essays and notes by W.B. Yeats. London: Colin Smythe, 1970. Griffith, Patrick. Christian Mothers. Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1926. Guinan, Rev. Joseph, The Island Parish. Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1908.

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Hamilton, Elizabeth. An Irish Childhood. London: Chatto and Windus, 1963. Hayden, Mary. The Diaries of Mary Hayden, 1878–1903, ed. Conan Kennedy, 5 vols. Killala, County Mayo: Morrigan New Century, 2005. Lankford, Siobhán. The Hope and the Sadness: Personal Recollections of Troubled Times in Ireland. Cork: Tower Books, 1980. Liguori, Alfonso Maria de. The Mission Book: Instructions and Prayers to Preserve the Fruits of the Mission / Drawn Chiefly from the Works of St. Alphonsus Liguori. Dublin: James Duffy, 1910. Lockington, William J., S.J. The Soul of Ireland. London: Harding & More, 1920. Lynd, Robert. Home Life in Ireland. London: Mills and Boon, 1909. MacDonald, Walter. Reminiscences of a Maynooth Professor. London: J. Cape, 1926. McKenna, Christina. My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress: An Irish Childhood in the 1960s. Glasgow: Neil Washington Publishing, 2004. Michelet, Jules. Priests, Women and Families, 3rd edn., trans. C. Cocks. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846. Moloney, Mary Antoinette. Down Memory Lane: A Collection of Personal Stories and Memories from the Past. Ahane, Co. Limerick: Mary Antoinette Moloney, 2010. Murphy, Jeremiah. When Youth Was Mine: A Memoir of Kerry 1902–1925. Dublin: Mentor Press, 1998. Murphy, Maura. Don’t Wake Me at Doyles: A Memoir. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 2005. Murphy, Maureen, ed., I Call to the Eye of the Mind: A Memoir by Sara Hyland. Dublin: Attic Press, 1995. Ní Ghuithín, Máire. Bean an Oileáin. Dublin: Coiscéim, 1986. O’Brien, Edna. Mother Ireland. New York, NY: Plume, 1999 [1976]. O’Connor, Lily. Can Lily O’Shea Come Out to Play? Dingle: Brandon Books, 2000. O’Crohan, Tomás. Island Cross-Talk: Pages from a Diary, trans. Tim Enright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (1928). Office of the Irish Messenger. May Letters: An Exercise of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, Suitable for May and for all Saturdays and Feasts of Our Blessed Lady. Dublin: Office of the Irish Messenger, 1911. O’Keefe, Phil. Down Cobbled Streets: A Liberties Childhood. Dingle: Brandon Books, 1995. O’Reilly, Rev. Bernard. The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World. Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, n.d. Sayers, Peig. Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Schmitz, Rev. Peter, S.V.D. The Dignity of Motherhood. Dublin: Irish Messenger Office, 1947.

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Scott, Thomas Colville. Connemara After the Famine: Journal of a Survey of the Martin Estate, 1853, edited with an introduction by Tim Robinson. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995. Sheehan, Patrick A. Thoughts on Mary Immaculate. Dublin: Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, n.d. Taylor, Alice. Country Days. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993. Taylor, Alice. To School Through the Fields: An Irish Country Childhood. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Taylor, Fanny. Irish Homes and Irish Hearts. Boston, MA: Patrick Donahoe, 1867. Toksvig, Signe. Signe Toksvig’s Irish Diaries, 1926–1937, ed. Lis Pihl. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1994. Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. New York, NY: The Devin-Adair Company, 1913. Ua Cnáimhsí, Pádraig. Róise Rua: An Island Memoir, trans. J.J. Keaveny. Cork: Mercier Press, 2009. Verschoyle, Moira. So Long to Wait: An Irish Childhood. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960. Walsh, Marrie. An Irish Country Childhood. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Secondary sources Ballard, Linda-May. Forgetting Frolic: Marriage Traditions in Ireland. Belfast and London: The Institute of Irish Studies, the Queen’s University of Belfast, 1998. Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sighle. Ireland’s Art Ireland’s History: Representing Ireland, 1845 to Present. Omaha, NA: Creighton University Press, 2007. Bourke, Angela. The Burning of Bridget Cleary. London: Pimlico, 1999. Bourke, Angela, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills, eds. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002. Bourke, Angela, Siobhán Kilfeather, Maria Luddy, Margaret MacCurtain, Gerardine Meaney, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O’Dowd, and Clair Wills, eds. The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing Volume V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002. Brophy, Christina S. and Cara Delay, eds. Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Brożyna, Andrea Ebel. Labour, Love and Prayer: Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1999. Clear, Caitriona. ‘The voices of Catholic women in Ireland, 1800–1921’. In Irish Catholic Identities, ed. Oliver P. Rafferty, pp. 199–210. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

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Clear, Caitriona. Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland 1922–61. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000. Connolly, Sean J. Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1982. Crossman, Virginia. Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland, 1850–1914. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Crossman, Virginia. ‘Viewing women, family and sexuality through the prism of the Irish poor laws’. Women’s History Review 15: 4 (September 2006), pp. 541–50. Daly, Mary E. ‘Marriage, fertility, and women’s lives in twentieth-century Ireland (c. 1900–1970)’. Women’s History Review 15: 4 (September 2006), pp. 571–85. Delay, Cara. ‘Confidantes or competitors? Women, priests, and conflict in post-famine Ireland’. Éire-Ireland 40: 1&2 (Spring/Summer 2005), pp. 107–25. Delay, Cara. ‘“Deposited elsewhere”: the sexualized female body and the Modern Irish landscape’. Études Irlandaises 37–1 (2012), pp. 71–86. Delay, Cara. ‘Ever so holy: girls, mothers, and Catholicism in Irish women’s life-writings, 1850–1950’. In The Country of the Young: Interpretations of Youth and Childhood in Irish Culture, eds. Kelly Matthews and John Countryman, pp. 10–30. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013. Delay, Cara. ‘Meddlers amongst us: Catholic women in famine-era Ireland’. In Women and the Great Hunger in Ireland, eds. Christine Kinealy, Ciarán Reilly, and Jason King, pp. 71–82. Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press/Cork University Press, 2017. Delay, Cara. ‘Women, childbirth customs, and authority in Ireland, 1850– 1930’. Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 21 (July 2015), pp. 6–18. Donnelly, James S., Jr. ‘Knock shrine, the worst of times: the 1940s’. Éire-­ Ireland 48: 3&4 (fall/winter 2013), pp. 213–64. Donnelly, James S., Jr. ‘The Marian shrine of Knock: the first decade’. Eire-Ireland XXVII: 2 (summer 1993), pp. 54–99. Donnelly, James S., Jr. ‘Opposing the modern world: the cult of the Virgin Mary in Ireland, 1965–85’. Éire-Ireland 40: 1–2 (spring/summer 2005), pp. 183–245. Donnelly, James S., Jr. ‘The revival of Knock shrine’. In History and the Public Sphere: Essays in Honour of John A. Murphy, eds. Tom Dunne and Laurence M. Geary, pp. 186–200. Cork: Cork University Press, 2005. Earner-Byrne, Lindsey. Letters of the Catholic Poor: Poverty in Independent Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Farrell, Elaine. ‘A Most Diabolical Deed’: Infanticide and Irish Society, 1850–1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Fischer, Clara. ‘Gender, nation, and the politics of shame: Magdalene Laundries and the institutionalization of feminine transgression in modern Ireland’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41: 4 (2016), pp. 821–43.

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Godson, Lisa. ‘Catholicism and material culture in Ireland, 1840–1880’. Circa: Contemporary Visual Culture in Ireland 103 (2003), pp. 38–44. Hayes, Alan and Diane Urquhart, eds. Irish Women’s History. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2004. Hill, Myrtle. Women in Ireland: A Century of Change. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003. Hynes, Eugene. Knock: The Virgin’s Apparition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Cork: Cork University Press, 2009. Inglis, Tom. Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987. Kearns, Kevin. Dublin’s Lost Heroines: Mammies and Grannies in a Vanished City. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006. Kearns, Kevin. Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994. Kelleher, Margaret and James H. Murphy, eds. Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997. Kinmonth, Claudia. Irish Rural Interiors in Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Larkin, Emmet. ‘The devotional revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’. American Historical Review 77: 3 (1972), pp. 625–52. Lee, Joseph J. ‘Women and the Church since the famine’. In Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension, eds. Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha Ó Corráin, pp. 37–45. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Luddy, Maria. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lysaght, Patricia. ‘Attitudes to the rosary and its performance in Donegal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. Béaloideas 66 (1998), pp. 9–58. MacCurtain, Margaret. ‘Late in the field: Catholic sisters in twentiethcentury Ireland and the new religious history’. Journal of Women’s History 6–7 (1995), pp. 49–63. Magray, Mary Peckham. The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. McKenna, Yvonne. Made Holy: Irish Women Religious at Home and Abroad. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006. Meaney, Gerardine. Gender, Ireland, and Cultural Change: Race, Sex, and Nation. New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2010. Miller, David W. ‘Landscape and religious practice: a study of mass attendance in pre-famine Ireland’. Éire-Ireland 40: 1&2 (spring/summer 2005), pp. 90–106. Morgan, David. Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.

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Murphy, Ignatius. The Diocese of Killaloe, 1850–1904. Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995. Nash, Catherine. ‘Remapping and renaming: new cartographies of identity, gender and landscape in Ireland’. Feminist Review 44 (1993), pp. 39–57. O’Dowd, Mary and Maryann Valiulis, eds. Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain. Dublin: Merlin Publishing, 1997. O’Dowd, Mary and Sabine Wichert, eds. Chattel, Servant or Citizen? Women’s Status in Church, State and Society. Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1995. Ó Héalaí, Pádraig. ‘Priest versus healer: the legend of the priest’s stricken horse’. Béaloideas 62–63 (1995), pp. 171–88. Orsi, Robert. Thank You St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Owens, Rosemary Cullen. A Social History of Women in Ireland, 1870– 1970. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005. Quinn, E. Moore and Cara Delay, ‘Bounty, moderation, and miracles: women and food in narratives of the Great Famine’. New Hibernia Review 21: 2 (Summer 2017), pp. 111–29. Rattigan, Cliona. ‘What Else Could I Do?’ Single Mothers and Infanticide, Ireland 1900–1950. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012. Rose, Gillian. ‘Looking at landscape: the uneasy pleasures of power’. In Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, eds. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp, pp. 193–200. London: Arnold, 1997. Ryan, Louise. ‘Constructing “Irishwoman”: modern girls and comely maidens’. Irish Studies Review 6: 3 (1998), pp. 263–72. Smith, James M. Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Taylor, Lawrence. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Turpin, John. ‘Visual culture and Catholicism in the Free State, 1922–49’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57: 1 (January 2006), pp. 55–77. Whelan, Kevin. ‘The Catholic parish, the Catholic chapel and village development in Ireland’. Irish Geography xvi (1983), pp. 1–15. Wolf, Nicholas. An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Religious Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

Index abortion 6, 29, 117–18, 145, 237–8 adolescence see girls autobiography 7, 37, 43, 58, 60–4, 98, 105, 111, 139, 146, 155 baptism 19, 185, 192, 199, 215 birth see reproduction birth control see contraception Blessed Virgin Mary 5, 8, 32, 40, 43– 4, 65, 68–74, 83, 99–111, 120, 122, 141, 146, 149, 151–2, 154, 180–1, 240 body, the 19, 27–8, 63, 70–3, 76–7, 108–9, 118, 120–2, 149–50, 152, 164–5, 175–9, 184–5, 188–91, 193 of Christ 70–3, 77, 86–8, 120–2, 149–50, 164–5 and discipline 63 of the Virgin Mary 108 women’s bodies 19, 27–8, 76–7, 86–8, 108–9, 118, 175–9, 188–91, 193 burial customs see death catechism 32, 63, 65, 68–70, 81–4, 148–9, 213, 215 Catholic Bulletin 28, 32, 34–8, 110, 147, 150 Catholic Record of Waterford and Lismore 28–9, 32 Catholic Truth Society 30, 32, 35

censorship 31, 118 changelings see fairy belief chapels 1, 4, 9, 19, 28, 32, 41, 44, 63, 68–70, 81, 83, 86–8, 100–1, 105, 114, 148, 156–67, 175, 178–82, 191–202, 216, 221–2, 230–1, 240 charity 6, 20, 24, 42, 115–19, 124, 128–30, 167, 175, 212 childbirth see reproduction churches see chapels churching see reproduction clergy see priests clothing 28, 74, 79, 84–8, 112, 163, 196–7 communion 7, 28, 35, 59, 86–8, 112, 161, 164–5, 199, 229 communion dresses 86–8, 112 First Holy Communion 7, 35, 59, 81–8, 112 confession 19, 81, 84–85, 157–60, 164, 192, 194–5, 199, 210–14 confirmation 74, 81–3 confraternities 25, 69–70, 103 Connaught Champion 144 Constitution (1937) 4, 21–2, 40, 111 consumerism 2–3, 8, 16, 30–45, 70, 138, 143–6, 196 contraception 21, 29, 31, 117–18, 238 convents see nuns

252

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dancing 27, 106, 156, 164, 186, 216 death 29, 39, 40, 75–6, 104, 114–15, 142, 185–91, 230 absolution 40 burial 185–6, 188–90 funerals 19, 58, 76, 193, 199 wakes 19, 75, 174, 186–8 keening 186–8, 240 ‘devotional revolution’ 1–2, 4–5, 9, 19–20, 22–3, 46, 63, 66, 68, 73, 99, 101, 119, 122, 139, 143, 148, 158, 174–5, 181, 192–3, 195–9, 201, 209, 213, 216, 224–6 education 6, 15–16, 18, 21–3, 34–8, 62–8, 73, 109–16, 148–9, 176, 225, 227–9, 231, 239 convent schools 21–3, 38, 64–8, 73 and literacy 31, 33-35, 225, 227–9, 231 National Schools 63–6, 109–10, 227 emigration 9, 17–18, 26, 31, 46, 114, 118, 161, 179, 196–7, 210, 228, 237 Eucharistic Congress 35, 144, 192 fairy belief 1, 44, 176–81, 185, 202, 217, 225 changelings 177–8 famine see Great Famine fashion 27–8, 86–8, 144–9, 196 see also clothing fasting 86, 128, 164–7 feminism 9–10, 23–4, 40, 116, 238–9 folklore 7, 25, 152–3, 166–7, 182, 194, 217 National Folklore Collection, Dublin, 152 food 73, 76–7, 112, 120, 126, 164–7 Free State see Irish Free State funerals see death

Galway Pilot and Vindicator 30, 33 girls 2, 7–8, 15–20, 22–4, 26–31, 35–9, 43, 45, 58–88 girlhoods 2, 7–8 see also education Great Famine (1845–52) 1, 3–4, 16–19, 25, 29, 41, 46, 66, 100–1, 122, 138, 140, 142, 151, 158, 167, 174–5, 179, 181, 224, 239 holy water 43, 110, 139, 143–4, 149, 179–80 holy wells 1, 191 hospitals 23, 24, 101, 116, 174, 178, 200–1 infanticide 6, 26, 117–18 Irish Catholic Directory 27, 30, 32, 67, 100, 144 Irish Constitution (1937) see Constitution Irish Countrywoman’s Association 116, 166 Irish Free State 3, 21, 31, 111, 118 Irish Homestead 116, 139, 144 Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart 32 Irish Monthly 32, 38–9, 120 keening see death Knock, apparition at 5, 33, 100, 174, 105–8 Ladies’ Land League 20, 39 Legion of Mary 102–3, 119 literacy see education Magdalen laundries 117, 238 marriage 17–18, 26, 29, 40, 46, 65, 77, 113–14, 118, 124, 192, 195, 199, 210–12 masculinity 19–20, 70–1, 213 mass 1, 8–9, 19, 28, 63, 81, 82, 115, 139, 150, 157–66, 180,

index 187, 191–9, 215, 216, 221–3, 228 mass attendance 9, 19, 63, 150, 187, 191–9, 215, 228 station-mass 8, 115, 139, 157–66, 216 see also chapels menstruation 109, 118, 145 missions, parish 19, 27, 43, 81, 145, 156 mission-stalls 145 mothers 1–2, 5–6, 8, 15, 18–24, 29–31, 36–46, 59, 61, 64–7, 72, 77, 80, 83–4, 86–8, 98–130, 138, 141–3, 146–67, 177, 181, 183, 193, 210, 214, 219, 224–7, 239–40 Munster News 30, 33, 174–5 nuns 2, 6, 8–9, 16, 18, 22–4, 29, 35, 37, 39, 59–60, 62–8, 70, 77–80, 128, 175, 196, 201, 239 orphanages 23, 201 philanthropy see charity prayer-books 35, 43, 88, 112, 147, 157 prayers 1, 8, 58, 64, 69, 76, 83, 84, 101, 103, 110, 139, 141, 148–57, 191, 199 see also rosary priests 4–5, 6, 8, 9, 18–19, 27, 30, 40, 42, 44, 81–5, 98, 99, 103, 105, 108, 118,

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120, 123, 124, 128, 150, 158–67, 175, 178, 181–95, 200, 201, 209–32, 239–40 prostitution 29, 119 reproduction 6, 29, 40, 99, 114, 117, 178, 181–5, 188, 193, 210, 237 childbirth 114, 118 churching 183–5 popular beliefs 181–3 pregnancy 114, 117, 178, 181–85, 188, 193 rosary beads 1, 43–5, 76, 78, 87, 88, 112, 141–4, 147, 152–4, 157 rosary (prayer) 8, 70, 85, 101, 139, 147–8, 180, 186, 199, 238 Sacred Heart of Jesus 43, 69–72, 115, 119, 120–1, 138, 142, 144–7, 156 same-sex relationships 77–81 scapulars 43, 144, 181–2 sodalities 69–70, 104, 227 station-mass see mass stations see mass suffrage, women’s 6, 23–4, 39 Synod of Thurles 19–20, 158–9, 192 Virgin Mary see Blessed Virgin Mary wakes see death widows 24, 26, 123, 126–8, 212–13, 227, 229–30 wise women 217–18 workhouses 24, 26, 82, 174, 178, 225