Irish nationalist women, 1900-1918 9781107047747, 1107047749

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Introduction

It is a curious fact that women as women, got a very meagre place in the pages of history. And Irish history, I am sorry to say, is no exception to this rule.1

The many Irish women who were active in nationalist circles in the early twentieth century did not expect to be forgotten. They chronicled their own experiences as they lived them and displayed, time and time again, a sensitivity for and an appreciation of the longer history of women’s political activism in Ireland. They were acutely aware of how they, and Irish women more generally, might be remembered. The many memoirs, reminiscences, rough lecture notes and half-inished autobiographical sketches which survive remind us of both the vibrancy of the world in which they lived and of their own sense that their experiences were worth remembering in and of themselves and in the context of the wider national narrative. This is a book about those politically active nationalist women who believed they had a stake in the development of modern Ireland. It explores a wide range of their experiences and activities ranging from learning and buying Irish to participating in armed revolt. This book is emphatically a work of women’s history in so far as I am less concerned with discourse analysis than with recreating the context in which the competing discourses of nationalism and feminism met, interacted and sometimes clashed. As Karen Offen has recently reminded us, ‘feminist claims are primarily political claims, not philosophical claims. They never arise in – or respond to – a sociological vacuum. They are put forward in concrete settings and they pose explicit political demands for change.’2 The history of feminism must be understood in the context of Ireland’s broader history of political change, and a study of political change in

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Eithne Coyle, lecture at University College Dublin (UCD), Sighle Humphreys Papers, University College Dublin Archives (hereafter UCDA), P106/1226(1). Karen Offen, European Feminisms: A Political History (Stanford, 2000), p. xv.

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Ireland in this period should take feminist political activism irmly into account. Neither was unaffected by the other. This study builds on and has been shaped by the research of many historians of Irish women. Women had been writing about the history of women in Ireland since at least the irst half of the nineteenth century, but a school of distinctly feminist history writing began to emerge in the late 1970s.3 A new world of ideas and questions emerged as scholars began to explore the political, social and economic history of women across the centuries and, for some researchers at least, to link women’s campaigns in the past to contemporary events in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The political history of Irish women, and especially of nationalist women in the early years of the twentieth century, is probably the most extensively covered of all areas in Irish women’s history, and it is not dificult to see why. The broader context of war, rapid social change and rebellion, the large number of women who became politically active and the dynamism of the period more generally provide a compelling context for research. The centrality, moreover, of nationalism to virtually all studies of modern Ireland has meant that historians of Irish women have been inevitably drawn to the subject area in order to recover their experiences in the irst instance, and to integrate them into the national story in the second. Beth McKillen’s and Margaret Ward’s research into the relationship between nationalism and feminism in the 1980s set the tone of much subsequent analysis.4 Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries explored three key women’s nationalist organisations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, highlighting the dificulty women had in integrating themselves into male and mixed organisations and arguing that the ‘contradictions’ between feminism and nationalism were at times overwhelming for the women involved.5 She concluded that an overriding ‘emotional and ideological identiication with nationalism’ was an important factor in preventing politically active women from developing a broader form of liberation and that this identiication ‘ultimately dissipated their radical potential’.6 Building on Rosemary Cullen Owens’ ground-breaking study of the Irish suffrage movement, McKillen pursued related themes, arguing that ‘the feminist cause in Ireland’ had been 3

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Mary O’Dowd, ‘From Morgan to MacCurtain: Women Historians in Ireland from the 1790s to the 1990s’, in Maryann G. Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin, 1997), p. 40. Beth McKillen, ‘Irish Feminism and Nationalist Separatism, 1914–23’, Eire-Ireland, 17:3 (fall 1982), 52–67; Beth McKillen, ‘Irish Feminism and Nationalist Separatism’, 1914–23, Eire-Ireland, 17:4 (winter 1982), 74–90; Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London, 1989). 6 Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 3. Ibid., p. 248.

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Introduction

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deeply damaged by constitutional and, in particular, separatist nationalism before 1916.7 McKillen’s argument rested on three major assumptions. The irst was that male (and female) separatists failed to give their support to the suffrage cause ‘because of their belief that women’s emancipation had to be deferred until Irish independence was won’.8 The second was that splits between feminists over whether to prioritise women’s suffrage over Irish nationalism, fatally weakened the women’s movement. The third was that the Easter Rising, and the Proclamation of Independence which guaranteed equal rights for all Irish citizens, changed this dynamic fundamentally. Historians have subsequently produced more empirically robust and nuanced analyses of the relationships between politically active Irish men and women in the period 1900–18. Dana Hearne’s perceptive work on nationalism, feminism and militarism, for example, explored the ‘range of meanings’ which could be found within Ireland’s diverse feminist movement in the early years of the twentieth century. Although she too identiied the impact of the divisions which clearly emerged between some feminists and some nationalists, she also emphasised the commonalities which linked almost all politically active women, sometimes in unexpected ways.9 In addition, Hearne highlighted the distorting historiographical impact of Irish nationalism on Irish women’s history, arguing that women had not only been largely left out of major accounts because they did not it easily into dominant explanatory paradigms and narratives, but because the overwhelming emphasis on nationalism, both constitutional and separatist, made it dificult to ‘discern each of the many strands that went into the visions of nation-building in the decades before Independence’.10 Some of these, including feminism, were at times inluenced by nationalism, but they also existed as vibrant and independent political movements, alive with ideas and possibilities about the evolution of Ireland in the new century. Louise Ryan’s anthology of the Irish Citizen, a lively and important feminist newspaper which ran from 1912 to 1920, similarly and systematically brought to life many of the key themes which preoccupied and animated feminists. Her work, like Hearne’s, suggested that women’s historians would do well to look beyond the overwhelming historiographical and analytical hold of Irish nationalism in their research.11 7 9

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8 McKillen, ‘Irish Feminism’, p. 74. Ibid., p. 62. Dana Hearne, ‘The Irish Citizen, 1914–1916: Nationalism, Feminism and Militarism’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 18:1 (July 1992), 1–14. Ibid, p. 1. Louise Ryan, Irish Feminism and the Vote: An Anthology of the ‘Irish Citizen’ Newspaper, 1912–1920 (Tallaght, 1996).

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Irish women’s history has expanded enormously in recent years, and we now have available to us a number of excellent studies of organisations, movements and individuals.12 The ield has been enriched by the increasing availability of relevant archival sources, not least because of the meticulous work of the scholars who have collated information about such material.13 A number of historians have expanded on the work of Ward, McKillen and others, and the result has been the production of a steady stream of fresh studies of women and Irish nationalism. Ruth Taillon and Sinéad McCoole have produced particularly enlightening accounts of the period, and recent research by Cal McCarthy and Ann Matthews on Cumann na mBan has extended our knowledge of the workings of that organisation exponentially.14 Largely through the production of several excellent biographical studies, we now have a better idea than we did only twenty years ago about who Ireland’s politically active women were, what causes they championed and why.15 Scholars including Cliona Murphy, William Murphy and Paige Reynolds have continued to shift attention away from the polarising impact of public disputes between feminists and nationalists, by focusing instead or as well on important feminist issues like sexual violence and the inadequacy of the law, on feminist modes of expression including humour and theatricality and on feminists’ experiences and critiques of imprisonment. Maria Luddy and Carmel Quinlan have reminded us that Irish feminism developed from a number of political and intellectual inluences in the 12

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Particularly good accounts include: Cal McCarthy, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution (Cork, 2007); Diane Urquhart, Women in Ulster Politics, 1890–1940 (Dublin, 2000); and Oonagh Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin: Philanthropy, Politics and Education in the Early Twentieth Century (Dublin, 2005). A Directory of Sources for Women’s History in Ireland, Women’s History Project/Irish Manuscripts Commission (Dublin, 1999); Angela Bourke et al. (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, 2 vols. (Cork, 2001); Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart, The Irish Women’s History Reader (London and New York, 2001); Maria Luddy, Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork, 1995); Margaret Ward (ed.), In Their Own Voice:Women and Irish Nationalism (Dublin, 2001). Sineád McCoole, Guns and Chiffon:Women Revolutionaries and Kilmainham Gaol, 1916– 1923 (Dublin, 1997), and No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years, 1900–1923 (Dublin, 2004); Ann Matthews, Renegades: Irish Republican Women, 1900–1922 (Cork, 2010); McCarthy, Cumann na mBan; and Ruth Taillon, When History Was Made: The Women of 1916 (Belfast, 1996). These include, but are not limited to, Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (eds.), Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th Century Ireland (Dublin, 1995); Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (eds.), Female Activists: Irish Women and Change, 1900–1960 (Dublin, 2001); Rosemary Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett (Cork, 2001); Charlotte H. Fallon, Soul of Fire: A Biography of Mary MacSwiney (Cork, 1986); Leeann Lane, Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular (Dublin, 2010), Proinnsíos Ó Duigneáin, Linda Kearns: A Revolutionary Irish Woman (Nure, 2002); Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor (Dublin, 2006); Margaret Ward, Maud Gonne: Ireland’s Joan of Arc (London, 1990); Margaret Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: A Life (Dublin, 1997).

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Introduction

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nineteenth century. Some of these were directly related to Ireland’s own political status, but others, including the anti-slavery and anti-Contagious Diseases Acts campaigns, suggested an international dimension to Irish feminism, a dimension which continued to develop into the twentieth century.16 These have been welcome developments, but gaps remain, even within the most heavily researched ield within Irish women’s history. So too do some older assumptions which continue to shape scholarship on the period. The idea that division characterised the Irish women’s movement has, for example, remained intrinsic to most studies, and it is not dificult to see why this should be the case. In addition to the differences of opinion expressed by suffragists and separatists, there were within the Irish women’s movement disagreements between nationalists and unionists, militants and non-militants, supporters of the British war effort and paciists, as well as between Home Rulers and Republicans. The potential for discord was great, and politically active women did at times engage in heated debates between and among themselves. But this does not deine women’s political activism in the period. A remarkable level of co-operation also persisted; I argue that this co-operation was a more signiicant aspect of it than the dissent, and it more fairly characterises the Irish women’s movement as a whole in this period. Acknowledging this allows one to explore the idea that gender provided many of the women who worked within the Irish nationalist and feminist movements with the basis for a shared ‘common historical experience’.17 In the introduction to their book of collected essays devoted to exploring the connections between women and Irish nationalism, Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward argued that much of the theorising about the relationship between the two ideologies is dependent on ‘how one deines feminism and what it means to be a feminist’.18 This is unquestionably the case, as the example of Cumann na mBan, an organisation founded for and by women and one which naturally remains central to studies of women’s nationalist activity in the early twentieth century, shows. Does the fact that it was established in order for women to aid rather than join the all-male Irish Volunteers render it conformist, un-feminist or even anti-feminist? The debates which broke out on its inception about this very issue reveal not only that differences of opinion on these very 16

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Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995), and Carmel Quinlan, Genteel Revolutionaries: Anna and Thomas Haslam and the Irish Women’s Movement (Cork, 2002). Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp. 1 and 204. Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (eds.), Irish Women and Nationalism: Soldiers, New Women and Wicked Hags (Dublin, 2004), p. 4.

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questions existed but, perhaps more tellingly, that they deeply offended the women behind Cumann na mBan. They resented the accusation that they were in any way betraying their sex or compromising their feminism, all the more so because many of them were deeply committed and active suffragists. They presented thoughtful replies to their critics, replies which reveal why some women prioritised their political causes differently, and also that many did not feel that they had put aside their feminist principles at all. Feminism had different meanings for different women, and the republican women who put nation before sex did so in a highly practical though no less committed way, reminding their critics that, as Mary MacSwiney explained in 1914, ‘I quite agree with you that there can be no free nation without free women; but the world – women included – has taken some thousands of years to realise that fact. Three years more, in our very exceptional circumstances, will not hurt us.’19 It was of course the case that the majority of Irish women suppressed their feminist demands at times when these were seen to impede a settlement of the national question, most obviously in 1912, just as some British women put aside their suffrage agitation because their country was at war. This was not exceptional behaviour. In Ireland, as in the rest of Europe, gender was not the primary determinant of political afiliation, and it is thus not surprising that feminist politics were deferred at times of national political crisis.20 In the main, however, such deferrals were neither permanent nor absolute, and many political women campaigned simultaneously on several fronts, nationalism and feminism being two that were very commonly combined. This was most obviously the case for Cumann na mBan. Although most scholars would agree with McKillen’s point that members attempted to ‘remove themselves from their subordinate position’ after the Easter Rising, less attention has been paid to the way in which Cumann na mBan was alive to the question of its auxiliary status and its position vis-à-vis the Volunteers from its inception.21 A core of feminists within its executive had rejected the idea that the organisation was subservient to the Volunteers and had worked to promote its independence from its earliest days. The Proclamation of Independence was important to the development of Cumann na mBan after 1916, but it conferred legitimacy on already existing feminist impulses within the organisation rather than creating them from scratch. These feminist impulses may have been more persuasive than is commonly assumed. The very fact of the egalitarian language found within 19 21

Irish Citizen (hereafter IC), 9 May 1914. 20 Urquhart, Women in Ulster, p. 4. Maria Luddy, ‘Women and Politics in Ireland, 1860–1918’, in Bourke et al., Field Day Anthology, pp. 69–74, at p. 73.

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the Proclamation, for example, demands an answer to the question of how such an emphatic declaration of the equal citizenship rights of men and women made its way into the nation’s foundation document if the separatist men who wrote it had not been persuaded by the arguments of suffragists before 1916. As well as thinking again about the appeal and reach of feminism, we can also proitably explore the question of what it meant to be a nationalist in early twentieth-century Ireland, and especially what it meant to be a female nationalist. In the irst place, it did not necessarily mean commitment to Irish separatism; in fact, before 1916 at the very earliest, this remained a minority view among men and women alike. Advanced nationalist women, whether in Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sinn Féin or, later, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Citizen Army, were in a tiny minority within a minority of all Irish nationalists, male and female. The case remains, nonetheless, that with the exception of Diane Urquhart’s innovative research on women in Ulster, analyses of the participation of women in Irish nationalist organisations are principally devoted to studies of separatist societies, and a casual reading of any history of the period would lead the reader to conclude that the few women who were involved in nationalist politics were republicans, socialists or both. This is partly because of the tendency, only relatively recently reversed, of Irish historians, including women’s historians, to focus on separatist rather than constitutional politics in this period. It is also due to the more mundane truth that separatist women generated more records than their constitutional counterparts. This book considers the fate of constitutional nationalist women, and in tracking their frustrating and ultimately futile attempts to break through the chauvinism of the Irish Party, extends our analysis of the decline of constitutional nationalism itself. The years after 1900 were punctuated by regular collisions between the old world and the new. While there was nothing pre-ordained about the collapse of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1918, it is possible to trace the slow advance of its major rivals. One of the most striking features of most of the new advanced nationalist societies was that they were more willing to entertain female involvement than the Irish Party. An analysis, therefore, of deepening female involvement in nationalist life can and should serve as a useful guide to broader political change. From the late nineteenth century, when Irish women began to gain access to literary and debating societies, to their enfranchisement in 1918, they were involved in almost every major advanced political association and activity apart from the Irish Republican Brotherhood. This in itself should suggest that the widely held conviction that, for example, ‘the gender roles promulgated by nationalist organisations were profoundly conservative and saw

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women clearly in a subservient position’, might require some revision.22 The intrusion of determined women into the formerly male strongholds of nationalist political activism was not always welcome, but the very fact of it signiied major shifts in the Irish political landscape. This was not an organic shift; it depended on the determination of women to force themselves in, and often thereafter to attempt to change the cultures of those political organisations in order that they relect feminist views, especially in regard to women’s suffrage. Most advanced political societies accommodated women, if only because they provided valuable free labour. This was to become crucial in 1918, when women’s campaigning and votes helped to steer Sinn Féin to victory. The Irish Party, in the meantime, appeared to become ever more resolutely opposed to female participation as the years passed, distancing itself from what had become a British political norm by the turn of the twentieth century, and what was fast becoming indispensable to its Irish rivals. And yet, as constitutional nationalism continued to claim the support of the majority of Irish nationalists until at least 1916, there is no reason to suppose that women’s loyalty was any less solid than men’s. Some nationalist women believed that they could make alliances with the liberal Irish parliamentarians who appeared to share their views on the suffrage question, and at times they did. Yet the options available to constitutionally minded women seemed to shrink in line with the Party’s decline. Some radical constitutional women saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship, but others became as lost in the radicalisation of Irish politics as the Party itself, and they shared its subsequent historiographical marginalisation. The breadth and totality of the collapse of the old political world has obscured a number of sub-cultures which operated within it and has seen them labelled inherently conservative, old-fashioned and backwardlooking. This relects a larger tendency to label some forms of women’s political activism ‘conservative’, especially if they stood outside Ireland’s republican tradition or if such activism was seen to be auxiliary or supplementary. One scholar has recently argued that all feminist activity was radical as it was undertaken in male-dominated societies and was therefore expressed in opposition to them.23 In early twentieth-century Ireland, all women’s political activism, whether explicitly feminist or not, was similarly subversive for it implicitly challenged existing ideas about the political sphere. This was no less the case for the nationalist women who, through insisting on their rights as political citizens in the context 22 23

Ibid. Karen Offen (ed.), Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (London and New York, 2010), p. xxxiii.

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Introduction

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of a larger debate about the transfer of sovereign power, faced condemnation from all sides. Being political was a highly complex process for these women, and this complexity was relected, as Kathryn Gleadle has argued in another context, in the production of ‘ambivalent self-representations’.24 Women presented themselves and their demands in a variety of forms, as quintessentially feminine, as stridently modern or, more usually, as a mixture of the two. The cultural revivalist and (largely) British liberal ideas about natural justice which also informed women’s ideas about political rights complicated the way women articulated their politics, and we must be sensitive to their modes of expression. I wish to widen our understanding of what it meant to be political in this period by examining the languages in which women critiqued existing social and political arrangements and understood their subordination within them. Irish feminists, in common with female activists across Europe, largely based on their assessment of the social organisation of their society and their demand for fairer treatment under the law, on the idea of ‘equality of difference’. Feminism for them implied political equality with men, but it also implied difference between the sexes, a difference which justiied women’s involvement in public political life and even promised to transform it. It was the idea that the enfranchisement of women would enrich and improve the public political sphere that drove Irish feminists, much more so than any abstract sense of democratic rights, though this, too, was important for some women. This book will explore how what have been variously termed ‘domestic’ or ‘separate spheres’ discourses provided a common language for feminist women within Ireland.25 The rallying cry printed in the irst issue of the radical republican-feminist women’s journal Bean na hÉireann indicated this: We must set about raising the present position of women in the social and political life of the country, and we must labour to make their present environment compatible with their moral and intellectual advancement, which incidentally means the development of the nation and the race. Our desire to have a voice in directing the affairs of Ireland is not based on the failure of men to do it properly, but is the inherent right of women as loyal citizens and intelligent human souls. It is not our intention to countenance any sex antagonism between Irish women and Irish men … but we think that men would be the better for a little of women’s unselishness and spirituality, and we look for the advent of women into public life for a loftier idealism and a purer atmosphere.26 24

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Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–1867 (Oxford, 2009), p. 1. Offen, Globalizing Feminisms, p. xxxii. Bean na hÉireann, 1:3 (January 1909). (Bean na hÉireann was erratically edited, and dates and page numbers were often not given. This will be relected in some footnotes.)

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Their belief that women possessed particular skills and sensitivities which would civilise the public sphere if allowed political expression formed the backbone of every political campaign in which Irish women were involved in this period. Historians have not devoted enough attention to this particular dynamic in their analyses of Irish women’s activism in this period and have too often assessed women’s contributions to political organisation and campaigns on the basis of categories almost exclusively ascribed to men in a modernising and militarising society. It is only when we understand that feminist and other progressive ideas about equal citizenship often distinguished between male and female characteristics and roles that we can comprehend how it was that the women who taught children the Irish language, raised money for male militias and administered irst aid to Volunteers believed themselves to be actively working towards full citizenship. As we shall see, feminism, in its many forms, offered a number of distinctive models of emancipation to Irish women, not all of them obviously egalitarian in the way that we might today understand this idea. Developments in broader Irish political historiography have also had a marked impact on this study. Although consensus has not been reached about the parameters or ideological coherence of Ireland’s ‘revolution’, most historians seem to have accepted that the term may usefully and perhaps even legitimately be applied to the sequence of political ruptures which culminated in the end of the Union between Great Britain and Ireland.27 Nonetheless, the term remains problematic, not least because Ireland’s revolution was unbuttressed by a coherent ideology and held together only very loosely by the determination of its foot soldiers to create a ‘free Ireland’. Nationalism drove republican activists, but it was a nationalism created from an assortment of odd inluences including civic republicanism, Catholic mysticism and revolutionary socialism in some cases. This constituted less a theory of revolutionary change than it did a list of the interests and prejudices that animated the men and women who believed that the moment to strike out against the British presence in Ireland had arrived in 1916. These activists were as vague about the stages any revolution might follow before it accomplished its aims as they were about the political system which would be instituted at its successful conclusion. The women at the heart of this study expressed a range of ideas about what it was they had set in train and what kind of independent Ireland they wished to see established at the close of their campaign. They would continue to puzzle over quite what it was they 27

Charles Townshend, ‘Historiography: Telling the Irish Revolution’, in Joost Augusteijn (ed.), The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923 (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 1–16.

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Introduction

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had been involved in into their old age. In one of the irst relections on the meaning of the Rising, the Irish Citizen Army woman Margaret Skinnider, for example, claimed it as a revolution, but offered the following relection on why it might not have seemed so to the uninitiated and largely incredulous people around whom the event unfolded: [O]ne week is a short time for the general, uninformed mass of a dominated people to decide whether an outbreak of any sort is merely an impotent rebellion, or a real revolution with some promise of success. Besides, there have been so many isolated protests in Ireland, doomed from the irst to failure.28

Historians continue to ask the question that Skinnider suggested only months after the Easter Rising. Our understanding of what happened in Ireland between 1900 and 1918 and how the radicals at the political centre of those years understood and experienced those developments has shifted over the past decades, not least because of the increased availability of written personal accounts by participants. Most of the earliest accounts of female involvement in the events of the period, and especially in the Easter Rising, were self-consciously didactic attempts to slot those experiences into conservative explanatory paradigms, and this pattern was largely followed by historians thereafter.29 Sporadic biographical and autobiographical accounts appeared in the next decades, often turning up in religious journals, and sometimes inding their way into overtly republican publications, usually coinciding with signiicant commemorative years.30 Cumann na mBan, the most active women’s nationalist organisation during this period, moved very quickly to chronicle its own involvement in revolutionary events, beginning in 1919 when it published a short history of the organisation in Leabhar na mBan, a journal which promised further scrutiny. Initial enthusiasm for the project soon faded, and no oficial history appeared until 1969 when Lil Conlon produced Cumann na mBan and the Women of Ireland, a patchy account of the organisation which, by the author’s own admission, constituted more a series of vignettes than a systematic study. Conlon wrote the book on sufferance, out of a sense of duty as she believed that ‘a history of Cumann 28 29 30

Margaret Skinnider, Doing My Bit for Ireland (New York, 1917), p. 201. See, for example, the Catholic Bulletin’s Easter Rising series, 6 (1917). For example, Eithne Coyle, ‘The History of Cumann na mBan’, An Poblacht, 8 April 1933; Betsy Gray, ‘A Memory of Easter Week’, Capuchin Annual (1948), 281–5; Éilís Bean Ui Chonaill, ‘A Cumann na mBan Recalls Easter Week’, Capuchin Annual (1966), 271–2; Lily M. O’Brennan, ‘The Dawning of the Day’, Capuchin Annual (1936), 157–9; Elizabeth O’Farrell, ‘Events of Easter Week’, Catholic Bulletin, 7:4 (April 1917), 329–34; ‘Miss O’Farrell’s Story of the Surrender’, Catholic Bulletin, 7:5 (May 1917); Nora O’Daly, ‘The Women of Easter Week’, An t-Óglach (April 1926); and M. Reynolds, ‘Cumann na mBan in the GPO’, An t-Óglach (March 1926).

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na mBan should have been compiled long ago by some member or members of the Dublin executive: ‘I was naturally expecting its publication for the 1916 commemoration and was disappointed at its non-appearance.’31 The prominent republicans Maire Comerford, Margaret Skinnider and Fiona Plunkett had collected a great deal of information about Cumann na mBan in the 1960s, evidently with the hope that it would constitute a full institutional history, but this did not appear.32 Cumann na mBan and other activist women were not entirely forgotten, but from the 1920s a series of angry outbursts about them began to shape the way they were to be remembered in the coming decades. P. S. O’Hegarty’s misogynistic rant in The Victory of Sinn Féin singled out republican women, or at least the women who did not agree with him, as ‘practically unsexed’, animated by ‘swashbuckling and bombast and swagger’ and utterly incapable of understanding the complexities of politics.33 Maire Comerford attempted to write her own account of the period, explicitly so that it would ‘stand beside’ O’Hegarty’s book, which had ‘misinformed people for years’.34 She was furious about his misrepresentation of the anti-Treatyite women, but O’Hegarty was not the only man to characterise activist women in this way, and such characterisation has unfortunately survived in historical analyses into our own day.35 Ernest Blythe was no less scathing. Their view of republican women as hysterical camp-followers began to ind expression in published accounts, especially biographical studies. The irst of these was Sean O’Faolain’s biography of Constance Markievicz, a book in which his exasperation with his subject and his lack of sympathy with her ideas is evident in its sneering and at times patronising tone.36 His characterisation of her ideas as essentially theatrical and fundamentally unserious provided a template for an understanding of her life which, as Karen Steele has argued, many subsequent biographies have largely replicated.37 Many of the women who insisted on the inclusion of women in the national story did so through the production of biographical sketches of Markievicz. This was inevitable, given her combatant role in 1916, her election to both the British House of Commons and Dáil Éireann 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

Lil Conlon, Cumann na mBan and the Women of Ireland, 1913–25 (Kilkenny, 1969), p. 1. Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1402(2). P. S. O’Hegarty, TheVictory of Sinn Féin (Dublin, 1988), pp. 73–4. Strangely, O’Hegarty’s wife, Mina Smith, was a member of the Ulster Women’s Suffrage Society and supporter of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/35(10). Tom Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996), p. 99. Sean O’Faolain, Constance Markievicz (London, 1934). Karen Steele, ‘Constance Markievicz’s Allegorical Garden: Femininity, Militancy and the Press, 1909–1915’, Women’s Studies, 29:4 (2000), 423–47, at p. 424 and pp. 443–4.

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Introduction

13

in 1918 and her involvement at a high level in the politics of her day. But they also consciously focused on her in order to counter the myths which had grown up around her and the other political women like her. Her close friend and fellow activist Helena Molony set this out clearly in 1950 when, furious about how O’Faolain had distorted Markievicz’s character in his biography, she insisted that: It is a curious thing that many men seem to be unable to believe that any woman can embrace an ideal – accept it intellectually, feel it as a profound emotion, and then calmly decide to make a vocation of working for its realisation. They give themselves endless pains to prove that every serious thing a woman does (outside nursing babies or washing pots) is the result of being in love with some man, or disappointment in love of some man, or looking for excitement, or limelight, or indulging their vanity. You do not seem to have escaped from the limitations of your sex, therefore you describe Maeve [Markievicz] as being ‘caught up’ by, or rallying ‘to the side’ of Connolly, Larkin, or some man or other, whereas the simple fact is that she was working, as a man might have worked, for the freedom of Ireland … We were writing about Labour conditions – women’s labour in particular – years before Larkin came to Ireland, and she never ‘abandoned’ or ‘drew away from’ that cause.38

The eventual and sporadic publication from the 1950s of a number of long-unnoticed autobiographical accounts, usually with the help of an editor, helped to correct some of these distortions. It signalled the beginning of a new phase of remembering and perhaps even that twentieth-century Ireland might be ready to hear their stories.39 The release of the Bureau of Military History’s witness statements in 2003 complemented the existing published accounts and allowed historians an unprecedented glimpse into the world of republican activism in the early twentieth century. Though deeply partisan in their choice of subject, and unquestionably problematic, as Eve Morrison has shown, the statements nonetheless provide invaluable insights into often shadowy and almost forgotten aspects of female political organisation.40 They allow 38

39

40

Helena Molony to Sean O’Faolain, 6 September 1934, Bureau of Military History, Dublin (hereafter BMH), WS 391: Helena Molony. These include: Cullen and Luddy (eds.), Women, Power and Consciousness; Cullen and Luddy (eds.), Female Activists; Kathleen Clarke, Revolutionary Woman: My Fight for Freedom (ed. Helen Litton) (Dublin, 1997); John Cowell, A Noontide Blazing: Brigid Lyons Thornton, Rebel, Soldier, Doctor (Blackrock, 2005); Sidney Czira, The Years Flew By: The Recollections of Madame Sydney Czira (Dublin, 1974); Fallon, Soul of Fire; Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh (and Edward Kenny), The Splendid Years: Recollections of Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s Story of the Irish National Theatre as Told to Edward Kenny (Dublin, 1955); Ó Duigneáin, Linda Kearns; Ó hÓgartaigh, Kathleen Lynn; and Maire O’Neill, From Parnell to De Valera: A Biography of Jennie Wyse Power, 1858–1941 (Tallaght, 1991). Eve Morrison, ‘The Bureau of Military History and Female Republican Activism’, in Maryann G. Valiulis (ed.), Gender and Power in Irish History (Dublin, 2009), pp. 59–83.

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14

Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

for welcome cross-checking, increased sensitivity to regional variation and also, in many cases, a glimpse into the private world of nationalist political life, often through remembrances of jokes, feuds, romances and moral dilemmas. More than half of the 146 women who gave witness statements were members of Cumann na mBan and more than half of those were in senior roles within the organisation.41 These documents must therefore be read carefully as they clearly over-represent mainly senior and especially republican active women, who inevitably at times misremembered and exaggerated.42 More importantly, one must be sensitive to the way they relect the mores of the decades in which they were produced, rather than the mores of the Ireland of their subjects’ youth. The chief casualties of the projection of contemporary values on historical reconstruction found in the witness statements are socialism and feminism, both of which were deeply suspect in 1940s and 1950s Ireland. While, for example, we know that many of the women who joined the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) had previously been very active in socialist politics and therefore almost certainly joined the ICA through a sense of socialist solidarity, such reasoning rarely features in their accounts. Suffragism is usually a given, seemingly unworthy of particular analysis and most often described in terms of how it interacted with nationalism. Elizabeth Bloxham, for example, one of Cumann na mBan’s busiest organisers, was also an extremely activist suffragist. We only learn this, however, because of the brief reference to her useful experience ‘as a public speaker at literary and suffragette meetings’.43 The historian must dig deeply in order to unearth some of the other political ideas which drove these women. As I am concerned with the experiences of politically active nationalist Irish women in the early twentieth century, this book is, necessarily, also a book about feminism and about the way two creeds interacted. Nearly all the most prominent nationalist women of the period self-identiied as suffragists, but even those who did not were shaped by feminism, not least because it offered them frameworks for women’s political activity. One of the key aims of this book is to show how feminist activism took place around, within and often despite the sometimes crushing inluence of Irish nationalism, and how feminist ideas shaped some aspects of Irish nationalism itself. Ireland was almost unique in this period in that nationalism and feminism, whose zeniths most European states and proto-states experienced separately, collided in the early years of the twentieth century, producing a highly fertile but also volatile political 41 43

Ibid., pp. 59 and 66. 42 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 3. BMH WS 632: Elizabeth Bloxham.

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Introduction

15

climate for female activists. The politically active women whose stories appear in these pages articulated their political demands as nationalists and women. This meant that nationalist women were obliged to become multi-lingual in more than a literal sense. They spoke the language of Irish nationalism, they imbibed its prejudices and traditions, they could share conversations about its trajectory and engage in campaigns to further its aims, but at the same time they were informed by additional ideological impulses. The result was the development of a number of peculiarly Irish political dialects, each of which relected the merging of aspects of Irish nationalism with modern feminism and sometimes socialism. Components of these political creoles included attempts to emulate and honour female Celtic predecessors, the commitment to recording Irish women’s history and the drive to have women’s suffrage included in the programmes of all the main Irish political organisations. The problem remained, however, that most Irish nationalists stayed stubbornly attached to a purely nationalist vernacular. The story of how women attempted to make them bi-lingual is central to this study. Competing discourses about citizenship – feminist and nationalist – were not of course championed exclusively by men or by women. Neither were feminists or nationalists united unproblematically under their respective banners. Irish nationalism and Irish feminism were diverse and complex creeds, both of which boasted a number of political and social agendas and shifting networks of supporters. The borders of each were porous, making cross-fertilisation and activism possible, but there were limits to co-operation between the two. Given, for example, that the fate of both Home Rule and women’s suffrage was largely dependent on the votes of MPs in the House of Commons, it was inevitable that the two would at some point compete for parliamentary and public attention. When this happened, most famously in 1912, feminists and nationalists were forced to choose sides. There was no space for a common language at this point, and the result, as we shall see, was recrimination and rifts within Ireland’s most progressive political circles. Yet, while nationalism could and did place constraints on women’s feminist convictions, it could also make possible forms of political activism for women that were previously unavailable. Constitutional nationalists recognised this implicitly when they frequently linked the national demand with women’s suffrage. As one campaigner argued, the ‘two analogous movements, like all those making for human freedom, ought, of course, to advance together’.44 Their ideological yoking was for many feminist nationalists both logical and irrefutable. 44

Freeman’s Journal (hereafter FJ), 10 April 1912.

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Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

Advanced nationalism fostered particular cultural and martial environments in which women’s nationalist organisations, especially Inghinidhe na hÉireann and Cumann na mBan, could be formed. Although the former was more explicitly revolutionary than the latter, both organisations allowed women to engage in forms of political activism which had previously been almost unthinkable to most of them: lag-burning, antirecruitment, street protesting, gun-running and armed revolt to name a few. Of course it is true that only a minority of Irish women were involved in these activities, but demonstrating one way or another the typicality of these women can only get us so far, especially as it could hardly be argued that the men who joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the Irish Volunteers were representative of their fellow countrymen. This is not a book about ordinary women, but the very extraordinariness of the women featured in these pages should be seen as both a relection of and an explanatory factor for the radicalisation of Irish politics in the early twentieth century. Finally, a word about chronology. Ruth Harris has recently reminded us that ‘patterns of social evolution, often continuous rather than disruptive, stand outside the textbook dates of revolution and regime change’.45 Early twentieth-century Ireland is a case in point, but the analysis can be extended further if we seek out the social and political shifts which occurred in the shadow of political shifts that were, if not more important, then at least more celebrated. The ‘Irish revolution’ of the early twentieth century contained within it multiple demands for liberation whose chronologies did not always correspond exactly with the period bordered at one end by the third Home Rule Bill and at the other by the establishment of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. It is as well to remember this as we head into a decade of centenaries and commemoration. This study begins in 1900, the year of the foundation of Inghinidhe na hÉireann and the onset of large-scale and ongoing women’s nationalist activism. It ends in 1918, a seminal year in the history of the emancipation of women and the year in which the collapse of the Irish Party and the ascendency of Sinn Féin were established beyond all doubt. These years do not usually constitute an established period for historical research or one within which Irish political change is measured. But they do constitute a discreet period of women’s nationalist and feminist activism, a period in which women built the foundations for the liberation of their sex and their country, and in which their investment in this project appeared to have paid dividends before disillusionment rapidly set in. 45

Ruth Harris and Laura Lee Downs, ‘What Future for Gender History: Is Gender Dead?’, in R. Gildea and A. Simonin (eds.), Writing Contemporary History (London, 2008), pp. 69–94, at p. 71.

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The movement

A foreign journalist visiting Ireland during the irst ten years of this century to study the political situation, would probably have gained the impression that the Nationalist and Unionist parties represented the sum total of Irish political thought, and that the men these two parties sent to the British parliament were the leaders of the Irish people. Only if he had been led behind the scenes would that journalist have heard of a new political force which was coming into existence, and which, with a touch of prophetic vision, we called ‘the Movement’. It had no other name than that – just ‘the Movement’ for it was not organised into one body, and it had no recognised leaders. But the Movement did move, slowly at irst, and then with tremendous momentum.1

I Irish women experienced something of a political awakening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Political opportunities expanded rapidly as a variety of new and existing organisations opened their doors to women, as women themselves established feminist and social and political reform organisations and as broader constitutional changes allowed for the deeper involvement of women in the political life of the country. The Irish women’s suffrage movement was both a beneiciary and an essential architect of these shifts. It served as a crucial agent in the politicisation of Irish women in this period. Its victories, as well as the training it provided women in political agitation and organisation, shaped the development of Irish politics into the twentieth century. At the same time, the experience women began to gain in unionist and nationalist campaigning also informed their involvement in suffrage and social reform activism. The merging of interests in all these spheres was to remain a feature of Irish women’s political activism into the twentieth century. 1

Czira, Years Flew By, p. 46. Sidney Gifford was known variously as Sidney Gifford, Czira (her husband’s name) and ‘John Brennan’, a literary pseudonym. For the sake of clarity, I generally refer to her in the main body of the text as Sidney Gifford.

17

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Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

Irish women inched ever closer to full political citizenship as local franchises expanded to include them in the late nineteenth century. As in the rest of the United Kingdom, mounting attention was turned on local government as the century progressed, partly because of the expansion of reformist philanthropy and the consequent conviction that women remained ‘handicapped’ because ‘they lacked the weapon by which they could most effectively help to bring about the reforms that they had at heart’.2 Irish women faced greater legal restrictions on their right to become involved in local government than most of their counterparts across the British Isles. If they had the appropriate property qualiication, English women could vote in municipal elections from 1869; from 1870 they could stand for election to school boards, and they began to stand as Poor Law Guardians from 1875. Further legislation in 1888 made women eligible to vote in elections to and to stand for parish and district councils.3 Only city and county councils remained closed to women. The Irish situation was quite different, not only because Ireland’s local government structure differed from systems in the other parts of the United Kingdom, but also because restrictions preventing women’s participation in Irish local government were slower to be removed. Irish women protested against the uneven pace of reform across the country, and they evidently had some success as Belfast women ratepayers were awarded the municipal franchise in 1887.4 Women in the County Dublin townships of Blackrock and Kingstown won the same privilege in 1894, and the right to stand for Poor Law elections followed in 1896. A still more important shift occurred two years later when the Local Government Act enfranchised about 100,000 women who could, thereafter, vote and stand in local government elections.5 Having lagged behind for many years, Irish women rose to the top of the hierarchy through the 1898 legislation. This was free of some of the anomalies which plagued the English local government acts and consequently placed Irish men and women electors on a more equal register.6 By 1911–12, the inal obstacle was removed, and women could 2 3

4

5

6

Irish Times (hereafter IT), 10 December 1913. The 1888 legislation which had reformed English local government so thoroughly was not extended to Ireland as Balfour apparently believed that new councils would be dominated by the National League: Pauric Travers, ‘A Bloodless Revolution: The Democratisation of Irish Local Government, 1898–9’, in Mary Daly (ed.), Country and Town: One Hundred Years of Local Government in Ireland (Dublin, 2001), pp. 12–23, at p. 13. Virginia Crossman, Local Government in Nineteenth Century Ireland (Belfast, 1994), pp. 83–4; Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp. 150–1, and Isabella Tod, ‘Municipal Franchise for Women in Ireland’, Englishwoman’s Review, 18 (1887), 289–91. Dublin Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association, Suggestions for Intending Women Workers under the Local Government Act (Dublin, 1901), p. 1. Jessie Margaret King, Women and Public Work: Their Opportunities and Legal Status in England, Scotland and Ireland Compared (London, 1902), p. 14.

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The movement

19

stand for election as county councillors. The ‘lady politician’ had arrived, and the advance of women into remaining areas of formal political activity appeared to be, if not inevitable, then certainly much more likely. At the same time, Irish women were becoming more closely involved in speciically Irish political campaigning. Unionist women were much more extensively organised than their nationalist counterparts, through societies including the Primrose League, the Women’s Liberal Unionist Association and the Ladies’ Committees of the Irish Unionist Alliance. Nationalist women were slower to organise, though the Ladies’ Land League suggested in the early 1880s that an appetite for women’s nationalist activism existed. Some Ladies’ Land Leaguers remained involved in nationalist politics through literary and journalistic endeavours after the decline of the association, while other women attempted to emulate them by forming new all-female groups. The most active of these included the Belfast-based Nationalist Association of Irishwomen and its successor, the Irish Women’s Centenary Union, which followed in 1898.7 One of the co-founders of these groups, Alice Milligan, acknowledged that some people might consider the foundation of an all-female group to be ‘narrow’, but she argued that women could transcend the political schisms which divided male groups, as well as organising more freely than their male counterparts, who might be carefully watched by police.8 Momentum grew, and by the turn of the twentieth century Irish women had become involved in most spheres of political and cultural-nationalist activity. Until the formation of the all-female Inghinidhe na hÉireann in 1900, such activity largely took place in mixed societies or in male societies which occasionally opened their doors to women. A number of the new literary societies established in the late nineteenth century were particularly important in providing intellectual and social outlets for the growing number of women who were well educated by the standards of the day, who had time on their hands, or both. Founded in 1893 to promote the Irish language, the Gaelic League was the most important of these organisations. Although the precise number of branches and members is impossible to conirm, Timothy McMahon, the League’s most careful scholar, has estimated that the number of branches expanded rapidly from about eighty in 1899 to a peak of around 671 in 1908.9 The League offered many women, especially nationalist women, their irst real chance at assuming important institutional and often 7

8 9

Shan Van Vocht, 1:2 (February 1896), p. 36 and 2:10 (October 1897), p. 192, and Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp. 91–2. Shan Van Vocht, 2:10 (October 1897), p. 192. Timothy G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893– 1910 (Syracuse, 2008), pp. 87–8.

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Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

public roles. It gave women a direct stake in the development of Ireland in the new century in the public and private realms, and paved the way for further involvement in cultural and cultural-political politics into the twentieth century. The annual reports and records of the Gaelic League are ‘scattered and often problematic’,10 and it is dificult to be certain about who joined and when, but they do reveal that women were involved almost from the establishment of the organisation. They were irst listed as members of the council in 1896, when four of the twenty members were women.11 This igure, both in absolute terms and proportionately, was much lower at times in subsequent years, but breakthroughs did occur, such as the launch in 1899 of the irst County Sligo branch of the League by a woman who also became the irst ‘lady secretary’ in Ireland.12 By 1902 Mary Hayden and Agnes O’Farrelly, two of Ireland’s leading female academics, had become not only resident members of the League’s board but also two of its most active and articulate advocates, especially of the League’s non-political and non-party position.13 The Gaelic League had become by this time something of a magnet for the kinds of politically active and progressive women who were soon to become well known in wider political and social reform circles. Even the prominent feminist Hanna Sheehy Skefington, a critic of most women’s organisations apart from her own, acknowledged that women were ‘welcomed’ in the Gaelic League, though she subsequently claimed that this was largely because of ‘the nature of the work involved’.14 She argued that as women were usually the family’s economists and shoppers their voice could be ‘powerful’ and it was thus ‘primarily in her capacity as mother and housekeeper, not as individual citizen, that these movements have of necessity recognised [women’s] opinions’.15 This may have been the case for some women, but neither Hayden nor O’Farrelly supported this view, though both spoke out against sexism in other contexts. O’Farrelly even told Hanna Sheehy Skefington and her husband Francis Sheehy Skefington that they would ind ‘co-education in all its simplicity and fearlessness’ in the Gaeltacht.16 10 11

12 13 14

15 16

Ibid. Report of the Gaelic League (Central Branch, Dublin) for Two Years Ending 30th September, 1896 (Dublin, 1896), p. 12. An Claidheamh Solais, 1 (18 February 1899), p. 12. Gaelic League, Annual Report for the Year Ending 31st March (Dublin, 1902), p. 1. Hanna Sheehy Skefington (hereafter HSS), ‘Women and the National Movement’ (typescript), 19 February 1909, Sheehy Skefington Papers (hereafter SSP), National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), MS 22,266. HSS, ‘Sinn Féin and Irishwomen’, Bean na hÉireann, 13 (November 1909), p. 6. Letter from Agnes O’Farrelly to HSS, 4 April 1909, SSP, NLI, MS 22,662(ii).

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The movement

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Hayden and O’Farrelly may, however, have agreed with Sheehy Skefington’s assessment that while women were welcomed in branches, male members grew ‘restive’ at the thought of women serving on the executive. Although precise numbers are dificult to verify, it appears that her claim may well have held some truth. McMahon’s study of the League’s 1903–4 and 1913–14 executives reveals that there was virtually no change in the number of women serving, and while the proportion varied over the years, it never grew to more than seven women members. The women who were appointed, however, probably punched above their weight as they tended to go to more executive committee meetings than their male counterparts and led distinct phases of the Irish revival.17 Women also tended to make up very signiicant minorities, if not majorities, of the regular attendees at branches across the country, ensuring that although they did not necessarily hold powerful positions within the League, their presence at meetings remained steady.18 This may have been because they had fewer options for political or cultural association than men, but it did not result in the Gaelic League at branch or executive level challenging traditional gender roles in any major way. McMahon’s research, for example, conirms that separate language classes were sometimes formed for women students and that women were sometimes asked to adopt auxiliary roles in major event planning.19 He also concludes, however, that increasing numbers of women joined as the League became more established.20 The sheer variety of women who joined the League makes it extremely dificult to generalise about their motivation for joining. Their varied class, religious and political backgrounds also meant that female members, especially the prominent ones, joined themselves and urged other women to join for very different reasons. The result, inevitably, was no one ‘women’s voice’ or even an accepted ‘women’s role’ in the Gaelic League or the Irish-Ireland movement more broadly; rather, it was a mixture of messages and recommendations which relected contemporary ideas about the public and private roles of women as much as it relected the individual values of their proponents. Sheehy Skefington’s analysis of the restrictions faced by some women in the Gaelic League was no doubt accurate, but she probably overestimated both the rigidity of the roles the League encouraged women to play and the level of importance which the most active women attached to such expectations. There was no shortage of prescriptive literature which reminded women that their function as nurturers and teachers of the coming generations 17 18

McMahon, Grand Opportunity, pp. 95–6. 19 Ibid. Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 98.

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Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

gave them special roles and responsibilities in the regeneration of the Irish language. But far from discouraging women, much of this instruction was delivered in a way that empowered them or which was at least interpreted as empowering by the women who read it, and wrote it. Mary Butler, for example, a leading exponent of the domestic power of women, argued that ‘woman reigns as an autocrat in the kingdom of her home. Her sway is absolute.’21 Instead of describing domestic work as inferior and less important than civic work, women’s power in the home was placed at the centre of the cultural regeneration of the country. Butler called for education and home life to be ‘nationalised’ and added that ‘the whole onus of the work falls on us women’.22 Learning and teaching the Irish language, through the Gaelic League and other revivalist organisations, was central to this task. Butler, who was herself very active in the Gaelic League and later Sinn Féin, could be less than consistent at times, her many public pronouncements relecting the tension between what one scholar has recently described as ‘a view of female domesticity that saw women’s role in the home as a basis for intervention in the public sphere and a resurgent traditional (and markedly Catholic) notion that women should be conined purely to the home as wives and mothers’.23 Butler and other Irish-Ireland activists were obliged to navigate a path through these apparently contradictory positions, but in common with many other mid to late Victorian activists, they found within and through both a basis for increased female involvement in public life. Karen Steele has argued that Butler’s journalistic promotion of the role of woman as domestic nationmaker demonstrated ‘some of the limitations of early feminist discourse, as it primarily imagine[d] women’s contributions in the home’.24 This is a valid point, but it is important to remember that in turn-of-the-century Ireland women’s power was primarily found in the domestic sphere, especially among married women who ran their own homes and families. It was from this platform that they could exert economic and political inluence. Domestic discourses were anything but static in this period, and their very elasticity ensured that they could be used to make all sorts of cases, especially as they were underpinned by an agreement among commentators, even those at opposite ends of the argument about women’s 21 22 23

24

Mary E. L. Butler, Irish Women and the Home Language (Dublin, no date), p. 3. United Irishman, 17 October 1903. D. A. J. MacPherson, ‘Mary Butler, Domesticity, Housewifery, and Identity in Ireland, 1899–1912’, in J. Hannam and M. Boussahba-Bravard (eds.), The Human Tradition in Modern Britain (Lanham Md., 2006), p. 172. Karen Steele, ‘Raising Her Voice for Justice: Maud Gonne and the United Irishman’, New Hibernia Review, 3:2 (summer 1999), p. 89.

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23

political enfranchisement, that women’s roles as wives and mothers, as consumers, educators and moralists, inside the house or in public, were vital. The authority invested in women as domestic managers, moralists and mothers was a well-established trope within all women’s movements in this period and the Gaelic League was no exception. Promotion of the Irish language was, moreover, only one of the myriad ways in which women could play important roles in the broader IrishIreland movement. Buying Irish, learning Irish and teaching Irish all implied participation in private and public life, and, much like philanthropic activity, these endeavours launched many women into further political activity. Such work, even when it involved an activity as seemingly mundane as shopping, was demanding. For many of the women involved in the Irish-Ireland movement, ordinary life, the everyday tasks women performed, became political. Buying Irish was one of the most exacting of these because it required a great deal of time and effort and because one’s purchases often gave away one’s political leanings. Sidney Gifford recalled that: It will not be realised by the present generation of people, who are able to buy without dificulty practically every commodity they use from Irish manufactured supplies, that in the period we are discussing it was like hunting for buried treasure to try and get any article of Irish manufacture in any shop, with very few exceptions. Members of the national organisation used to report to each other with excitement the name of a shop where an Irish made article was on display.25

One way of getting around this was to adopt the strategy of fellow republican activist Helena Molony: she would go into shops, ask for items she knew were made in Ireland but, having ascertained that the ones shown to her were imported, she would declare that she would buy only the Irishmade product and walk out of the shop. This apparently had ‘a wonderful effect’.26 Wearing Irish also became important for activist women as, according to Sidney Gifford, it became ‘almost evidence of your political opinions to be seen wearing Irish tweed garments’.27 Buying, wearing and consuming Irish manufacture became for women both a patriotic duty and a social responsibility. The nationalist women’s journal, Bean na hÉireann, advised, for example, that ‘to relieve unemployment every woman has in her own hands one simple and swift remedy, the support of Irish manufacture’. Women could also kill two birds with one stone by giving preference to Irish irms which ‘pay their workers honestly for their labour and give them opportunities to live decent healthy lives’.28 But consistent support of 25 26 28

BMH WS 909: Sidney (Gifford) Czira. 27 Ibid. Czira, Years Flew By, p. 47. Bean na hÉireann, 1:3 (January 1909), p. 3.

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Irish industries was, as one advocate, Maire Killeen, admitted, ‘very, very dificult’.29 The insistence on buying Irish despite the evident dificulties this posed for women preigured what Jason Knirck has described as economic sacriice. This would evolve into a ‘particularly female sacriice’ as it was subsequently extended and adapted by the republican women who called attention to the inancial strains they endured while male breadwinners were dead, incarcerated or on the run.30 Irish-Ireland activism was not all hard work, however, and the League in particular helped to transform the social lives of many of its members, allowing men and women to mix at meetings, classes and dances, and at the same time helping to normalise the co-operation of the sexes in branch and committee work. One prominent member went as far as attributing explicitly feminist aims to the organisation, arguing that the Gaelic League ‘rejected the false sex and class distinctions which were the result of English inluence’.31 Others, including Mary Hayden, more typically delighted in the social freedoms allowed by League activities, in her case the opportunity to go to Irish-speaking weekends in mixed company.32 Maire Comerford, who moved in her youth in Catholic gentry circles, agreed, remembering that while Wexford’s social life was ‘very limited’ and ‘dancing frowned upon by the clergy’, priests were ‘much more lenient where céilís were concerned’.33 Despite its non-political platform, the Gaelic League also provided some of its women members with a political education. Maire Comerford, who was to become a Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan activist, remembered, for example, that ‘one thing which I noticed immediately in the Irish-Ireland movement was that so many of my new friends had far more education than any of my old friends would have thought possible’. She remembered that there were ‘books and pamphlets everywhere’, and many were issued through the Gaelic League.34 The League also served as a kind of springboard into more radical and open political activity for a number of women for whom it was simply not political enough. What was crucial about the politicisation of such women is that they graduated 29 30

31

32 33

34

BMH WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain. Jason Knirck, ‘Women’s Political Rhetoric and the Irish Revolution’, in Thomas E. Hachey (ed.), Turning Points in Twentieth-Century Irish History (Dublin, 2011), pp. 39–56, at p. 42. Jennie Wyse Power, ‘The Political Inluence of Women in Modern Ireland’, in W. G. FitzGerald (ed.), The Voice of Ireland: A Survey of the Race and Nation from All Angles (Dublin, 1924), pp. 158–61, at p. 159. Diary of Mary Hayden, 1 January 1901, NLI, MS 11,683. ‘Maire Comerford’, in Uinseann MacEoin (ed.), Survivors:The Story of Ireland’s Struggle as Told through Some of Her Outstanding Living People (Dublin, 1980[?]), pp. 37–8. Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/11(4).

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from the League to Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan rather than to the constitutional nationalist United Irish League (UIL). The latter remained almost entirely closed to women, while the former provided opportunities for additional open political involvement, either alongside men or in exclusively female societies. This did not mean that the Gaelic League itself remained entirely immune from politics, oficial policy notwithstanding. Bridget Fay, for instance, remembered that she and her sisters joined the League’s notorious Keating branch where, she explained, ‘I got to know many people who later took part in the Rising. I can state that it was the atmosphere of the Keating Branch that really aroused the spirit of Nationality that up to then was latent within me.’35 That branch became practically and symbolically signiicant for many Dublin activists. On Easter Sunday 1916, Éilís Ní Ríain of Cumann na mBan, for example, went at once to the Keating branch in search of further information about the Rising after she heard about MacNeill’s countermand.36 Siobhan Lankford, who worked in the post ofice at Mallow, described how she and a ‘few other girls’ set up a branch of the Gaelic League to help with the ‘national effort for freedom’. Many of her friends were already members of Cumann na mBan but Lankford was one of those who, as a civil servant, could not join the women’s organisation. The League provided the perfect cover for her political work.37 The experience of belonging to the League could awaken other, perhaps more unexpected, ‘latent’ political tendencies. Maeve Cavanagh, who later joined the ICA, recalled her discomfort at the ‘snobbish’ nature of the Derry branch to which she briely belonged. Some of her fellow Gaelic enthusiasts there did not take kindly to the idea of ‘factory girls coming in as members’, so Cavanagh and some like-minded rebels founded a second branch.38 The reminiscences of almost every woman who became active in advanced nationalist politics in the period after 1900 conirm that membership of the Gaelic League was the rule rather than the exception among this cohort.39 It contributed profoundly to the nationalisation of a generation of Irish women, but it did not single-handedly politicise them. The Gaelic League was, for many women, just as it was for many men, only one of the several political or cultural groups to which they belonged. This was, in the words of actress and nationalist Maire Nic 35 36 37 38 39

BMH WS 484: Bridget Fay. Ui Chonaill, ‘A Cumann na mBan Recalls’, pp. 271–2. Siobhan Lankford, The Hope and the Sadness (Cork, 1980), pp. 100–1. BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. These included Marie Perolz, Sidney Gifford, Bridget Fay, Elizabeth Bloxham, Louise Gavan Duffy and Maire O’Brolchain.

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Shiubhlaigh, who thrived in Dublin’s nationalist demi-monde, an era of ‘innumerable little clubs and societies, of diverse moments, aimed at the establishment of a new order’.40 The broader political afiliation of her nationalist friends was to what they described as ‘the movement’, and the League was but one of the many components of this phenomenon. This was an exciting time for young activists, especially for those who threw themselves into cultural-nationalist politics.41 Marie Perolz, a founder member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, explained simply that ‘I took part in everything’, and in her dedication she was not alone.42 Moving from one organisation to another regularly, often on a daily basis, meant that the boundaries between them sometimes became blurred. It was inevitable that in this context politics of various kinds would feature in the League. Women’s suffrage, for example, was debated among members, many of whom were both suffragists and active Irish-Irelanders, though some members objected strongly – to the point of resignation from the Gaelic League – to suffragettes, who ‘were not created in our country’.43 Those who worked hard to keep politics out of the League were often viewed as spineless pseudo-patriots who hid their cowardice behind their membership cards. The Waterford activist Rosamond Jacob described a ‘Miss B’, who refused to participate in an anti-royal-visit demonstration, as ‘one of the non-politicals, who deceive you into thinking they are good patriots with their Gaelic League and their Industrial Revival activity, and then bust up when it’s a question of coming out openly as Nationalists’.44 Women like Jacob displayed no such qualms, though their openly political work was, publicly at least, done through organisations other than the Gaelic League. What were the options for such women? II Some of the groundwork for the involvement of women in cultural and political organisations in the early twentieth century had taken place in a number of small and innovative literary societies in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Founded in 1888, the Pan-Celtic Society, for example, included the nationalist writers Rose Kavanagh, Dora Sigerson and Ellen O’Leary among its active members and ofice-holders.45 Other women were drawn to the National Literary Society, which, though 40 42 44

45

41 Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 3. Ibid., pp. 3–4. BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. 43 Sinn Féin, 5 April 1913. Diary of Rosamond Jacob (hereafter DRJ), 8 April 1911, Rosamond Jacob Papers (hereafter RJP), NLI, MS 32,582(21). The Nation, 1 September 1888; 8 May 1889.

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not explicitly political, included among its impressive membership leading igures from Ireland’s cultural and literary circles. At its meetings Ireland’s political and cultural female elite rubbed shoulders with Edward Martyn, Douglas Hyde and W. B. Yeats among many others. Mary Hayden, Katharine Tynan and Maud Gonne were involved with the National Literary Society from its inception in 1892: Tynan and Gonne served as vice-presidents, and Mary Hayden chaired an early meeting whose audience was majority male, before going on to serve as the society’s librarian.46 This stood in sharp contrast to her experience within the deeply segregated Royal University of Ireland, which had failed to afford her the intellectual and professional respect she clearly warranted as one of its outstanding scholars. A comparable role was played by the Contemporary Club, which excluded women from its membership but provided an important forum for men and women to meet and discuss the principal events of the day at a symposium held every fourth Saturday. Mary Macken, another future radical nationalist, recalled meeting Yeats at the Contemporary Club; the republican poet Ella Young, Alice Oldham and Maud Gonne also attended.47 They were among the many women who lourished in the new literary and intellectual environment which grew out of the growing interest in Irish history, language and culture and which in turn encouraged the growth of newspapers, journals, debating circles and discussion groups. Women’s increasing involvement in explicitly feminist societies such as the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA) and the Irish Association of Women Graduates was simultaneously working to normalise female involvement in Irish political and civic life. Yet, although Ireland’s cultural, political and literary worlds were increasingly open to women, the segregation of the sexes remained a fact of some aspects of public life, even in the more radical societies which emerged in the 1890s. Some women bypassed this convention, sometimes by maximising what could be done within an auxiliary role and sometimes by openly bucking the system. The outright rejection of female membership was neither a foregone conclusion nor an insurmountable obstacle, as Maud Gonne learned when she asked how one went about joining the Celtic Literary Society (CLS). Gonne’s question may have provoked some embarrassment within the exclusively male organisation, but she and her female colleagues managed to introduce a strong female presence into the CLS, partly by 46

47

National Literary Society Minute Book, 24 May 1892 and 20 October 1892, NLI, MS 645. Mary Macken, ‘W. B. Yeats, John O’Leary and the Contemporary Club’, Studies, 28 (1939), pp. 137–9.

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emphasising the particular skills that women could bring to it. The CLS went on to play an especially important role for a generation of activist women. It, more than any other comparable society of its era, explicitly accelerated the politicisation of Irish cultural nationalism, a process in which women played a key role. It was, according to Margaret Keogh, a founder member of the Inghinidhe na hÉireann, ‘through the Celtic Literary Society, to which our brothers and friends belonged, that we became so national’.48 Founded by William Rooney in 1893, the CLS aimed to support the Irish language, literature, history and music, and it endeavoured to provide ‘independent action’ in the political sphere, a less than formal modus operandi which suited women – excluded from established political organisations like the Irish Parliamentary Party – well. Weekly meetings were open to the public, but in reality few but the dedicated clique who ran the Society attended, encouraging a culture of exclusivity which in turn fuelled loyalty and a sense of mission. For regular members, ‘the Celtic’ was ‘the only oasis in the desert’, where lectures and discussions were ‘treated from the standpoint of “Advanced” (pure) Nationalism’.49 Meetings usually consisted of debates and the presentation of papers, often on Irish historical topics, and provision was also made for Irishlanguage classes, music sessions and other social events.50 These were all activities in which women could and did play a role, society rules notwithstanding. Teaching, in particular, was an activity which was seen to be suitable for women and, as the irst annual report of the Inghinidhe itself stated, its founding members ‘were mostly members of the Irish Classes connected with the Celtic Literary Society’.51 The co-operation of willing men was also vital, and in Rooney and, later, Arthur Grifith, political women found willing allies, men who would work alongside women so long as the regeneration and education of the Irish nation remained the primary goal. Grifith maintained this liberal attitude in his subsequent political organisations including Cumann na nGaedheal and Sinn Féin, partly through conviction but also surely because these marginal organisations were in no position to turn away willing and active supporters. In line with broader Irish nationalist tradition, family ties also played a crucial role in the development of nationalist women’s political consciousness. Grifith’s and Rooney’s own sisters attended CLS 48

49 50 51

BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. Keogh joined the Inghinidhe and the CLS under her maiden name, Quinn, and was usually known as Maggie. For the sake of clarity, I refer to her as Maggie Quinn in the main body of the text. George A. Lyons, Some Recollections of Griffith and His Times (Dublin, 1923), p. 3. Richard Davis, Arthur Griffith and Non-Violent Sinn Fein (Dublin, 1974), pp. 5–6. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report (Dublin, 1901), p. 1.

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events and joined Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and a large number of women’s memoirs emphasise the role of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters in the development of their political positions.52 The growing appeal and the general respectability of Irish cultural revivalism made the involvement of women in groups which fostered aspects of it much more likely. At the same time, the impact of the expansion of women’s participation in public life was also being seen in cultural and political organisations. Thus, the author Alice Milligan read a paper to the CLS in 1897, and Maud Gonne presided over a lecture on the Irish nation in 1899.53 By 1901, Inghinidhe na hÉireann was using the Society’s rooms and female members were attending its committee meetings.54 Increasingly, women also assumed oficial roles within the Society, relecting the growing acceptance of their status as full members in all but name.55 The increasing radicalisation of a group of women associated with the CLS mirrored the diversiication of the wider cultural revivalist movement and its association with what has been deemed the new advanced politics. It is no coincidence that while women were becoming more irmly entrenched in the CLS and other cultural-nationalist groups, they were also participating in some of the most spectacular political protests of their day, including opposition to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion.56 It is also no coincidence that so many of them were closely associated with Ireland’s radical nationalist press. III Political literature was probably the single most inluential politicising agent of nationalist women of that era. A great number of activist women discovered Irish politics through books, newspapers and journals, many of them presenting their irst encounters with nationalist literature of various kinds as pivotal moments in their political education. Maire Comerford’s conversion to nationalism came while studying in England: 52

53

54 55

56

Some examples include: BMH WS 1681: Mollie Cunningham; BMH WS 293: Aine Heron; BMH WS 398: Bridget Martin; BMH WS 195: Molly Reynolds; BMH WS 399: Josephine Mulcahy. For the sake of clarity, I refer to Josephine Mulcahy as Josephine or Min Ryan in the main body of the text as she was not known as Mulcahy until she married in 1919. Celtic Literary Society Minute Book, 18 February 1897; 31 October 1896; 6 May 1897; and 6 October 1899, NLI, MS 19,934. Ibid., 4 October 1901 and 1 November 1901, NLI, MS 19,934(ii). See, for example, a letter from M. Quinn to Alice Milligan, written on CLS notepaper, which dealt with arrangements for a visit to Dublin by Milligan; 5 May 1901, Allen Library, Box 386, Folder 8, Item 33. See the Minute Book of the Transvaal Committee, 7 October 1899, NLI, MS 19,993.

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Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

having gone to London utterly naïve about Irish politics and history, she experienced the constant ‘prodding’ of a ‘black, bitter Protestant’ teacher, before resolving to enlighten herself through books. The works of Lecky, A. M. Sullivan and Dubois were decisive: ‘[I]t was a spontaneous conversion … I had no one to inluence me save my books.’57 Mary Butler read Mitchel and turned away from ‘Irish society’ and the ‘Castle’ for ever.58 She, like many other women, was also deeply inluenced by Grifith’s journalism, most likely because it was inclusive, it emphasised cultural politics and because Grifith himself welcomed women contributors to his United Irishman. Importantly too, the United Irishman emphasised over and over again that patriotism was not dependent on membership and support of the Irish Party; this was vital for the nationalist women who were excluded from the Party and largely unrepresented in the publications which supported it. Josephine ‘Min’ Ryan remembered that she and her siblings read every paper with which Grifith was connected ‘from cover to cover. That was the origin of [their] coming into the movement.’59 Some of Grifith’s female associates had made tentative forays into political journalism of a sort through their contributions to the CLS’s manuscript journal, Shanachie, which was read on ladies’ night, and some of these contributors went on to write for the United Irishman and, later, Sinn Féin.60 Other women discovered the United Irishman through more unexpected circumstances. Elizabeth Bloxham, like many other women from Protestant and unionist backgrounds, came across the newspaper through Catholic acquaintances, in her case two local boat-builders. When she asked to read it they at irst refused to give it to her, claiming that ‘this is the sort of paper ye wouldn’t like in your house’. She did like it, and ‘in a short time’ she was writing articles for it which seemed to justify the boat-builders’ ‘conviction that it was an unsettling paper to let loose in a Protestant household’.61 She later wrote for Sinn Féin, the Irish Volunteer and the Irish Review. Bloxham was one of many women who found Grifith to be courteous and generous when she called to see him in Dublin. He listened to her ideas about Irish politics and literature and introduced her to some of his Dublin friends.62 Maeve Cavanagh agreed. She and Grifith corresponded about her brother’s cartoons and he later published some of her poems in United Irishman. She seemed amazed at the attention he paid her, especially as at the time she believed that 57 58 59 61

‘Maire Comerford’, in MacEoin, Survivors, p. 37. Mrs T. P. O’ Nolan, ‘The Life of Mary L. Butler’, NLI, MS 7,321. 60 BMH WS 399: Josephine Mulcahy. BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. 62 BMH WS 632: Elizabeth Bloxham. Ibid.

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she was one of only two people who bought his paper in Sligo.63 Sidney Gifford also entered Grifith’s orbit. She progressed from reading the Leader to buying Sinn Féin, for which she subsequently wrote under the pen-name of ‘John Brennan’. She took this nom de plume because she did not want her unionist family to ind out about her activities.64 The nationalist Dulcibella Barton, sister of Robert and Thomas and cousin of Erskine Childers, described how in her staunchly unionist household, her parents took The Times, while the children read Sinn Féin.65 The rise of the woman journalist was a feature of the British Isles in this period and Ireland was no exception. Ireland’s smaller population meant of course that there were bound to be fewer opportunities for female journalists than in Britain, but Ireland also lacked the networks of political and social radicals and reformers which could sustain house periodicals, let alone publications explicitly aimed at activist women. The idea that politically minded Irish women should have their own publication was nonetheless loated regularly in the early years of the twentieth century, but it was not realised until 1908, when Inghinidhe na hÉireann launched Bean na hÉireann. Women had contributed to nationalist journals run by men before this time, notably the Nation in the nineteenth century, and this trend was to continue into the twentieth.66 Among the pioneers of Bean na hÉireann, for example, were women who had contributed to many journals and newspapers in the early days of the cultural revival period. One of the most prominent was Alice Milligan, co-founder of Shan Van Vocht, launched with her friend, Anna Johnston (Eithne Carbery), in Belfast in 1896. Shan Van Vocht lasted until 1899, effectively paving the way for Grifith’s United Irishman, to which the founders handed over their subscription lists when they folded. As we shall see, this was not to be the last time that women illed a gap in the market for radical nationalist literature. Many of Grifith’s future writers had been contributors to Shan Van Vocht, including William Rooney, James Connolly, W. B. Yeats and George Russell, as well as Grifith himself on occasion.67 But women made up the bulk of contributors.68 Maud Gonne, Alice Furlong , Katharine Tynan and others helped to fuse the link between cultural nationalism and advanced nationalism and thus to create a wider space for women’s involvement in nationalist politics. 63 64 66

67 68

BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. 65 BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira. BMH WS 936: Dulcibella Barton. Ríona Nic Congáil, ‘Young Ireland and the Nation: Nationalist Children’s Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Eire-Ireland, 46:3/4 (fall–winter, 2011), p. 38. Shan Van Vocht, 3:8 (August 1898), p. 146. Karen Steele, Women, Press and Politics during the Irish Revival (Syracuse, 2007), p. 30.

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There was no equivalent in constitutional nationalist circles. Not only did women rarely contribute to the mainstream nationalist press, they were largely excluded from the constituency organisations of the Irish Parliamentary Party.69 Some very determined women were soon to force their way into the UIL, but the fact remained that no equivalent to the Primrose League or the Women’s Liberal Federation was ever established in Ireland. The closest nationalist Ireland had ever come to such an organisation was the Ladies’ Land League but its impact was very mixed, not least because its very intense form of political activism set it apart from most existing women’s political organisations and earned the disapproval of many prominent Irish politicians. It was surely no coincidence that so many of the Irish MPs who had frowned upon the Ladies’ Land League were, a generation later, to be very opposed to women’s suffrage, and that Betsy Gray and Anne Devlin were held up as role models for Irish women in the nationalist press, while the Parnell sisters and their colleagues generally were not. The Ladies’ Land League thus left a mixed legacy: its radicalism ensured that the very idea of a women’s nationalist organisation became anathema to some men. This helps to explain why no nationalist Primrose League was ever formed and, as a consequence, why so many women turned increasingly away from the inhospitable Irish Party. At the same time, subsequent generations of nationalist women viewed the Ladies’ Land Leaguers as pioneering heroines for precisely the same reasons, none more so than Inghinidhe na hÉireann. 69

See Chapter 3 for a full discussion of the status of women in the UIL and Irish Parliamentary Party.

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Daughters of Ireland

The awakening of women to a realisation of the duties they owe to themselves, their countries and humanity, is a universal and prominent feature of the hour. It is a world movement which inds expression in many forms, ranging from higher education to civic administration, from a passion for philanthropic work to demands for suffrage recognition; but in its very guise it connotes progress … Let us, Irishwomen, be inspired with it, and we will take our place in the world no less worthily then the rest.1

I Established in 1900, Inghinidhe na hÉireann was one of the most important political organisations founded in early twentieth-century Ireland. The fact that it was established for and by women only added to both its distinctiveness and its allure to the militant women who joined its ranks. Several historians have explored the foundation and development of this organisation, but it merits further analysis, not least because new sources have become available since the last large-scale study of Inghinidhe na hÉireann was produced. Its radical and serious nature has been underestimated by some scholars who have all too often focused on its founder, Maud Gonne: she has proved, more than any other woman in Irish history, to be a magnet for hagiographers, and this too has obscured some of the more interesting aspects of the organisation as well as overshadowing some of its more remarkable members. It operated, at least at irst, as one of the many spheres of advanced nationalist activity which orbited around Arthur Grifith and his various enterprises. The Inghinidhe’s relationship with the broader culture of advanced nationalism, in its political and cultural forms, reveals much about why women organised independently of men, as well as how they shaped and articulated their particular position within ‘the movement’.

1

Bean na hÉireann, 1:3 (January 1909), p. 10.

33

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Inghinidhe na hÉireann was both a product of and an important agent in the revival of nationalist politics after 1898, and it helped to shape the extra-parliamentary nationalist movement in the early years of the twentieth century. But the Inghinidhe also owed its existence to political developments beyond Irish nationalism or revivalism. The most important of these was the growth of a number of speciically women’s political and pressure groups and what might be termed a women’s political movement. Unionist women made the running here through their involvement in a number of societies. They were hardly considered to be the political equals of unionist men and they remained excluded from some public meetings and societies, but there can be no doubt that their politicisation in the wake of the two Home Rule crises of the late nineteenth century represented a signiicant phase in the evolution of political activism among Irish women. At the same time, the Irish women’s suffrage movement began to grow in the late nineteenth century, providing another political model and inspiration.2 The Inghinidhe evolved in tandem with the Irish feminist movement, existing in a sometimes uneasy but always mutually productive relationship with it, especially after the foundation of the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL) in 1908. Inghinidhe na hÉireann was the only explicitly nationalist and feminist organisation in Ireland in the early twentieth century, a remarkable fact given the overriding political complexion of the country. While almost all members prioritised nationalism over feminism, all were affected by shifts in both movements and this was to cause some tension within the organisation. The Inghinidhe grew primarily out of a new Irish nationalism which was sometimes explicitly supportive of but always at least tolerant of feminist aspirations so long as they did not impede the national demand. It was itself a product of the integration of several new strains in Irish politics at the in de siècle, not least of which was the participation of a number of women in several advanced nationalist protest movements. The involvement of women in the demonstrations against the visit of Queen Victoria to Dublin in 1900 was a logical extension of roles they had played in other protests including the ’98 Centenary movement, the Irish Transvaal Committee and in the upkeep and decoration of ‘patriotic 2

The best summaries of the early Irish women’s suffrage movement are Mary Cullen, ‘Anna Haslam’, in Cullen and Luddy Women, Power and Consciousness, pp. 161–96; Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland: A Regional Survey (London and New York, 2006), pp. 252–60; Quinlan, Genteel Revolutionaries; and Carmel Quinlan, ‘“Onward Hand in Hand”: The Nineteenth-Century Irish Campaign for Votes for Women’, in Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (eds.), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin, 2007), pp. 21–44.

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graves’.3 These events had served as political apprenticeships for some women who were eager for further political organisation by 1900. The announcement that Dublin’s children would be given a treat to celebrate the monarch’s visit inaugurated a new phase of nationalist protest and signalled what was to become one of the women’s major political preoccupations. Much has been written about the Ladies’ Committee for the Patriotic Children’s Treat (LCPCT), an organisation composed of nationalist women which was formed to provide alternative entertainment for children who refused to be ‘bribed’ into attending the Queen’s event. Reports of its wild success, its mobilising effect on young proto-nationalists and the ostentatious role played by Maud Gonne in its organisation have been questioned and it is by now clear that a great many of these reports were exaggerated, in part due to the willingness of historians to accept Gonne’s version of events.4 But the very nature of the small and clannish milieu in which the children’s treat organisers operated also helps to account for the multiplicity of myths which grew up around the activities of the LCPCT and its successor, Inghinidhe na hÉireann. Membership of a number of organisations which revolved loosely around Grifith, Gonne and Rooney was lexible and often shared, and it is thus hardly surprising that even activists themselves attributed the success of the Treat to various organisations ranging from the Inghinidhe, the Transvaal Committee and the CLS. The borders between them were so lexible as to be virtually non-existent at times.5 Embellishment notwithstanding, the children’s treat did have a real impact on individual women and on the development of Inghinidhe itself. Most strikingly, the LCPCT set in train the largest nationalist women’s project seen in Ireland since the Ladies’ Land League. The founders of the Committee met initially at the rooms of the CLS on 18 April and there is some evidence that William Rooney himself had urged its establishment.6 Maud Gonne was nonetheless the igurehead and moving force: she called this meeting, she presided over it and became the chairman of the committee formed that day, but remained in France while much of the work was done. The Inghinidhe appealed immediately for funds and supplies to be donated to an as yet unspeciied event which 3 4

5 6

FJ, 11 May and 17 October 1900. See, for example, Elizabeth Coxhead, Daughters of Erin: Five Women of the Irish Renaissance (London, 1968), pp. 30–1; Ward, Maud Gonne, pp. 62–3; and, more recently, Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse, 2001), p. 74. Lyons, Recollections, p. 31. See, for example, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1226(10–12).

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would ‘bring out all the patriotic school children’. This might take the form of a visit to Bodenstown or a still more ambitious project depending on funds.7 The campaign evidently gathered pace quite quickly for by late April donations of money, bread, hams and fruit had been promised.8 By early May, the committee had its name and some high-proile supporters including John Daly, the Fenian mayor of Limerick, who promised a donation of bread and confectionery. The list of women associated with the LCPCT underlined its links with other radical organisations including the Transvaal and ’98 Centenary Committees (Gonne, Anna Johnson), the CLS (Gonne, Maire Quinn, Elizabeth Morgan and the Misses White, Grifith, Moran and Rooney) and even the Ladies’ Land League through Jennie Wyse Power. The Fenian connection was also a feature through the membership of Mrs Curtis O’Leary and Mrs James Egan. A number of founder members would continue to be involved in radical Irish politics well into Irish independence and many would become well-established igures in radical Irish political circles, some as active participants and others, like the three Meagher sisters, Bridget, Sheila and Mary, who ran a small shop on one of Dublin’s quays, who would provide valuable cover and aid during the War of Independence.9 This was patently a committee of political radicals. The nationalist children’s event eventually took the form of a parade and picnic which took place in early July at Clonturk Park, the children having registered their names beforehand. Margaret Quinn, the Committee’s treasurer, described the many hours of hard work which went into the organisation of the event, but she also recorded the very enthusiastic response to the Committee’s appeals. She was astonished both by the quantity and quality of the goods donated to the appeal and by the numbers of children who registered for the treat: the women’s organisation had had ‘very little to pay for’.10 Advertisements for the event were carried in the United Irishman and the day itself was imbued with a Fenian-literary atmosphere through the presence of members of the CLS and the Gaelic Athletic Association, and speakers including Rooney, O’Leary Curtis and Maud Gonne herself. Though the number of children who attended was exaggerated by those involved, there is no doubt that the event itself passed off very successfully. Newspaper reports did not, however, suggest that the LCPCT was bound for permanence. It was, it appears, expected to be a temporary group which was formed by volunteers and deputations from small women’s groups including the Daughters of Erin, the Ladies’ Foresters and the Ladies’ 7 9

United Irishman, 21 April 1900. 8 Ibid., 28 April 1900. IT, 17 October 1961. 10 BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh.

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Wolfe Tone Committee, all associated with various separatist and proBoer activities.11 Its immediate aim was the organisation of a rival treat, but momentum clearly grew and a number of nationalists became increasingly aware of the political potential of children. In its emphasis on children, the LCPCT built on the work of the Ladies’ Land League which had established Children’s Land League branches from 1881. In that same year, the Nation explicitly urged women to ‘train up the children’, congratulating the Ladies’ Land League for having begun this important work.12 As Ríona Nic Congáil’s pioneering research has shown, female activists had also targeted nationalist children through The Nation and Young Ireland, while some members of the Ladies’ Land League remained committed to fostering nationalist cultural activities for children, becoming involved in the inal years of the nineteenth century in literary and cultural clubs for children.13 Queen Victoria’s treat had once again focused attention on this relatively unpoliticised stratum in Irish society, a stratum which was increasingly open to political inluences of the ‘wrong sort’, presumably because of the advent of the scouting and similar movements for children. Disgusted at the success of the ‘loyal treat’, the United Irishman editorialised about the need for nationalists to target Irish youth, and the women involved with the nationalist children’s event agreed.14 II The origins of Inghinidhe na hÉireann became blurred and steeped in nationalist mythology over the years, and, given changes of name and personnel within months, it is hardly surprising that some confusion exists about its precise foundation. Easter Sunday 1900, for example, is the date often given to its establishment, but that was in fact when the LCPCT began to meet.15 The idea of an Easter launch became important in later years because, for the women who went on to play an active role in separatist and feminist politics at least, it provided a symbolically powerful date with which to emphasise their self-suficiency and independence from nationalist men, and to link their organisation with the highly successful children’s treat which had preceded the foundation of Inghinidhe na hÉireann. Within ten years, in what is the closest thing we have to an ‘oficial history’ of the Inghinidhe, its origins had been 11 13 14 15

United Irishman, 5 May 1900. 12 Nation, 1 October 1881. Nic Congáil, ‘Young Ireland and the Nation’, pp. 17–18. United Irishman, 28 April 1900. See, for example, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 1, and BMH WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain.

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suficiently mythologised to relect these considerations.16 The existence of a foundation story was crucial to its members, who were deeply conscious of Irish history and particularly of the role of Irish women in it. It was largely because of their versions of the establishment of the Inghinidhe that Easter Sunday has gone down as the day of its foundation and thus of the dawn of a crucial phase of women’s nationalist activity. Other issues discussed that Easter Sunday included ‘the best way for dressing the hair’ but those women evidently had more serious issues to discuss: The girls talked, too, of founding a society, and decided on the names [sic] ‘Inghinidhe na h-Eireann.’ The spelling of ‘Inghinidhe na h-Eireann’ was antiquated … But you will agree that it was a good morning’s work, the presentation of that stick, the undertaking of a patriotic children’s treat (there were 30,000 of them) on nothing, and the founding of a women’s national society for the advancement of Irish language, literature, history and industries specially amongst the young.17

This was clearly an attempt to invent history, as there is simply no evidence that all these complex subjects were decided, let alone resolved, at one meeting. It is no accident that the quasi-oficial version of the foundation story given above was mostly likely contributed by Helena Molony, herself not an Inghinidhe member until 1903 and therefore not present at the Easter meeting. By 1910 she was something of a keeper of the lame of women’s nationalist activity through her friendship with Anna Parnell and Maud Gonne. The Inghinidhe was founded explicitly for women like Molony who wished to politicise the goals of the cultural revival and to provide a forum for the growing number of women who were involved in advanced politics. Ten years after its establishment, one member – most likely Molony again – claimed that ‘the Inghinidhe came into existence in a stirring time, and well they did their work, as women and nationalists. The work in those early years exploded for ever that silly “women’s sphere” idea, which always stiles the high courage and patriotism which is in every Irishwomen’s heart.’18 Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, the irst Irish actress to Hibernicise her name and a founder member, described how the Inghinidhe had given women access to a broader world of political activity and had brought together various of the political cultural strains which were then pulsing through nationalist and artistic Dublin. She argued that the Inghinidhe was probably the only organisation ‘of its kind to offer young women an opportunity of taking 16

Bean na hÉireann, 20 (1910), pp. 3–5.

17

Ibid.

18

Ibid., p. 8.

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part in national work’ and consequently had ‘a wide following amongst young girls all over the city’.19 The political intent of the founders was clear from the outset, its radical nature underlined by its links to other advanced nationalist causes. The impact of the Boer War, for instance, continued to be felt, as in July several women, including Gonne, Maire Quinn and Jennie Wyse Power, travelled to Paris as representatives of the women’s group to present Kruger with an address. They travelled at the invitation of the FrancoIrish society, an organisation in which Gonne was very prominent. The travelling group, which also included Grifith and Henry Dixon, attended an oficial function at the Hôtel de Ville as well as the Bastille Day military review.20 Maud Gonne clearly provided a number of the women around her with new political opportunities, the trip to Paris being the irst of many. Through her networks in France, she also internationalised the advanced nationalist movement, and especially the women within it. Despite her frequent absences and ostentatious ways, Gonne was absolutely central to the formation of the Inghinidhe as well as a much needed source of inancial and moral support over the years of its existence. She paid for the production of much of the organisation’s propaganda material and was responsible too for paying the rent on a house at 22 North Great George’s Street, known as Inghinidhe House.21 Her collaborators remembered her with exceptional fondness and it is dificult to ind a bad word having been said about her by her female colleagues. As Margaret Quinn claimed in a far from unusual tribute: ‘Maud Gonne was responsible for the whole affair. Her teaching and inspiration acted like magic on all of us. We would have done anything she wanted us to.’22 Gonne’s inluence was vital, but she was fortunate in attracting a group of exceptionally committed and energetic women who in turn maintained the organisation and kept its day-to-day activities ticking over when its president was in France, as she increasingly was after the breakdown of her marriage to John MacBride. Members undertook at their irst meeting to encourage the use of Gaelic, to support Irish manufacture and to combat the spread of ‘low English literature’, English songs, ‘vulgar English entertainments’ and ‘to combat in every way English inluence, which is doing so much injury to the artistic taste and reinement of the Irish people’.23 Individual members were also obliged to adopt a Gaelic name by which they would be known, therefore rejecting, according to Helena Molony, the ‘Seoneen’ fashion of using ‘Miss’ before their 19 21 23

Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, pp. 2–3. 20 O’Neill, From Parnell to De Valera, p. 48. BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. 22 BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 1.

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names.24 They were also required to ‘accept the principle of independent nationality for Ireland’, a vague formula which chimed well with the similarly ambiguous guiding principles adopted by the CLS and the United Irishman. Individual members, however, had much clearer ideas. Helena Molony, for example, insisted that the Inghinidhe ‘formed itself into a permanent society of Irishwomen pledged to ight for the complete separation of Ireland from England, and the re-establishment of her ancient culture’.25 The Inghinidhe’s immediate activities centred on Irish children, on language and dancing classes and on the organisation of further treats for the patriotic among them. These parties soon became annual Christmas events, at which the children were shown lantern pictures of ‘scenes illustrating British imperial rule’, taught to dance, lectured on Irish history and given a feast.26 Their activities no doubt took these forms because of the success of their children’s treat and the previous involvement of some members in Irish-language teaching, but one could also argue that it was a relection of prevailing social attitudes which viewed women’s philanthropic or educational work with children as entirely acceptable, indeed laudable. Members of the Inghinidhe were clearly inluenced by this social expectation and it is no coincidence that they catered mainly for poor children, but they were not the kind of women who buckled easily or entirely under the burden of social convention. Although, for instance, certain daring priests gave them some assistance, they braved clerical disapproval of their activities, accepting that the majority of clerics ‘would not touch [them] with a forty foot pole’.27 This was not an easy stance for the membership, the majority being Catholic, but it was neither the last time they would attract clerical disapproval, nor the last time they would disregard it. The Inghinidhe’s children’s activities were irst and foremost propagandist in aim and explicitly designed to ‘imbue the youthful minds’ of Irish children with ‘the love of country which will tend to preserve their nationality when they come to take their places as the men and women of the coming generations’.28 Children, especially of the poorer classes, were also targeted because it was believed to be crucial that workingclass boys be so imbued with national feeling that they would not join the British Army, while girls would learn to apply moral and social pressure

24 25 26

27

Kilmainham Gaol (henceforth KG) WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Maud Gonne’s introduction to a paper on Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,817(6). 28 BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. United Irishman, 21 April 1900.

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on the boys who did enlist and the girls who fraternised with them.29 No doubt an extension of the anti-recruitment activities in which many members were involved during the Boer War, this anti-British Army rhetoric permeated all the activities of the Inghinidhe, and the children who attended their classes were pledged never to enlist in the British Army or Royal Navy.30 The quality of the teaching they provided children was varied to say the least, but enthusiasm no doubt made up for the lack of formal skills. According to its own oficial record, the society began running classes in Irish language and history, dance and drill for children twice weekly from October. There was apparently such a strong demand that classes had to be moved to a bigger venue.31 Volunteer teachers included Ella Young, who joined the society and agreed to teach the children Irish history ‘by a re-telling of the sagas and hero tales’.32 Marie Perolz, another Inghinidhe language teacher, admitted that ‘what I learned on Monday I taught on Thursday’.33 Her experience appears to have been quite typical. Helena Molony, for example, described how ‘there were two books to be taught to the children: and as soon as you had read one, you taught it to them’.34 This was an amateur operation run by volunteers. It was also an organisation whose members were not themselves well-off. All but one (Gonne) were in paid employment and were thus obliged to it a multitude of propagandist activities around their working days.35 Propaganda work took on a number of forms, one of the most hazardous being anti-recruitment activity. The Inghinidhe was at the forefront of this from its inception until the First World War. Given her father’s British Army career and her own determination to prove her nationalist credentials, it is perhaps not surprising that Gonne emphasised so strongly the need for members to take on anti-recruitment work among adults and children. Anti-recruitment became a widely held and unifying position within advanced nationalist circles into the twentieth century, its zenith coming towards the end of the First World War with the conscription crisis, when the hard work of the previous two decades would be vindicated in a spectacular style. Before 1918, it was largely advanced nationalist women who carried on the campaigning against 29 30

31 32

33 35

KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. See, for example, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p.4, and Maud Gonne’s introduction to a paper on Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,817(6). Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 3. Ella Young, Flowering Dusk: Things Remembered Accurately and Inaccurately (London and Toronto, 1945), pp. 70–1. BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. 34 KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. Bean na hÉireann, 20 (1910).

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Irish recruitment to the British Army, louting social conventions and placing themselves in dangerous situations in order to do so.36 Their anti-recruitment activity fell into two main categories: composing, printing and distributing lealets and posters which they would fasten on ‘buildings, seats on trains, any place where they would be noticed by the public and yet not be pulled down immediately by the police’; and physically confronting soldiers and their female companions.37 The former was illegal but the latter was the most dangerous, as confronting soldiers usually involved venturing into unrespectable areas which were frequented mainly by military men, prostitutes and other undesirables. Campaigning women were, for example, showered with objects, abuse and ‘very vile language’ when they took their propaganda into the public houses frequented by soldiers and their friends.38 They also distributed their pamphlets on the General Post Ofice (GPO) side of O’Connell Street, an area into which ‘no respectable person’ ventured. Inghinidhe members targeted the vicinity because of the apparently large presence there of ‘innocent young country girls’ who required reminding about their patriotic duty to shun members of the British Army.39 This kind of activity unsurprisingly prompted criticism from people outside nationalist circles: Grifith’s own sister resigned from the Inghinidhe after receiving some ‘foul letters’ about the organisation’s anti-recruitment work.40 But so daring did this work appear to some commentators, even those friendly to the organisation, that individual women were sometimes warned against it from within ‘the movement’. Sidney Gifford, for example, was very active in this form of protest, but she was warned by Grifith, himself strongly against Irish enlistment in the British Army, not to participate in anti-recruitment work.41 Helena Molony recalled that even the people who sympathised with anti-recruitment sentiment often disapproved of Inghinidhe methods: A group of us would set out about eight o’clock in the evening and start from the Rotunda Hospital, walking rapidly as far as the Bank of Ireland. We walked in two’s, some twenty or thirty yards apart, and managed in that way to ‘paper’ the whole promenade, before these young people had time to grasp the contents of their hand-bill. Sometimes the girls thought they were religious tracts, and would display some hostility. The soldiers, when they became aware of this campaign against them, were, of course, offensive and threatening. The leaflets had to be concealed in hand-bags or hand-muffs (which were worn then) and delivered surreptitiously. Any hesitation or delay would lead to a mobbing, 36 38 39 40

37 BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira. BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. 41 Ibid. BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira.

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and soldiers at that time had the habit of taking off their belts and attacking civilians with them if they thought there was any hostility to them. This was a very crowded thoroughfare at this time, but only by soldiers and their girl friends. Ordinary civilians did not walk on that side of the street. If they managed to locate any of us we would have got a rough passage, so naturally it was considered dangerous work for the Inghínídhe, and many of our friends disapproved, as it was not thought ‘becoming’. At that time the militant ‘Suffragette’ movement had not been heard of and women and girls were still living in a semi-sheltered Victorianism. The hurly-burly of politics, particularly the kind which led to the risk of being involved in street rows, was certainly not thought ‘becoming’. However, we managed to avoid any real unpleasantness. Only on one occasion did we come near it. Misses E. O’Farrell and Sighle Grenan and myself were spotted by police. We took to our heels, and were chased through Henry Street, Mary Street and right up to the Markets in Capel Street. We got away clear, as we were young and swift, and the police were hampered by long heavy overcoats. On the whole we feared more the soldiers with their canes. We desired above all to avoid any fracas, and we succeeded. This campaign led to a prolonged newspaper controversy which showered us with abuse and called us all sorts of names, and we individually got a constant supply of anonymous letters of the foulest nature. It was not pleasant, but it did raise a volume of opinion and we had our defenders too.42

The women within the organisation knew that they were well qualiied to do this particular kind of anti-recruitment work. Their male colleagues could not as easily attempt to dissuade young women from consorting with soldiers, at least not in the areas where this took place, lest they be taken for ‘clients’, religious proselytisers or police. Women, on the other hand, were not only able to aim their written propaganda at women and girls, they could also approach them more easily in the streets. Precedents had been set by social reformers and rescue societies, though this was not the role of the Inghinidhe, whose aim was political rather than reformist. The skills members developed through such propaganda work, through journalism, speaking on public platforms and participating in large- and small-scale political protests were to prove to be some of their most potent weapons and also the most valuable of women’s skills to the broader separatist movement. In a precursor to women’s activity in a series of byelections and ultimately in the 1918 general election, for instance, some Inghinidhe members canvassed in 1900 on behalf of Thomas Byrne’s candidacy in municipal elections.43 Although, like Grifith, the organisation denounced electoral politics and claimed that they ‘did not take part 42 43

BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 4; Inghinidhe na hÉireann, To the Women of the North Dock Ward (Dublin, 1901); and BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh.

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as an Association in the politics of the city’, some campaigned for Byrne, a ‘trojan’ worker for the children’s treat.44 This was important for a number of reasons and brought together several political ideas which were to take a more developed form in Sinn Féin. Women were entitled to vote in municipal elections, and Inghinidhe thus appealed directly to their ‘fellow countrywomen’, claiming subsequently that the women turned out in large numbers and helped to secure the victory. In municipal elections in the following year, they once again canvassed where there were ‘distinct national issues’ and ‘issued circulars to the women of the wards with excellent results’.45 This decision to focus on local politics was likewise a taste of things to come, as Grifithites were beginning to wonder, as Padraic Colum later explained, whether the new local councils could be used as the ‘nucleus’ of a union between the new cultural and political forces.46 It was in some ways unsurprising that separatist women played a leading role in taking advantage of the new electoral possibilities after 1898 given their interest in both nationalist and speciically feminist politics. The pamphlet in support of Byrne’s candidacy was signed by Gonne, Maire and Margaret Quinn and Jennie Wyse Power, among others. All were supporters of women’s suffrage, and Wyse Power in particular was deeply involved in the Irish campaign. She belonged to the IWSLGA and had been one of the irst women elected a Poor Law Guardian in Ireland. Always alive to the potential for radical nationalism of women’s electoral power, she insisted in subsequent years that had Irish women been enfranchised, the by-elections fought in the aftermath of the Parnell scandal ‘would have had very different results’.47 As a Poor Law Guardian in the North Dublin Union, she demonstrated the practical possibilities of both women’s formal involvement in the political life of the country and the Sinn Féin agenda. Her Union, for example, replaced ‘On His Majesty’s Service’ with ‘I Seirbhis na h-Eireann’ on their envelopes and helped to block a visit by Lady Aberdeen to a Union hospital.48 Such forms of municipal resistance formed the backbone of Sinn Féin activity in the organisation’s earliest years, and Wyse Power demonstrated par excellence how women could play a crucial role in that form of symbolic and practical political agitation. Most of her suffrage and local government activity was conducted in the company of like-minded Protestants and a few very liberal Catholics, so it is highly likely that 44 45 46 47 48

BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Second Annual Report, 1901–1902 (Dublin, 1902), p. 3. Padraic Colum, Arthur Griffith (Dublin, 1959), p. 49. Wyse Power, ‘The Political Inluence of Women’, p. 159. BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power.

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she welcomed the decision of the Inghinidhe to become involved in this kind of political activity. Women’s suffrage was to become a contentious issue within advanced nationalism generally, but within the Inghinidhe, at least, only the mode of achievement was debatable, never the principle itself. From an early stage, the Inghinidhe worked implicitly for women’s suffrage and for increasing women’s role in the political life of the country. Local government appeared to be an obvious place to begin, and Sinn Féin’s subsequent espousal of a similar idea acknowledged the potential new political force of women as local electors in a way unseen within the UIL or the Irish Party itself.

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3

Politics, theatre and dissent

Dublin had just begun to gather momentum. Dublin bristled with little national movements of every conceivable kind: cultural, artistic, literary, theatrical, political. I suppose a generation arriving amidst the bickerings of parliamentarians, of Parnellites and anti-Parnellites, had turned from politics and begun at last to seek a national expression elsewhere. Everyone was discussing literature and the arts, the new literature that was emerging. Everywhere, in the streets at ceilidhes and national concerts, anywhere that crowds gathered, one met enthusiasts, young people drawn from every side of the city’s life, leaders or followers of all the little clubs that were appearing every day. The parent group was the Gaelic League, which was non-political and non-sectarian and strove principally for the revival of the language, but there were other bodies like Cumann na nGaedheal, the forerunner of Sinn Féin, whose leader was Arthur Grifith; smaller clubs which combined social with political activities; circles devoted to industrial and agricultural development; and from the beginning there had been societies for the foundation of an Irish theatre.1

I The sheer range of political activity in which advanced nationalist women were involved relected not only the expansion of the role of women in politics generally, but the very existence of a lourishing new political culture in early twentieth-century Ireland. The very lively opposition to Queen Victoria’s visit had revealed both that what opposition existed was thoroughly ad hoc and that the potential for a new kind of political movement clearly existed. By early 1900 Grifith had suggested a loose federation of the advanced nationalist societies.2 Lively discussions ensued and Cumann na nGaedheal was formed following a meeting of a number of literary and political societies in September. This was to be a co-ordinating body under whose aegis member organisations would 1 2

Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, pp. 3–4. United Irishman, 4 March 1899, and Davis, Arthur Griffith, p. 17.

46

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be able to retain their individual characteristics while working collectively as, according to George Lyons, ‘centres for propaganda and recruiting’.3 The Inghinidhe decided at a meeting in October to afiliate with Cumann na nGaedheal and the organisation obtained representation on the central council as a result. Miss Grifith and Miss M. O’Kennedy were appointed by the Society to attend the irst Cumann na nGaedheal Convention in late November. The Inghinidhe’s close involvement with Cumann na nGaedheal was important for a number of reasons, not least because the acceptance of the women as full members validated their status as serious political activists. This was the irst time any explicitly nationalist organisation had accepted women as equal members in Ireland and in this it set an important precedent for a variety of its offshoots, most signiicantly Sinn Féin. The involvement of the Inghinidhe was more than ceremonial or decorative. Maud Gonne herself helped to write the organisation’s programme in collaboration with Grifith, and it is thus unsurprising that its aim to ‘link up all the existing national societies’ chimed well with the Inghinidhe’s manifesto.4 Moreover, the women’s group was in an excellent position to contribute to all of Cumann na nGaedheal’s main activities as it was already deeply involved in the kinds of pursuits Cumann na nGaedheal would champion, anti-recruitment and theatre work in particular. The Inghinidhe constituted what existed of an active radical wing in Cumann na nGaedheal and remained the most explicitly separatist of the organisations aligned to the parent body. Quite how many members the organisation attracted is impossible to tell as it did not publish oficial igures. At least twenty-nine women were present at its irst meeting in October 1900, but by the end of the 1900–1 session, the organisation claimed to have branches in Limerick, Galway and Ballina and as far aield as New York, Boston and St Louis.5 This seems unlikely, and though branches certainly were established in Cork and Belfast, the society, like most others of its kind, remained almost entirely centred on Dublin.6 The number of known members always remained small, and the overlap between the Inghinidhe and other small advanced nationalist groups meant that some women most probably drifted in and out of the organisation. The most complete list of members we have was compiled by Rose McNamara, who joined the society in 1906 and went on 3 4

5 6

Lyons, Recollections, p. 44. Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (Dublin, 1950), p. 303, and Davis, Arthur Griffith, p. 17. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 7. Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp. 107–9; Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 64.

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to become vice-commandant of the Inghinidhe branch of Cumann na mBan. Her roll consists of the names of ifty-six women who were members prior to Easter Week 1916, but this is a misleading number as some older members had drifted away when the society became a branch of Cumann na mBan, while others remained only loosely allied.7 There may have been more than ifty-six members at any given time, but the activist core remained small, so small in fact that Maeve Cavanagh, though not herself a member, claimed to have known ‘all’ of the Inghinidhe women. She remembered this ‘formidable body’ as being among the very few women who attended Grifith’s meetings.8 Helena Molony subsequently claimed that ‘the Inghinidhe na hÉireann did more revolutionary and daring work than any small movement of men or women up to then. Even the I.R.B. were not doing active work.’9 We have already seen that the group was at the forefront of antirecruitment activity but it was also active in l ag-stealing and -burning, plastering placards around the city and open political protest. This was in part a relection of the genuine radicalism of the women who tended to be drawn to the organisation, but it also relected the deeply clandestine and often clannish culture of most of the exclusively male allied groups. Women remained excluded from some of these groups, but the Inghinidhe nevertheless maintained links with like-minded old friends like the CLS as well as cultivating links with new fellowtravellers including members of the Dungannon Clubs. Cumann na nGaedheal’s deliberate amorphousness clearly allowed for a great deal of political power-brokering and dissent under the surface, but for the women, it also allowed for political lexibility and more movement across and between various separatist societies. From the outset of this new advanced nationalist experiment, the women’s group was clearly allied to the separatist wing. As we have seen, the women’s group had established its rebellious credentials during the visit of Queen Victoria, when individual members participated in all aspects of opposition to the visit, from letterwriting to street protests, l ag-waving and placarding. By 1903, when Edward VII was due to visit Ireland, opposition to his tour was much better organised and the Inghinidhe once again stood at the forefront, lobbying councillors at their homes or places of business and by attending Corporation meetings in force. A children’s treat was once again organised.10 Gonne worked through personal contacts and through Cumann na nGaedheal, attempting to establish a series of ‘open-air 7 9

BMH WS 428: Rose McNamara. 8 BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. 10 United Irishman, 25 July 1903.

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entertainments all bearing on the visit so as to prepare the public feeling’ and to organise for the composition of a ‘very direct short anti-king play’.11 Joseph Ryan’s short sketch, ‘a twinkle in Ireland’s eye, being a play of a royal tour’, was most likely the outcome of her endeavour and was performed on the eve of the King’s arrival in Dublin.12 Gonne also collaborated with Yeats and some kindred spirits within Cumann na nGaedheal’s orbit to establish the People’s Protection Committee, in May 1903. This was founded because it was thought vital to have in place a dynamic body which could act quickly and make instant decisions when necessary. Within days, it was renamed the National Council, another co-ordinating body composed at irst of members of the executive of Cumann na nGaedheal but open to nationalists of all stripes who believed in the ‘absolute independence of their country for one purpose … the stamping out of lunkeyism and toadyism in the land’.13 The main difference from Cumann na nGaedheal was that membership was open to individuals rather than organisations. Gonne claimed to have been the moving spirit behind the formation of this body, inviting a number of the people who would become most active in it to a tea party at her home at which its organisation was discussed. She and Maire Quinn represented the Inghinidhe on the National Council and their inluence may clearly be seen in the organisation’s communiqué, which explicitly appealed to Irish men and women.14 Gonne and Quinn also travelled to Belfast, where they participated in anti-visit activities alongside the Inghinidhe’s Belfast branch.15 The most spectacular protest against the King’s visit came on 18 May, when a number of members of the People’s Protection Committee attended an open UIL meeting at the Rotunda. Their aim was to question Tim Harrington, then Lord Mayor of Dublin, about claims that Dublin Corporation planned to issue a welcome address to the visiting monarch. There is some dispute about whether Gonne, Grifith, Edward Martyn or someone else led this delegation, but there is no doubting that its presence at the Rotunda caused uproar. Chairs were thrown, the hall erupted, and Gonne was carried away from her seat for her own protection. The Irish press labelled the event ‘The Rotunda Fracas’ and the ‘Rotunda Riot’, while George Russell famously described it as the ‘most gorgeous 11

12 13 14

15

Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, 7 May 1907, in A. MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (eds.), The Gonne–Yeats Letters, 1893–1938: Always Your Friend (London, 1992), p. 152. Minute Book of the Celtic Literary Society, 1904, NLI, MS 19,934. United Irishman, 30 May 1903. Ibid., and typed copy of a letter from Maud Gonne to Seumas MacManus, in reply to his query about the ‘Battle of the Rotunda’, Seumas MacManus Papers, NLI, MS 33,669/G. United Irishman, 1 August 1903.

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row Dublin had since Jubilee Time’.16 Gonne subsequently claimed that the Rotunda Affair was a deeply signiicant moment in nationalist history as it marked the irst open clash between the ‘decaying parliamentary movement and the rising Sinn Fein movement’.17 The ‘Rotunda Riot’ certainly had a deep signiicance for the Inghinidhe because it was the irst time members openly ‘went militant’, thus preceding suffragette militancy by some nine years.18 For an organisation whose members had a profound sense of their place as both women and nationalists in Ireland’s history, this was indeed a signiicant moment. The Inghinidhe was responsible for printing, distributing and posting 10,000 copies of the Coronation Oath in 1903, a high-proile activity as opposition to the visit emphasised the oath’s alleged anti-Catholicism.19 Taking advantage of the holiday awarded by many irms to their workers, members had plastered copies of the Coronation Oath around Dublin in an effort to highlight this and to challenge the rumour that the King himself actually disapproved of the Oath. Others had also engaged in lag-burning protests and setting ire to the ‘trophies’ which had been captured by the children who attended their classes.20 But most spectacular of all was the ‘Battle of Coulson Avenue’, a suburban stand-off between the Inghinidhe and their supporters and the police. The event was triggered by Maud Gonne hanging a black petticoat from her window, allegedly in honour of the recently deceased pope. Gonne refused to remove the ‘lag’ when asked to do so by police, and various supporters called on reinforcements to help her defend her home and her lag. Maire Quinn had heard from a milkboy about the arrival of the police and she had asked him to leave a note on the ofice door (106 Brunswick Street), informing members, who were due to a meeting, about the disturbance and requesting their assistance. The note stated: ‘Our president’s house besieged. Come at once.’21 A large number of Gonne’s supporters arrived to defend her, and, inding a cordon of police outside her house, they and their fellow Cumann na nGaedheal members ‘took up their positions and deied anyone to come near’.22 They remained there throughout the night, periodically receiving refreshments from Maud Gonne, her housekeeper and her neighbour, Violet Russell, wife of George Russell. This was neither the irst nor the last time the Inghinidhe would indulge in lamboyant display and theatricality. By 1903 both had 16

17 18 20 22

Senia Pašeta, ‘Nationalist Responses to Two Royal Visits to Ireland, 1900 and 1903’, Irish Historical Studies, 31:124 (November 1999), 488–504, at pp. 498–9. BMH WS 317: Maud Gonne MacBride. 19 BMH WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain. United Irishman, 27 June 1903. 21 BMH WS 317: Maud Gonne MacBride. Ibid. BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh.

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become vital to the society, providing members with the means to make a living and to raise money for the movement, while at the same lifting the society’s proile and embedding it irmly within Dublin’s nationalist and artistic establishments. II The Inghinidhe was, despite its commitment to Gaelic culture and history, a profoundly modern organisation, both in its views about women’s roles and in the way it adopted contemporary methods and technologies when they proved useful. Their activities and ideas spread relatively quickly through cheap newspapers and journals, through their placards and through their own frequent appearances on public platforms. This kind of promotion was possible because of the existence of both an affordable and reliable means of production and distribution, and a growing group of women who were willing to undertake such open political work. Crucially, too, all their activities required money, and while some was collected through fundraising campaigns, much of the women’s activity was only possible because members earned wages which enabled them to travel, read, write and dedicate time to nationalist activities of all kinds. The organisation was truly reliant on the advent of the ‘new woman’, and important aspects of its work were also only possible because members moved largely on the fringes of Irish society, in a kind of cultural and political demi-monde where social mores were much less rigid than they were in polite society. This formed an important setting for the organisation’s foray into theatre. Theatricality and display had an established place in Irish political circles before the turn of the twentieth century, but it was the innovative women of the Inghinidhe who were the irst to grasp its potential for a new era and who pioneered its use as a powerful propaganda tool within the cultural revival movement. Lantern slides had been used by Gonne and other Transvaal League members to publicise its cause in the late 1890s, and this carried on into the new century as the Inghinidhe continued to stage such displays. These slides were particularly attractive to children, who were shown scenes from Irish history and of the Boer War, usually accompanied by a rousing speech by Maud Gonne or another member.23 This activity was soon overtaken in popularity by historical tableaux vivants, usually performed to packed audiences at the Antient Concert Hall and often directed by Alice Milligan.24 The staging of plays and tableaux 23 24

Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 3. BMH WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain.

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made inancial as well as propagandist sense, as they provided a useful source of income for the organisation. Maud Gonne recalled that the Inghinidhe had begun to organise tableaux in order to pay for their children’s activities, and it seems that the funds generated by such activities could be quite substantial.25 When planning for tableaux to be held on St Patrick’s Day, for example, Maire Quinn explained to Alice Milligan that the Inghinidhe hoped to make ‘a pile of money as people have no place to go on such a night, besides the entertainment will be very appropriate’.26 For a number of members, drama of various kinds also became a means to make a living which could be itted in around their many political commitments. The staging of these kinds of theatrical events seemed almost inevitable when one looks at the organisation’s membership lists and supporters from its earliest days. Leading lights in this aspect of the society’s work included Alice Milligan, Sinead Flanagan, Anna Johnson, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, Helen Laird, Susan Mitchell and Ella Young.27 Between them, they could cover most of the tasks which went into the production of plays: writing, directing, stage-management, costume design and acting. Fortunately for them, some of their closest political and cultural associates shared their interest in theatre and supplied additional artistic and inancial support. But more important was the swelling interest in Gaelic culture and history and the convergence of various devotees in small clubs and societies which were central to its growth.28 Given its clear political afiliation, its success in staging plays and its connections with literary Dublin, the Inghinidhe was in a good position to draw together a number of diverse people whose opinions on the relative importance of drama as propaganda or art differed radically at times, but were compatible enough to allow them to converge for a brief and extraordinary period. Padraic Colum described the Inghinidhe as ‘the mother of the Irish theatre’, and he, for one, doubted that an Irish theatre would have emerged without it.29 He was to became deeply involved in the nationalist theatre movement of this period, playing a central role in many of its controversies, and he was very well versed in feminist-nationalist politics through his friendship with the actress Helen Laird, and with (Mary) Molly Maguire, subsequently a teacher 25

26

27 28 29

Maud Gonne’s introduction to a talk about the Inghinidhe, Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,817(6). Maire Quinn to Alice Milligan, in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899–1901 (Dublin, 1975), p. 86. BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, pp. 3–4. Padraic Colum, ‘Early Days of the Irish Theatre’, Dublin Magazine (October–December, 1949), 11–17, at p. 14.

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at Patrick Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, a founder member of Cumann na mBan and soon to be his wife. The early activities of the Inghinidhe foreshadowed this nascent dramatic movement, with the most committed members planning from its irst days ‘to establish the nucleus of a national dramatic company which would run in conjunction with Nationalist organisations in the city’.30 The Inghinidhe’s irst tableaux were staged with the co-operation of members of the CLS, the Gaelic League and Cumann na nGaedheal. Cumann na nGaedheal aimed to celebrate at least two ancient festivals per year, including staging plays for the annual festival of Samhain. This usually lasted a week and consisted of concerts, prize-giving ceremonies for the children, choral works and plays. In the same year they staged their irst ‘cottage Ceilidhe scene’ which starred Douglas Hyde, among others. This unique form of entertainment involved drama, music, dance and song with talks between the items. Wishing to take their patriotic drama a stage further, Maud Gonne and Arthur Grifith approached Frank Fay, actor and theatre critic, about directing an Irish-language play for them. The main parts were to be played by some of the women who had been involved in teaching Irish to Dublin’s children. Fay agreed, and this collaboration marked the beginning of a dificult but deeply signiicant artistic partnership. William Fay and his brother Frank were already by 1900 well established in Dublin’s literary and dramatic circles. In 1892 they had formed the Ormonde Dramatic Society, through which they learned how to act, direct, stage-manage and publicise drama, and they went on to set up further theatre companies. Both brothers had clear nationalist sympathies, Frank Fay transparently so through his columns as theatre critic in the United Irishman. He believed passionately in the necessity for an ‘Irish National Theatre’ which would have international appeal while also seeing ‘life through Irish eyes’, and he maintained at irst that this could only be done through the Irish language. He also wondered why the Irish Literary Theatre (ILT), formed in 1899 by W. B.Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, did not entrust its Irish plays to Irish actors.31 This was pure United Irishman parlance and just the sort of notion which would appeal to Maud Gonne, whose own ideas about the best way to express Irish nationality seemed similar. Connections between the Inghinidhe and the ILT had already been established through the friendship of Gonne and Yeats, and it was through the former that Yeats came to know the Fays, instituting one 30 31

Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 3. United Irishman, 11 May 1901, and IT, 30 May 1970.

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of his more important dramatic relationships.32 In 1901 Gonne had appointed William Fay to the honorary position of producer and stagemanager with Inghinidhe na hÉireann. The organisation moved from producing short pieces to full-length productions under the guidance of Fay from the middle of 1901. They included short plays alongside their programme of tableaux, songs and dances, before producing longer plays under their auspices, including Milligan’s The Deliverance of Red Hugh, which was one of a number of performances staged by the Inghinidhe during Dublin’s annual Horse Show in 1901 as part of its protest against ‘lunkeyism’. Fay directed P. T. McGinley’s Eilís agus an Bhean Dhéirce, performed entirely in Irish and for the irst time in Dublin. The leading female roles were played by two Inghinidhe Irish teachers, Maire Quinn and Marie Perolz. This performance was politically and inancially important: the proceeds of the Saturday evening performance of both it and Alice Milligan’s ‘dramatic sketch’ were ear-marked for the William Rooney Memorial Fund.33 The spectacular ran over ive nights and involved the co-operation of more than a hundred performers of various kinds. In the meantime, the Fays attracted a small team of talented actors, and Frank Fay in particular hand-picked potential talents and gave them intensive training. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh described how Frank Fay approached her in 1900 and asked if she would like to act. Occupied primarily with political agitation at the time, she replied that she had never thought about it, but would like to try. This led to a rigorous training schedule which began with weekly two-hour classes in elocution, six months of learning poetry and, inally, exposure to live audiences in small-scale productions.34 William Fay, almost certainly more concerned with the artistic rather than the propaganda potential of a permanent theatre company, nevertheless saw the advantages of merging the theatrical ideologues and the professionals in one company. Fortunately for the Fays, many of the people in their immediate circle straddled the two. Frank Fay had taken St Teresa’s Temperance Hall in Clarendon Street for the rehearsals of his new company, and he continued to search for a suitable play while he trained his company and the Inghinidhe actors. He inally identiied Deirdre, an uninished play by George Russell, persuaded the poet to complete it and delivered it to his little company. In the cold, draughty theatre in Clarendon Street, the Fays’ Irish National Dramatic Company and the Inghinidhe’s National Players merged. The group 32 33 34

Gerald Fay, The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (Dublin, 1958), p. 35. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Second Annual Report, p. 2. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s hand-written recollections of the Abbey Theatre, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh Papers, NLI, MS 27,634.

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which gathered around the Fay brothers included Maire Quinn, Helen Laird, Dudley Digges, Padraic Colum, Fred Ryan, James Cousins and Frank and Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh. William Fay subsequently claimed that he met Maud Gonne, Yeats and Lady Gregory during rehearsals, and, having heard what the group was trying to do, Yeats offered Cathleen ni Houlihan to the company if Deirdre proved to be too short.35 Though he admitted that the performance ultimately took place ‘under the auspices of Miss Gonne’s society’, Frank Fay clearly underestimated or at least minimised the role of the Inghinidhe in the production of one of the most important plays ever to have been staged in Dublin. This was unsurprising, given his spectacular falling-out with Maud Gonne and the Inghinidhe. The Inghinidhe’s second annual report claimed that the Society had staged Deirdre and Cathleen ni Houlihan because Yeats’s ILT did not propose to give its annual performance: ‘unwilling that the effort to establish a permanent Irish National Theatre should be abandoned’, the women then took it on.36 Ella Young claimed that the Inghinidhe put on the play (‘an effort on a grand scale’),37 while Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh recalled that the Inghinidhe agreed to subsidise the production.38 When the plays had their debut in April, the Inghinidhe’s banner of a gold sunburst on a blue background hung near the modest stage and the organisation received irst billing on the programme. As Paige Reynolds has recently argued, this performance ‘consolidated in the minds of the Irish public the amalgamation of women’s political involvement and national theatre’.39 George Russell pronounced himself delighted by the company’s progress during rehearsals, characteristically telling Yeats that the plays were to be ‘produced under the auspices of the ladies whom Miss Gonne has united together in a society whose name I have never learned to spell’.40 He believed that Ireland would ‘get a good lift’ from Gonne’s performance, explaining to Sarah Purser that ‘the Daughters of Erin have lung their Aegis over us, and Yeats and I are being produced under the auspices’.41 Yeats corroborated this later that year when he wrote that the 35

36 37 38

39

40

41

W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (London, 1935), p. 118. George Roberts, on the other hand, remembered that AE and Gonne persuaded Yeats to contribute the play: Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History, vol. II, Laying the Foundations, 1902–1904 (Dublin, 1976), p. 12. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Second Annual Report, pp. 2–3. Ella Young, Flowering Dusk, p. 73. Nic Shiubhlaigh, recollections of the Abbey Theatre, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh Papers, NLI, MS 27,634. Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge, 2007), p. 79. AE to W. B.Yeats, 28 January 1902, in George Russell and W. B.Yeats, Some Passages from the Letters of AE to W. B.Yeats (Dublin, 1936), p. 27. AE to Sarah Purser, 5 March 1902, in Russell and Yeats, Letters, pp. 38–9.

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plays had been staged at ‘the invitation’ of the Inghinidhe.42 Members of the Inghinidhe believed strongly that the plays were performed because of their own hard work, money and foresight in engaging Fay and cooperating with his company. Gonne herself clearly had high hopes of the experiment, assuring Yeats during rehearsals that ‘Deirdre is going really well’, and proclaiming herself to be ‘delighted’ that Yeats had agreed to give Cathleen ni Houlihan to Fay.43 But the history of the genesis of the plays began to be written and rewritten by a number of those involved almost as the irst audience left the theatre. As the impact of the plays, particularly of Cathleen, became better known and word began to spread, the ideological differences between the various collaborators emerged. Writing a iery letter in 1903, Gonne staked the claim of her women’s group, reminding Yeats that: You forget the existence of the National Theatre Society was originally due to Inginide na hEireann [sic] and Cumann na Gaedhal [sic]. If these Societies had not taken Fay up he would still be contentedly playing vulgar English farces in the Union Jack Coffee Palace. It was after Inginide na hÉireann [sic] passed a resolution forbidding any of their members to act for Fay in his English farces and for the Coffee Palace that he came to me and said he would rather act for Nationalists if he could get National pieces and we introduced him to Russell who gave him or rather gave us his ‘Deirdre’ to act. Have you forgotten how Russell and I urged you to let us have your ‘Kathleen’ how you said Lady Gregory thought you should not – and how at last to make things smooth I consented to act Kathleen. It was Inginide na hÉireann [sic] and Cumann na Gaedhal [sic] who inanced each of Fay’s irst attempts at National performances. On each occasion we not only gave him the dresses and scenery we had paid for, but also gave him more than the fair share of proits and even when there was a loss made up something for Fay, not for himself naturally but with the idea of helping in the formation of a National Theatre Co – Members of Cumann na nGaedhal [sic] personally gave money and collected money for the Company and all this because we wanted a NATIONAL Theatre Co to help us combat the inluence of the low English theatres and music halls.44

The Fays themselves later claimed that they had been written out of this episode of Irish theatre history by Yeats and Lady Gregory: George Russell agreed with them. The exact origins of the plays became important because of a subsequent split in the nationalist theatre alliance: poring over tiny details became irresistible as political and artistic positions hardened. But for the young men and women who irst put on the plays, this kind of bickering seemed to be a world away from their shabby 42 43

44

Samhain (ed. W. B. Yeats, Dublin) (October 1902), pp. 3–4. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, March 1902 and February 1902, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne–Yeats Letters, p. 152 and p. 147. Ibid, p. 176.

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theatre. Margaret Quinn claimed that ‘to present such plays at such a time was a great achievement, but everybody was so cooperative that it was a labour of love’.45 So used were they to co-operating on a multiorganisational level that it is unlikely that any of them believed that any one organisation was responsible for the venture. Exactly who belonged where in the theatrical-political world would become much clearer over the next few years, but in 1902 it is more likely that most would have agreed with the assessment Colum offered almost ifty years later: With the rehearsal of DEIRDRE in the Coffee Palace the National Theatre had its real beginning. Two groups coalesced, forming a nucleus: there were the professional people, Willie Fay, Frank Fay, young Dudley Digges, young P. J. Kelly, and there were the political ideologists – Mary Quinn, Mary Walker, and to them were added the poet AE and with him one or two other disciplines from the Hermetic society and myself as an apprentice dramatist.46

This was a generous assessment from a man who was shortly to become one of the ‘political ideologists’, and it did not relect accurately just how the main players split. But it does capture something of the moment, of the experience of being part of an innovative and successful new departure in Irish theatre. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh described the transient, improvised and thrilling period leading up to the irst performance, clearly revelling in the excitement of the age: rehearsals took place at the homes of sympathetic friends, sometimes at the home of AE in Rathgar or at the Coffee Palace if Fay was ‘lush’. The company’s poverty, combined with theatre’s generally dissolute reputation, ensured that normal social conventions were not always adhered to, providing for the women members at least a real sense of freedom from social expectations and restraint. Memoirs reveal women who mixed more freely with men than was usual in the period, and this relected the broader social mores found within the advanced nationalist world. Visitors came and went, offering advice, delivering props, material and equipment. St Teresa’s Hall had no dressing-rooms, actors dressed upstairs, moving through the auditorium before the audience arrived. The set itself was limsy and ‘wobbled dangerously’ whenever the cast, squashed into the wings, moved. On the opening night Maud Gonne customarily arrived late, causing a sensation as she swept through the auditorium in Cathleen’s ghostly robes. Fay called this unprofessional: the audience was spellbound, and the performance itself was a great success.47 45 46

47

BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. Padraic Colum, ‘Early Days of the Irish Theatre’ (continued), Dublin Magazine (January– March 1950), 18–25, at pp. 18–19. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, pp. 12–20.

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The bohemian atmosphere continued after the irst performances, the small company buoyed by the success of the plays and not at all sure where that success might lead them. Professionalism did not appeal to some of them, though the disintegration of the ILT and the growing calls for a new, permanent theatre suggested that something fresh and lasting would ind an audience. In the meantime, inances remained precarious: the Inghinidhe did not take the share of proits to which it was entitled, but money nevertheless remained elusive and company members continued to work during the day and rehearse in the evenings and at weekends. But the success of the plays had provided something of a spur to a number of literary and theatrical people who believed that the time had come for the permanent establishment of a ‘society whose object would be solely to develop drama in Ireland’.48 George Roberts, the Fays, Cousins, Russell and the actors considered this, and after much discussion a decision was taken to form the Irish National Theatre Society (INTS) with Yeats as president, Gonne, Hyde and Russell as vice-presidents, William Fay as stage-manager and Fred Ryan as secretary. A modest ‘theatre’ was soon acquired, in reality the ‘back shed of an egg and butter store’, cheap and, according to Joseph Holloway, ‘villainously cold and draughty’.49 Adding carpentry, cleaning and decoration to their busy work schedules, the company settled into its new home, the scene of the ‘irst Irish theatre’. There ‘politicians, artists, poets and dramatists’ soon attracted like-minded individuals including Sara Allgood. She joined Nic Shiubhlaigh, the Quinn sisters, Gonne and Mary (Molly) Allgood (who used the stage name Maire O’Neill), all members of the Inghinidhe. Other members, including Helen Laird, Ella Young and Susan Mitchell, were also involved in various aspects of the company’s work, their presence serving as evidence of the critical artistic and economic role the Inghinidhe played in the development of the Irish theatre movement of the early twentieth century. The key word here is ‘movement’, because the Inghinidhe actresses very much viewed the INTS as a part of the broader nationalist movement in which they operated. It was more of a means to an end than an end in itself: cracks within the company were the logical outcome of such dogged commitment to nationalist politics above all else among one section of its membership. Nic Shiubhlaigh maintained that most of the members entered the new theatre society ‘simply because it was part of the new national 48 49

IT, 13 July 1955. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 23, and Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (eds.), Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His Unpublished Journal, ‘Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer’ (Carbondale, Ill., 1967), p. 20.

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movement’;50 Gonne similarly believed that the theatre should have been ‘another instrument to carry on the work of combating English stage inluence’.51 But Yeats and his allies within the company plainly did not order their priorities in the same way. By September 1903, he was proclaiming that ‘though one welcomes every kind of vigorous life, I am, myself, most interested in “The Irish National Theatre Society”, which has no propaganda but that of good art’.52 The second half of 1902 had witnessed the deepening of tensions within the company, and a permanent split seemed ever more likely. The theatre company was ostensibly democratic, decisions about which plays would be performed being put to a vote of the entire troupe, cast and crew, but the rather egalitarian process of taking plays to a reading committee aided the eventual drift towards the centralisation and professionalisation of the company, a shift many members resented. Tensions within the group were compounded by the growing connection of sections of the company to Cumann na nGaedheal and its various satellites. This did not present a problem to the INTS so long as relations between the factions remained generally good. Cordial relations between Yeats and Grifith and the support of the United Irishman were established, the newspaper acting as kind of INTS house journal, but this could not and did not last, despite a successful provincial tour and an even more successful one to London. In January, Maud Gonne questioned the society’s alleged fear of performing plays for political reasons, and in the following month a serious dispute arose over Colum’s play, The Saxon Shillin’.53 The play had won a Cumann na nGaedheal prize and was, as Ben Levitas has argued, ‘the dramatic equivalent’ of the Inghinidhe anti-recruitment campaign.54 It was thus sure to appeal to the Inghinidhe and other members of Cumann na nGaedheal, but not to William Fay, who refused to put it on, allegedly on the grounds that it could not be staged effectively. Fay claimed that Maud Gonne had appeared at a rehearsal and warned him that Cumann na nGaedheal would be ‘vexed’ by his attempt to have Colum rewrite the play. Fay denied that he objected to staging the play because he ‘did not want to have the garrison deployed against the hopeful theatre company’,55 maintaining that ‘a Theatre is no more a Political Party when 50 51

52 53

54

55

Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 12. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, 25 September 1903, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne–Yeats Letters, p. 177. Samhain (September 1903), p. 4. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History, vol. III, The Abbey Theatre – The Years of Synge, 1905–1909 (Dublin, 1978), p. 49. Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1890–1916 (Oxford, 2002), p. 78. Colum, ‘Early Days’ (continued), p. 22.

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it’s a Temperance platform or can exist at all as a Preaching shop for one set of opinions. For pity’s sake, let Art at least be free.’56 He wanted the ending of the play changed at least, but this suggestion won him few supporters. The ‘huge row’ which ensued saw Gonne, Grifith and Maire Quinn ranged against Yeats and the Fays. Gonne insisted that Fay had been foolish to quarrel with Cumann na nGaedheal over the play, as the majority of his actors were members, and she threatened to resign as vicepresident of the company.57 Some order was restored by the intervention of George Russell, who warned Yeats that a rebellion within the company had occurred and drastic measures had been taken to diffuse it.58 Grifith and Gonne distanced themselves from the society, and mavericks including Maire Quinn and Dudley Digges posed additional problems by maintaining their right to perform at times with other companies. They went on to form the rival Cumann na nGaedheal Theatre Company, the INTS’s performance of Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen proving to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Yeats appeared to be less than alarmed by the departure of some of the politicals, calmly informing one correspondent that ‘Miss Quinn and Digges have revolted, and founded a company to play for Cumann na nGaedheal. I don’t think they will do us any harm … The Patriotic Societies were bound sooner or later to want a theatrical company of a directly propagandist nature.’59 Maud Gonne and other political purists saw it another way. As she told Yeats: ‘Of course the theatre is a great disappointment to me and to all the nationalists interested in it, and it is entirely Fay’s fault if he is considered anti-national or at least indifferent to national things.’60 Some of Gonne’s Inghinidhe colleagues, notably Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, remained loyal to the old company, supporting the play on artistic grounds and maintaining that ‘an unnecessary controversy’ had grown through misunderstanding the play’s content. Interestingly, too, she put some of the furore down to the misplaced belief that ‘in those days if an actress played an unpleasant part then it followed that she was an unpleasant person’.61 Her own association with nationalist politics certainly did not cease at this time: she went on to perform with a number of explicitly nationalist, indeed separatist, theatre companies, joined Cumann na mBan and was stationed in Jacob’s during the Rising. Relations between 56 57

58 59

60

61

W. Fay to W. B. Yeats, 1903, quoted in Hogan and Kilroy, Laying the Foundations, p. 51. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, January 1903, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne– Yeats Letters, p. 162. AE to Yeats, 1903, in Russell and Yeats, Letters, p. 42. W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, 2 October 1903, in John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (eds.), The Collected Letters of W. B.Yeats, vol. III, 1901–1904 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 436–7. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, 9 September 1903, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne–Yeats Letters, p. 174. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 44.

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the Inghinidhe and the National Theatre Society were strained, and this must have put some pressure on Nic Shiubhlaigh and the other women who remained loyal to the new society. In early 1904, for example, Mary Macken wrote a bad-tempered letter on behalf of the Inghinidhe to the secretary of the INTS, demanding the return of the Inghinidhe’s curtains. There had evidently been some disagreement over the ownership both of these curtains and the Deirdre costumes. Macken, clearly at the end of her patience, inally insisted that ‘when any branch of Cumann na nGaedheal requires the use of the Costumes in question you will be good enough to see that they get there at once when applied for’.62 Nic Shiubhlaigh inally left the company in early 1906, accompanied by almost all the other remaining ‘politicals’, including Padraic Colum, James Cousins, Helen Laird, Vera Esposito, Maire Garvey and Frank Walker. These members rejected what they described as the commercialisation which had become a feature of the company since Annie Horniman had become involved in the Abbey Theatre and moves were made to change the company’s status from co-operative to salaried.63 To accept a subsidy from an outside source would, according to Nic Shiubhlaigh, be contrary to the ideals on which the original company had been based, that is, its ‘independence as a national movement’.64 She also maintained that the company ‘was not going to be a National Theatre and never ha[d] been’.65 Ideological disagreement had strained relations, and personality clashes and arguments about money also played an important role, with Yeats in particular making a habit of infuriating and alienating company members. Synge himself claimed that Yeats’s maladroit handling of Nic Shiubhlaigh’s hesitation about remaining with the new company inally pushed her to resign, though she had been primed to stay shortly before walking out.66 There may have been other factors. Certainly Synge had his own rather eccentric theories, wondering in 1904, for example, whether a ‘neo-patriotic-Catholic clique’ was responsible for his play being rejected by some members of the company. He believed that while Colum found the play unsatisfactory because the saint was a Protestant, Helen Laird was being frozen out of the company because she was a Protestant.67 62

63 64 65

66

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Mary Macken to INTS secretary, 22 January 1904, George Roberts Papers, NLI, MS 21,946(xv). R. F. Foster, W. B.Yeats: A Life, vol. I, The Apprentice Mage (Oxford, 1997), pp. 338–9. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 72. Nic Shiubhlaigh, recollections of the Abbey Theatre, Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh Papers, NLI, MS 27,634. J. M. Synge to Lady Gregory, 5 January 1906, in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), The Collected Letters of John Middleton Synge (Oxford, 1983), vol. I, pp. 148–50. J. M. Synge to Lady Gregory, 11 September 1904, in Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors:William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge (Gerrards Cross, 1982), p. 64.

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Yeats appeared to believe that the Fays saw Laird as ‘a centre of gossip and the starting point for grievances’ within the company.68 There is no extant evidence to support these claims, particularly Synge’s, but it was the case that Laird was and continued to be involved in a number of cross-denominational groups including the IWFL and the Theatre of Ireland. She also married a Catholic. It was perhaps her close friendship with Russell and Susan Mitchell (with whom she shared a lat for some time), two fellow theosophists who also distanced themselves from the Abbey, which irritated Yeats. It is also likely that this deeply intelligent and creative member of the company who had, with Russell, been primarily responsible for the design of sets and costumes as well playing parts under the stage name Honor Lavelle, presented particular challenges for the men. Known for her wit and dogged commitment to a number of causes, she was probably dificult to manage. Whatever the Fays might have thought of her, it was she who was responsible some thirty years later for raising a memorial to Frank Fay.69 The Abbey’s only remaining Inghinidhe members were Sara Allgood and her sister, Maire, the latter perhaps unsurprisingly as she was Synge’s iancée by this time. Like Nic Shiubhlaigh, their role in the women’s organisation dwindled and they appeared to drift away from the Inghinidhe. Most of the dissidents had well-established connections with some of the Abbey’s rivals, in particular with societies associated with Cumann na nGaedheal and the Gaelic League, and they managed to maintain their participation in a number of theatrical enterprises. A core group established the Theatre of Ireland, patronised, according to Sidney Gifford, by nationalists who ‘always thought of it as part of Sinn Fein’. This was hardly surprising given the involvement of Grifithites including Gogarty, James Stephens, Gonne, Colum and Edward Martyn in the new society.70 This new venture ran for six years, and its uncompromising political position ensured that both the old and the new generation of Inghinidhe actresses had an ideologically acceptable organisation around which to coalesce, vital as newer converts included such unashamedly separatist actresses as Marie Perolz, Helena Molony and Constance Markievicz. These three political rebels would be at the forefront of the next phase of women’s political activism.

68

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70

W. B. Yeats to AE, 7 September 1905, in John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (eds.), The Collected Letters of W. B.Yeats, vol. IV, 1905–1917 (Oxford, 2005), p. 170. Dudley Digges to Helen Laird, 8 April 1931, Curran Papers, UCD Special Collections, CUR/L/117/1. Czira, Years Flew By, p. 37.

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4

Old nationalism

Just as the English Suffragists had to teach the Liberal Party and the Liberal Government the meaning of Liberalism, so will Irish Suffragists have to teach the Irish Party and their henchmen the essence of Nationalism. To those who unthinkingly accept Nationalism as a shibboleth, or to those whose ideas are limited to the transfer of Dublin Castle’s powers of patronage and corruption to the A.O.H., the combination of Nationalism with opposition to women’s enfranchisement may seem excusable; but to those who understand the meaning of Nationalism, such a combination must appear hideously unnatural. The principles of self-government and self-reliance which vitalise the nationalist movement are identical with the basic principles of the women’s suffrage movement. The spirit of Liberty is one and indivisible. When Davitt said, ‘I would not purchase the liberty of Ireland at the price of one vote cast against the liberty of the Republics of South Africa,’ and when Professor Oldham refused to speak for National freedom from a platform which had just been sullied by association with sex tyranny, they were true to that lofty idea of Nationality which is not within the ken of opportunist politicians.1

I The loyalty of nationalist Ireland in the early twentieth century was overwhelmingly invested in the United Irish League and the Irish Party. Although the allegiances of nationalist women cannot be measured in votes in the same way as men’s, there is no reason to suppose that theirs were markedly different. The history of advanced nationalist women is, however, much better known and understood than the history of constitutional nationalist women. Is this because separatists were more active, more mindful of their historical legacy, or did they simply happen to be among the constituency whose impressions were sought by oficial chroniclers? The answer is a combination of a number of factors, none more important than constitutional nationalism’s own failure to tolerate, 1

Letter from Francis Sheehy Skefington (hereafter FSS) to FJ, 3 March 1912.

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let alone to welcome, politically active women. In what is in some ways a striking parallel to the way in which it ignored some cultural organisations, not only did the Irish Parliamentary Party discourage interested women, it positively set out to alienate them. Irish women’s greatest numerical contribution to the constitutional nationalist cause was probably through their work in the ladies’ branches of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). This was a religious rather than a strictly political organisation, though it was at least informally aligned to the Irish Parliamentary Party. The AOH was one of the largest Catholic and nationalist organisations in Ireland, surpassing even the UIL in some parts of the country.2 Women were able to join a Ladies’ Auxiliary of the AOH from 1910. This hardly presented them with a dynamic political role but was as close as most constitutional nationalist women came to ‘formal’ support for the Irish Party. By 1912 about a thousand women members belonged to one of the six divisions which used the AOH’s central facilities in Dublin, and by 1914 there were apparently several hundred branches of the Ladies’ Auxiliary throughout Ireland.3 The Order published membership igures annually but these usually excluded women, whose expanding numbers were noted only in general terms.4 The fact that we know so little about what these women’s branches did is in itself revealing of the regard in which their activities were held, if not of the level of activity undertaken. The role of female Hibernians was strictly traditional in the sense that they appeared rarely to speak for themselves, were subservient to the male branches and were expected to devote themselves to their families irst and to Christian philanthropic activity second. They were seen to be an integral part of the ‘Hibernian family circle’, a unit in which the functions of individual members were heavily prescribed. This role was rooted in both the structure of the organisation itself and in the kind of Catholic worldview which it promoted. The role of women as defenders of the Catholic faith and morals and as voluntary social workers was heavily emphasised, although even in these roles lady Hibernians were restricted as ‘the best social work’ was being conducted by monks and nuns.5 Nonetheless, lay women did useful work by, for instance, visiting the poor, preventing infant mortality, raising committees (which were afiliated to the International Catholic Girls Protection Society) to ‘safeguard the spiritual and temporal interests of unprotected girls’, raising money for the Catholic Prison Gate Mission and becoming enthusiastic 2 3 4

Urquhart, Women in Ulster, p. 101. FJ, 13 April 1914, and Urquhart, Women in Ulster, p. 101. FJ, 19 August 1915. 5 Hibernian Journal (February 1917), p. 362.

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war workers from 1914.6 The one intriguing exception to this appeared to be in New York, where the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the AOH apparently supplied some of the ‘most valuable workers’ to the campaign to set up a branch of Cumann na mBan in 1916.7 American ladies’ auxiliaries had also assisted Maud Gonne when she visited the United States on a fundraising and anti-recruitment tour in 1900–1, further highlighting their difference from the Irish branches.8 American women had had longer to organise, as ladies’ auxiliaries had been recognised by the American AOH executive since 1894, though unoficial branches had existed before this time.9 Ladies’ Auxiliaries were strictly that: women were there to aid and supplement the men’s groups. A useful model was provided by the Hibernian Journal, which explained that ‘in the Hibernian organisation the word Auxiliary, which literally means “helpful”, “bringing aid or succour”, briely and concisely indicates the part which our Sister Hibernians are called to play’.10 This was analogous to the role played by nuns vis-àvis priests and was accomplished by upholding Catholic morals within women’s homes and extending these to the public realm within appropriate limits. In other words: As its motto suggests, the aims of the Ladies’ Auxiliary are mutual assistance, advice and sympathy between its own members, co-operation with the men Hibernians, as far as the Lady members’ qualiications and opportunities permit, especially in regard to the social life of the Order, and lastly charitable work of various kinds among the poor.11

The Order offered very little to politically active nationalist women, especially those who classed themselves as feminists, progressives or liberals. The Order’s reputation as deeply sectarian as well as prone to violence against opponents – including suffragists – would have done little to endear them. In addition, the AOH was unambiguously and aggressively Catholic: there was certainly no place for Protestant women, leaving the constituency of female Protestant constitutional nationalist utterly uncatered for. Opportunities for women in the Irish Parliamentary Party were not much better, as Irish women were completely excluded from its higher echelons and barely had a role, even at a branch level. The exact position 6

7 8 9

10

Irish Independent (hereafter II), 26 February 1917 and 28 February 1912; FJ, 14 December 1910; 13 November 1914; and 19 January 1915. BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report, p. 7. John O’Dea, History of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies’ Auxiliary, vol. III (Notre Dame, Ind., c. 1994), p. 1112. Hibernian Journal (August 1937), p. 65. 11 Ibid. (July 1915), p. 28.

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of women in the UIL remains unclear, as some precedent for Britishbased women to join local branches existed. It is possible that the earlier pioneering work of Lady Florence Dixie, a member of the British Home Rule Association,12 may have allowed this difference across the United Kingdom, but the precedent does not appear to have spread to Ireland, an interesting relection of Irish political mores and one which was to survive into the new century. The Irish National League had pledged to organise ladies’ branches in 1889, hoping that nationalist women would ‘ight the Primrose Leaguers on their own ground’.13 This idea appeared to make no headway, and little changed when the UIL became the Irish Party’s constituency organisation in the early twentieth century, at least in Ireland itself. Some ladies’ branches of the UIL were formed, but information on them is extremely scarce, suggesting that they were insigniicant, few in number or both. Diane Urquhart has identiied two active Belfast ladies’ branches; a County Westmeath ladies’ branch also met from at least 1910; and a Dundalk ladies’ branch was active from about the same time.14 The ladies’ branches that did exist were evidently so badly organised or impoverished that only two managed to pay their £3 annual subscription to the UIL over the entire 1905–18 period.15 By contrast, ladies’ branches of the UIL became active in England from at least 1906, and some branches appeared to accept male and female members. Northern English branches, especially in Blackburn, Preston and Bolton, led the way.16 Blackburn even hosted a junior branch, whose representatives in 1909 consisted of one girl and one boy. By 1907, there were at least thirteen ladies’ branches in England and Scotland, and women had begun to attend annual general meetings of the United Irish League of Great Britain (UILGB) as representatives of ladies’ and mixed branches.17 Given that British UIL branches enjoyed some autonomy and were advanced in terms of female membership, it is unsurprising that some female members, notably Patricia Hoey of the Irish Parliament branch, urged the British executive to establish a newspaper which would represent the views of the UILGB.18 This would not 12 14

15

16

17

13 Englishwoman’s Review, 17 (1886), p. 224. Nation, 5 October 1889. Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp 98–9; FJ, 9 January 1911 and 18 January 1913; and Hibernian Journal (August 1915), p. 46. By 1915, Belfast’s Henry Joy McCracken branch evidently had some ‘lady members’, suggesting a mixed membership in that branch at least: Irish News, 15 January 1915. These were a Belfast ladies’ branch in 1905–6 and a County Westmeath branch in 1909– 10: Minute Book of the Directory of the United Irish League, p. 147 and p. 372, NLI, MS 708. United Irish League of Great Britain, Annual Reports and Reports of Proceedings at Annual Conventions, 1906–1909 (no date). 18 Ibid. FJ, 31 May 1909.

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be the last time that Hoey would call on the Party to modify the way it communicated with its supporters. The League’s constitution insisted that membership should be open to all ‘without any distinction of class or creed’, but it made no mention of sex.19 With one notable exception, its Irish branches were nonetheless largely closed to women. But the existence of ladies’ branches must have made at least some impact in political circles, because Hanna Sheehy Skefington identiied them in 1909 as chiely existing ‘for social purposes, their main duty being apparently to present valuable pieces of lace, or Belleek ware, to the wives of leading politicians; they had no voice in the choice of delegates to Conventions or Executives, no powers in the management of the organisation’.20 In 1914 John Redmond told a group of women in Belfast that he had never before addressed an audience of ladies, an extraordinary admission which suggested once again that the Party, at the highest level at least, had done very little in the way of recruiting women to its ranks.21 It was probably the case, as Diane Urquhart has suggested, that in contrast with the Unionists, the IPP did not need to cultivate women’s support as it was relatively secure by 1910 in its Liberal alliance and its dominance of nationalist Ireland. But this does not explain why the Party had failed to foster the sorts of women’s organisations which had provided inancial support and much-needed voluntary labour to all the major British political parties by the late nineteenth century: neither the Primrose League nor the Women’s Liberal Federation refused women’s support in good times or in bad. It appears, moreover, that some women were willing to donate their time and energy to the Irish Party, but were refused on application. Some Irish Party MPs did not hesitate to call on women as voters in municipal elections, as unpaid party workers and as benefactors when it suited them, but they were the exception. In 1911, Richard Hazleton, a liberal on the question of women’s suffrage, urged a Dundalk crowd to strike a ‘direct blow at Healyism’ by keeping Healyite supporters out of the local urban council. The fact that women could vote at the upcoming election apparently gave him ‘peculiar satisfaction’, and he urged women from all over the country to be led by the example of the Dundalk ladies who had done good work in relation to the recent contest in North Louth.22 But it seems that nationalist women in other parts of the country did not have the opportunity to do so. Patricia Hoey was the most prominent nationalist woman who was formally connected 19

20 21

United Irish League, Constitution and Rules Adopted by the Irish National Convention, June, 1900 (Dublin, 1900). HSS, ‘Women in the National Movement’, SSP, NLI, MS 22,266. 22 Urquhart, Women in Ulster, p. 100. FJ, 9 and 10 January 1911.

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to the Irish Party. A journalist and member of the London-based Irish League for Women’s Suffrage, she also served as parliamentary secretary of the London United Irish League.23 Hoey spoke in late 1911 to the Young Ireland Branch (YIB) of the UIL about Home Rule and women’s suffrage,24 but severed her connection with the IPP over its stand on women’s suffrage the next year: within eight years she had become very active in Cumann na mBan. Determined female constitutional nationalists who sought an active role had one option, the Young Ireland Branch of the UIL, and that was only available to relatively young women, most of whom were students or university graduates living in Dublin. Established in 1905, and home to many UCD students and graduates, who were widely considered to be more dynamic and liberal than the Party leadership, the YIB had decreed that neither sex, class nor creed should disqualify potential members.25 This declaration relected the views of some of the earliest women members, particularly Hanna Sheehy Skefington, whose set of conditions for women’s membership of the YIB appears to have been largely incorporated into the organisation’s constitution. The most important of her stipulations was that a separate women’s branch would be unacceptable and that women must enjoy full equality within the organisation.26 These basic conditions were to inform all her subsequent feminist activity and were to bring her into conlict with fellow nationalists and feminists many times over the coming years. The best known of the women who did join the YIB were the Sheehy sisters, Hanna, Mary and Katherine, and Kathleen Shannon, all of them graduates of the Royal University. All these women served at times on the YIB committee, Kathleen Sheehy in the most senior role as vice-president in 1910–11. Despite its relatively liberal constituency, the involvement of women in the YIB was dificult for two reasons: the irst was that some of their fellow members were not as progressive as their female colleagues in their opinions about women’s involvement in politics or even about women’s suffrage; the second was that the YIB proved itself to be a thorn in the side of the Party on a number of occasions, rendering the entire enterprise, women’s membership included, suspect in the eyes of some Party stalwarts. The YIB itself urged the Party to adopt a ‘ighting policy’, and proceeded to lecture it on policy and procedure. The Irish Party was initially supportive of the new group, even allowing it to use UIL rooms in O’Connell Street for a time, before forcing the society to 23 24 25 26

Common Cause, 4:162 (16 May 1912), p. 94. Votes for Women, 5:191 (3 November 1911), p. 68. Rules of the Young Ireland Branch of the United Irish League (Dublin, 1905[?]), p. v. c. 1905, SSP, NLI, MS 41,183/9.

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ind alternative venues after it became too outspoken in its criticism of the Party. Francis Sheehy Skefington insisted that the YIB ‘desired not to destroy the Irish Party but to see that it realised its full possibilities’, but by the following year he was instructing the Party to get its ‘house in order’ and insisting that its personnel should be ‘radically changed’.27 Some members of the YIB were more outspoken, including, inevitably, Francis and Hanna Sheehy Skefington, whose own politics were becoming increasingly feminist and socialist. But others, including Francis Cruise O’Brien, were also becoming progressively more critical of the Party, not least because of its strong ties to the AOH, an organisation disliked by more liberal nationalists, and what the YIB saw as the Party’s continuing subservience to the Liberal Party. All these complaints were to be echoed by the Irish Women’s Franchise League, but such common grievances would not ultimately bind the movements as each organisation insisted on the absolute primacy of only one aim, Home Rule in the case of the YIB and women’s suffrage in the case of the IWFL. The two organisations would have a inal showdown in 1912, but before this time nationalist feminists continued to work within the Party, and they had good reason for doing so, at least as good a reason as their Irish and British counterparts who similarly worked within their particular party organisations, be it the Primrose League, the Irish Unionist Alliance or the Women’s Liberal Federation, while also campaigning for women’s suffrage. The Irish Party did not seem at irst to be as institutionally hostile to women’s suffrage as it later appeared to be, and nationalist women clearly believed that there existed scope for conversion to their cause within nationalist Ireland. Mary Sheehy Kettle argued in 1910 that at least threequarters of the Irish Party was sympathetic to the cause,28 and her husband claimed in the following year that there was ‘no substantial opposition’ in the Irish Party to women’s suffrage.29 In 1910, Kathleen Shannon, secretary of the IWFL, stated that her organisation was ‘not dissatisied’ with the attitude of the Irish members. They had, she believed, ‘approached the subject from a serious standpoint’, many had supported that year’s Conciliation Bill, and even John Redmond had set a good example by abstaining from the division when he could not support the Bill.30 She vowed that her organisation would not heckle individual Irish MPs: the IWFL did not expect them to agitate for women’s suffrage but they did expect that they would vote for a suffrage Bill when introduced by the government or a private member. The IWFL hoped that antis like John 27

28 29

FSS to ‘Dear Sir’, 14 February 1909, SSP, NLI, MS 22,258, and Draft YIB manifesto, 1910, SSP, NLI, MS 22,268. Votes for Women, 3:139 (4 November 1910), p. 67. IT, 18 October 1911. 30 FJ, 16 July 1910.

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Redmond would continue to abstain, and Shannon claimed that a number of MPs, including Redmond himself, John Dillon and T. P. O’Connor, had fallen in with their view.31 Even Margaret Cousins, IWFL co-founder and bitter critic of the Party, subsequently conceded that although her organisation had not been able to make women’s suffrage a party question, a majority of nationalist MPs came to support it.32 This was in fact debatable and dificult to quantify, as Irish MPs voted inconsistently on the issue, largely because of the alleged impact of women’s suffrage on Home Rule. William Redmond, for instance, claimed with real regret in 1912 that the majority of Irish MPs were not in favour, but his concurrent and apparently inconsistent claim that the Irish Parliament, when established, would enfranchise women, highlighted the distorting impact of Home Rule even on the views of very loyal supporters.33 John Redmond was to become the major stumbling block and would become public enemy number one as far as suffragists were concerned, both in Ireland and in the rest of the United Kingdom. Irish suffragists targeted all the major anti-suffrage MPs over the course of their long campaign, but as leader of the largest party, Redmond was singled out for particular attention. He appeared at irst to be relatively neutral on the issue, perhaps even unresolved, and more concerned with the strategic impact of such a Bill than opposed on principle. Crucially, too, in 1911 he gave an undertaking to the IWFL that his party, having ‘always been in favour of the separate treatment of political prisoners’, would ‘take up’ the question with regard to imprisoned suffragists.34 This kind of undertaking was of vital importance to the militant IWFL and provided yet another reason for the League to persevere in its attempts to bring the Irish Party on side. The IWFL was soon to learn, however, that neither personal support nor strong personal commitment to women’s suffrage was enough to ensure the support of even friendly individual MPs, let alone the Party as a whole. Francis Sheehy Skefington claimed that the IPP leader had remained deliberately shy of saying publicly that he opposed women’s suffrage in order to keep various nationalist factions on side.35 In 1909, Redmond told a deputation that his own personal views on suffrage were ‘somewhat vague’ and that: At present members of the Irish party voted as they individually thought it, but a resolution could be brought forward at the next meeting of the party to instruct 31 32 33 34

Ibid. James Cousins and Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (Madras, 1950), p. 169. Hansard (5 November 1912), vol. 43, col. 1096. IT, 18 January 1911. 35 Votes for Women, 5:94 (3 May 1912), p. 508.

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every member to vote for Woman Suffrage, and if this resolution were carried he and all the members would vote in accordance with it.36

Hanna Sheehy Skefington claimed many years later that Redmond had told her privately that he feared that women’s suffrage would produce a conservative vote and clerical domination, but he asked her not to publish his views as he too feared those forces.37 Whatever his personal views, by 1912 he declared himself implacably opposed on principle, inally dashing hopes at last that he could be personally converted to the cause. But although his own public opposition to women’s suffrage rendered the possibility of his party adopting it as policy unlikely, a number of individual Irish Party members, including his own brother, William Redmond, had an excellent parliamentary record on women’s suffrage. Philip Snowden claimed in 1912 that the Irish Party had ‘contributed a larger share of votes in favour of woman suffrage than any other party except the Labour Party’, and the IWFL’s own sums bear out the high level of pro-suffrage sentiment found within the IPP.38 In 1910, twentyeight of the 196 signatories to the parliamentary memorial which asked the prime minister for facilities for the suffrage Bill were Irish nationalists, including William Redmond, Joseph Nannetti, T. P. O’Connor, Hugh Law and Swift MacNeill.39 In an intriguing document, the IWFL classed all Irish MPs, unionist, nationalist, liberal and independent, under six categories of attitude towards women’s suffrage: reliable supporters, less reliable supporters, adult suffragists, neutrals, anti-suffragists and very decided opponents. John Redmond featured in the ‘anti’ category, while Carson appeared in the ‘very decided opponent’ category. Though interesting, these categorisations can be misleading, as some MPs changed their minds, while others voted unexpectedly at times, and Carson took the Unionists in a pro-suffrage direction well before the Irish Party did so. He did this for strategic reasons, but a Unionist lead in this area cannot have been what the IWFL was expecting when it added up its numbers. The YIB boasted two MPs from within its own ranks, Tom Kettle and Richard Hazleton, who were pro-suffrage, no doubt buoying up the women members. Kettle was an especially vocal supporter, addressing 36 37

38

39

Ibid., 3:94 (24 December 1909), p. 193. Hanna Sheehy Skefington, ‘Reminiscences of an Irish Suffragette’, in Andrée Sheehy Skefington and Rosemary Cullen Owens, Votes for Women: Irish Women’s Struggle for the Vote (Dublin, 1975), pp. 12–26, at p. 18. Lists of Irish MPs’ attitudes on the woman suffrage question, reprinted from the SSP, in Cliona Murphy, The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1989), pp. 221–4. See also Constance Rover, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–1914 (London, 1967), p. 155. FJ, 11 July 1910.

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the Commons and public meetings on the issue as well as publishing a pamphlet, Why Bully Women, in which he linked the women’s suffrage issue to wider questions of Home Rule and the democratisation of Ireland.40 His wife, Mary Sheehy Kettle, wore a ‘votes for women’ badge during their wedding celebrations, as did several guests; women’s suffrage was mentioned in several of the speeches, and the occasion itself was described by one observer as ‘full of suffrage atmosphere’.41 Kettle’s linking of nationalism with women’s enfranchisement was to become a common trope within suffrage propaganda. As Deborah Webb, sister of the veteran nationalist and suffragist Alfred Webb, explained in 1912, the ‘two analogous movements, like all those making for human freedom, ought, of course, to advance together’.42 Such Home Rule analogies are not dificult to ind: Patricia Hoey, for example, wondered in 1911 how it was that the Party could not possibly appear to ignore the rights the Protestants but could easily ignore the rights of women.43 A number of commentators, British and Irish, made the point that suffragists were ighting the government in the same way that Parnell and the Land League had. Christabel Pankhurst, for example, claimed to be indebted to Parnell for the idea of militant tactics, and Irish suffragettes took up this theme with great enthusiasm.44 The IWFL’s oficial policy was that as an organisation it must remain strictly independent of all political parties, and individual members were obliged to oppose MPs who were themselves hostile to women’s suffrage. This was based on a similar WSPU tactic, and it probably proved even more divisive in Ireland than it had in Britain. Given that virtually all Irish newspapers were allied with a political party, the IWFL strategy almost guaranteed that sympathetic press coverage in Ireland would be scarce, but it also put women loyal to the Nationalist or the Unionist Party in the awkward position of having to publicly rebuke the leaders of causes which were exceptionally important to them. Even Jennie Wyse Power, who, given her Sinn Féin afiliation, would probably never be forced into such a position, admitted that it was ‘an open secret’ that she did not agree that IWFL members should be compelled to oppose any politician who was not in favour of suffrage.45 The IWFL began by heckling John Redmond and other senior politicians, petitioning the Party as a whole and demanding audiences with various MPs. Members 40 41 43 44

45

T. M. Kettle, Why Bully Women? (Dublin, 1906), p. 7. Votes for Women, 2:80 (17 September 1909). 42 FJ, 10 April 1912. Votes for Women, 5:191 (3 November 1911), p. 68. FJ, 5 March 1910; and, for example, FSS, Votes for Women, 2:85 (29 October 1909), p. 75. IC, 1 June 1912.

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appeared to target nationalist politicians more than unionist MPs, but this was no doubt a relection of the strategic importance of each party and of the willingness of particular politicians to meet them. By 1911 John Redmond had received three delegations from the IWFL: Carson, on the other hand, had been heckled, but as he was ‘a very elusive person’, he had not yet agreed to receive a delegation.46 This kind of agitation was compatible with the nationalism of suffragists for as long as a large number of MPs were in favour and Redmond did not actively set out to destroy a suffrage Bill, as he was to do in 1912. In the meantime, feminists could try to inluence the Party from within, using the limited forums available to them. Margaret Connery, who served in a number of executive positions in the IWFL, delivered a paper on women’s suffrage and Home Rule to the Clontarf UIL, resulting in the branch passing a resolution for women’s suffrage which was sent to John Redmond, but other attempts to introduce feminism into the Party were less successful.47 Hanna Sheehy Skefington argued at a meeting of the YIB that if women had been admitted as delegates to the 1909 UIL Convention the meeting would have been more civilised.48 Her interjection was greeted with laughter, presumably just the kind of response which was increasingly testing her patience and the loyalty of the other feminists to the organisation. Cracks within the YIB had already begun to appear in ways which anticipated subsequent political alignments around women’s suffrage and Home Rule. In a letter allegedly refused publication by the Freeman’s Journal, Francis Sheehy Skefington claimed that the 1909 Convention had also witnessed Tom Kettle’s ‘irst breach of faith with the woman’s suffrage party’ as he had pledged to second a resolution in favour of women’s suffrage, but refused at the last minute at the behest of John Redmond.49 Redmond was never allowed to forget this, the Irish Citizen reminding its readers time and again not only of his own appalling record on suffrage but, more unforgivably, the pressure he allegedly brought to bear on the nationalist MPs who wished to support women’s suffrage.50 The individual MPs who bowed to his will were also chastised over the years, but none more so than Tom Kettle, no doubt because of the harsh way he dealt publicly with the IWFL in 1912 and his own failure to move the promised resolution at the 1912 Convention. But even he

46 48 49

50

IT, 18 January 1911. 47 Votes for Women, 5:193 (17 November 1911), p. 110. II, 20 February 1909. IC, 3 August 1912, and FSS, ‘Redmond the Fox’, Votes for Women, 5:217 (3 May 1912), p. 508. See, for example, IC, 3 April 1915 and 25 September 1915.

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was ultimately forgiven. The Irish Citizen announced ‘with much regret’ his death at the Somme in September 1916, emphasising his strong suffrage beliefs while putting his failure to introduce resolutions to the UIL Conventions in 1909 and 1912 down to ‘the personal inluence of Mr. Redmond’. Although Kettle’s failure to keep faith with his fellow countrymen and women was ‘bitterly and long resented by Irish suffragists’, this bitterness was now changed ‘entirely to pity’ as that same ‘personal inluence of Mr. Redmond’ had apparently led Kettle to abandon his university gown and don a soldier’s uniform instead.51 Kettle’s decision to join the British Army was of course much more complicated than this, and the Sheehy Skefingtons knew it as they were related to him by marriage, but by this time Francis Sheehy Skefington, who disliked Kettle, was dead and suffrage history was already being rewritten to relect the momentous changes that the war and the Rising had brought. For a brief time Kettle was exonerated: it would not last long. Pulling no punches and clearly utterly frustrated, Hanna Sheehy Skefington delivered a stinging attack on the Party’s anti-feminism in 1909, providing the most detailed exposition we have of the exasperation experienced by constitutional nationalist women in the twilight years of the Irish Party. This lecture was probably written at around the same time as the 1909 Convention took place. Entitled ‘Women and the National Movement’, the paper was originally read to a YIB meeting,52 before being published as a series of three articles in 1912. Describing the YIB as in reality the ‘Young Men’s Branch’ of the UIL, Sheehy Skefington explained how she and a number of female colleagues who had heard that nothing in the YIB’s constitution barred women from joining, attempted to sign up and were told by an ‘amazed oficial’ that they should form a ladies’ branch. They were inally formally enrolled, but even then faced opposition from some male members of this supposed bastion of advanced and liberal nationalism. She concluded that: Our Parliamentary section of Irish politics is, curiously, in this respect the most backward. Woman are welcomed in Sinn Fein, in the Gaelic League (and this is probably due to the renascence of older Irish traditions, wherein women shared as a matter of course every phase of the community’s life) they are inluential; and their aid is courted in whatever Unionist political life exists, – though here their inluence is less direct, and consequently less valuable, for an English tradition is followed. Why women have been so completely ignored in the later phase of Parliamentary Nationalism it is not possible to determine accurately. Personally I am inclined to attribute it partly to the absence of the vote (politicians have 51 52

Ibid., October 1916. Copy of letter from FSS to S. C. Harrison, 20 January 1909, SSP, NLI, MS 21,634(vii).

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but little time to waste on the voteless), and partly to the less tangible, but none the less baneful, inluence of certain party-leaders who temperamentally are wont to ignore women save as ornamental social factors. Whatever the true cause may be … the growing estrangement between Irishwomen and the Parliamentary Party is now acute, almost to alienation. Possibly the last to realise this will be the leaders themselves … There is no place for her in present-day Parliamentarianism.53

Sheehy Skefington acknowledged that the end of the Ladies’ Land League had spelled the end of any attempt to mobilise nationalist women and concluded that women were locking instead to Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League, which were ‘indifferent to or hostile to Parliamentarianism’. Hardly popular with the Irish Party in its own day, the Ladies’ Land League was nonetheless held up as a sort of totem by subsequent generations of nationalist Irish women. Young female nationalists and older parliamentarians learned very different lessons from the experiences of the Ladies’ Land League, and this may well help to explain some of the antipathy towards women’s involvement in nationalist politics, especially among the older Party members, who had long memories. Even allowing for personal views on women’s suffrage, the Irish Party’s refusal to accept women members – though it happily accepted their donations – appears abnormally unbending. In 1910, Francis Sheehy Skefington was enraged when he heard that the UIL was to exclude women from a forthcoming Mansion House meeting. As secretary of the YIB, he had ifty tickets, and he pledged to distribute them to women members of the branch ‘on exactly the same terms and conditions as to the male members’.54 There was no indication that women would protest or seek to disrupt the meeting: Redmond appeared to wish to keep women out on principle or perhaps because he feared some kind of feminist interruption. Redmond had little cause to be wary of the IWFL or any other Irish suffrage group in 1910. Since its foundation in late 1908, the IWFL had targeted all Irish politicians, unionist and nationalist, but they were more limited in their potential impact on their MPs than their counterparts in the WSPU because Ireland had many fewer genuinely contested elections. The Irish Party MPs probably received more attention from the IWFL because of personal connections through the YIB and family ties, but most importantly, the Irish Party seemed to hold the key to suffrage for Irish women, especially after the removal of the Lords’ veto. As Home Rule looked more and more likely, so too did the probability that women’s 53

54

HSS, ‘Women and the National Movement’ (typescript), 19 February 1909, SSP, NLI, MS 22,266. Copy of letter from FSS to John Redmond, 11 November 1910, SSP, NLI, MS 21,634(x).

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suffrage would be considered as part of the Bill or, at the very least, would be quickly introduced by an Irish Parliament, once established. Particular efforts were therefore made to keep the pressure on nationalist MPs, while maintaining their lobbying of all MPs through petitions, protests and meetings where possible. As Dublin lacked a national parliament, opportunities for picketing politicians were necessarily more limited than in London, and as the Dublin Corporation had declared in favour of women’s suffrage, the next most obvious focus for protest was unavailable to the IWFL. The organisation did, however, take every chance to target any prominent politicians who came to Dublin, including Birrell in late 1910, who agreed to receive a delegation, and, famously, the closely guarded Asquith in 1912.55 Campaigns were also conducted in regional centres, including Waterford and Belfast, but Dublin necessarily remained the focus of most suffrage activity, underlining the centrality of the national capital to women’s political activism. The combination of Liberal and Nationalist concern about the potential effect of women’s suffrage on election results, coupled with the antisuffrage views of both Asquith and John Redmond, cast real doubt on the prospect of the inclusion of women’s suffrage in any Home Rule Bill. The common objection that twinning Home Rule and women’s suffrage might compromise or at least detract attention and time away from the former made it still less likely. It was one thing to support a private member’s women’s suffrage Bill, but it was quite another to insist that women’s enfranchisement be included in any Home Rule Bill, especially when the introduction of successful Home Rule legislation became a matter of when and not if. The idea that pursuing women’s suffrage could somehow jeopardise or delay the Home Rule Bill gained currency, and the determination of Irish suffragists, especially the nationalists among them, to pursue their cause despite this earned them few friends, even within their own political circles. Priorities began to be tested and, to stalwart suffragists at least, to be found wanting. The denouement came in 1912, though some suffragists had lost patience with the Party before this time. Deborah Webb, for one, sent her usual Irish Party subscription instead to the IWFL in 1911 and urged other women to follow her lead.56 She would not be the last woman to lose faith with the Irish Party. II Over the course of 1912, many suffragists abandoned any remaining conidence they had had in the Irish Party, and became especially embittered 55 56

Votes for Women, 3:139 (4 November 1910), p. 67. Ibid., 3:154 (17 February 1911).

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over the about-face of once loyal friends of the women’s suffrage cause from within the Party. The IPP was found wanting after the second reading of the 1911 Conciliation Bill early that year. All Irish MPs had been extensively lobbied before the division on this private member’s Bill, and there was good reason to believe that a majority would vote for it. But only three voted for it on its second reading in 1912. There was no question that Irish MPs voted in this way in order to free up parliamentary time which they believed could be better used on passing the Home Rule Bill. Given the division of opinion on women’s suffrage within the Liberal Party, it was also believed that no risk should be taken to split the Liberal Party, or, worse, the Cabinet, on the eve of the parliamentary Home Rule debate. The Irish Citizen was unequivocal about the nationalist vote, insisting that ‘the Irish Party killed the Conciliation Bill’.57 Feminists were outraged by the fact that nationalist MPs voted against a Bill which some members had actually helped to frame the year before. They wondered why abstention had not been suficient and warned the Party that although its MPs’ votes had no doubt been ‘dictated by motives of political expediency’, it was a ‘blunder’ ‘likely to cost the Party the allegiance of many of its best friends’.58 Charles Oldham, a veteran suffragist and nationalist, denounced the Party’s vote, but the more common response from Irish nationalists, from within and outside the Party, was that the suffragette ‘window smashers’ had killed the Bill.59 Irish suffragettes increasingly took direct action by attempting to attend nationalist events at which they were unwelcome in an effort to drum up publicity and to have their views heard throughout 1912. There were of course a great many such public meetings held to discuss the Home Rule Bill, and feelings often ran very high at such gatherings. Feminists, even known nationalists, found that they were often refused entrance, or worse, forcefully evicted and brutally treated for what were perceived to be their attempts to ‘kill Home Rule’, despite numerous assurances that the Franchise League remained ‘neutral’ on the national question and that there was ‘no opposition whatever between Home Rule and Women’s Suffrage’.60 When two women attempted to attend a UIL meeting which was to be addressed by the pro-suffrage Joe Devlin, they were told by the steward at the door that only nationalists were admitted. When they replied that they were nationalists and that the event had been advertised in the newspapers as a public meeting, a group of men ‘began to thump them’, use ‘foul language’ and ‘bang them about’. Order was only restored when the police arrived.61 57 60 61

IC, 25 May 1912. 58 FJ, 30 March 1912. 59 Ibid., 3 April 1913. IC, 25 May 1912; and Common Cause, 3:156 (4 April 1912), p. 876. FJ, 4 and 6 April 1912.

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About twenty-three suffragettes marched through Dublin on Home Rule Sunday in late March. Attempts were made by nationalist stewards to bar women from the Home Rule platforms during this event, but ‘two women professors’ and ‘one woman member of the Dublin Corporation’ refused to be excluded.62 One of these professors was Mary Hayden, who congratulated Hanna Sheehy Skefington on her letter of protest against the exclusion of women from the Convention. Hayden described the UIL’s attitude as ‘disgusting’, but vowed to go anyway, as did Agnes O’Farrelly, no doubt the other obstinate professor.63 The female member of Dublin Corporation was Sarah Cecilia (‘Celia’) Harrison, who, like Hayden and Haslam, was a suffragist who opposed the IWFL’s militancy. These three women insisted on and gained admission on the grounds of their proven loyalty to the constitutional cause. Other women were not so lucky. The IWFL claimed that its contingent was met with great courtesy by the crowd, but that they were greeted with anything but by ‘that portion of the Irish Nationalist Party called Hibernians and Foresters’.64 This kind of brutality was becoming commonplace as suffragists were increasingly perceived to be fair game for thugs, most often by members of the Foresters or the AOH (the ‘Ancient Order of Hooligans’, according to Francis Sheehy Skefington).65 Many commentators agreed, but the Order itself denied the charges. Joe Devlin, a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, claimed that the accusations against the AOH were ‘absolute falsehoods’.66 Individual members agreed with Devlin, one, for instance, insisting that many Hibernians were themselves suffragists.67 Another furious correspondent claimed, however, that the thugs were neither ancient nor Hibernian.68 But worse was to come when the Party held its annual Convention in April 1912. Some kind of trouble was expected: the IWFL had ‘declared war’ on the Irish Party, and Hanna Sheehy Skefington had announced that as far as the IWFL was concerned, it was ‘done’ with the Party. The events of Home Rule Sunday, coupled with the increasing unwillingness of prominent nationalists to publicly associate themselves with the women’s suffrage movement, let alone to co-operate with its militant wing, ensured that the appearance of the IWFL at the Convention would be deeply unwelcome. The IWFL denied the claim that there existed no 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Votes for Women, 5:435 (12 April 1912), p. 440. Mary Hayden to HSS, no date, SSP, NLI, MS 41,177/24. FJ, 3 April 1912. HSS, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 16, and Sunday Independent, 4 August 1914. Joseph Devlin to HSS, 1 August 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 33,603(17). IC, 5 October 1912. Clara Smith to HSS, 19 April 1914, SSP, NLI, MS 41,180/3.

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precedent for the admission of a body other than the UIL to a nationalist Convention, arguing that a precedent had in fact been established when Douglas Hyde had been received by the Convention in the midst of the debate about compulsory Irish. Hanna Sheehy Skefington complained that the IWFL had never oficially been warned that its delegation would not be received at the Convention and also made the reasonable point that the IWFL could not guarantee that there would be no disorder on the day. Her claim that the IWFL’s last ‘peaceful and orderly’ demonstration only became disorderly after it was attacked by nationalist stewards who ‘deliberately provoked street disorder’ was undoubtedly true, but the IWFL was a militant society and not averse to robust tactics.69 The Franchise League was not the only suffrage organisation planning to attend the Convention; it would be joined by members of the London-based and non-militant Irish League for Women’s Suffrage, of which Patricia Hoey was president. Having turned up to the Convention as a UIL representative, her delegate’s card was torn from her hand. As a result, she resigned from the Irish Parliament branch of the UIL.70 In a private letter to Hanna Sheehy Skefington, she explained that: The Irish Party have in my opinion by their attitude towards Irishwomen committed what is worse than a crime, a blunder. As you know I have resigned my secretaryship of the Irish Parliament Branch as a protest – in spite of strong pressure brought to bear on me not to do so. I am still a convinced Nationalist and will continue to do Nationalist work but I cannot in honour any longer serve the Irish Party personally as they have deliberately betrayed the interests of one half of Ireland. It may interest you to know that the Irish Party are now boycotting Irish suffragists, they refuse to answer our letters, and have given out openly that ‘they are not coming out to talk to women in the House’. So far as I know Mr P. J. Brady M.P. is the one exception as regards courtesy, I mean[;] to the cause of Irish working women he is as great an enemy as the other members of the Party.71

About seventy women marched to the Convention, and almost all of them, even those connected oficially with the UIL like Patricia Hoey, were prevented from entering the Mansion House. Only two women were permitted to enter the building, and they did so at the personal invitation of the Mayor. Even opponents of women’s suffrage noted that the sight of the women trying to force themselves into the convention was ‘ugly’ and that the UIL’s ‘burly stewards’ lung two women who tried to rush the door to demand admittance down the steps. The nationalist 69 71

FJ, 23 April 1912. 70 IC, 8 June 1912. Patricia Hoey to HSS, 24 May 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 22,663(iv).

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suffragist Maud Lloyd described in graphic detail the treatment of the marching women: I continued my course, undeterred by the opposition of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians and the Foresters. I was closely followed by the rest of the suffrage ladies, and we managed to reach the Mansion House. There we were set upon by the oficial stewards. In any case, it is dificult to defend oneself against attack when one is boxed up in sandwich boards. These, however, did not shackle us long, for they were torn off our backs and rent in pieces. Several giants dressed up in sashes and badges struck members of our little band, others tried to pull off our hats. One lady was stabbed with a hatpin. I should also add that the language used by these oficial gentlemen was very objectionable, and some of their behaviour such that, in order to defend themselves, one or two of the ladies had to resort to force. When I remonstrated with the most active of our assailants, asking repeatedly why we had not as much right to be there, pointing out that we were going to say and do nothing, his only answer was: ‘Not to-day; Not to-day’.72

This proved to be the end of any hope of a constructive relationship between the Franchise League and the Irish Party. Sheehy Skefington personally sent her resignation to the YIB in April,73 citing the ‘recent treachery of the Irish Party regarding the Conciliation Bill’ and the ‘unprovoked assaults’ on her colleagues as reasons for her withdrawal. She severed her connection ‘with regret’, having dedicated a good deal of time and effort to the YIB in particular, but by 1912 she clearly felt that the YIB and the Irish Party were unreformable.74 III It would be dificult to argue that the IWFL’s decision to wait on the Convention earned it any support or sympathy whatsoever in nationalist circles. Although it is impossible to be precise about the level or otherwise of public support for women’s suffrage, it is evident that there was no widespread demand for it among the Irish public. It did not appear to be particularly unpopular either, but there was clear and widespread support for Home Rule and any perceived threat to it was not well received. The IWFL’s position on the relative importance of Home Rule and women’s suffrage was very much a minority view and condemnation of the women’s actions was universal in the nationalist press. This was hardly surprising, but what was perhaps less predictable was quite how much opposition the IWFL faced both from friends of the movement and even from within its own ranks. It was clearly the case that Tom Kettle’s opinion relected much more accurately the tenor of 72 74

FJ, 3 April 1912. 73 Votes for Women, 5:435 (12 April 1912), pp. 438–40. SSP, NLI, MS 41,201/7.

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nationalist Ireland than the IWFL’s. Celia Harrison, for instance, had had a word with John Redmond in early April, ‘quietly saying’ that she ‘hoped he would ind it possible to have the municipal franchise put into the Home Rule Bill’. Redmond ‘did not like it’, but she vowed that she would not ‘quarrel with him’ if he failed to add the amendment.75 Harrison had more reason than most to oppose the Irish Party’s position on women’s rights. Descended from a prominent northern nationalist family – her brother was the nationalist MP Henry Harrison and her great-uncle was the United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken – her own nationalist credentials were impeccable. But when contesting Dublin’s South City ward she stood as an independent, no doubt largely because the Irish Party did not welcome female support. She in fact described the local government register as ‘disgraceful’ owing to the number of bogus voters on it because unionists and nationalists ‘worked to get their opponents off and their friends on’.76 Among Harrison’s strongest supporters was Alderman Thomas Kelly, Sinn Féin leader in the Dublin Corporation to which Harrison was elected in 1912,77 but she herself refused to abandon the Irish Party. Harrison had already told the Sheehy Skefingtons that militancy was ‘disastrous to the cause of women’, and, having been asked to petition Irish MPs on the Conciliation Bill, she declared that ‘I am too ignorant of the exact position politically, to be of any use in canvassing our Nationalist members and of course I put Home Rule before everything else as they must.’78 Their disagreement over political priorities was evident in their interpretations of a suffrage gathering held on 17 April. Harrison attended the IWFL meeting in order to ‘explain to the members of the IWFL that she personally put Home Rule before Woman’s Suffrage, and to plead with them on behalf of the Irish Party’, but she was, according to Francis Sheehy Skefington, prevented from addressing the meeting by a ‘band of about 20 women who had received speciic instructions to prevent Councillor Harrison from speaking’. This band of women apparently shouted her down with cries of ‘No votes for women’, ‘We want Home Rule’ and ‘Cheers for John Redmond’.79 Harrison denied this account of the meeting, claiming that Sheehy Skefington was completely mistaken about the origin of the disturbance. She urged ‘all nationalist women who desire to do their duty by their country … to put aside all effort 75 76 77

78 79

S. C. Harrison to HSS, Easter Day 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 41,180/3. IT, 8 May 1914. Marie O’Neill, ‘Sarah Cecilia Harrison: Artist and City Councillor’, Dublin Historical Record, 42:2 (March 1989), p. 69. S. C. Harrison to HSS, 16 March 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 41,180/3. FJ, 18 April 1912.

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to obtain the suffrage until such a time as we have our own Parliament sitting in Dublin’.80 Sheehy Skefington in turn denied the truth of her version of events and maintained that his was correct.81 We cannot know whose interpretation was correct, but we do know that Harrison’s was hardly a lone voice. Agnes O’Farrelly summed up the opinion of most pro-suffrage Home Rulers when she argued in the Freeman’s Journal: The situation now is this: A measure of Home Rule is before the country today – measure for which our people have fought and suffered during long years. That measure, many hoped, would include parliamentary franchise for women. It does not, however, and with a Cabinet divided on the question, it looks as if it might be extremely dangerous to include a clause involving a principle on which the English Parliament is not agreed. What are Irishwomen who believe in Home Rule to do? To ask their fellow-countrymen to insert a franchise clause, and endanger the Bill, or to throw their inluence on the side of the Bill and trust to their own fellow-countrymen in the time to come – or at least stand aside and leave the Irish representatives free with regard to this knotty question? Which course does patriotism and common prudence demand?82

O’Farrelly rather naïvely claimed that she was ‘personally convinced’ that had it been possible, a women’s franchise clause would have been inserted in the Home Rule Bill and that had there been any chance that inserting such a clause could have damaged or delayed Home Rule, ‘it would have been nothing less than criminal’ for the Irish MPs to insist on it.83 Mary Hayden, another nationalist friend of the IWFL, did not agree with much of O’Farrelly’s letter, and ‘especially’ dissented from her generous assessment of the ‘recent conduct of the Irish Party’, but she warned the IWFL that its policy might prove to be counterproductive, given both the seeming inevitability of Home Rule and the social makeup of the Irish Party.84 Both O’Farrelly and Hayden made the compelling argument that Irish women should look to a native Irish assembly to introduce women’s suffrage, and they were not alone in this sentiment. Isabella Richardson, a supporter and former speaker at IWFL meetings, agreed and added that if the organisation maintained its militant and hectoring tactics, its ‘conduct will be another grief to those women who value the vote, but who prize much more highly the dignity of women and the chivalry of men’.85 She reinforced these views in a private letter to Hanna Sheehy Skefington, begging her friend to understand that she irmly believed that ‘the recent 80 82 84

Ibid., 19 April 1912. 81 Ibid., 20 April 1912. Agnes O’Farrelly, ibid., 22 April 1912. 83 Ibid. Mary Hayden, ibid., 23 April 1912. 85 Isabella Richardson, ibid., 22 April 1912.

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methods of the I.W.F.L. are ruining the Women’s cause in Ireland, and that therefore it is one’s duty to oppose them’.86 Richardson’s letter in the Freeman’s Journal had, she added, provoked ‘some congratulations from outsiders’ but this failed entirely to console her as she dreaded ‘the idea that Suffragettes might in any way regard me as a traitor’.87 The militant and the anti-Irish Party stand of the IWFL lost the organisation some members and almost certainly gained it none. Members of the Limerick branch of the League felt so strongly about the issue that they publicly distanced themselves from the parent body, refusing to send members to the Convention: they considered ‘such action unreasonable, ill-timed and likely to do harm to the cause of women’s suffrage in Ireland in present circumstances’.88 Hanna Sheehy Skefington’s own sisters parted company with her over the IWFL’s tactics. Kathleen Cruise O’Brien argued that: My attitude re I.W.F.L. policies remains the same since before National Convention, for I see no sense in a demonstration which will give the Nationalist party an excuse to say Suffragists are opposed to Home Rule and are out to destroy the H.R. Bill. It is absurd, of course, to think that the tactics of the league would destroy H.R. if the Liberals wanted to push H.R. thro’, but nevertheless, I stick to the policy of not getting the Party’s back up – and, more than that, of getting the Country’s mind prejudiced – the moment suffrage appears as hostile to nationalism, that moment the Country people go downright against what they were at irst apathetic about.89

Criticising suffrage tactics was extremely dificult for these women, but it was equally dificult for some suffragettes to publicly censure the Irish Party. As Patricia Hoey wrote to Hanna Sheehy Skefington: We Irish suffragists in London are determined to leave no stone unturned to secure a Government Amendment giving women the suffrage under the Home Rule Bill and we will most heartily co-operate with you in any steps you are taking for this purpose. There is a hard and even a bitter ight before us for many of us are ighting against our personal friends and life long associations – but with courage, determination and unity we can and we shall win. The Irish Parliamentary Party have betrayed us, let us remember that once they betrayed Parnell but now when they want to rouse a meeting to a frenzy of enthusiasm they just mention Parnell’s name. So comrades let us forward in unison. We are not only working for women’s suffrage but for the holy Cause of Ireland. The Irish Party are asking Home Rule for a section of Ireland – we are asking it for the whole of Ireland.90

86 87 89 90

Isabella Richardson to HSS, 24 April 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 22,663(ii). 88 Ibid. FJ, 23 April 1912. Kathleen Cruise O’Brien to FSS, 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 33,611(iii). P. Hoey to HSS, no date, SSP, NLI, MS 22,663(iv).

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Hanna Sheehy Skefington explained many years later that even many old Irish nationalist ‘rebels’ encouraged women to wait until Home Rule had been won before pressing their cause, and ‘curiously too’ these included many Sinn Feiners, Arthur Grifith among them. Her surprise about Sinn Féin opinions on suffrage must have been inluenced by her subsequent allegiance to the organisation, because during critical phases of the women’s suffrage, Sinn Féin’s stand mirrored the Irish Party’s. About the only public support the women received came from the socialist James Connolly, who admired ‘the insurgence of women’ and applauded suffrage tactics in the wake of the defeat of the Conciliation Bill as ‘the most hopeful and glorious sign of our day’. He wished the ‘slave women’ in the textile mills could show as much deiance.91 Some of his colleagues disagreed. Rosamond Jacob was shocked and ‘revolted’ by the way Constance Markievicz, for one, spoke about how the suffragettes were treated at the Convention, especially as some of the protesting women were her great friends.92 Hanna Sheehy Skefington claimed that the exclusion of women from the Home Rule Bill had drawn together militant and constitutionalist and nationalist and unionist and that the party allegiances, ‘so dear to our loyal women’, were ‘for once subordinated to sex principle’.93 On the basis of a huge meeting held that June at which men and women from all parties spoke, one must agree with her. The exceptionally high level of co-operation seen at the meeting relected the fact that while the vast majority of Irish feminists may have disagreed with the IWFL’s methods and priorities, they continued to afirm the core principle of votes for women, even within a Home Rule Bill. McKillen has argued that a ‘bitter and irreconcilable split’ developed between many suffragists and constitutional nationalists, but the situation was not as clear-cut at she suggested.94 The Irish Party MPs who had traditionally supported women’s suffrage continued to do so, and, as we have seen, most actively feminist nationalist women appeared to support their MPs’ decision to put Home Rule irst in 1912. Suffragists responded pragmatically, advocating both political principles in general, while disagreeing among themselves about methods and priorities. The June meeting represented a remarkable show of unity in the context of an ever-widening chasm between North and South, unionist and 91 92

93 94

Votes for Women, 5:215 (19 April 1912), p. 460. DRJ, 7 May, 1912, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(23). This observation should be seen in the context of Jacob’s growing antipathy towards Markievicz: Lane, Rosamond Jacob, pp. 65–6. IC, 8 June 1912. McKillen, ‘Irish Feminism and Nationalist Separatism’, p. 55.

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nationalist and militant and constitutionalist, and this did not come easily to some women. One columnist argued that ‘probably only Irishwomen could understand how great a sacriice of party sympathies was involved in this common demand from both Unionist and Nationalist women’.95 A colleague from within the IWFL urged Sheehy Skefington to ‘inluence and restrain’ the more headstrong members who were not to abuse the ‘“dear Party” at this meeting’.96 Mary Hayden obliged through the resolution she introduced to the meeting. She began with the assertion that the societies represented at the meeting called on the government to amend the Home Rule Bill by adopting the local government register, but she went on to express ‘no opinion on the general question of Home Rule’. It is dificult to see how this could have offended any of the Irish suffrage groups, as an absolutely determined effort was made to keep out militancy and the discussion of anything but the impact of the Home Rule Bill on women’s enfranchisement. Mrs Chambers of the Belfast Irish Women’s Suffrage Society went so far as to argue that unionist women must be enfranchised if they wished to save the Union, even if that meant being enfranchised through the Home Rule Bill.97 Particularly interesting was the attendance of Inghinidhe na hÉireann and of so many women who were then associated with Sinn Féin and who would soon lock to Cumann na mBan. The Inghinidhe had hitherto been loath to associate itself with a movement which ‘begged’ the imperial parliament for concessions, but it was an unambiguously feminist organisation, and individual members probably found it impossible to resist the opportunity to protest against their inferior political situation. It was, therefore, not the case that the Inghinidhe was ‘silent’ on the matter of the exclusion of women from the Home Rule Bill; rather, the views of the group as a whole and of individual members were not entirely consistent, and certainly changed according to circumstances.98 This was especially true for such members as Helena Molony, Markievicz and the Gifford sisters. The appearance of the Inghinidhe was also signiicant as it was one of the organisation’s very rare collective ventures in these years. It is highly likely that some of them could not refuse the opportunity to criticise the Irish Party by highlighting the inadequacies of the settlement it had achieved. Markievicz appeared on the platform at the event, and Molony and Gonne sent messages of support.99 Gonne had been invited to attend after some discussion about her suitability, but she could not make it because of ill-health. She sent her 95 96 97 99

Common Cause, 3:143 (4 January 1912), p. 678. K. Oldham to HSS, 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 22,663(i). IC, 8 June 1912. 98 Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 85. IC, 8 June 1912.

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best wishes and £1 to the IWFL, telling Hanna Sheehy Skefington that she was ‘not at all surprised’ to hear of Redmond’s attitude and that the Irish members had not kept up Irish tradition, which was ‘generous and just to women, giving them equal rights with men’. The Irish Party was, apparently, aping inferior English traditions. This, of course, was exactly what the IWFL had been accused of doing by its critics.100 IV The mass demonstration appeared to have had no impact at all on the Irish Party, but the pressure was kept up both in Ireland and in London. The Party’s position on women’s suffrage was to be tested once again in 1912, this time by Philip Snowden’s amendment to Clause 9 of the Home Rule Bill, which would include women in the electorate for the proposed Irish Parliament. The IPP, or at least its leadership, was convinced that Unionists were primed to use this amendment as a blocking tactic, as a way of stretching out the debate about the Home Rule Bill to the point where it might collapse or split the Liberal cabinet. The Party’s aim, therefore, was to get shot of the suffrage debate as quickly as possible and to return to the real business of passing the historic Bill. Most Irish nationalists supported this tactic as ‘very wise’ given that the Ulster Unionists were apparently determined to obstruct and waste time in the hope of ‘knocking the Government programme completely out of gear’.101 Quite how and precisely by whom this tactic was to be employed was never made clear, though some MPs pushed the nationalist Irish MPs very hard on this question.102 William Redmond argued in 1912 that the issue ought to be left to the Irish people to decide as a ‘strong division of opinion’ existed on it, and he maintained that the upcoming Franchise Bill would be the place to enjoy ‘a full and free vote upon the merits of the question’. This view was echoed by a number of Irish commentators, both in the Commons and in Ireland itself, and was the standard response to critics of nationalist tactics. A number of commentators pointed out that this was illogical given that the entire Bill dealt with an Irish issue and was nonetheless debated and settled in the British Commons. But Redmond offered the rather more interesting argument that ‘no parliament has been established where this matter has been settled by this House. It has been left to the people of the various self-governing districts.’103 This touched on the vital question of what kind of parliament the Home Rule Bill was going 100 102

Maud Gonne to HSS, 1912, SSP, NLI, MS 22,663(i). 101 II, 5 November 1912. Hansard (5 November 1912), vol. 43, col. 1097. 103 Ibid., col. 1081.

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to confer on Ireland. Redmond’s view emphasised the idea that the new Irish Parliament would effectively deliver dominion status to Ireland, which should, therefore, like Australia and Canada, be free to debate the question of women’s suffrage in its own sovereign parliament. This was a direct refutation of Snowden’s argument that given that the parliament established under the Bill would be a local legislature it should be elected on the same franchise as county or municipal government and that franchise included women, even in Ireland.104 The nationalist MPs were of course absolutely obliged to deny this line of reasoning no matter what their personal views on suffrage, as it necessarily downplayed both the level of autonomy of the new Irish Parliament and the scale of the Party’s achievement in winning it from the British Parliament. But other MPs, even anti-suffragists and unionists, made exactly the same point. As the unionist Ronald McNeill said, ‘those who hold that the Parliament we are setting up in Ireland is to be in any sense a subordinate parliament ought to be ready to confer this franchise on women for that Parliament’.105 This was no doubt precisely the kind of comparison the Irish Party wished to avoid and, moreover, could not afford to concede through their votes on the amendment. Ironically, their cause was supported by the Irish unionists in the Commons who were just as willing – for their own reasons – as their nationalist counterparts to emphasise the autonomy of the Irish Parliament. As Walter Long argued, did anybody really believe that a municipal parliament had power over customs duties and their own post ofices?106 The Bill opened the door to arguments about complex constitutional issues which were grist to the mill for opponents of Irish devolution. It was a determination to see off any more discussion than absolutely necessary on such questions which probably explained why the Party was so keen to drop the issue quickly. The Irish MPs maintained that they had an absolutely free vote on Snowden’s amendment, as they had always had on women’s suffrage Bills, but this was dificult to square with the fact that even convinced nationalist suffragist MPs voted so overwhelmingly against two parliamentary enfranchisement measures in 1912 after voting the opposite way for many years previously. They convinced no one of their argument, least of all their fellow MPs, who wondered why there were apparently ‘no party leads, even though there are going to be Party Whips, and though the Government is going to put its Whips at the door Member after Member among the supporters of the Government had informed the Committee that he is going to follow his own conscience on 104 105

Philip Snowden, Home Rule and Women’s Suffrage (no date), pp. 3–4. Hansard (5 November 1912), vol. 43, col. 1086. 106 Ibid., col. 1093.

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this for once’.107 The ‘only opposition’ within the Irish Party to women suffrage was, as far as the Liberal David Mason was concerned, that ‘they believe in some way or another that their attitude with regard to Women Suffrage will endanger Home Rule’.108 Irish members’ protestations about a free vote notwithstanding, the fact of the matter remained that when the vote was inally taken ‘the division was not on party lines except so far as the Irish Nationalists were concerned’.109 The women’s suffrage issue placed nationalist suffragist MPs in a very awkward situation, not least because they were forced to deny what was for many of them a very strongly held principle. Ramsay MacDonald understood this, expressing sympathy for Hugh Law, who, he claimed, was ‘in an extremely dificult position. He would like to vote one way and he cannot. He is going to vote the other way and he wants an excuse for it.’110 Law had appeared on suffrage platforms for many years, was considered a very strong supporter of the cause, and his own wife had marched with the Irish contingent in London in 1910.111 Nonetheless, he argued in Parliament that Snowden’s amendment should not be accepted, because Irish women had not themselves demanded parliamentary enfranchisement in large numbers, or at least not in similar numbers to women in the rest of the UK. His statements drew the greatest wrath from Irish suffragists, who described his speech as ‘amazing’ and immediately organised a campaign to prove the strength of the demand in Ireland.112 While Law and other Irish MPs attempted to ind even vaguely ingenuous excuses for their about-turns, the reality was, as Law himself admitted, ‘at the present moment I am convinced that among Irish women themselves there is no such demand as should justify us in imperilling Home Rule even in the very slightest degree in order to extend the franchise to them’.113 This infuriated Irish feminists, but although they did not and could not admit it, Law was on solid ground, and all but the most diehard of IWFL members almost certainly agreed with him. V The IWFL’s intransigent stance prompted at least some commentators to advocate the establishment of an explicitly nationalist suffrage society. The prospect of constitutional and advanced nationalist women working 107 110 111 113

Ibid., col. 1116. 108 Ibid., col. 1073. 109 II, 6 November 1912. Hansard (5 November 1912), vol. 43, col. 1117. 112 Votes for Women, 3:120 (24 June 1910), p. 642. IC, 9 November 1912. Hansard (5 November 1912), vol. 43, col. 1115.

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together in any such organisation remained deeply unlikely, however, not least because neither camp could depend on reliable backing from any of the established political parties. But while Ireland never had an explicitly and open nationalist suffrage society, it did come close in 1915 when the Irish Catholic Women’s Suffrage Association (ICWSA) was launched. Its founders, Mary Hayden and Mary Gwynn, were very wellknown nationalists who had both been involved in a number of suffrage groups before 1915. Both women continued to work with other associations even after the foundation of their own society, Gwynn continuing to serve on the committee of the IWSLGA, for example. The ICWSA was loosely attached to the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society, founded in England in 1911, though the Irish group was by no means a branch of the larger British society; records of its activities did appear in the Catholic Suffragist, but never in the ‘London and branches’ columns. The ICWSA was, like all Irish suffrage groups, apart from the Conservative and Unionist Suffrage Association, oficially non-party, but the fact of the involvement of women including Mrs Gwynn, Mrs Esmonde and Mrs O’Mara, all married to nationalist MPs, was telling. So too were their frequent comparisons of the women’s suffrage movement with Irish nationalism.114 Other members included Evelyn Gleeson, who had been deeply involved in the Dun Emer Industries and was particularly interested in fostering training and employment opportunities for young women and bringing working women into the suffrage movement.115 Catherine Mahon, former president of the National Teachers’ Organisation, was another active member, and Katharine Tynan was also involved. Two well-known and long-serving Poor Law Guardians, Miss M. Weldrick and Miss M. Murphy, fellow members with Jennie Wyse Power of the North Dublin Union, joined its committee in 1916. Other committee members included Mrs Johanna Brunicardi, philanthropist, journalist and wife of the editor of the Evening Herald. All were constitutional nationalists, and Weldrick held the honour of being one of the very few women nominated by her local UIL branch to stand as a candidate in the 1911 Poor Law elections.116 This was not a committee of lightweights; neither was it afraid to take on the anti-suffrage pronouncements of Catholic clerics, but actively attacking the Irish Party remained largely out of bounds. The timing of its foundation in 1915 was in some ways ‘rash’, even according to Gwynn herself, as Ireland was preoccupied with the First 114 115 116

See, for example, IC, 15 December 1915 and 15 August 1916. Catholic Suffragist, 1:3 (15 March 1915), p. 23. FJ, 2 May 1911 (by 1920 she was standing as a Municipal Reform Association candidate).

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World War and suffrage agitation had died down, but these circumstances in fact provided a promising context for the organisation’s growth. The founder members were motivated by the fact that an important section of Irish society, namely Catholic women, had not been properly brought into the suffrage movement, with the result that ‘so far, the Catholic women in Ireland have stood aloof from the movement, so that the existing Leagues are almost entirely led by Protestants. This, in a Catholic country, is enough to make people say that the majority of Irishwomen do not want the vote.’117 Gwynn and Hayden believed that their society was more likely to lourish in 1915 than earlier because by that year most nationalist women believed that there was ‘no political question in which we need fear to embarrass the Irish Party’.118 The Irish Citizen had earlier made a similar point, arguing that nationalist women had ‘no excuse whatever for hanging back’ after the Home Rule Act was placed on the statue book in 1914.119 But not all nationalists agreed that the time was now right, even in 1915. New Ireland published a letter by Gwynn about the new society, but its editor noted in a postscript that although he was ‘fully in support of trying to settle the question of women’s suffrage constitutionally’, he did not ‘think it or a number of other issues [could] be dealt with satisfactorily until after Home Rule’.120 Nevertheless, as the status of Home Rule from ‘if ’ to ‘when’ was well established by 1915, it seems that Gwynn and Hayden were conident that impending devolution, coupled with the momentous social changes which had been already been put in train by the war, constituted a hopeful context for the establishment of the ICWSA. There was a real sense that the social and political fabric of Irish life was on the verge of a major transformation, and women’s suffrage had to be part of that change.121 Irish women, they argued, must be ready to pursue their claims when the ‘necessity for the old way of doing things’ disappeared on the establishment of an Irish Parliament in College Green.122 As Mary Hayden argued at the society’s inaugural meeting, there was a great need to organise Catholic women who would ind themselves in very changed circumstances after the war.123 Esmonde agreed, insisting that while women’s position remained in 1915 ‘a more or less varying one of uncertain value and stability’, under Home Rule they would constitute a ‘strong political force’.124 It was in reality dificult to maintain such a position based on 117 119 121 122 123 124

118 Irish Catholic, 27 February 1915. IC, 27 February 1915. Ibid., 3 October 1914. 120 New Ireland, 2:49 (22 April 1916), p. 301. Catholic Suffragist, 1:11(15 November 1915), p. 95. Ibid., 1:9 (15 September 1915), p. 72. Ibid., 1:3 (15 March 1915), p. 23. E. Esmonde, ‘Women in the New Ireland’, New Ireland, 1:23 (16 October 1915), p. 356.

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the Irish Party’s suffrage record. It was conceivable that women’s suffrage would be carried by a free vote in a Home Rule parliament, but the uncertainty of that, coupled with the embarrassing truth that despite their proven record on constitutional nationalism, these women could not call on the Party’s support for their organisation, probably contributed both to this organisation being associated with Catholicism rather than constitutional nationalism and the more general failure of a nationalist suffrage association or even a vibrant constitutional nationalist women’s organisation to emerge in Ireland. This failure to cultivate female support in line with modern political practice was to cost the Party dearly when women inally came to matter in electoral terms in 1918.125 The Representation of the People Act would fundamentally transform the Irish electorate when the number of people eligible to vote would increase from around 700,000 to almost 2 million.126 As we shall see, in ignoring the potential of women as voters and voluntary workers, the Irish Party was at a real disadvantage as it lagged behind not only Sinn Féin and the Ulster Unionists, but every major political party in the United Kingdom, most of which had been keenly aware of the usefulness of women activists since the nineteenth century. Why the Irish Party, which through the UIL had developed a strong and active network of branches across the country, failed to provide any sort of serious basis for women’s organisation is a question worth asking, not only because of what it can tell us about women’s history in the period but also because of what it can suggest about the decline of the Irish Party itself.

125 126

See Chapter 11 for a full discussion of the impact of the new electorate in 1918. John Coakley, ‘The Election that Made the First Dáil’, in Brian Farrell (ed.), The Creation of the Dáil: A Volume of Essays from the Thomas Davis Lectures (Tallaght, 1994), pp. 31–46, at p. 35.

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In the year 1907 we decided to start a women’s journal. I think that we Irishwomen, in common with the women of the rest of the civilized world, felt that the time had come when the point of view of women on the many aspects of Social and National life, had to be expressed deinitely.1

I While constitutional nationalism continued to refuse to adapt to the reality of women’s growing involvement in politics of various kinds, advanced nationalist women continued to seek out and to ind new political opportunities, despite what were often dificult political and personal circumstances. The activities of the Inghinidhe changed after the 1903 royal visit, and the organisation appeared to go through a distinctly quiet phase until about 1907. This was partly because some members became increasingly involved in other aspects of ‘national life’, including the theatre and Sinn Féin, but also because Maire Quinn went to the USA and Maud Gonne spent longer and longer periods away from Ireland, depriving the organisation of two of its most dynamic members. Maud Gonne’s near-exit from public and Irish life was triggered by her unfortunate marriage in 1903 to John MacBride and, more destructively, by their separation in 1906. This high-proile split divided advanced nationalist opinion as friends and colleagues of both parties were obliged at times to choose between them, no easy task as they had moved in similar advanced nationalist circles. The Inghinidhe was forced to choose sides, and the organisation’s afiliation to Cumann na nGaedheal ensured that its loyalties would have to be made more public than some members may have wished. Maud Gonne herself maintained that she attempted to keep the Inghinidhe out of the iring line when her separation became public, knowing that her private life would have an impact on her comrades. As she told Yeats: 1

BMH WS 391: Helena Molony.

92

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I am distressed about Inghinide [sic]. This is not the sort of ight I want them to be in and yet what can I do? If I sent my resignation as president just now it would I think make their position more dificult, as many of them wouldn’t accept it, and even if they did it would weaken them and be used against them. I have written to some of them telling them not to ight at all on this matter and to refuse altogether to discuss it or to try and defend me. The verdict in the court will do that, but I know it is very hard for them.2

She told directly only Mary Macken, Ella Young and Maire Quinn of the Inghinidhe about her separation, but news spread fast, and the loyalty of her friends was eventually tested. This must have been especially dificult for Macken, who was by 1903 a secretary to Cumann na nGaedheal as well as a close friend of Gonne. Yet when a resolution calling on Gonne to resign was proposed at a meeting of the executive, Margaret Quinn, then Inghinidhe treasurer, and other loyal supporters opposed it.3 Denis McCullough remembered that the women’s organisation defended its president ‘iercely’ in the face of an IRB-organised plot to have MacBride elected to the vice-presidency of Cumann na nGaedheal.4 The discussion at the Annual Convention was ‘heated’, and pressure was brought to bear on members, but the Inghinidhe refused to back down, and inally it disafiliated from Cumann na nGaedheal rather than withdraw its support for its founder. Quinn acknowledged that the incident caused a ‘good deal of excitement’, and she herself (and presumably her sister, Maire) fell out with her brother, Mick, himself a former friend of Gonne and active member of the CLS.5 Helena Molony went further, claiming that the Gonne–MacBride separation had ‘horrible repercussions on Ireland’.6 Nevertheless, the women’s organisation remained loyal and pledged that there would be ‘no backbiting; it is not worthy of Irishwomen; we will talk about neither’.7 There was indeed little public comment on the matter among women, but behind the scenes various women were deeply involved in the separation. Maire Quinn, by 1905 settled in New York, provided a deposition on behalf of Gonne testifying to MacBride’s almost constant state of intoxication while in the States.8 On the other side, Jennie Wyse Power, another founder member of the Inghinidhe, testiied exactly the opposite, claiming that Gonne had always spoken ‘in the most affectionate terms’ about her husband, and declaring herself to be ‘astonished’ when she 2

3 5 6 8

Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, March 1905, in White MacBride and Jeffares, The Gonne– Yeats Letters, p. 196. BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. 4 BMH WS 916: Denis McCullough. BMH WS 273: Margaret Keogh. 7 KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. Ibid. Deposition of Mary Quinn, 12 July 1905, dated 15 June 1905, F. J. Allan Papers, NLI, MS 29,823.

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heard that Gonne was making accusations about him. She also claimed that she had not seen MacBride intoxicated or behaving in an ungentlemanly way since his return to Dublin.9 Jennie Wyse Power’s loyalties were split. She and her husband moved in Fenian circles and had known MacBride for many years: their restaurant in Henry Street was something of an advanced nationalist command centre, where MacBride, Grifith and Henry Dixon would meet every day for lunch.10 Dixon was another close friend of Gonne and the Inghinidhe who went on to provide an afidavit in support of MacBride.11 Gonne felt especially let down by some of her male friends, among whom she found ‘few who cared or troubled’, and though she did not attempt to involve the Inghinidhe in the debate, she found the women to be ‘in everything far more dependable than any of the men of the same class’.12 Both the Inghinidhe and the National Players re-elected her president of their organisations despite the fact that she had been attacked and her nationality called into question at the Cumann na nGaedheal Convention.13 Gonne lived mainly abroad from 1905, fearful that her husband’s family might attempt to take custody of her son if she returned with him to Ireland. In addition, her reputation within nationalist Ireland had taken a battering and she was not always as welcome as she had once been. She was, for instance, hissed by some of MacBride’s supporters when she attended an Abbey performance in 1906.14 Gonne’s involvement in the Inghinidhe after her separation was never as high proile as it had been in the irst three years of the organisation’s existence, but she kept a close watch over it from France and contributed to its activities in a much less lamboyant style than she once had. Her close friend Helena Molony became the most active member, replacing Maire Quinn as secretary in 1903 and spearheading a new era of activity. Under Molony’s stewardship the organisation moved in a more radical direction, emphasising separatism, socialism and feminism more explicitly than before. This radicalisation took place partly in response to the increasing inluence that Grifith’s Sinn Fein seemed to be having in advanced nationalist circles. A number of Inghinidhe stalwarts, including Wyse Power and Macken, had become deeply involved in Grifith’s National Council, even sitting on its executive, but although all Inghinidhe 9

10 11 12

13 14

Afidavit of Jennie Wyse Power, 18 November 1905, F. J. Allan Papers, NLI, MS 29, 826. BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power. Afidavit of Henry Dixon, F. J. Allan Papers, NLI, MS 29,826. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, April 1905, in White MacBride and Jeffares, The Gonne– Yeats Letters, p. 200. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, November 1905, ibid., pp. 216–17. Foster, Yeats, p. 353.

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members moved in Sinn Féin circles, their political sympathies placed them irmly on the radical wing of the movement, where they mixed with Bulmer Hobson and his fellow separatists who initiated the formation of the Sinn Féin League. Molony argued that Sinn Féin’s ‘social values’ did not appeal to the Inghinidhe, who viewed Grifith’s vision of ‘a progressive and enlightened aristocracy, a prosperous middle-class, and a happy and contented working-class’, as ‘dull and a little bit vulgar’: Arthur Grifith had founded Sinn Féin, based on the entirely new idea of achieving freedom by passive resistance – a policy of extreme non-cooperation, and obstruction of foreign governments. It gradually captured the imagination of the country, and certainly overshadowed the old Physical Force party, as Sinn Féin was deinitely and explicitly against physical force. Thousands of young Irishmen profoundly disagreed with this policy, or rather with the repudiation of any idea of physical force. Of course Inghínídhe na hÉireann emphatically disagreed. While we encouraged and carried out the Sinn Féin policy as far as supporting everything Irish – Language, Games, Manufactures, etc., – and sabotaging and obstructing British Government whenever opportunity offered, we could not see any virtue in joining a mere Repeal Movement, for the original object of Sinn Féin was to restore the Irish Parliament of 1782. We considered that the ideals of Tone, Davis, Mitchell and Fintan Lalor were being pushed into the background. We thought that Sinn Fein was a movement to attract the ‘Moderate’ Nationalists, and the Anglicised or more peace-loving section of our people.15

Sidney Gifford agreed, arguing that Grifith satisied neither the parliamentarians nor the ‘small but live body of extremists’ to which the Inghinidhe belonged.16 To her mind, Grifith was a skilled factionalist, but a Home Ruler nonetheless, whose primary aim appeared to be to condemn Redmond and his Party ‘inch by inch with petty criticism of their statements’.17 Her organisation, by contrast, was unequivocally committed to republicanism and direct action. The Inghinidhe and its allies were careful not to argue with Grifith, recognising that he had made a ‘unique and paradoxical achievement’ by ‘compelling tens of thousands of people, who disagreed with his object, to carry out his policy with the greatest enthusiasm’. This achievement nevertheless made it ‘imperative’ that the radical wing establish a newspaper to question what they believed to be Grifith’s socially and politically conservative views.18 As she subsequently made clear, one of the main reasons Molony worked so hard in founding Bean na hÉireann was to counter Grifith’s moderate nationalism.19 A social radical herself, Molony felt compelled to take an ‘active part’ in the Inghinidhe once she was ‘inside’, and she identiied the establishment 15 17

16 BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,871(6). 18 19 Ibid. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Ibid.

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of Bean na hÉireann as an ideal opportunity to propagate her views.20 She aimed to combine feminism and separatism in one publication, and she called on fellow feminists, even those who were not as avowedly separatist as she, to contribute to her project. A conference was duly organised at which the possibility of ‘starting a nationalist Woman’s Journal, devoted to women’s interests’ was discussed. This was held under the aegis of the Inghinidhe, which lamented the fact that Irish women did not, on the whole, take enough interest in social and national questions.21 Ella Young, Helena Molony, Constance Markievicz and Sylvia Dryhurst were among the leading proponents of this venture, arguing that a woman’s journal was the most practical way of encouraging the participation of women in national life.22 Bulmer Hobson collaborated with Molony in devising a inancial strategy which provided just enough money to enable the paper to pay its way, and to appear, though not always regularly – publication ceased for a time because ‘affairs got a little out of hand’ – for almost three years. Molony and other members begged and borrowed from friends, urging supporters to contribute just one shilling a month to their journalistic endeavour.23 Maire O’Brolchain was an early fundraiser who was amazed by the ‘astonishing number of small P.O.s’ which were received from around the country, conirmation surely that there existed a small but vibrant market for an unambiguously separatist newspaper in Ireland.24 The publication nevertheless always operated on a shoe-string, and its production was precarious at best: Molony herself was plunged into the editorship of the newspaper ‘reluctantly’, after the irst editor, Sylvia Dryhurst, returned to England after editing just one issue. Bean na hÉireann was founded both to serve as an unambiguously separatist organ and to raise the ‘present position of women in the social and political life of the country’.25 Uniquely, then, its roots lay in the British feminist newspapers which were available in Ireland including Votes for Women, as well as in Shan Van Vocht and Gonne’s L’Irlande Libre as much as they did in United Irishman and Hobson’s Republic. Matthew Kelly has argued that Irish Freedom was established in 1910 to offer an explicitly republican alternative to Grifithite political ideas, but it is worth pointing out that Bean na hÉireann did this irst.26 Moreover, it served as the sole forum for separatist and feminist commentary until the appearance 20 21 22 24 26

R. M. Fox, ‘Helena Molony’, in Rebel Irishwomen (Dublin, 1935), p. 121. Helena Molony to HSS, 24 August 1908, SSP, NLI, MS 33,603 (10). Sinn Féin, 5 September 1908. 23 Bean na hÉireann, 18 (1910). 25 BMH WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain. Bean na hÉireann, 1:1 (January 1903), p. 1. Matthew Kelly, ‘The End of Parnellism and the Ideological Dilemmas of Sinn Féin’, in D. G. Boyce and A. O’Day (eds.), Ireland in Transition, 1867–1921 (London and New York, 2004), pp. 142–58, at p. 157.

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of Irish Freedom and Irish Citizen in 1912. By then, as Molony argued, ‘the need for our paper was not so urgent and the strain of getting it out was too much in the midst of other activities’, and Bean na hÉireann ceased publication.27 But while it was in circulation, its militant editorial line and dedication to publishing original literature of various kinds attracted a mixed and really rather prestigious collection of contributors, none of whom were paid. Its authors included George Russell, Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh, James Stephens, Maeve Cavanagh and Susan Mitchell, as well as regular columns by Inghinidhe members who contributed under noms de plume: Constance Markievicz wrote gardening columns as ‘Armid’ or ‘Macha’; Molony contributed editorial comments and labour notes as ‘Emer’ or ‘A Worker’; Maud Gonne was published as ‘Maidbh’, and ‘Dectora’ was in reality Madeleine ffrench-Mullen. Some of these women had been associated with the Inghinidhe from its earliest days, but others were drawn into the organisation through Molony and Bean na hÉireann. Dryhurst brought the Gifford sisters into the Inghinidhe while she was herself involved in the paper’s production, thus introducing some of its most active members in Muriel, Sidney and Grace Gifford. The Giffords’ irst exposure to the Inghinidhe took place on the same evening that Markievicz presented herself to the group. Markievicz caused a stir that evening as she arrived in an elaborate court gown, directly from an event at Dublin Castle, creating quite a spectacle in the committee room, where a group of women sat ‘earnestly discussing the plans for launching a paper’. They were, by contrast to Markievicz, plainly dressed in ‘costumes of Donegal tweed in shades of dingy browns or greys, which were the chief or only colours in which it was manufactured in those days’.28 Markievicz received a ‘very cool reception that evening – almost cutting’. But in the Inghinidhe she found the kind of revolutionary movement she had been seeking for some time. Like the Gifford sisters, Markievicz (described memorably by George Russell as ‘the Gore-Booth girl who married the Polish Count with the unspellable name’29) had arrived at the Inghinidhe via a number of artistic and political groups, and she too brought some theatrical and bohemian lavour to the movement. The Gifford sisters had themselves hardly followed a conventional path to radical activity, having been brought up as Anglicans in a well-to-do unionist family, their mother a Protestant, their father a Catholic. The sisters mixed in every kind of political and cultural group they could ind, alarming their father, who, if one of his 27 29

28 BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Czira, Years Flew By, p. 49. AE to Sarah Purser, 5 March 1902, in Russell and Yeats, Some Passages, p. 39.

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daughters happened to be home of an evening, would ask her sarcastically ‘What’s the matter? I hope you are not ill.’30 The sisters apparently told their mother they were going to ‘mission meetings’ when they were in reality going to political events, and in this subterfuge they scandalised even their fellow activists, one of whom disapproved of the way they kept ‘open house to their contraband friends when their parents are away’.31 Molony clearly played a formative role in the political education of Markievicz and other women who would become key players in republican Ireland. Kathleen Lynn, another Protestant raised in a unionist family, met Molony through Markievicz, a distant cousin. Markievicz had asked Lynn, a medical doctor, to tend to Molony when she was ill. Having recovered, Molony stayed with Lynn at her Dublin home in Belgrave Road, and whilst there the women enjoyed long talks during which Lynn was ‘converted’ to the national movement.32 Though Markievicz subsequently claimed to have been responsible for ‘having introduced her to the real Ireland’, Lynn herself gave more credit to Molony and presented her conversion as an almost logical extension of the democratic views which had taken her to into the women’s suffrage movement and into philanthropic activity of various kinds.33 Lynn belonged to both the IWSLGA and the WSPU, but her sympathies became increasingly republican and socialist under Molony’s inluence. Markievicz, too, became increasingly interested in socialism, and this was translated into direct action by the Inghinidhe. Bean na hÉireann also showed a lighter side of the Inghinidhe, as debates about fashion, for example, were often conducted in a jovial manner. Sidney Gifford agreed to read a paper at one of the monthly Inghinidhe meetings, but only on the condition that she could choose her own subject: ‘The Need of More Frivolity in the Irish-Ireland Movement’. Marie Perolz was delighted with the idea and the lecture was duly published in Bean na hÉireann.34 Similar sentiments were expressed by ‘Crede’, who, in a letter to the paper, denied that Sinn Féin women were required to be ‘old and staid, taking one’s recreation solely in Industrial Exhibitions and Lectures’. She disputed the idea that fashions were conined only to Britain, and argued that a true patriot could choose to ‘follow the prevailing fashion clothed in Irish materials’.35 Fashion columns and recipes appeared regularly in the paper, and while they were always framed within 30 32 33

34

31 BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira. DRJ, 11 April 1911, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(21). BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. Medb Ruane, ‘Kathleen Lynn’, in Cullen and Luddy, Female Activists, pp. 61–88, at p. 69. See also Constance Markievicz, to Eva Gore-Booth, 9 June 1917, in Amanda Sebestyen (ed.), The Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz (London, 1986), p. 174. 35 BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira. Bean na hÉireann, 1:3 (January 1909), p. 3.

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an Irish-Ireland context, they were invariably delivered in a jocular manner. More importantly, these columns never assumed that housework, children and fashion were women’s main concerns, hardly surprising when one considers that Markievicz, Molony and ffrench-Mullen, none of whom was especially concerned with any of these, tended to write them. Molony later remembered that the paper was a mixture of ‘guns and chiffon’, ‘a funny hotch-potch of blood and thunder, high thinking, and home-made bread’.36 It was eclectic but it remained a irm advocate of the rather modern notion that the ‘sphere of women’ was not ‘bounded by frying pans and fashion plates’.37 Neither were members necessarily ‘bounded’ by confessional considerations, though religious faith and conventions did inluence their political and personal lives. Oonagh Walsh has argued that the Bean na hÉireann was strikingly free of confessional rhetoric and focused overwhelmingly on historical moments of particular relevance to Irish Protestants while largely omitting discussion of what might be termed ‘speciically Catholic moments of historical trauma such as the famine’.38 Its articles and editorials made connections very infrequently between the religious and the political outlook of the majority of Irish people. This may have been, as Walsh argues, a deliberate tactic which protected the Protestant Inghinidhe members from being accused of hijacking a cause in which their co-religionists had traditionally been on the ‘wrong side’. Certainly, given that the bulk of the journal’s contributors were themselves Protestants, it would have been dificult for them to embrace a purely Catholic nationalism even if they had subscribed to such a notion. But their rhetoric was also free of religious overtones because these women espoused the old Fenian virtue of secular republicanism. This helps to explain the focus, often via the pen of Molony, a Catholic herself, on ‘identiiably Protestant historical moments’ such as the 1798 Rebellion. Bean na hÉireann remained a separatist and republican journal. This did not mean that individual members were uniformly unreligious, but it did mean that religion was left out of politics as far as possible. The organisation noted that it had been founded ‘after 12 mass’ on Easter Sunday,39 probably relecting the confessional allegiance of the majority of early members, but by around 1910 the most prominent members, especially the regular contributors to Bean na hÉireann, were mostly Protestant. The personal religious beliefs of these women were far from orthodox, and only Kathleen Lynn could be described as a devoted 36 38

BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Walsh, Anglican Women, p. 44.

Bean na hÉireann, 18 (1910). Bean na hÉireann, 20 (1910), p. 3.

37 39

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and practising Anglican. Interestingly, her close friend and life-time companion Madeleine ffrench-Mullen was one of the only truly devout Catholics in the organisation. The ability of these women to cohabit and work together in various social and political campaigns was clearly not undermined by their genuine confessional allegiances. The religious beliefs of their fellow members were much less orthodox than most. Molony, for example, described herself as ‘not a very good Catholic’. Having been told that ffrench-Mullen went to early mass on each weekday and refused to travel on the Wednesday before Easter, she exclaimed that she ‘didn’t know she was as bad as that’. Markievicz was described as a ‘lax Episcopalian’ and a good deal of private anti-clerical comment was common.40 Devout Catholicism was, however, to become much more of a feature in Cumann na mBan in later years, and non-Catholicism came increasingly to be seen as somewhat dubious, particularly in the wake of the conversions of Markievicz and Casement. Rosamond Jacob, an atheist who was nonetheless probably more anti-Catholic than she was anti-religious in the round, complained: ‘I do dislike to have things look as if no one could be a Sinn Féiner without being a Catholic.’41 Situating Irish women in what the Inghinidhe considered to be their rightful place in Irish history became one of the most important ways in which the organisation attempted to redeine women’s roles in modern Ireland. An interest in Irish history had informed the organisation from its earliest days: papers on notable Irish women were frequently read and discussed at Inghinidhe meetings, the names of Irish heroines adopted by members and the role of Irish women in nationalist history especially emphasised. This allowed for the scoring of easy propaganda points, as women’s inferior social and political position in modern Ireland could, like so many other things, be blamed on English rule: adding 700 years of female oppression to the broader nationalist catechism was relatively simple and effective. Though not above making such claims, the Inghinidhe was nonetheless the irst Irish organisation to take an explicit interest in constructing a kind of female nationalist genealogy, and in so doing it set a precedent for subsequent women’s societies, especially militant ones which would similarly look to Ireland’s past in order to justify contemporary claims of equality. Inghinidhe members tried harder than most amateur propagandist historians to ill in the gaps as far as women were concerned, and they were in an especially fortuitous situation when it came to claiming the legacy of the Ladies’ Land League, widely seen by the Inghinidhe as 40 41

DRJ, 21 May 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(21). Rosamond Jacob to HSS, no date, SSP, NLI, MS 22,689.

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its direct forebear. When the Ladies’ Land League was disbanded, two members, Mrs Bourke and Mrs O’Toole, suggested that leagues should be established all over the country which would encourage the circulation of national literature and teach ‘the rising generation’ about their country’s history.42 The Inghinidhe appeared to have stepped in, albeit almost twenty years later, to fulil their mission. Anna Parnell was in particular admired and acknowledged as ‘the pioneer of the organised advanced women of Ireland’.43 The Inghinidhe boasted in Jennie Wyse Power an authentic member of the Ladies’ Land League, and it also appeared that Anna Parnell shared the Inghinidhe’s politics. She had, for instance, pledged public support for the National Council’s campaign against an oficial welcome for Edward VII in 1903,44 and she deigned to make a rare public appearance at an Inghinidhe meeting, where she read a paper on the Ladies’ Land League before depositing the manuscript with the organisation.45 Molony, who was ‘interested in any woman with historical relations’, had heard that Anna Parnell was living just outside Dublin, and had invited her to speak to the society. Parnell was apparently interested in the work of the Inghinidhe and Molony ‘paid many visits to her at her rooms in Bray’.46 Though Molony found the elderly Parnell ‘almost repellent’ in her steeliness, she nonetheless attracted a large crowd to her talk and even managed to ‘loor’ Francis Sheehy Skefington, who was shocked by her open condemnation of the Irish Party and the Kilmainham Treaty.47 Parnell’s variety of uncompromising politics appealed to Molony in particular, and Parnell in turn evidently believed that Molony was the right person to publish her manuscript. Molony explained that publication could take years, and that it would be easier to bring out sections rather than the entire work at once.48 Parnell, for whom having the manuscript published became something of an obsession in the years before her death by drowning in 1911, insisted that only a full publication was acceptable.49 Though she lived in near-poverty and claimed that the time she could devote to correspondence regarding the manuscript was ‘strictly limited’ as she had ‘no money to pay for lodgings except for a very short time’, she nonetheless persuaded Molony to take on the task, presumably on the grounds of her proven record as an editor and 42 43

44 46 48 49

Englishwoman’s Review, 112 (15 August 1882), p. 377. Jennie Wyse Power, text of lecture on ‘The Ladies’ Land League’, BMH, Captured Documents 193. United Irishman, 6 June 1903. 45 BMH WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain. 47 BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Ibid. Anna Parnell to Helena Molony, 7 July 1910, NLI, MS 12,144. Jane McL. Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters (Basingstoke, 1991), p. 247.

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an activist of the ‘right sort’.50 Molony found, however, that no publisher would take it, and, despite the attempts of Parnell’s sister,Theodora Paget, to fulil her sister’s wish after her death, a publisher would not be found for many decades.51 The manuscript subsequently went missing during raids on Kathleen Lynn’s house, where Molony had stored it, but having been published in instalments by William O’Brien, it was not entirely lost, and the original was eventually found during a house clearance in 1959.52 Molony tried once more to have the work published in the 1960s, but was again unsuccessful. She was deeply saddened by Parnell’s death, even hinting at foul play,53 but it appears that even Parnell’s former friends knew next to no details about her drowning. Jennie Wyse Power, Parnell’s closest friend from within the Inghinidhe, was more deeply ‘pained’ than she could say to hear that the organisation went on with its programme of plays on the evening of Parnell’s death. Wyse Power believed that they should have postponed the plays out of respect for her memory and was relieved that she was no longer associated with the society.54 II Quite why Jennie Wyse Power resigned from the Inghinidhe is unclear. She may have been too busy with Sinn Féin and her local government and suffrage commitments, though she was never one to shy away from involvement in what she considered a just cause.55 She may have objected to the Society’s disafiliating from Cumann na nGaedheal in the aftermath of the Gonne–MacBride split. She may simply have believed that the Inghinidhe had outlived its purpose or she may have lost patience with its refusal to work openly with suffrage societies and its continued oficial opposition to societies such as the IWFL despite the undoubted prosuffrage beliefs of its members. Molony and others were deeply committed to women’s suffrage, but they held that agitation for votes for women in Ireland implied claiming British citizenship and was thus inconsistent with separatism and republicanism. Molony had to work hard to persuade Markievicz, a committed feminist, of this, but Wyse Power, herself a member of the IWSLGA, could not accept this position.56 Debate 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

Anna Parnell to Helena Molony, 7 July 1910, NLI, MS 12,144. Theodora Paget to Helena Molony, 23 November 1911, NLI, MS 12,144. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony, and McL. Côté, Fanny and Anna Parnell, p. 247. KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. Letter from Jennie Wyse Power, 7 April [?], Allen Library, Box No. 386/5. As well as open political work, she often provided meals and refreshments through her restaurant and shop, as for example in November 1911, when she organised the catering for the Irish Women Workers’ Social and Dance: Irish Worker, 4 November 1911, p. 2. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony.

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about this issue had been a feature of Bean na hÉireann, whose editorial line was blatantly pro-suffrage, even to the point of congratulating English suffragettes on their struggle and tactics. But at the same time it maintained that although even militant suffragettes were ‘with us in our sex’s war for freedom’, they were ‘with the men of England against us’ in the national struggle.57 Having argued strongly that the vote for women must be won in Ireland and that the feminist cause in Ireland was best ‘served by ignoring England’, Bean na hÉireann concluded that the case for women’s suffrage would anyway be conceded by Irish men if it were put logically before them because their ‘love of freedom and justice would compel them to give women a voice and a place in the government of their country’.58 It maintained a strong feminist line, often by reporting on absurd and lagrant examples of sexism in Irish society. One staff member, for instance, decided to get electricity connected to her house after a Dublin gas company refused to accept the name of a woman as a guarantor. ‘They seem’, argued the editor, ‘to drag the question of sex even into gas meters.’59 The Inghinidhe’s argument that ‘the rights of Irishwomen are in Ireland, and must be won in Ireland, not in England or any foreign country’ was in essence the Sinn Féin line, and it was one which invited criticism.60 A journalistic debate on the issue followed and was largely conducted by Hanna Sheehy Skefington and members of the Inghinidhe. Sheehy Skefington continued to maintain that nationalism was not inconsistent with women’s suffragism, while Bean na hÉireann in turn maintained that it supported equal rights for women but would not stoop to what it described as ‘begging’ the English Parliament for concessions. Sinn Féin provided a practical example of this conviction in 1911 when members objected to Dublin Corporation’s pro-women’s suffrage petition to the House of Commons on the grounds that ‘no petition should be presented to the British parliament’.61 Markievicz herself told a meeting that: Surely compromise never gives the impression of strength in a movement, and, therefore, when a Sinn Féiner starts an agitation to try and force the Parliamentary Party to do their best to pass a bill for them they at once weaken the Sinn Féin position by tacitly admitting, that once it comes to a vital issue, it is the Parliamentary Party that can give them their end not Sinn Féin … Now we do not ‘refuse to join the woman’s Franchise movement’ in the emphatic way that [Jennie Wyse Power] suggests; but we decline to join with the Parliamentarians and Unionists in trying to force a bill through Westminster. We prefer to try and organise a woman’s movement on Sinn Féin lines or on lines even broader still. 57 59 61

Bean na hÉireann, 1:3 (January 1909), p. 9. 58 Ibid., 1:4 (February 1909), p. 1. Ibid., 1:12 (1910), p. 8. 60 Ibid., 1:3 (February 1909), p. 1. Votes for Women, 3:161 (7 April 1911), p. 447.

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Freedom for our Nation and the complete removal of all disabilities to our sex will be our battle cry.62

Bean na hÉireann’s key argument came down to this: The women of Irish Ireland have the franchise, and it would only be humiliating themselves and their country to appeal or even demand the endorsement of a hostile parliament. They stand on equal footing with the men in the Gaelic League, in Sinn Féin, and the Industrial Movement. They are represented on the executives of all of these, and should be content to regard these as representing Irish Government. The fact that they have not received the imprimatur of a hostile Government will worry no Nationalist woman. These movements leave plenty of room for the activities of Irish women.63

The problem with this logic was twofold, and Jennie Wyse Power recognised this immediately. Not only was it patently not the case that women had achieved little more than formal recognition in the Irish-Ireland movements, it was also the case that there existed little scope within these movements for active and explicit feminist politics. They did not enfranchise women any more than they enfranchised men. She argued as a Sinn Féiner and a feminist that women in Ireland had a perfect right to the vote, just as English women did, and while she would like to have women Sinn Féin MPs – who would abstain of course but would nonetheless need to be elected on an expanded franchise – this was not going to be possible unless the vote for women was conceded. How then, she asked, coming to the crux of the problem, should nationalist Irishwomen go about winning the vote? She could offer no irm answer but concluded that ‘however much we may admire the Englishwomen who are carrying on the suffragist agitation against English politicians, we do not want to join English organizations.Yet the ight here must also be against the same English politicians. How?’ She continued to maintain that she saw no ‘antagonism between Irish women’s demand for citizenship and the demand for a native parliament’ because her central demand remained equal citizenship in whatever constitutional arrangement pertained. If it were made available under Westminster it should be accepted while the constitutional struggle would be maintained.64 In the meantime, the Irish Party’s continued demonstrations of its antisuffrage colours only strengthened her argument that constitutionalism was politically and morally bankrupt, and in this her Sinn Féin credentials were very useful.65 As the IWFL had learned, attempting to keep party politics out of suffrage politics was a risky strategy as it was bound to alienate some 62 64

Bean na hÉireann, 1:6 (April 1909), p. 9. IC, 8 June 1912. 65 Ibid.

63

Ibid., p. 15.

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nationalists while failing to reassure most unionists, but there was little option for activists. Jennie Wyse Power who, as a well-known Sinn Féiner, was well in advance of Hanna Sheehy Skefington in her rejection of the Irish Party, similarly attempted to keep party and feminist politics separate. But she also tried to reconcile her fellow advanced nationalists to feminism, turning to well-worn parallels between the oppression of women and the Irish at the hands of the English. In addition, Wyse Power and Sheehy Skefington also emphasised the fact that no nationalist, no matter how dedicated to Irish-Irelandism, could stand entirely outside the British state: all Irish people were obliged to use British money, buy British stamps and pay British taxes so why should they not also have a say in how these taxes were spent, even within the context of an imperfect political arrangement? It was dificult to argue with this logic, especially as Sinn Féin had supported various education campaigns, such as compulsory Irish, which depended on direct lobbying of politicians and parliament. What, asked feminists, was the difference between feminist agitation and Irish-language agitation, as both implied recognition of the British Parliament? It was a question to which there would never be an agreed answer, but it produced a lively debate, itself a relection of the vitality of the issue and the willingness of Sinn Féin to engage with it. Though discussion of long-dead Irish women, particularly if they were related to well-known male patriots, tended to feature in its publications more often than serious debate on women’s rights, Sinn Féin was broadly supportive of feminist demands. This is a point worth emphasising, if only because it challenges the widespread view that ‘nationalist groups in Ireland were profoundly conservative on issues relating to gender equality’.66 Certainly, Sinn Féiners tended to emphasise women’s ‘natural’ domestic roles over their public political roles, and there is no suggestion here that Sinn Féin institutionally endorsed the complete equalisation of political and social rights for men and women. But in opening its executive positions to both sexes equally and in debating and supporting women’s suffrage, it was well in advance of its main nationalist rival and, in fact, of many political organisations across the United Kingdom. Even Hanna Sheehy Skefington admitted this.67 Sinn Féin acknowledged that it was the ‘right of a woman to have a vote if she wants it’ but declared that ‘the strongest opposition to women suffrage in Dublin’ arose from the ‘manner in which they use their votes at Municipal elections’.68 This statement relected some of the basic ideological differences between Sinn Féin and the feminists who prioritised 66 68

Luddy, ‘Women and Politics’, p. 71. Sinn Féin, 22 January 1910.

67

Bean na hÉireann, 13 (April 1909), p. 6.

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women’s enfranchisement over Irish nationalism. Women’s suffrage was a concrete political aim, it was not a ‘movement’ or an ideology. For Hanna Sheehy Skefington and others in the IWFL, the vote was not a symbolic and abstract concept, it was ‘the key-stone of citizenship’.69 Unlike the Irish Party, Sinn Féin, especially before it began operating in the manner of a parliamentary political party from 1917, had little interest in votes as it neither ran candidates at a national level nor depended on the votes of men or women to keep itself aloat. It emphasised detachment from the prevailing political arrangement through abstention and the eventual establishment of an alternative, native parliament. The question of women’s votes hardly mattered here and would only truly matter when Sinn Féin put up its own candidates, or at least worked to get IPP men out, rather than urging them to abstain. The principle of women’s suffrage was, however, supported, at least at an editorial level. This relected the generally supportive view of active members of the executive and, no doubt, provided another opportunity to focus on the Irish Party’s inconsistency and double-dealing. The opinions of individual members and branches are much more dificult to determine. Jennie Wyse Power kept up the pressure on the organisation, aided at key points by Arthur Grifith. Together, for example, they argued in 1909 that women could be members of both Sinn Féin and of the IWFL at a meeting of the Inghinidhe which adopted the opposite position.70 This most likely accelerated Wyse Power’s departure from the organisation. Wyse Power’s and Grifith’s argument – that a demand for the vote ‘on the same terms as it is, or may be, extended to men’ was a perfectly legitimate one for nationalist women to accept as it did not mention the British Parliament – was rejected ‘irmly but respectfully’.71 Markievicz went so far as to claim that the IWFL violated Sinn Féin principles. Grifith denied this, arguing that the IWFL was an independent body of Irish women who held various shades of opinion. He stressed, however, that if the IWFL ‘at any time adopts a policy repugnant to Sinn Fein, we are certain the Sinn Feiners in its membership will not continue their support’.72 Though the women’s suffrage question was hardly the journal’s most pressing issue, Sinn Féin did carry notices of suffrage activity without subjecting them to criticism.73 The journal and its readers no doubt enjoyed the disapproval levelled by suffragists at the Irish Party’s refusal to back women’s suffrage at Westminster, but it advised them that they 69 71 73

70 Bean na hÉireann, 13 (April 1909), p. 6. Sinn Féin, 27 March 1909. 72 Ibid. Sinn Féin, 27 March 1909. See, for example, ibid., 24 June 1910 and 19 March 1910, and 6 April 1912.

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would be better off putting their faith in a parliament in College Green than in a parliament in London.74 The Home Rule crisis of 1912 saw Sinn Féin fall largely in line with the majority of nationalist opinion when it increasingly emphasised the necessity of placing political questions before ‘social’ ones. Its position on suffrage agitation hardened markedly as a consequence. Ironically, it adopted the same position as the Irish Party when it argued that that ‘the Rights of Woman and the Rights of man have got to wait until the Rights of Ireland have been regained’.75 The paper published a letter from Charles Oldham MP to John Redmond, in which Oldham condemned the Party for opposing the suffrage amendment to the Home Rule Bill. Sinn Féin could hardly pass up an opportunity to publicise discord from behind enemy lines, but Grifith added that Oldham’s position made no sense as the Irish Party was acting logically: The irst interest of the Irish nation is self-government, and the interest of the nation is higher than the interests of any of its component parts. There is no fallacy as dangerous to Ireland as the fallacy that she must settle her social questions before she settles her national question.76

Jennie Wyse Power challenged this view on the grounds that the Party’s behaviour might have been ‘logical’ but was nonetheless deeply disappointing, and added that there appeared to be no point in advocating suffrage in general terms but failing to condemn the attack on the feminists who waited on the UIL’s 1912 Convention. But Grifith refused to budge, insisting that no section of the Irish population had the right to ‘hold up’ Home Rule and, more controversially, that ‘surely if a number of women force their way into the centre of an excited crowd which believes they intend to attack the Mansion House, they give rufianism its opportunity’.77 In this, Sinn Féin and the Irish Party found themselves in a state of rare harmony. Though not advocating the beating of suffragettes, Sinn Féin did adopt an increasingly hostile position over 1912. Wyse Power was not alone in her dual dedication to Sinn Féin and feminism, and many fellow Sinn Féiners did support women’s suffrage while keeping up their struggle against Sinn Féin indifference and even hostility. The old Fenian, O’Leary Curtis, for example, supported women’s suffrage from ‘a Sinn Fein point of view’ as it would only, he argued, ‘be when women had a political status that they would have real political power to take a share in the Sinn Fein Parliamentary policy’.78 Wyse Power and Sheehy Skefington joined with Markievicz in attempting to 74 77

Ibid., 23 July 1910. Ibid., 13 April 1912.

75 78

Ibid., 5 June 1909. Ibid., 5 June 1908.

76

Ibid., 6 April 1912.

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bring a motion to a Sinn Féin meeting on the desirability of amending the Home Rule Bill to include women. Grifith ruled their motion out of order despite the ‘manifestly friendly attitude of the meeting’.79 Sidney Gifford moved a motion similarly advocating the inclusion of women in any altered franchise at a larger Sinn Féin conference that same year, but it too was rejected by Grifith as a ‘social question’.80 Many female Sinn Féiners tended to support both women’s suffrage and Sinn Féin in very general terms, berating both the out-of-touch Irish Party and insuficiently patriotic suffrage societies for their insistence on ‘running after’ English ideas and approval. Thus, ‘John Brennan’ (Sidney Gifford) could accuse Irish suffragists of ‘too often’ studying the history of the English suffrage movement when their true salvation could be found in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin, which were attempting to rebuild the Gaelic civilisation in which ‘the woman was the equal of the man in all things’.81 The problem remained, however, that Sinn Féin men were just as likely as their parliamentary nationalist counterparts to put nationalism before feminism or to be openly opposed to it. Advanced nationalist women knew this, and most of the best-known ones opted to maintain support for both. Maud Gonne for one joined the IWFL, spoke at its meetings and donated money to it in 1912, as did Elizabeth Bloxham, fellow Sinn Féiner and close friend of Wyse Power.82 Markievicz took the part of Joan of Arc in tableaux vivants organised by the IWFL in 1913, spoke at its meetings and wrote to ‘her friends’ in the organisation from her prison cell during the 1918 election.83 Molony herself took the trouble to attend a meeting of the Dublin branch of the unashamedly English WSPU, held in protest against the rearrest of Emmeline Pankhurst and to demand the repeal of the Cat and Mouse Act. She maintained, however, that she was a ‘rebel’ who, while she did not herself belong to a suffragette society, was ‘connected with a society of women who were out for a republic. She supported militant tactics.’84 In 1913 she even acted in a suffrage play written by Susan Day of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, an organisation which was neither militant nor nationalist.85 Conversely, members of the IWFL, including Helen Laird, Hanna Sheehy Skefington and 79 81 82

83

84

IC, 9 January 1915. 80 Ibid. Ibid., 14 September 1914, p. 131. Some contributors to the Legal Defence Fund, SSP, NLI, MS 21,639(ii); Report of the Executive Committee of the IWFL for 1913 (Dublin, 1914), p. 22; IC, January 1919. ‘Life of Constance Markievicz’, by her stepson, Stanislaw Dun Markievicz [sic], Part II, NLI, MS 44,619, p. 154; Programme of the Daffodil Fête: Suffrage Play and Tableaux, 24 and 25 April, SSP, NLI, MS 41,177/39; and Report of the Executive Committee of the IWFL for 1913, p. 8. 85 II, 13 December 1913. IT, 7 October 1913.

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Margaret Cousins, hardly shunned the Inghinidhe and even attended its tenth-anniversary celebrations.86 Connections between individual members of the IWFL, the Inghinidhe and Sinn Féin were soon to become even closer. This ‘silent support’ was not unusual and was in fact most likely the norm among advanced nationalist women. There is very little evidence that lasting and fatal divisions between suffragists and separatist nationalist women developed as a result of some public disagreement between both camps, though this has become an established idea within the historiography of women’s activism in the period. Rosamond Jacob, member of her local Sinn Féin club in Waterford from 1907, explained to Hanna Sheehy Skefington that she could not, with her political views, join a suffrage society ‘as long as we are governed by the British parliament … I don’t want the British parliamentary franchise – at least I would rather not have it than ask the British parliament for it.’87 She claimed, too, that the Gaelic League was forced to recognise the British government in order to have speciic laws changed, but that as its ‘whole tendency is towards a separate Irish nation’, it could not be accused of begging before an English Parliament in the same way as the IWFL.88 Although Jacob’s argument about the Gaelic League’s explicit separatism was based more on wishful thinking than reality, she nonetheless identiied another common objection to the IWFL and the women’s suffrage movement more generally: that it was not suficiently and explicitly nationalist. As a passionate supporter of women’s suffrage herself, Jacob faced the same dilemma that Wyse Power, had struggled with in the pages of Sinn Féin, and, like Wyse Power she did in fact actively support the IWFL. Unlike Wyse Power, however, she did this quietly. She gathered cowslips for the IWFL to sell in Dublin, she attended its meetings, and she had close friends within the organisation.89 Molony adopted a similar line, explaining that ‘[W]e held that an agitation for votes for women in Ireland inferred claiming British citizenship, and consequently was inconsistent with Irish Republicanism and Separatism.’ She added, however, that ‘[O]f course on the principle of Equal Rights we were all united, and we worked in the most friendly way with the Irish “Suffragettes”.’90 This was the bottom line, and it was fuzzy, especially, as we shall see, when the IWFL increasingly displayed its nationalist sympathies. 86 87 89

90

FJ, 4 October 1910. Rosamond Jacob to HSS, 24 November 1913, SSP, NLI, MS 33,608(9). 88 Ibid. DRJ, 1 May 1913, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(25); 18 March 1913, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(24); 16 August 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(34). BMH WS 391: Helena Molony.

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Relations between suffragists and nationalists nonetheless were sometimes chilly, turning decidedly frosty at times. By 1914, the Irish Citizen, a suffrage journal which represented a broad range of feminist opinion but which was run in the main by members of the IWFL, declared that Sinn Féin women put ‘racial hatred before the cause of women’s freedom’ by refusing to lobby for the vote from Westminster. Refusing to accept the suffrage from England was not only putting women second, it was doing so ‘from a motive inconsistent with the international and worldwide character of the women’s movement’.91 The Inghinidhe was able to fudge this tricky issue when the suffrage demand could be combined with another of its political objectives. Thus, when Ireland’s leading suffrage groups staged a mass meeting to protest against the exclusion of woman suffrage from the Home Rule Bill, Inghinidhe na hÉireann was represented and Markievicz and Lynn were speakers at the event.92 III Molony was one of several Inghinidhe members who were by this time also becoming more likely to involve themselves in socialist politics. James Connolly came into contact with a number of other women who were to play important roles in labour politics and ultimately in the Citizen Army through her. His close female conidantes came to include Molony, Markievicz, Perolz and Kathleen Lynn, all like him socialists, republicans and feminists. As these women became more involved with Bean na hÉireann, the journal became noticeably more radical. It is striking how, by 1911, most of what might be termed the more frivolous sections of the paper had all but disappeared, articles about clothes and entertainment having been replaced by solidly advanced political propaganda. This relected the increasingly militant and socialist tone of its remaining active members, particularly of Molony and Markievicz. They were also among the most radical and prominent participants in the opposition to the visit in 1911 of George V and Queen Mary, often in co-operation with the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI). Organised opposition was largely co-ordinated by the United National Societies Committee (UNSC), which included Sinn Féin, the National Council and the Wolfe Tone Clubs, but not the Inghinidhe. Quite why the women’s organisation was not included in this collective is unclear. It may have been because it did not have a particularly high proile by early 1911, or it may have been because the involvement in the UNSC of Jennie Wyse Power and Markievicz (as members of Sinn Féin) was 91

IC, 14 November 1914.

92

Ibid., 8 June 1912.

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deemed suficiently representative. Whatever the reason, this exclusion clearly did not deter the Inghinidhe, especially as the few women who were involved began to express their reservations about the UNSC’s apparent inability to include a ‘woman’s point of view’.93 Molony wrote to the press on hearing of the upcoming visit, asking the Lord Mayor to declare publicly against a welcome address for the visiting monarch, then urged ‘nationalist women voters’ to ‘exert their inluence on their Municipal representatives to … vote against the resolution to present an address of welcome to the King of England’.94 Together with the SPI, the Inghinidhe held a meeting to protest against the forthcoming royal visit, while Molony herself was instrumental in launching the Nationalist Women’s Committee (NWC).95 The NWC was not oficially an Inghinidhe committee, though the idea of a separate women’s protest group was almost certainly spearheaded by Molony in her role as Inghinidhe secretary. Consisting mainly of the Inghinidhe and relatives of IRB men, the NWC probably expanded beyond the Inghinidhe in order to encourage the involvement of as many nationalist women as possible. A ‘scratch committee’ was assembled at Sinn Féin headquarters in Harcourt Street to undermine what became known as ‘collecting Marys’, a newspaper-sponsored drive to have all Irish women with the given name of Mary participate in an address of welcome to the Queen.96 Nationalists, male and female, from a number of organisations objected to ‘collecting Marys’ in various parts of the country, but it obviously had a particular resonance for nationalist women.97 Opposing any aspect of a royal visit, moreover, had a particular signiicance for the Inghinidhe, which, according to Molony, felt it would ‘have to follow the precedent of 1903, and smash any proposal for an oficial Royal Address’.98 The Inghinidhe resolved to print thousands of protest lealets before organising a ‘council of war’ to safeguard the liers before distributing them along the route of the royal procession.99 Having taken advice from a medical student who allegedly had some experience of ‘shock tactics’ in tsarist Russia, the Inghinidhe resolved to adopt the methods of Russian protesters by folding the lealets in two and linging them into the air if they saw police approaching. The liers would then fan out among the crowd before being picked up by curious spectators. Expecting a hostile response from the people who turned out to welcome the royal couple, the organisation masqueraded as suffragettes, 93 94 95 97 98

Jennie Wyse Power to FSS, 2 April 1911, SSP, NLI, MS 21,622(iii). FJ, 30 and 31 March 1911; and IT, 30 March 1911. 96 Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 76. BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power. DRJ, 11–15 March 1911 and 8 and 11 April 1911, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(21). 99 BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira.

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reciting ‘Votes for Women’ as they handed out their propaganda and leeing before the recipients had time to read their lealets.100 Having attended a large all-party protest meeting at Smithield, on their way back to Dublin, Molony and her companions collected loose stones which were being used for road repair. The stones were distributed, but Molony felt ‘deep disappointment’ in the failure of any of their hundreds of supporters to throw a single one. Though numerous Sinn Féin members were active in the opposition to the visit, the Inghinidhe was appalled by the failure of IRB men in particular to take decisive action on this occasion, despite the fact that many of them had also been very active in the campaign. Sidney Gifford was so disgusted that she wrote lampooning it, but the Inghinidhe apparently gave this very little publicity ‘out of kindnesses to their “young men”’.101 The sketch was sent to Irish Freedom for publication, but although it was acknowledged, it was never published. The Inghinidhe gave their friends in the IRB a very hard time about their failure to join the protest.102 The IRB’s ‘contemptible’ decision to march to Bodenstown on the day of the royal entry rather than protesting on the royal route itself made it even more important for the women’s group to take the strongest possible action, lest it be thought that there existed in Ireland no separatist organisation which was prepared to make its opposition known. Having already been forcibly removed from City Hall along with Markievicz and some other protesters, Molony took matters into her own hands and threw her own stones at an illuminated screen which displayed portraits of George and Mary on the corner of Grafton Street. The feeling of the stones rattling about in her pocket, ‘coupled with the absence of stone-throwing’ by anyone else, was apparently ‘too much’ for her.103 A near-riot followed as she attempted to escape by galloping wildly through the streets in a wagonette driven by Markievicz. Molony was caught and removed by police, at the time a ‘terribly humiliating’ experience even for Molony, as only ‘rowdies’ were taken to police stations.104 Charged the next morning with ‘throwing stones, and disorderly conduct’, and given the option of a ine or a prison term, she refused to pay the ine and was taken for the irst but not the last time to Mountjoy prison. Disturbances greeted her appearance in court the next day, and the Socialist Party of Ireland staged an unruly protest against her arrest, having been joined by IRB men led by Bulmer Hobson and Sinn Féin men including Thomas Kelly.105 So unaccustomed were prison authorities 100 102 104

101 Ibid. KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. 103 BMH WS 909: Sidney Czira. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. 105 IT, 10 July 1911.

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to this kind of protest from a woman that one senior oficial at least – and no doubt other members of the public – believed that her protest was associated with the women’s suffrage campaign.106 Molony was released after a few days when an anonymous well-wisher paid on her behalf: she was mortiied when she learned that the impoverished Anna Parnell had paid the ine so that her editor could continue to work on her history of the Ladies’ Land League.107 She was rearrested shortly after her release, this time for allegedly attacking police while speaking with Francis Sheehy Skefington on an anti-royal-visit platform. Molony was ‘elated’ to receive a telegram from Maud Gonne which congratulated her on ‘keeping up the reputation of the Inghinidhe’, as even some of her friends had opposed her public demonstration.108 An infuriated Markievicz told Nancy O’Rahilly that she believed that ‘half’ the committee was ‘angry with [Molony] being arrested; because it wasn’t digniied! They of course had not the pluck to say so – perhaps they were only jealous.’ Some members of the Inghinidhe refused to join with the SPI in protest against Molony’s arrest, but Markievicz then ‘whipped up the girls who are not afraid’ and agreed to a joint public meeting ‘with the Socialists’.109 A schism appeared to be forming within the Inghinidhe, with a more radical faction gravitating towards Molony. For the women on the left of the organisation, the willingness to take direct political action when appropriate remained central to the aims and methods of any separatist organisation. Having expressed her dismay at the failure of the IRB to act in 1911, Molony subsequently claimed that the rules and constitution of the Inghinidhe were more ‘admirable and complete’ than anything else she knew of.110 Years before the formation of the Volunteers, Bean na hÉireann asked its female readers if they were truly prepared to ‘die for Ireland’ if put to the test and wondered how many were ‘really trying to put their opinions into practice or to spread their faith in physical force as the ultimate test between England and Ireland?’111 Sidney Gifford similarly proudly recalled that the Inghinidhe had asked about this ultimate sacriice ‘three years before the Irish Citizen Army or the Irish Volunteers had been founded’.112 She, like Molony, the Giffords, Perolz and others, irmly believed that the Inghinidhe had carried the 106

107 108

109 110 111

General Prisons Board Suffragette Papers, National Archives of Ireland, Box 1, File A, Minute no. 5167. Fox, ‘Helena Molony’, p. 123. Nell Regan, ‘Helena Molony’, in Cullen and Luddy, Female Activists, pp. 141–68, at p. 147. Letter from Markievicz to Nancy O’Rahilly, O’Rahilly Papers, UCDA, P102/482. KG WS: Helena Molony, 21-MS-IB43-10. 112 Bean na hÉireann, 15 (1909), p. 8. Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,871(66).

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separatist torch when no other nationalist publication or organisation was as active, explicit or organised in its activities. This was to hold these women in good stead when one political crisis after another engulfed Ireland from 1912 and republicans moved into a volatile new phase of political agitation.

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6

Social activism

A great many, if not all, the various pressing social problems could be much more effectively dealt with by women than by men.1

I Women from all camps within the suffrage–nationalism debate did manage, despite their disagreements, to work well together on many occasions. Friendly co-operation reached a peak in 1910, when similar political and social convictions drew together the Inghinidhe and some members of the IWFL in a concerted attempt to tackle child poverty and hunger in Dublin. Maud Gonne, who had maintained her commitment to Dublin’s poor children through her articles as ‘Maeve’ in Bean na hÉireann, and the journal more generally had kept up their insistence that children were a real ‘force’ in the country and ought not be ignored by nationalists.2 Karen Steele has described Gonne’s early journalistic essentialism as ‘strategic’ in so far as her articles on women in the domestic sphere served as ‘a stepping-stone to broader activism’.3 Gonne in fact continued to write and propagandise about the power of women in the domestic sphere and in traditionally ‘female activities’ which took place outside the home. The nurturing and teaching of children remained key to her ideas about women’s inluence being advocated as important activities in their own right and not merely as the means to a more radical end. The Inghinidhe had continued in an ad hoc way to teach and sometimes feed children since its inception, but in 1910 the organisation announced a more formal plan to ‘inaugurate a scheme by which a certain number of poor children will be supplied with free food’, and to persuade municipal authorities to take over the work in time.4 This announcement was probably penned by Gonne, who subsequently claimed that she had been prompted 1 3 4

Bean na hÉireann, 1:3 (January 1909), p. 1. 2 Ibid., 1:8 (1909), p. 8. Steele, Women, Press and Politics, p. 74. Bean na hÉireann, quoted in Ward, Maud Gonne, p. 97.

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to undertake this task after witnessing ‘ragged children’ snatching the food her son intended to feed to ducks in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green.5 She then went immediately to the IWFL and enlisted the aid of Hanna Sheehy Skefington, Margaret Connery, Mary Sheehy Kettle and others.6 The society eventually assembled to undertake this task was christened the Ladies’ Committee for Providing Meals for Poor Children in the Schools, usually known as the Ladies’ Dinner Committee (LDC). This was not an exclusively Inghinidhe venture, but individual members were heavily involved, not least because of the inluence of Gonne. She served as its irst treasurer, while Marie Perolz became the inaugural secretary of the organisation, whose headquarters was at 6 Harcourt Street, home of the Inghinidhe since 1910 and soon, as nerve centre of Sinn Féin, to become one of the most famous of all nationalist addresses in Dublin.7 Maud Gonne found a supporter in James Connolly, who spoke with her to a meeting of the IWFL in late 1910, asking for the support of the suffrage organisation.8 The IWFL evidently became increasingly involved as Helen Laird, IWFL member and old friend of the Inghinidhe through her theatrical activities, took over the secretaryship of the committee from Helena Molony in 1911. Involvement in this scheme posed potential problems for both the Inghinidhe and the IWFL. Hanna Sheehy Skefington had clashed with the Inghinidhe over the nationalist women’s decision to put country before sex and must have been wary of being publicly associated with an organisation composed of ‘slave women’ which followed the Sinn Féin line at the expense of their own liberation. In addition, the League usually maintained a ‘suffrage irst’ position, despite its genuine interest in a number of social questions. While individual members were themselves involved in many social campaigns, as an organisation the Franchise generally remained unaligned to such causes. The IWFL even took the trouble of informing allies, including large sections of the Irish left, that it worked for suffrage and had ‘never taken part in demonstrations for any other purpose’.9 Margaret Ward has argued plausibly that the IWFL’s foray into this kind of campaign was ‘entirely consistent’ with its methods in so far as it sought legislative change by lobbying male politicians if necessary.10 But it appears that the League’s support for the scheme was expressed through the efforts of individual members rather than collectively. This was essential if its claims of political neutrality were to appear even remotely credible. 5 6 8 9 10

BMH WS 317: Maud Gonne MacBride. 7 Ibid.; and Ward, Maud Gonne, p. 97. FJ, 17 November 1910. Votes for Women, 3:141 (18 November 1910), p. 141. Margaret Cousins, Irish Worker, 30 September 1911. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 82.

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The Inghinidhe faced a related though not identical dilemma, as its members must have been aware that aiming to force the municipal authorities to eventually take over the feeding of poor children involved an explicit recognition of the government as it existed in Ireland. The organisation had a proud history of applying pressure to Dublin Corporation, best seen during the royal visits, but this new campaign aimed explicitly to have the School Meals Act of 1906, which allowed local authorities to provide meals to poor schoolchildren in Britain, extended to Ireland. The Ladies’ Committee decided at its second meeting that members should ‘write to all the Irish members of Parliament, asking them to get the Act extended to Ireland as quickly as possible’.11 This was lobbying of a different order and more akin to the kind of petitioning it had not so long before condemned, no matter how worthy the aims of the lobbyists.12 Some Inghinidhe members had, as we have seen, earlier been involved in electioneering at the local government level, but they had stayed well clear of canvassing or lobbying at the national level. It appeared initially that this general standard could be maintained and the pill made easier to swallow by the fact that it was local rather than national government oficials who had at irst to be lobbied. The involvement of Sinn Féiners and old friends of the Inghinidhe, such as Alderman Thomas Kelly, probably helped, too. Dublin Corporation offered some support for the scheme, but its formal implementation was out of its hands: only an Act of Parliament could authorise the Irish municipal councils to take on the task. It may well be the case, as Margaret Ward has argued, that the organisation’s decision to become involved in this kind of lobbying revolved around the ‘powerful personality of Maud Gonne’, who was ‘never a stickler for principle if doing so meant that the weak were left to suffer’.13 But the organisation was clearly wary enough of dabbling in the kind of degrading lobbying it had once condemned that it lobbied through a separate organisation in the case of the school meals issue. It was also probably the case that launching the scheme under an alternative name allowed the women to attract wider support and to apply pressure in ways to which they usually objected. Maud Gonne herself had expressed the Inghinidhe’s willingness to work with other societies from the outset.14 Thus, though Inghinidhe members, including Sidney Gifford and Helena Molony, remembered the dinner campaign as having been instigated by Gonne and run by the Inghinidhe, the work was oficially carried out by the Ladies’ Dinner Committee, and publicity always went out under that name.15 11 13 15

12 FJ, 17 November 1910. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 82. 14 Ibid. Bean na hÉireann, quoted in Ward, Maud Gonne, p. 97. BMH WS: 391: Helena Molony, and Czira, Years Flew By, pp. 52–3.

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Lobbying of the Corporation began almost at once, while a subcommittee sought and gained the support of Father Kavanagh, a priest friendly to the Inghinidhe and connected with St Audeon’s, a national school in one of Dublin’s poorest areas.16 The irst meals were served there, and by the end of 1911 the organisation was providing 450 meals daily to the school and had extended the scheme to a second national school in John’s Lane.17 Having accumulated useful experience over the years, the Inghinidhe turned at once to tried and true methods, urging companies and individuals to donate money and food to their scheme. Such appeals for donations were expressed largely in philanthropic terms, but a strong political message also ran through the campaign. Maud Gonne for one did not lose the opportunity to highlight the indifference of the Irish MPs when the issue was brought to their attention, but she was critical, too, of general Irish inaction on the question.18 She was appalled by the uninterested Irish politicians, who informed her that she would have to ‘wait for Home Rule’ before the scheme could be introduced.19 Their indifference provided her, however, with further propaganda opportunities, if nothing else. Convinced that forcing poor children into schools without providing adequate facilities was contributing to the declining health of poor children, the Dinner Committee wondered how the Irish MPs had allowed Ireland to be exempted from the 1906 Act.20 The Irish MPs, it seemed, paid little attention to the Ladies’ Committee at irst, but by 1914 John Redmond declared his support, and a Bill was passed in that same year.21 This change of heart no doubt owed much to the substantial amount of lobbying done by a group described rather self-effacingly by Gonne as ‘a body of women, a small uninluential body’ to which she belonged.22 Members drew on various connections, often from fellow nationalists including Oliver Gogarty and Tom Kettle, whose expertise as doctor and economist proved useful.23 Irish MPs were carefully courted. Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skefington presented Stephen Gwynn with a draft of the Bill required to allow Dublin Corporation to strike a rate which would pay for the meals. He in turn introduced Gonne to his fellow parliamentarian P. J. Brady, whose task it was to persuade the government to give suficient time for 16 17

18 20 22 23

FJ, 17 November 1910. See also, Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 81. IT, 30 November 1911, and Maud Gonne, ‘Responsibility’, Irish Review, 1:10 (December 1911), 484–5. 19 Gonne, ‘Responsibility’, p. 484. Ibid. 21 IT, 5 December 1911. IC, 18 October 1913, and IT, 28 February 1914. Gonne, ‘Responsibility’, p. 484. Helen Laird to FSS, ‘Friday’, 1911, SSP, NLI, MS 21,622(v).

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a non-contentious measure.24 The Committee, in Gwynn’s words, made ‘everything ready’ for the Party, though Gonne subsequently argued that Helen Laird was in fact the draft Bill’s main architect.25 As well as negotiating with the Corporation and Irish MPs, the Ladies’ Committee provided volunteers to prepare and serve the meals to the children. Voluntary waitresses who served the food and cleaned up afterwards included, at various times, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Markievicz, the Gifford sisters, Gonne, Molony and Laird.26 By 1914 they were providing between 450 and 600 meals daily, all paid for by subscription.27 The lunches consisted of Irish stew four days a week and of jam and rice on Fridays, all food being cooked, served and tidied away afterwards by members of the IWFL and the Inghinidhe. Great care was taken to remove any question of charity from this service: those who could pay contributed only half a penny, and those who could not pay, did not.28 This all-star cast, no matter how well-meaning, also attracted some criticism, mostly from those who believed that providing free or cheap food would encourage laziness and dependence, and it was felt that contributions were kept back because of this.29 The very fact of offering any form of assistance, whether described as charity or not, was bound to prove controversial in a context where voluntarist and philanthropic activity was watched carefully in order to guard against proselytism or lay interference in the Church’s sphere. Protestant women were far more active in philanthropic activity than their Catholic counterparts, partly because of the emphasis in most Protestant churches on the personal responsibility of individual members to undertake practical and godly work in the world and also because nuns had traditionally taken on the bulk of voluntary and philanthropic work which similarly inclined lay Catholic women might otherwise have done.30 Some Catholic commentators were beginning to urge more lay women to come forward and were lamenting the fact that they remained so apparently reluctant to take on charitable work. According to Father L. J. McKenna, a leading exponent of Catholic vigilance, Irish Catholic women were less involved in charitable work than their European counterparts, and he put this partly down to the nature of philanthropic work

24

25

26 28 30

I am grateful to Colin Reid for this information. Observer, 23 October 1938 (Gwynn’s review of Gonne’s Servant of the Queen). See also Leah Levenson and Jerry H. Natterstad, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington: Irish Feminist (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 29–30, for the collaboration between Sheehy Skefington and Gonne; and BMH WS 317: Maud Gonne MacBride. 27 Czira, Years Flew By, p. 53. IC, 28 February 1914. Bean na hÉireann, 22 (1910), p. 8. 29 IT, 5 February 1912. Luddy, Women and Philanthropy, pp. 215–16.

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being seen as ‘Protestant’.31 But an organisation like the Ladies’ Dinner Committee was almost certainly not what Father McKenna had in mind. The LDC was determinately neither Catholic nor Protestant, and this, in some ways, was more alarming than an openly religious society because its membership was ‘mixed’ and untied to religious dogma or overt clerical direction. Moreover, the Dinner Committee clearly catered in the main for Catholic children. It was mindful of religious obligations, as evidenced by its serving rice and jam on Fridays, but the fact remained that many of those involved were Protestants, socialists and feminists, and all were advocates of state intervention. They were neither sponsored by nor did they answer to any religious organisation. In addition, no matter how carefully the volunteers took into account the religious sensitivities of the schoolchildren and their teachers, they could not help but encroach on the exceptionally problematic question of the relative roles of church and state in primary education. Adding parental responsibility to the mix further complicated the issue, as the provision of food by the State undermined parental accountability and added a further layer of state involvement in the day-to-day life of Irish schools. For Gonne, this dilemma provided a perfect opportunity to criticise the State while absolving parents and teachers from all blame or responsibility. While objecting to the insistence of the State on a particular model of education, she called on it to fund adequately that same lawed system. How the children would be fed if they remained at home was not addressed, though the implication was that the very act of being in school deprived these children of nutrition. Gonne believed that the State offered the worst of all worlds: a long school day without adequate nutrition for the children who were ‘forced’ to attend. This form of compulsory education had, she argued, contributed to the ‘physical degeneration of the race’, which was ‘marked by an increase of lunacy’.32 Gogarty shared her eugenicist concerns, warning that lunacy was ‘increasing in the country’ and that the ‘unit’ were being ‘propagated and preserved’.33 Stephen B. Walsh, another doctor, agreed, linking such concerns to the broader question of ‘the intimate relation between the welfare of the child and that of the nation at large’.34 This chimed perfectly with the Inghinidhe’s

31

32 33

34

L. J. McKenna, ‘An Irish Catholic Women’s League’, Irish Monthly, 45 (1917), quoted in Alison Jordan, Who Cared: Charity in Victorian and Edwardian Belfast (Belfast, 1992), p. 197. IT, 5 December 1911. Oliver St John Gogarty, ‘The Need of Medical Inspection of School Children in Ireland’, Irish Review, 2:13 (March 1912), p. 18. Stephen B.Walsh, ‘Food and the Hungry School Children’, Irish Review, 2:21 (November 1912), p. 494.

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long-standing insistence that the physical and moral nurturing of children represented a vital investment in the Irish nation. The ability of the women involved to effectively side-step some of the obvious objections to their scheme rested on their persistent criticism of the State and, in the case of the advanced nationalists amongst them, of the Irish MPs for failing to pursue the matter. Their scheme consequently won a great deal of support from a number of quarters, some not even nationalist. A real boost came in 1912 with the election of Celia Harrison, the irst female member of the Dublin Corporation. She spearheaded the scheme in the Corporation.35 By 1914 it had gained the support even of prominent clerics like Father Finlay, though due care was taken not to offend the Catholic hierarchy and its ideas about maintaining control of educational matters.36 By 1914, feeding schoolchildren one meal a day probably looked very mild in comparison to some of the assistance being offered to the children of striking workers, and this may have reduced the concerns of some critics. Gonne and Laird, respectively convert and Protestant, had had the dificult task of reassuring the hierarchy that the scheme was neither socialist nor overly interventionist.37 This was a delicate assignment, as there existed ‘secret but very troublesome and dangerous opposition from one of the school managers’ who was ‘jealous of their exclusive control of the schools’.38 Clerical suspicion almost certainly intensiied after the 1913 Lockout, when both voluntary feeding and the care of children assumed particular signiicance. Gonne, Laird and other members of the Committee were careful to explain to Archbishop Walsh in 1913 that they worked ‘wholly through a parochial committee nominated by a manager’ from each school.39 The school-meal programme was important for a number of reasons, not least because it was the irst occasion on which the Inghinidhe and the IWFL openly co-operated. It also contributed to discourses about the relationship between philanthropy and state intervention and, moreover, the relationship of both to nationalist and socialist political activism. On a more practical level, feeding hungry children gave valuable experience to a number of women from both organisations, who became active in providing meals to striking workers and their families in 1913. During that year, the women who continued to 35 37

38

39

IC, 9 January 1915. 36 Ibid., 28 November 1914. Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, November 1913, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne–Yeats Letters, p. 327. Maud Gonne to John Quinn, March 1911, quoted in Janis Londraville and Richard Londraville (eds.), Too Long a Sacriice: The Letters of Maud Gonne and John Quinn (London, 1999), p. 73. Lucy McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy (Ithaca, NY, 2005), p. 157.

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provide lunches to children chastised the well-fed critics who disapproved of supplying food to hungry children because of the ‘irresponsibility’ of their parents, arguing that the children were not responsible for their parents’ decisions and that even temporary starvation would cripple their health for years to come.40 After the Act became operative in Ireland it also served as a real spur to feminists, who noted that when it passed out of the original committee’s control and into the ‘realms of high inance, and therefore outside women’s sphere’, it became more expensive to administer and was less effectively run. The Ladies’ Committee had offered its expertise to the Corporation and managers, but this had been rejected. The Irish Citizen demanded that at least half the new committee should be female, given that women alone had fed children since its inception and had built up real expertise. A number of Irish suffrage societies and the Dublin Trades Council agreed, but apparently to no avail.41 An enraged ‘HM’, quite likely Helena Molony, advised men to ‘conduct world wars if you must, rule empires if you will … but for mercy’s sake leave the feeding of children to women, who do know something about the business’.42 II By 1913, some advanced nationalist women had thus built up valuable experience in social work, and some had already staked a place in Irish socialist circles before the Dublin Lockout broke out in that year. Markievicz and Molony, for instance, had been supporters of the recently established Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU): Markievicz spoke on its behalf at its launch in 1911, and Molony became in time its principal organiser.43 The establishment of the IWWU allowed women like Molony to engage with the movement as full union members rather than as sympathetic supporters. Though ‘naturally attracted to the Labour movement’, and keen to show her support through her Bean na hÉireann columns, Molony’s ‘professional work’ had prevented her from full involvement before this time. Hanna Sheehy Skefington was another early advocate who also spoke at the IWWU’s irst meeting and was to become a irm advocate of the strikers in 1913.44 She was one of the many suffragists who had clear socialist sympathies, who supported the formal organisation of women workers into trade unions and, in common with many

40 42 43 44

IC, 18 October 1913. 41 Ibid., 14 November 1914. Ibid., 16 October 1915. Pádraig Yeates, Lockout, Dublin 1913 (Dublin, 2001), p. 48. Irish Worker, 9 September 1911.

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trade unionists, advocated the employment of female factory inspectors.45 Sheehy Skefington’s public association with the IWWU was, nonetheless, based on her personal political views and did not represent the IWFL’s oficial line. This was crucial, as some members of the Franchise League and the wider women’s suffrage movement were hostile to socialism, and the League was of course strictly non-party. Margaret Cousins, IWFL secretary in 1911, made this crystal clear in a letter published in the IrishWorker, shortly after Hanna Sheehy Skefington appeared at the public launch of the women’s union.46 Despite such declarations of non-alignment, many feminists did move increasingly in a leftward direction, especially after the Labour Party and a number of trade unions and trade unionists began to openly support women’s suffrage while the major Irish parties remained resolutely opposed. James Larkin, founder of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), had included adult suffrage and equal voting rights in his union’s programme from its foundation in 1909. He celebrated the election of Celia Harrison to Dublin Corporation in 1912, and was acknowledged by the Irish Citizen to be a great friend to the women’s suffrage cause.47 Though publicly non-party, IWFL insiders privately acknowledged that the Socialist Party of Ireland was ‘very useful to the I.W.F.L. in a number of small things’ as they were ‘much more friendly to the Suffrage agitation since Connolly took up the reins’.48 The two organisations were in fact much closer allies than most realised at the time, in no small part because both ensured that the connections between them were concealed. The IWFL rented rooms in its early days from the SPI and shared in Francis Sheehy Skefington a member active in both societies. More important, however, was the role of Miss K. M. Shannon, ofice-holder in the IWFL and, publicly at least, as ‘Miss Devoy’ in the SPI and Independent Labour Party of Ireland from 1912. A former member of the YIB, she had apparently abandoned the Irish Party after its failure to support the women’s suffrage amendment to the Home Rule Bill. Sheehy Skefington and Connolly supported her role as SPI secretary, Connolly arguing that the Party needed her ‘enthusiasm and business ability’. ‘Besides’, he added, ‘we must get that class of people to take an interest in the movement, and leave us plebs to do the rough and tumble work.’49 Male trade unionists, Larkin and Connolly 45

46 47

48 49

Penny Holloway and Terry Cradden, ‘The Irish Trade Union Congress and Working Women, 1894–1914’, Saothar, 23 (1999), 47–59, at pp. 51–2. M. E. Cousins, Irish Worker, 30 September 1911. Theresa Moriarty, ‘Larkin and the Women’s Movement’, in Donal Nevin (ed.), James Larkin: Lion of the Fold (Dublin, 2006), pp. 93–101, at p. 93. FSS to ‘Dear Cousins’, 14 January 1911, SSP, NLI, MS 33,612(11). James Connolly to William O’Brien, 24 May 1911, William O’Brien Papers, NLI, MS 13,908(2).

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included, put trade union interests before feminism when forced to make a choice between the two, but, as Theresa Moriarty has shown, Ireland’s socialist and feminist circles nonetheless frequently and increasingly overlapped through common membership and ideals.50 James Larkin’s suffragist sister, Delia Larkin, became the irst general secretary of the IWWU, and she also contributed a ‘Women Workers’ column’ to the Irish Worker from the same year. Though primarily concerned with trade union issues, the column also at times relected many of the preoccupations of Irish-Irelanders and nationalists. She supported the language and ‘national costume’ revival, for example, their revitalisation being linked to the well-being of Irish industry and workers in much the way that Molony had earlier argued in Bean na hÉireann.51 Though small, the IWWU established a place for women within labour and wider Irish political circles. The union was given rent-free rooms at Liberty Hall, and some members embedded themselves in trade union life by joining the Irish Workers’ Choir and participating in other social activities in and around the trade union headquarters.52 In 1913 a small contingent of IWWU members marched on May Day for the irst time.53 By 1913, the women’s union had fought a number of battles on behalf of working women in various trades, but its proile received a real boost during the Lockout, when members joined with male workers in protest against attempts to restrict the right of workers to combine. Some were dismissed from Jacob’s biscuit factory for refusing to remove their union badges; just over a thousand others were locked out when they refused to capitulate to employers’ demands; and more than forty were arrested for strike-related activity.54 One member, Alice Brady, was shot in the wrist by a strike-breaker during a near-riot sparked during a coal delivery to a Dublin church.55 The sixteen-year-old became the IWWU’s irst martyr when she died two weeks later, having contracted tetanus. Her funeral attracted more than 500 members of the IWWU, as well as Delia Larkin, James Connolly and Markievicz.56 In addition to their involvement as strikers during the Lockout, women played a vital role in Liberty Hall, especially in feeding and clothing striking workers and their families. Delia Larkin took charge of the administration of Liberty Hall shortly after the dispute began, and, when her brother was imprisoned, she took overall control of union headquarters.57 She formed a Ladies’ Committee, which provided food for thousands 50 52

53 55 57

51 Moriarty, ‘Larkin’, p. 94. Irish Worker, 12 August 1911. Mary Jones, These Obstreperous Lassies: A History of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (Dublin, 1988), pp. 6–9. 54 Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., and Yeates, Lockout, p. 190 and p. 412. FJ, 3 January 1914. 56 Ibid., 5 January 1914; and Yeates, Lockout, pp. 497–8. Moriarty, ‘Larkin’, pp. 97–9.

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of people, mainly women and children: between November 1913 and March 1914, a staff of twenty-two, most of them women, prepared 3,000 breakfasts there each morning, provided clothes for thousands of children and served meals in a special area to nursing mothers.58 Markievicz became especially associated with this work in Liberty Hall and was subsequently presented with honorary membership of the ITGWU in recognition of her ‘unselish and earnest labours’.59 Having once been a hotel, Liberty Hall was well equipped with kitchens and dining rooms, making it an ideal location for such an enterprise. Its size and sprawling layout also offered privacy and would subsequently prove to be an ideal headquarters for political rebels who needed to get in and out of the building quickly and clandestinely. The work of feeding strikers and their families instigated something of a reunion for the republican and suffragist women who had earlier united to feed Dublin’s poor schoolchildren. The Ladies’ School Dinner Committee had provided a number of activist women with training which proved to be extremely useful during the Lockout. Many of the women who had fed children, including Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Markievicz, Nellie Gifford and Molony, provided a similar service during the Lockout, though funds for their own project were dangerously short in the months before the Lockout began.60 During the dispute, Helen Laird, secretary of the Dinner Committee, warned that semi-starvation was a ‘chronic condition in the poor parts of the city’ and that their resources were close to breaking point in the current crisis.61 Maud Gonne described the situation in Dublin as ‘a miserable state of things’, but she revealed that the ‘terrible’ situation had boosted her school-dinners project, as ‘it has become such a necessity that everyone is with me now over it, every school is giving dinners and many breakfasts to keep the children alive’.62 It seems that the work of the original Dinner Committee became conlated with wider relief schemes during the industrial crisis, the common link between them being the overall control of women, almost all of them suffragists and nationalists, most of them on the radical spectrum of each movement. The Lockout shaped women’s involvement in politics in several ways. Under the guidance of Delia Larkin, for example, the IWWU launched the Women Workers’ Co-operative Society, an enterprise in which 58 59

60 62

Ibid., p. 100. Address from the ITGWU to Markievicz, 1914, William O’Brien Papers, NLI, MS 13,940(2). IT, 7 June 1913. 61 Ibid., 29 September 1913. Maud Gonne to John Quinn, 20 November 1913, in Londraville and Londraville, Too Long a Sacriice, p. 110.

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republican women would become increasingly involved.63 The IWWU managed to pay some members a very modest wage during the Lockout, but the Co-operative aimed to provide them with longer-term employment. Between 400 and 500 female strikers lost their jobs permanently as a result of the Lockout and the Co-op became particularly important for them.64 Delia Larkin established a small shirt-making factory which employed between eight and ten of the women, who became ‘marked’, or virtually unemployable on account of their strike activities. Their speciality was a workman’s shirt called the ‘Redhand’, but as the enterprise expanded they added children’s clothes and women’s shoes and stockings to their repertoire, as well as serving as a private post ofice where small parcels of arms and ammunition were received.65After Delia Larkin’s departure for England in 1915, the involvement of republican women in the union increased. This was probably because some nationalists, including Helena Molony, had been suspicious of what she described as ‘the revolting unwholesome Englishness of Larkin and the strike and all’.66 James Connolly asked Helena Molony to take over the running of the Co-operative and, according to Molony, to begin to organise the women who worked in it ‘as a unit of the Citizen Army’.67 The women’s co-operative, later renamed the Connolly Co-operative Workrooms, was based behind Liberty Hall, at 31 Eden Quay, and served as something of a headquarters for Molony in particular. Her small but wellequipped ofice at the back of the Co-operative shop contained the printing press which produced the Worker’s Republic, of which Molony was then the registered proprietor.68 That ofice also hosted a steady stream of seditious visitors, including Pearse, Connolly, Markievicz and Joseph Plunkett, its relative inaccessibility to all but the initiated providing a perfect cover for their meetings and movements. It was soon to produce political armlets for a number of societies, as well as providing a base for activist women, including Rosamond Jacob and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen. The women who worked and organised there, who sang ‘rebelly songs’ as they went about their daily jobs, hosted jumble sales and concerts in aid of the republican movement as well as, by 1917, identifying themselves as a constituent organisation of the broader republican movement.69

63 65 66 67 69

Jones, Obstreperous Lassies, pp. 10–11. 64 Moriarty, ‘Larkin’, p. 100. Jones, Obstreperous Lassies, pp. 18–19. DRJ, 11 December 1913, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(25). 68 BMH WS: 391: Helena Molony. Ibid., and PRO, CO/904/210/305. Maud Eden, ‘Irish Women and Irish Labour’, New Ireland, 2:68 (9 June 1917), 420–1.

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All the women connected with the Co-operative were members of the IWWU, and many, almost certainly the vast majority, became members of the Irish Citizen Army, whose own 1914 constitution insisted that all members were members of a trade union.70 After the union’s reorganisation from 1916, its list of oficials boasted all the best-known ICA women including Lynn, Molony, ffrench-Mullen and Marie Perolz.71 After the Rising, new ofice-holders were to include Celia Harrison, Louie Bennett and the Misses Chenevix, relecting the growing appeal of the organisation among social reform activists. Molony attempted to train a number of organisers, hand-picked the women who worked at the Co-operative shop and in its workrooms and planned to organise women workers into sections when more organisers became available. This sectional organisation was subsequently partially accomplished with the help of experienced suffragists, but in the year or so between Molony’s takeover of the enterprise and the Easter Rising, establishing the ‘small keen union’ which Connolly had envisaged had to be squeezed in beside training, arming and organising the men and women of the ICA.72

70

71 72

Jones, Obstreperous Lassies, p. 17; and Sean O’Casey, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin, 1919), pp. 14–5. Jones, Obstreperous Lassies, p. 24. Maud Eden, ‘Irish Women Workers’ Union – Oficial Policy’, New Ireland, 2:70 (23 September 1916), 520–1.

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7

‘Loaded with sedition’

Emergencies ind their women as well as their men; if it were otherwise, with regard to either sex the lame of revolt against oppression would have died long before our time. The revolution threw up women along with men heroes; if things had been otherwise the war would not have achieved its limited success.1

I The establishment of Cumann na mBan in May 1914 should be viewed as a product of prevailing trends in nationalism and feminism.2 The immediate context for the formation of the women’s organisation was the foundation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913, but many of the feminist and nationalist reservations about Cumann na mBan which quickly emerged were well-established points of conlict before this time. The foundation of Cumann na mBan provided polemicists who were already well versed in these debates with a new and highly public forum for deliberation about the standing of women within nationalist politics and the ordering of political priorities. It also prompted an unusually public debate between constitutional and advanced political women which relected par excellence the relative force of each camp. The fact that the Volunteer movement was primarily aimed at Irish men was evident at its irst public meeting held in the Rotunda in November 1913, but so too was the implicit recognition that this was both customary and acceptable. The audience – composed mainly of men, though a space was provided for interested women – was told that ‘there will also be work for women to do’. This sentiment subsequently appeared in the Volunteer manifesto, which also declared that there were ‘signs that the women of Ireland, true to their record, are especially enthusiastic for

1

2

Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/41(44). This chapter’s title comes from the same source (UCDA, LA18/12(4)). McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 5.

128

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the success of the Irish Volunteers’.3 This gave encouragement to some women, hopeful of a meaningful role within the new organisation, but the reference to women’s work was in reality little more than a platitude of the kind common in an era when women’s participation in political life was no longer automatically disregarded but was not as yet taken for granted. The fact that women were mentioned at all relects slowly changing attitudes in Irish society at large and perhaps the more liberal views of some of the leading Volunteers, who may have been used to working alongside women in Sinn Féin. But the rest of the document was aimed entirely and explicitly at male nationalists, whose ‘civic rights as men’, for example, would apparently be compromised by their failure to join the new organisation.4 The founders of the Volunteers plainly did not expect women to join or participate in the organisation on the same terms as men, but neither, as McCarthy has argued, is there ‘evidence to suggest that the entire male leadership set about actively excluding women from the Volunteers’.5 The reality was that the involvement of women was very much a side issue, unsurprising both in the context of Ireland’s volatile political situation in late 1913 and its record of women’s involvement in nationalist politics. There appears to be little evidence that the main organisers spent much time contemplating the role of women, but there is evidence to suggest that the matter was a live one in some circles at least. In response to an enquiry from Chrissie Doyle, Patrick Pearse admitted, for example, that the organisers ‘had not yet had time to consider in any detail the work of the women’ as they had been too busy drilling and organising the men.6 The fact, however, that Doyle asked him so soon after the foundation of the Volunteers about what women might do within the movement suggests that activist women were quick off the mark and eager to be involved. Pearse’s reply also hinted at some of the contradictions which would come to characterise the role of women within the movement. While, for example, he suggested that women would soon have ambulance and Red Cross work to do, and that a women’s rile club would be ‘desirable’, he added that he ‘would not like the idea of women drilling and marching in the ordinary way but there is no reason why they should not learn to shoot’.7 What, one wonders, would be the purpose of only 3 4 5 6

7

Manifesto of the Irish Volunteers, Irish Review, 3:4 (December 1913), p. 505. Ibid., p. 503. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 10. Patrick Pearse to Chrissie Doyle, 30 November 1913, cited in Rosemary Cullen Owens, A Social History of Women in Ireland, 1870–1970 (Dublin, 2005), p. 113. Patrick Pearse to Chrissie Doyle, 30 November 1913, Ten Letters to Miss C. M. Doyle, NLI, MS 10,486.

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partial military training for women, unless the point of the movement was little more than symbolic? Some commentators refused absolutely to countenance the idea of women in a militia,8 but the overwhelming response to the issue was silence. This cannot have come as any kind of surprise to the women who had followed events from the audience or from outside the Rotunda. They largely collaborated in this public silence as even the most active of them set out quietly and privately to devise a role for women within the movement. One of the few published statements on the question appeared in the separatist Irish Freedom in late 1913. On the surface, the role for women outlined by ‘Southwoman’ appeared to be rather insipid, or could perhaps, as Margaret Ward has argued, be read as ‘a rearguard argument’ against those who denounced politically active women.9 But ‘Southwoman’s’ article, in which she listed supporting the language and native industries movements as admirable activities for patriotic women, was more than a conventional call to arms for loyal women. Its espousal of ‘traditional’ political activities for women relected the reality of the kind of work done by most nationalist women. But while acknowledging those, and perhaps reassuring her more conventional readers, ‘Southwoman’ also presented a robust case for vigorous female involvement in Irish political life: But if you want to be of use to Ireland, you must not shy at the word ‘politics’. You must be prepared to come forward as militant Nationalists (not ‘constitutional’ Home Rulers) and to follow your principles openly, as men are expected to do, even if they should lead you, through unpopularity and scorn of the fashionable people, to the prison gate.10

This article also argued that women had historically taken up arms in defence of their nation and, moreover, that Irish women should be ready to ight again if the country required their services. Very few commentators, feminists included, dared to broach the issue of women actually taking up arms except in the kinds of general terms seen in ‘Southwoman’s’ piece. ‘Southwoman’s’ article was not unusual in its attempt both to appease potential critics and to encourage women to become more active. It relected the dilemma faced by the kinds of women who had been involved in Inghinidhe na hÉireann, the NWC and, at times, Sinn Féin. These women were a minority among nationalist women, let alone 8 10

9 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 14. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 91. ‘Southwoman’, Irish Freedom, November 1913, quoted in Ward, In Their Own Voice, p. 40.

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among Irish women in general, and, like ‘Southwoman’, they must have been alert to the danger of advocating what most readers would have considered an overly radical message about women’s contribution to the national struggle. They must also have been well aware of the public disapproval that militant women had attracted in recent years. This was especially true of suffragettes, particularly those who had been accused of jeopardising Home Rule by putting their sectional interest before the national interest. Militant nationalist women had not been immune from public censure, either. Debates between women’s groups and nationalist organisations including Sinn Féin and the Irish Party had also, as we have seen, resulted in public disagreement about political priorities and how to attain them. Similar arguments within and between women’s groups further complicated the issue, not least because of the rifts which had opened up between the women who prioritised women’s suffrage and the women, both constitutional and advanced, who argued that the two ideals were not mutually exclusive, but that the national interest must take precedence at times of crisis. Any attempt to deine women’s role in the Volunteer movement thus had to be approached very carefully if further public rows were to be avoided. But how could any new organisation hope to be at once advanced enough for the radicals, moderate enough for the constitutionalists, feminist enough for the suffragists and broad enough to appeal to the majority of female nationalists? One answer was to mirror the Volunteers’ public position of ‘neutrality’ and non-partisanship. There was a slim chance that the spectre of a damaging split – which loomed over Cumann na mBan even before its foundation – could be averted if this impartial stand were maintained. Given the seemingly uniied state of Ulster unionism, and Irish nationalism’s lamentable tendency to splinter at key moments, the possibility of a split was no small concern. A division would cause embarrassment and undermine the cause for men and women alike, but for the women, it could also undermine the very idea of women’s collective activity. Much was at stake. All these thorny issues would be played out within Cumann na mBan over the coming months and years, and many of the same debates which had plagued earlier women’s groups and political activities would be revisited. They had not, after all, been resolved before 1913. The details of Cumann na mBan’s foundation remain uncertain, but it was hardly spontaneous. The fact that it was formally launched several months after the Volunteers appeared suggests either that there was little immediate demand for such an organisation, or, as many of its earliest members subsequently asserted, that a good deal of behind the scenes

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planning and consideration preceded its launch. Mary Colum, a founder member, claimed: And so it was with a strong national feeling that if the Volunteer movement was to be a great national one, women must take their due place in it, that a few women gathered together in a small room to found Cumann na mBan. At irst a great many dificulties came in the way; when at last, after many meetings, the organisation was formed, it had no name but it had very deinite aims.11

Sighle Humphreys suggested that the idea for the organisation emanated from Thomas MacDonagh, and Nancy Wyse Power agreed.12 Kathleen Clarke claimed the IRB had had the idea to form Cumann na mBan,13 while Áine O’Rahilly believed that Jennie Wyse Power and a number of other nationalist women led the bid for association.14 Cumann na mBan’s history was to be rewritten many times over the years, with even the date of its foundation being disputed: some oficial documents, for instance, dated its establishment to November 1913 with branches following in March of the following year.15 It is no surprise that ambivalence about the society’s formation remains, given that most members’ memoirs were written many years after their involvement, at a time when the calibre of individual contributions to the nationalist struggle were often measured by their roles in the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, both of which had become central to most narratives. Most active members joined after 1916 and had no real insight into its foundation in any case, but those who were involved in the earliest days tended to emphasise the pioneering role of advanced nationalist women, most notably Wyse Power and some of her colleagues from the Inghinidhe and Sinn Féin. Elizabeth Bloxham’s description of a rather hectic evolution chimes with a number of others: The actual founding of Cumann na mBan was the result of a conversation with Mrs. Wyse-Power and I think Molly McGuire (later Mrs. P. Colum) and some others, whose names I don’t remember, during one of my holiday visits to Dublin. I cannot even remember where the conversation took place. It may have been during the Easter holidays of 1914. Mrs. Power spoke of an executive and I asked how an executive is elected – she said, ‘we elect ourselves; that is the way an executive has to be elected’ … She jotted down a number of names.16

Jennie Wyse Power’s own version complemented Bloxham’s, though Wyse Power emphasised the idea that the ‘various groups’ which met 11 12

13 15 16

Irish Freedom, September 1914, p. 3. Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1404/(1–4); and BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power. 14 Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, pp. 49–50. BMH WS 333: Áine O’Rahilly. Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution (Dublin, 1914), p. 1. BMH WS 632: Elizabeth Bloxham.

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before Cumann na mBan was founded aimed to ‘discuss the formation of a woman’s society whose goal would be to work independently, and at the same time organise Nationalist women to be of service to the Irish Volunteers’.17 Wyse Power’s view of proceedings was published in 1919 and was thus much closer to the actual event than most, but it was misleading in parts.18 It remains, nevertheless, an important document because it suggested that the discussion about women’s participation was not restricted to one political circle, and because it attempted to balance the independence of the women’s group with its aim to aid the Volunteers. Maintaining this equilibrium was to prove exceptionally dificult and would become one of the key points of contention, especially for the feminists in the organisation, among whom Wyse Power was one of the most prominent. McCarthy has argued that ‘it was quite clear that some women refused to work in a subsidiary capacity within the Volunteers, and so the idea of a separate women’s organisation gathered momentum’, and it is possible that this conviction drove the founders to decide on a separate women’s organisation rather than attempting to gain membership of the Volunteers.19 We cannot know whether the idea of integration was entertained privately, but it was not publicly discussed, perhaps because the founders of Cumann na mBan did not favour it, or possibly because they knew that the Volunteers would refuse them and they did not want to risk public embarrassment. In any case, the nationalist women who were watching the burgeoning activities of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC) were determined to participate in some way in this new militia movement, if not in the Volunteers. Cumann na mBan was oficially launched at a meeting at Dublin’s Wynn’s Hotel on 2 April. Press accounts of this irst meeting conirm that the attendance was relatively small, ‘about 100 ladies’ according to the Irish Times.20 But it seems that a large number of the women who were there were already active in political life and that they represented a genuinely broad spectrum of nationalist opinion. Agnes O’Farrelly presided over this meeting, suggesting that a good deal of thought and discussion about the public face of the assembly had indeed taken place before it was called. Wyse Power later explained that O’Farrelly had ‘shown a special interest in the formation of a woman’s organisation to assist the Irish Volunteers’.21 This was no doubt true, but her choice as president was more likely down to her appeal to a broad spectrum of nationalist opinion, despite 17 18 20 21

Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan (Dublin, 1919), p. 4. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 34–5. 19 Ibid., p. 12. IT, FJ and II, 3 April 1914; and McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 15. Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 4.

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the fact that her Redmondite politics were unacceptable to the majority of masterminds behind the formation of Cumann na mBan. A leading member of the Gaelic League and an important Gaelic scholar in her own right, O’Farrelly was an attractive igurehead, unthreatening to moderate nationalists, as evidenced by her position on the 1912 Home Rule Bill, and adept at working against sectionalism through her Gaelic League involvement. The more radical founders must have recognised that O’Farrelly, a mature and respected academic, was likely to quell anxieties about the potentially unrespectable nature of women’s involvement in nationalist politics and to bring to the movement the broadest possible backing. Such a wide support base was vital if the new women’s organisation was going to be able to compare favourably with the UWUC, and to demonstrate that an appetite for women’s involvement existed beyond the advanced circles of Sinn Féin and the Inghinidhe. Cumann na mBan’s founders were, moreover, as aware as the Volunteer leadership of the necessity of appearing to be a useful addition to the broader nationalist movement instead of a critical voice at the margins, rather like Sinn Féin. A broad, united front was vital, and O’Farrelly seemed to it the bill well. As a Home Ruler, O’Farrelly represented prevailing nationalist opinion among Irish women, and she was not alone in expressing enthusiasm for the new venture from within this constituency. Other constitutional nationalists, including Bridget Dudley Edwards and Mary Sheehy Kettle, were also present at the inaugural meeting.22 Alice Stopford Green soon became involved, and even Sophie Bryant, headmistress of the North London Collegiate School, became very enthusiastic about the branch started at her school by, among others, Min Ryan.23 The surviving evidence suggests that – O’Farrelly’s presidency notwithstanding – republican women were the main movers and shakers behind the scenes, and at least some of the tensions which they had perhaps hoped that O’Farrelly’s leadership would paper over were in reality all too evident from the initial meeting. The irst sticking point was her alleged sneering at the Irish Party’s work at Westminster.24 This appears a very strange accusation given her proven track record on party loyalty, but it hints at the very real concern among constitutional nationalists – even in the new organisation’s very earliest days – that Cumann na mBan might become a forum for anti-Party sentiment. This accusation came from Mary Sheehy Kettle, whose insistence that party politics should be kept out of the organisation received warm endorsement.25 O’Farrelly 22 24

FJ, 3April 1913. IT, 3 April 1914.

23 25

BMH WS 399: Josephine Ryan. Ibid.

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naturally denied the accusation, pledging her support for the Party, but her denial and perhaps even her alleged sneering were less important than the fact that the constitutional women feared an advanced monopoly of the organisation from the beginning. They were right to be concerned, but while Mary Sheehy Kettle’s comment reassured other constitutional women, it also hinted at political intrigue wider than Cumann na mBan. Eoin MacNeill learned from O’Farrelly and other committee members that ‘Mrs Tom’ had in fact made the comment in order to force a ‘profession of zeal for the Party’ and to aid in the rehabilitation of her husband’s political reputation.26 The intense pressure within the Volunteer movement to balance independence with the appearance (at least) of broad nationalist consensus clearly affected both the female and male associations. The public reassurance that party politics must be kept out of Cumann na mBan was heartening, but advanced nationalist women made their mark in other ways, not least in the composition of the irst provisional committee. Of the eight women named, six were well known in advanced circles: Jennie Wyse Power and Louise Gavan Duffy were members of Sinn Féin; Maire Tuohy was a former secretary of the Inghinidhe and the wife of a prominent Fenian; Mrs MacNeill, Nancy O’Rahilly and Mary Colum – the latter another former member of the Inghinidhe – were all married to prominent Volunteers.27 Each of these women would side with the Irish Volunteers in the split and would play an active role in the Sinn Féin election victory of 1918. Most were also very enthusiastic Irish-Irelanders: Colum and Gavan Duffy, for example, had taught at St Ita’s before Gavan Duffy went on to found her own Irish school in 1917. It is very striking that with the exception of Agnes O’Farrelly, no prominent constitutional nationalist woman was appointed to this provisional committee. This may have been a relection of the lack of formal organisational and political experience of Redmondite women. It also suggested that the establishment of the body had been stage-managed by advanced nationalist women who were willing to make compromises in the name of nationalist unity and respectability, but who had deliberately placed themselves in positions of real authority and inluence within the organisation. In this, they differed from their male colleagues. MacNeill and the other Volunteer founders knew that they had only to ‘hold up a inger and physical force men and every Sinn Féiner would come in’. But they actively courted the approval of the Irish Party, bringing in 26

27

Eoin MacNeill to Darrel Figgis, 11 May 1914, Bulmer Hobson Papers, NLI, MS 13,174(3). The other member was a Mrs MacDonagh O’Mahon, about whom I could not ind any information.

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Party men despite the wishes of many of the more radical founders.28 Cumann na mBan, on the other hand, began life with very few constitutional women in positions of leadership and made a much smaller effort to accommodate Irish Party women, aside from O’Farrelly’s leadership. This suggests, once again, that by 1914, at a crucial juncture in the Party’s history, it simply did not enjoy the support of women in any organised or practical way. Cumann na mBan failed to court such women with any real zeal because they were neither numerous nor inluential enough to bother cultivating. The aims proclaimed at the irst meeting of Cumann na mBan were unspeciic enough to cause little offence to most nationalists: To advance the cause of Irish liberty. To organise Irishwomen in furtherance of this object. To assist in arming and equipping a body of Irishmen for the defence of Ireland. To form a fund for these purposes, to be called the ‘Defence of Ireland Fund’.29 The name Cumann na mBan was also announced, though its translated name, the Irishwomen’s Council, was often used, especially by moderates and sceptics in the early days. Their four founding objects, though innocuous enough on the surface, in fact contained within them the seeds of great debate, particularly on the question of the status of Cumann na mBan vis-à-vis the Volunteers. Was Cumann na mBan a ladies’ auxiliary or a serious, independent organisation in its own right? Hanna Sheehy Skefington launched the feminist critique almost immediately, asking whether it would be ‘the principal duty of the new organisation to collect subscriptions for the men’.30 She soon after added fuel to the ire by describing Cumann na mBan as a ‘ladies’ auxiliary committee’.31 O’Farrelly replied immediately that Cumann na mBan would ‘naturally’ keep in touch with the men and support them to their best ability, but her inaugural address suggested a far more subservient role. She reminded her audience that it was not for women to ‘undertake physically and directly the defence of the nation except in the last extremity’ and that: We shall do ourselves the honour of helping to arm and equip our National Volunteers. Each rile we put in their hands will represent to us a bolt fastened behind the door of some Irish home to keep out the hostile stranger. Each cartridge will be a watchdog to ight for the sanctity of the hearth. We shall start irst aid classes, and later on, if necessary, ambulance corps.32 28

29 31

Eoin MacNeill to Darrel Figgis, 11 May 1914, Bulmer Hobson Papers, NLI, MS 13,174(3). IT, 3 April 1914. 30 Ibid. FJ, 6 May 1914. 32 Irish Volunteer, 18 April 1914.

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O’Farrelly’s words would not have sounded unusually submissive to the majority of her audience, especially as such sentimental rhetoric was a very common feature of contemporary nationalist writing about the roles and duties of Irish women. Even the radical press was not immune from this: the advanced nationalist newspaper, Spark, for instance, ran a kind of nationalist beauty and popularity contest with its ‘Dublin’s Best Girl’ competition from early 1915.33 There is anyway very little extant evidence to suggest that nationalist women actively sought to replicate the work of the Volunteers. Even its harshest feminist critics failed to suggest that members of Cumann na mBan should be uniformed, armed and trained alongside and identically to men. O’Farrelly’s tone was conventional in so far as women were encouraged to learn irst aid and signalling, but directing women to participate in what was essentially the foundation and maintenance of a militia was far from conventional. The only real contemporary parallel was the UWUC. More importantly, O’Farrelly’s speech must be understood within the context of the organisation’s determination to avoid sectionalism at all costs. As a Gaelic Leaguer and women’s education campaigner, O’Farrelly knew better than most how important – and dificult – this was. Nevertheless, a small number of the early enthusiasts evidently did not approve of her inaugural speech, which seemed to contradict some of their views. Wyse Power, for example, claimed that many young women ‘wanted very badly to learn to use a rile’.34 She was, however, almost unique in expressing this aspiration, and she did not repeat it. Áine O’Rahilly remembered that ‘at that irst meeting one of the women present, Miss Agnes O’Farrelly, suggested that we should start making puttees for the Volunteers. I was disgusted. I came away and told my sister-in-law I was not going there again.’35 She did, in fact, decide to attend the irst-aid classes run by the organisation, as did many other women who may well have hoped for a more active role but accepted what was available at the time. Others would ind alternatives, especially in Liberty Hall. The women who remained loyal to Cumann na mBan were obliged to reconcile themselves to the fact that their connection with the Volunteers was not particularly clear-cut; their independence and equal standing within the broader Volunteer movement in particular remained ambiguous. While many members appeared to be unconcerned about this, others very plainly were, not least members of its executive. Louise Gavan Duffy and Mary Colum insisted publicly from the organisation’s earliest days on a number of occasions that Cumann na mBan was an

33

Spark, 21 February 1915.

34

II, 4 May 1914.

35

BMH WS 333: Áine O’Rahilly.

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independent body rather than a ‘ladies’ auxiliary’. Criticism from Hanna Sheehy Skefington and others hit a very raw nerve. Some members were deeply offended by the notion that Cumann na mBan existed on anything but an equal footing with the Volunteers: emphasising its independence, and even attempting to portray it as a feminist-nationalist organisation became important, even imperative, to a number of members. Others were still more insulted by the idea that in supporting Cumann na mBan they were supporting John Redmond, enemy of women’s suffrage.36 This became a more pressing criticism after the Irish Party managed to gain some control over the Volunteer organisation. How could the claims that the Volunteers operated on a ‘broad national basis’ and that support of them did not imply support of Redmond continue to stand?37 Individual experiences of membership and status varied widely between branches and counties, as did personal opinions about Cumann na mBan’s position in the Volunteer movement hierarchy: some women campaigned actively for equality, others appeared mildly concerned, while many more probably gave the matter very little thought indeed. One memorialist explained that Cumann na mBan’s ‘early membership was drawn from the female relatives of the men who had inaugurated the Irish Volunteers in October 1913, and from the women members of the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin’, but added that: [T]he promoters of the organisation may have had in mind an auxiliary association of women acting under the general instructions of the Irish Volunteer Executive, but the decision of the founder members of Cumann na mBan was that the organisation should be independent, working in conjunction with and guaranteeing the maximum support for the Volunteers.38

An oficial publication similarly insisted in 1914 that its members were not ‘the auxiliaries or the hand-maidens or the camp followers of the Volunteers – we are their allies. We are an independent body, with our own executive and its own constitution.’39 The executive’s concerns continued nonetheless and were highlighted at the organisation’s 1915 Convention, when several members objected to the inclusion in the constitution of the passage ‘the arming and equipping of the Volunteers must be considered of irst importance’ on the grounds that when this need were met, Cumann na mBan would ‘not necessarily cease to exist’.40 This was almost certainly an attempt to address directly Hanna 36 38 39 40

IC, 9 May 1914. 37 Ibid., 4 July 1914. Cumann na mBan, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1404/(1–4). Cumann na mBan, The Volunteers, the Women, and the Nation (Dublin, 1914), p. 3. Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1915, Eoin MacNeill Papers, UCDA LA1/H/10(2–9).

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Sheehy Skefington’s argument that ‘the proposed “Ladies’ Auxiliary Committee” has apparently no function beyond that of a conduit pipe to pour in a stream of gold into the coffers of the male organisation, and to be turned off automatically as soon as it has served this mean and subordinate purpose’.41 Committed members clearly had long-term ambitions for Cumann na mBan, ambitions which stretched beyond their support work for the Volunteers. The feminists in the movement probably privately shared some of Sheehy Skefington’s concerns but, like the Sinn Féin women before them, opted to try to challenge the nationalist movement from within rather than from the sidelines. The women who wished to be active in the Volunteer movement had no real choice. Nancy Wyse Power, for instance, hesitated before inally – and ‘somewhat doubtfully’ – joining Cumann na mBan’s Central branch in 1915. Its ‘programme’ did not appeal to her, but she enrolled in the end because ‘from the trend of events [she] felt a desire to belong to some organised body’.42 Imperfect though it undoubtedly was, Cumann na mBan was the most active of all the nationalist groups which allowed female membership at that time. Nancy Wyse Power, in common with her mother and other prominent activists, attempted to bring feminism into Cumann na mBan. She insisted that ‘while the primary object was to render all necessary assistance to the ighting men, the organisation remained at all times independent and we at headquarters insisted that members should take orders only from their own oficers’.43 ‘The promoters’ may, she further argued ‘have had in mind an auxiliary association of women acting under the general instructions of the Volunteer Executive’, but Cumann na mBan ‘immediately declared itself to be an independent organisation of women determined to make its own decisions’.44 Cumann na mBan clearly had some success in this aspiration, as an Irish Volunteers’ auxiliary was launched for men and women who could not join the Volunteers or Cumann na mBan.45 The debate about the independence or otherwise of Cumann na mBan was not conined to metropolitan members. A Miss Colfer of the Waterford branch, for example, argued that the Irishwomen’s Council was not merely ‘an ambulance corps connected with the Volunteers’ but was ‘an independent women’s organisation to advance the case of Irish liberty in every way possible’.46 Nevertheless, equality appeared to be less important to most rural branches, many of which struggled in the early years to attract members, let alone to debate the place of women 41 43 46

IT, 8 May 1914. 42 BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power. 44 Ibid. Ibid. 45 Bulmer Hobson Papers, NLI, MS 13,174(3). Irish Volunteer, 22 August 1914.

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in the Volunteer movement. It is clear that practices varied across the country and that provincial branches often adopted their own procedures, according to means and local outlook. The extent and nature of the interaction between local Volunteer and Cumann na mBan branches was important for both societies, but it was the case that the Volunteers were much more often than not perceived to be and believed themselves to be the senior partner in the team. It is dificult to see how this could have been otherwise, given that Cumann na mBan was explicitly formed to aid the Volunteers. The executive worked hard to correct this impression, but its directives clearly did not always reach its members. Rosamond Jacob, a member of the Waterford branch, concurred with the two Dublin organisers who visited her during their tour of provincial branches in 1915: She had a lot to say, and seemed to me to look on Cumann na mBan too much as an auxiliary to the Volunteers, but it would be strange if she did not, after inding all the provincial branches almost entirely dependent on the kindness and encouragement of the local Volunteers. Miss Broder agreed with me in blaming the women’s uselessness on their upbringing, and in thinking that C. na mB. should be more independent of the I.V.47

It is dificult to know whether some branches would even have survived without such Volunteer support or, moreover, whether some members would have joined Cumann na mBan without male encouragement. There was nothing, after all, stopping them from supporting the Volunteers through contributing to the male organisation’s own collections. It seems that some branches relied on local Volunteers more than others. Elizabeth and Nell Corr’s membership of their Belfast branch, for example, was proposed by their Volunteer brother,48 while Aine Heron’s membership was proposed by a woman, but seconded by a man.49 Ata Horgan of the Killarney Cumann na mBan even recalled taking her orders from the local Volunteer captain.50 On the other hand, Deirdre Little of the Dundalk branch claimed that her society had no oficial connection with the Volunteers, but took much interest in their doings.51 Attitudes in individual branches notwithstanding, the organisation’s constitution was emphatic from the outset that Cumann na mBan was independent from the Volunteers. Min Ryan testiied to this insistence. Her own attitude was more ambivalent but probably closer to the general view of 47 48 50

51

DRJ, 23 April 1915, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(28). BMH WS 179: Elizabeth and Nell Corr. 49 BMH WS 293: Aine Heron. Ata Horgan to Sighle Humphreys, c. 1968, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1389(1). Deirdre Little’s account of the formation of the Dundalk Cumann na mBan, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1405(7).

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most members. She noted that Cumann na mBan ‘had it straight’ that it existed as an independent body with its own constitution but added that ‘the fact of the matter was that our activities consisted of service to the Volunteers … we were not formed as an auxiliary, but we looked on ourselves as such’.52 This is precisely what such critics as Hanna Sheehy Skefington had predicted would be the result of failing to insist on or even to clarify equal rights from the outset. She had compared Cumann na mBan unfavourably with the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council, which, though deeply objectionable as a women’s auxiliary, had at least extracted a promise of a place in Carson’s provisional government in return for their services.53 What had Cumann na mBan been promised? Why did nationalist women not have a place on the Volunteer executive?54 She maintained that she had the ‘approval and sympathy of nearly all the women present’ at the inaugural meeting. But some members professed their outrage at the ‘amazing suggestion that in return for our help we make a bargain with our men’ and characterised Sheehy Skefington’s position as: ‘“Give me a vote, and I’ll buy you a rile, otherwise you must buy it yourself ”.’55 The suffrage question was once again to divide nationalist-feminist opinion, and it appeared yet again that the radicals in the IWFL were clearly in a minority in their unconditional insistence on the primacy of women’s suffrage. O’Farrelly outlined what had become for many nationalists the standard response to IWFL criticism: The Chairman said that they were at one with a great many things Mrs. Sheehy Skefington had said, but she desired to point out that that association was not primarily a Women’s Suffrage Association. The irst thing in their minds was the liberty of Ireland, and she believed that the enfranchisement of women would more effectively follow an appeal to a body of Irishmen sitting in an Irish parliament than to a body of men sitting in Westminster.56

This must have been a dificult exchange for O’Farrelly, who had worked amicably with Sheehy Skefington in a number of feminist organisations, particularly in the women’s higher education campaign. She did not appear to want to prolong this public debate, but the sentiments expressed by Sheehy Skefington hit a raw nerve at the heart of the organisation, and other members were drawn into the debate. Jennie Wyse Power was probably the most outspoken Cumann na mBan suffragist, but others, including Bridget Dudley Edwards and Mary Colum, were also actively pro-suffrage. This trend would continue, with many of the women who would become central to the organisation 52 54

53 BMH WS 399: Josephine Mulcahy. FJ, 6 May 1914. 55 Ibid. Máire Ni Chillin, II, 8 May 1914. 56 FJ, 3 April 1914.

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also strong supporters. These included Markievicz, Mary MacSwiney and Elizabeth Bloxham. Louise Gavan Duffy and Mary Colum wrote at once to the Freeman’s Journal as secretaries of Cumann na mBan, emphasising the organisation’s independence and highlighting the irst two of its four aims; neither aim mentioned men, and both were vague enough to sustain the argument that the organisation was in ‘no sense a ladies’ auxiliary committee’.57 They also reminded readers that many within Cumann na mBan were themselves ‘keen Suffragists’ but added that ‘as an organisation, we must conine ourselves within the four walls of our constitution’.58 Gavan Duffy and Colum were on relatively safe ground here, as it would have been dificult to argue that an organisation dedicated explicitly to Irish nationalism should be compelled to endorse women’s suffrage. Louise Gavan Duffy later explained how the executive, including the suffragists among them, approached the question: There were women on the committee who strongly supported the cause of women’s rights and who had previously worked for the suffragettes. There were others who didn’t share those opinions – but the affairs of the Volunteers were so important, so secretive and so necessary that we couldn’t afford to divide our energies or our responsibilities. We put every other consideration aside and were ready to do whatever we were asked to do: messages, attending the wounded, supplying ammunition, any work which was needed.59

Gavan Duffy was herself a supporter of the women’s suffrage movement, but what her comment above makes clear is the distinction that existed in her mind at least between the two movements. This distinction was less absolute in the minds of other women, and while the Irish Citizen insisted that nationalist feminists were obliged to choose between Ireland and the vote, it seemed that most women simply did not agree with them, deciding as they had in 1912 that they could support both. The suffragists understood this and attempted to address it. The feminist nationalist argument that Home Rule must come before suffrage had of course acquired a sharper edge by 1914, as only the most dedicated of nationalist suffragists, namely some key members of the IWFL, continued to preach the primacy of the vote for women. The IWFL nonetheless maintained that this hierarchy of political priorities actually made less sense in 1914 than it had two years before, as the Home Rule Act was now on the statute book and nationalist suffragists thus no longer had ‘any excuse whatever for holding back’.60 A heated debate followed, mainly carried out in the pages of the Irish Citizen, which was in 57 59 60

Ibid., 8 May 1914. 58 Ibid. Louise Gavan Duffy, quoted in Taillon, When History Was Made, p. 5. IC, 3 October 1914, p. 156.

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many ways a replay of the earlier Sheehy Skefington–Bean na hÉireann dispute. The Irish Citizen characteristically described Cumann na mBan members as ‘slave women’, while Cumann na mBan activists accused the paper of becoming ‘the chief anti-suffragist organ in Ireland’. The nationalist and suffragist Mary MacSwiney learned about the formation of Cumann na mBan through the pages of the Irish Citizen, underlining once again how activist women moved between feminism and nationalism.61 Though MacSwiney remained committed to women’s suffrage, she contributed a number of carefully argued pieces to the Citizen, before inally begging its editors to see a ‘little common sense’ after several weeks of sharp debate.62 In common with most nationalist suffragists, she believed that Irish nationalists simply did not have the luxury of putting suffrage before Home Rule ‘in our very exceptional circumstances’.63 Helena Molony, though not herself a member of Cumann na mBan, agreed, and she also recoiled at the suggestion that supporting the Volunteers was in any way an endorsement of Redmond. She argued that O’Farrelly’s inaugural speech was ‘an expression of allegiance to anti-English militancy’ rather than evidence of a ‘slavish spirit’. She went on to set out the most eloquent objection to the Citizen’s position: It is with great regret I see the Citizen ranging itself on the side of those who are against women taking part in the armed defence of their country – because they may, incidentally, be a source of strength to Mr Redmond. This is an attitude which, as Miss MacSwiney says, will do much to injure Suffrage in Ireland. The Volunteers, men and women, have been called into being to defend the liberties of all Irish citizens … every Nationalist knows this to be true. You do not alter the facts of a case by dubbing other people’s principles ‘party’ and calling your own ‘freedom’. It is possible, and may be desirable, to support the Parliamentary party without necessarily supporting Mr Redmond’s anti-suffrage opinions; and, personally, I have great conidence in the ability of Irish suffragists to deal with Mr Redmond and other antis on the subject of women when we get them away from the protection of the English Parliament. It is also possible for some women, without being what you call ‘camp-followers’, to imagine that the freedom – even the partial freedom – of a nation to be of more importance than the partial freedom of the feminist portion of it. You say, truly, ‘there can be no free nation without free women’, but neither can there be free women in an enslaved nation, and it seems to me sound citizenship to put the welfare of the whole nation before any section of it. Of course these views are opposed to the policy of ‘Suffrage irst’ for which you stand, but I do not think the fact of our holding different views justiies your accusing us of being ‘reactionary’, ‘camp followers’, ‘patient thralls’, and ‘false to our sex and the highest ideals of Nationalism.’ Such an article is calculated to make the Irish Citizen, and what it stands for, unpopular 61 62

Mary MacSwiney Papers, UCDA, P48a/462, p. 45. Mary MacSwiney, IC, 23 May 1914. 63 Mary MacSwiney, ibid., 9 May 1914.

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with many Nationalists; and that is a thing, I am sure, most of the Volunteers would be very sorry to see.64

In common with MacSwiney and Rosamond Jacob, who also wrote to the Irish Citizen in protest against its position on Cumann na mBan, Molony’s letter was conciliatory on the whole. The same cannot be said of the paper’s replies to its critics, but, as in the case of the earlier exchanges between Hanna Sheehy Skefington and advanced nationalist women in the Inghinidhe and Sinn Féin, the ferocity and impact of the debate has been exaggerated. Beth McKillen, for example, argued not only that both the IWFL and Cumann na mBan ‘lost key members as a result of the feud’ but also that the ‘leadership qualities of women in both groups were wasted in personal vindictiveness’. This, moreover, apparently ‘hindered the development of an effective feminist movement in Ireland prior to 1916’.65 McKillen does not tell us who these ‘key members’ were, let alone give examples of ‘personal vindictiveness’, but, more seriously, her argument is undermined by the fact that many of the women who participated in these debates, especially Sheehy Skefington, Wyse Power, Jacob, Colum, Bloxham and Molony, continued to work together at key points despite their disagreements. Every one of the main contributors to this debate was a professed and active suffragist (and remained so), and, as we have seen, the two creeds were neither mutually exclusive nor permanently antagonistic. Rather than viewing the public debates between Hanna Sheehy Skefington (in the main) and Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan as proof of perpetual and bitter enmity, we might view them as evidence of a willing audience for a dynamic debate about how feminism and nationalism could or should coexist. The Citizen did not reserve its disapproval for Cumann na mBan alone: it continued to attack sexism where it found it, including the Volunteer organisation itself. The Sheehy Skefingtons and a number of their IWFL colleagues were irm nationalists, and they evidently had some sympathy with the aims of the Volunteers. They had among their own male supporters a number of well-known Volunteers. The Citizen even claimed towards the end of 1914 that Thomas MacDonagh had ‘exerted himself within the Volunteers to secure the recognition of the women’s movement’.66 MacDonagh spoke shortly afterwards on ‘Ireland, Women and the War’ to an IWFL meeting. A known supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and married to a suffragist, MacDonagh nevertheless 64 65 66

Helena Molony, ibid. McKillen, ‘Irish Feminism and Nationalist Separatism’, p. 59. IC, 5 December 1914.

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declared that though he himself ‘attached small importance to the vote’ he instinctively understood that the suffragettes were ighting for liberty. In the heated exchange that followed, MacDonagh was subjected to a barrage of criticism about the masculine nature of the Volunteers and was asked to explain his personal failure to ‘get the Irish Volunteers to embody liberty for women in their constitution’.67 This was an issue close to the heart of Francis Sheehy Skefington, who had written twice to the Volunteers, asking for information about how he might join his local company, but seeking at the same time assurance that the Volunteers would have ‘regard to the Rights and Liberties of women as well as men’.68 He evidently received no answer and did not join the Volunteers. But the question resurfaced the following year after MacDonagh agreed to speak in May at a meeting organised to protest against the government’s refusal to grant travel permits to the Irish women who wished to attend an international women’s peace conference at The Hague. MacDonagh’s speech can only be described as remarkable. He clearly understood the oddity of his speaking at a demonstration in favour of peace activists. He hoped ‘as a Volunteer, that he would have a better opportunity than voting to show that by “people” he meant the women as well as the men of Ireland’, and went on to declare amidst a near schizophrenic stream of consciousness that he was one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers, a member of the irst Provisional Committee, and now one of the ‘quintette’ who had been charged with running that organisation. He had devoted a considerable amount of time to the study of military subjects and of military training. It was part of his duty how to instruct men to bayonet their fellow-man; and how to put their foot on his body and pull the bayonet out afterwards. It was disgusting and nobody could hate it more than he did. He was an advocate of peace because everyone was being exploited by the dominant militarism. He had helped to arm tens of thousands of Irish men for defence; because the only justiication for war was to end age-long wars such as that in this country. He hoped they would not have any war in this country (applause). If the peace programme of the women were followed there would be no need. All their woes came back to exploitation. All the resolutions of the Hague Congress would be endorsed by everyone he knew; but they were all helpless under the ruling oligarchies. That was the reason some of them had armed. If women could take over the democratic control of the State, that would be a revolution which would end war.69

MacDonagh’s position was hardly unusual, though he was perhaps more honest than most in recognising the inconsistency at the heart of his 67 68 69

Ibid., 12 December 1914. FSS to the Volunteers, 19 October 1914, SSP, NLI, MS 33,612(17). IC, 22 May 1915.

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politics. Francis Sheehy Skefington, an avowed paciist, wrote an open letter to his friend, declaring his ‘full sympathy with the fundamental objects of the Irish Volunteers’. When the organisation ‘shook off the Redmondite incubus’, he had apparently been on the point of joining it. He did not join in the end because of the Volunteers’ failure to give a guarantee of women’s equality within the organisation and because it became more militarist as it expanded.70 Louie Bennett, one of the women who had been due to attend The Hague meeting, was less than satisied with the tenor of the demonstration at which MacDonagh spoke. She complained that its tone had been more anti-English than anti-militarist and that ‘I shall in future take no part in peace meetings which put Irish nationalism above international tolerance, and which are embittered by anti-English feuds.’71 Bennett objected to a paciism that made ‘exceptions and reservations’ and would have preferred a ‘frank outburst of hatred’ for England to the ‘sly digs’ made by an IWFL member.72 She made her most succinct case when she asked Francis Sheehy Skefington ‘by what train of reasoning militant suffragists arrive at the state of becoming peace advocates?’73 But exceptional circumstances could, it seems, lead to extraordinary conversions. Constance Markievicz had, for instance, been highly critical of the women who prioritised suffrage over nationalism, yet at a lecture she gave to the IWFL in 1915, she argued that only suffragettes were upholding the spirit of Ireland’s heroic ighting women. Women in the national movement were, on the other hand, ‘chiely there to collect funds for the men to spend. These Ladies’ Auxiliaries demoralise women, set them up in separate camps, and deprive them of all the initiative and independence. Women are left to rely on sex charm, or intrigue and backstairs inluence.’74 This was an extraordinary statement from a woman who would herself become president of Cumann na mBan in the following year. Markievicz had been involved in the foundation of Cumann na mBan in so far as she appeared to have brokered some sort of agreement between the Inghinidhe and the new women’s society in 1914.75 When Cumann na mBan was founded in 1914, an Inghinidhe na hÉireann branch of the new society was formed and continued to meet at Harcourt Street. This was distinct from the original Inghinidhe, as some old members did not join Cumann na mBan, but a number remained 70

71 72 73 74

FSS, An Open Letter to Thomas MacDonagh, reprinted from the IC, 22 May 1915, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(6). Louie Bennett to HSS, 12 May 1915, SSP, NLI, MS 22,674. Louie Bennett to HSS, 16 May 1915, SSP, NLI, MS 22,674. Louie Bennett to FSS, 18 January 1915, SSP, NLI, MS 22,265. IC, 23 October 1915. 75 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 26.

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active in the new organisation. Margaret Ward has argued convincingly that the Inghinidhe activities wound down as a number of its most highproile members gradually shifted their energies and allegiances to other nationalist organisations, primarily to Sinn Féin.76 This appears to have been the case for Jennie Wyse Power, who became increasingly active in Sinn Féin, but Molony, Markievicz and Perolz at least drifted more naturally to Liberty Hall and the Citizen Army, while a number of their comrades would become closely associated with Cumann na mBan in one way or another. Exactly when Markievicz herself joined Cumann na mBan is unclear, evidenced most spectacularly in the showdown between her and Sean O’Casey in late 1914. O’Casey called for her resignation from the Citizen Army on account of her strong connection with and sympathy for the Volunteers through her membership of Cumann na mBan. He accused her of holding an ‘oficial position on the Committee of one of the branches of Cumann na mBan’, but his motion was defeated.77 It is easy to see why he believed that she was in fact a member as she had chaired the irst meeting of the Inghinidhe branch of Cumann na mBan; she subsequently attended Cumann na mBan’s second Annual Convention in 1915 as a delegate of that branch.78 Quite how Markievicz understood her own connection to the Inghinidhe branch of Cumann na mBan is uncertain. It is possible that her denunciation of its auxiliary and passive status relected her primary allegiance to the Citizen Army, but even allowing for that, her IWFL talk suggested a real ambivalence towards Cumann na mBan at the very least. The question of the actual capacity for Cumann na Ban women to take up arms also probably informed Markievicz’s early disapproval, but as the Cumann itself became more radical (and the Citizen Army less active), her ambivalence appears to have been suspended. A seminal moment in the radicalisation of the organisation was the Cumann na mBan split in late 1914. II One of the dificulties of writing the history of Cumann na mBan is that the recollections of members themselves tend to cast the society in an exclusively republican light when, at its foundation at least, it was neither overtly republican nor even allied to one of the major nationalist factions. Like the Volunteers, it was founded in the shadow of the third 76 77 78

Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 75. O’Casey, Story of the Irish Citizen Army, pp. 44–6. Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1915, Eoin MacNeill Papers, UCDA, LA1/H/10(2–9).

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Home Rule Bill crisis and in imitation of the Ulster Volunteers/UWUC. It was primarily defensive and non-party in its early months, but memorialists often painted a different picture. Eithne Coyle, for example, in a lecture given many years after the heyday of the organisation, claimed that ‘the aims and objects’ of Cumann na mBan were ‘to help the Irish Volunteers to break the connection with England’.79 Jennie Wyse Power took this a step further in her history of the movement, written ‘entirely from memory’ in 1919. Describing the distinct political allegiances of its earliest members, she distinguished the republicans like herself from all the other people who had come into the Volunteer movement for the ‘sole purpose of ighting Carsonism, and being backed by the existing Liberal Government’. These insipid nationalists, she argued, ‘found their level when the war broke out in August and when Mr John Redmond, at Woodenbridge, offered the manhood of Ireland to ight the cause of England’. She even claimed that the history of Cumann na mBan only became ‘an interesting chapter’ after the split, suggesting that the presplit organisation was unformed, a work in progress, a pale imitation of the republican stronghold it was to become.80 Wyse Power was clearly attempting to play down the pre-republican ethos of the organisation, important in 1919 when her account was published, but important more generally to Cumann na mBan’s historical understanding of itself. Despite the political fallout, some members like Wyse Power presented the split as something of a relief, as a chance to reveal the true political colours of republican members and their organisation. Lily Brennan, for instance, described the meeting of Dublin’s Central branch where the split was debated as ‘a very enthusiastic meeting, and if a few prominent members left us, we closed ranks and knew where we stood’.81 Kathleen Clarke agreed. Though she argued that the organisation had been working in the ‘greatest harmony when the split in the Volunteers occurred’, she conceded that ‘one good result’ of the division was that ‘every member of Cumann na mBan and the Irish Volunteers knew what they were working for’.82 Some members were clearly relieved that the days of avoiding party-political debate and maintaining an even-handed approach to the national question were inally over. The split itself initially took place in October, several weeks after the Volunteers divided. Jennie Wyse Power insisted that the organisation’s 79 80 81

82

Eithne Coyle, lecture at UCD, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1226(11). Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, pp. 4–5. Lily Brennan, History of Cumann na mBan, Ceannt–Brennan Papers, NLI, MS 41,496/1, p. 26. Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, pp. 49–50.

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failure to choose sides immediately was not due to ‘want of sympathy’ but rather to ‘tactical reasons’.83 These ‘tactical reasons’ might have involved taking account of whether the advanced section would be able to commandeer the remains of the organisation after a split, and they almost certainly involved simply working out how and when a vote on the issue could be taken and by whom. Wyse Power later claimed that the question was inally decided at a Cumann na mBan Convention held in December, but the irst public debate on the issue actually took place at a ‘specially convened meeting’ of the organisation’s Central branch in October. This was Cumann na mBan’s largest branch, and the one to which most members of the executive belonged. The membership included some moderates, but, according to Bridget Dudley Edwards at least, the meeting was called without the knowledge of Agnes O’Farrelly.84 A manifesto, produced by the advanced women who outvoted the moderates by a large margin, appeared in the press soon after the meeting. It left no doubt about the views of the militants regarding the Irish Party and Irish participation in the Allied war effort: We came into being to advance the cause of Irish liberty and to organise Irishwomen in furtherance of that object. We feel bound to make the pronouncement that to urge or encourage Irish Volunteers to enlist in the British Army cannot, under any circumstances, be regarded as consistent with the work we have set ourselves to do … Since its inauguration Cumann na mBan has aimed at uniting those who, while differing on minor matters, were resolved that the integrity and honour of the Irish Nation were their irst consideration, and we rely on our members in 1914, to lift every question out of the region of personalities and parties on to the higher ground of our country’s welfare.85

A strongly Sinn Féin provisional committee which would direct Cumann na mBan branches was appointed in the aftermath of the October vote, but it was in reality little different from the original committee, with the exception of the inclusion of Margaret Dobbs and Nurse McCoy. Agnes O’Farrelly was listed as a member, but her tenure appeared increasingly uncertain. The formal split within the organisation took place at the December Convention, but the row between what had clearly become the two wings of Cumann na mBan had become very public before then. Bridget Dudley Edwards was the most high-proile constitutionalist who resigned at the October meeting of the Central branch. She subsequently claimed that she had ceased to take an interest in the society ‘from its very earliest days, mainly because of its Sinn Fein Committee’, and it seems that she was not alone in this sentiment.86 We cannot know exactly 83 85

84 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 5. Irish Volunteer, 28 November 1914. Ibid., 17 October 1914. 86 National Volunteer, 28 November 1914.

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how many members or branches were lost over the split, as membership records are patchy and various accounts of the organisation’s strength before and after the split inevitably suggest a variety of numbers. One account, for instance, claimed that it lost ‘some of its branches, and a few individual members’.87 Lily Brennan stated that ‘many branches died out’,88 while another oficial publication suggested in 1916 that there were ‘no longer branches in every country in Ireland’ as a result of the split and, even more alarmingly, that ‘[i]t seemed at one time as if the next month or two would see the end of Cumann na mBan as a National organisation altogether’.89 This was dramatic, but misleading. Aside from the fact that Cumann na mBan did not have a branch in every county before the split as it was still a comparatively weak organisation in 1914, membership numbers for the immediate pre- and post-split periods remain vague. Nevertheless, the organisation was in a ‘critical’ state after the split.90 McCarthy has estimated that Cumann na mBan lost more than half its branches, its own igures suggesting that twelve at most weathered the split, and that, on Cumann na mBan’s own igures, it had lost about 80 per cent of its branch network.91 A direct comparison of the strength of the anti-Redmondites in Cumann na mBan and the Volunteers is dificult, not least because of the lack of very exact igures and the very few surviving accounts from constitutionalists in particular, but it is likely that a higher proportion of women than men abandoned the Party. It is also likely, as was the case for the Volunteers, that the women who did stay were exceptionally committed. Their opposition to any Irish involvement in the First World War also meant that neither their energies nor their resources were depleted and distracted by a war which would ultimately trigger a crisis from which the Irish Party could not recover. After the split, the anti-Redmondite wing of the organisation retained the name Cumann na mBan, the Englishlanguage version of the name ceasing to be used.92 The strength of the organisation’s Central branch was vital as it was best placed to commandeer the society’s infrastructure, such as it was. Áine Ceannt recalled intriguingly that the Inghinidhe branch remained ‘solid as a rock’ during the spilt while the Central branch lost some of its founders as well as members.93 Jennie Wyse Power claimed that the 87 88 89 90

91 93

Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution (Dublin, 1919). Brennan, History of Cumann na mBan. Cumann na mBan Executive, The Turn of the Tide (Dublin, 19[?]), p. 2. Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1915, Eoin MacNeill Papers, UCDA, LA1/H/10/3. 92 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 40. Matthews, Renegades, p. 108. Brennan, History of Cumann na mBan.

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resolution adopted by the Central branch in October was supported by eighty-eight members and rejected by twenty-eight, relecting the strength of the advanced faction in this important branch, but this was probably not replicated around the country, where party stalwarts dominated some branches.94 The Belfast Women’s Council announced that it had never been attached to Cumann na mBan and was, as a consequence of the anti-Redmondite manifesto, now even more estranged from the Dublin body than before.95 At a meeting chaired by a local MP, the Athy branch similarly declared its support for the IPP, as did the Naas chapter.96 Some branches went the opposite way. The Limerick section, for example, received the manifesto from the Central branch ‘with acclamation’, but this appeared to be unusual and probably relected the heavy involvement of the implacably republican Daly women in that branch.97 By November, Redmondites were in fact jeering at Cumann na mBan’s failure to entice provincial branches to follow their lead and pronouncing that the organisation’s Sinn Féin conspiracy had backired: Poor Cumann na mBan! Their great move ‘down Redmond’ has downed themselves. They wouldn’t listen to reason when they might; now they found themselves left. They compelled all the supporters of Mr Redmond to withdraw from the organisation in the city; and then the Nationalists left them everywhere in the lurch throughout the country. Now they are bewailing their error. They want to ‘make our position perfectly clear’. Irish Nationalist ladies see it only too clearly. ‘From the beginning we have been non-sectional’. Oh, of course! That is why the Sinn Feiners who were pulling the wires insisted on sacking Mr Redmond. It was a non-sectional attack on Mr Redmond; a non-party attack on the Irish Party. Plain, honest Irish Nationalists don’t understand these ‘non-sectional’ attacks on the Irish leader. They prefer decent, open, undisguised enemies to these ‘nonsectional’ onslaughts. Let us have done with the ‘non-sectional’ fraud.98

Despite the October manifesto and the strong campaign being run by Dudley Edwards, Agnes O’Farrelly refused to concede defeat, arguing that she had never heard a word uttered against Redmond in the ‘inner circles’ of Cumann na mBan and insisting that as the organisation was independent, its members should not take sides unnecessarily and ‘thus emphasise still further the unfortunate state of our national affairs’.99 Dudley Edwards replied that had she not known that O’Farrelly was on ‘the right side’ she would have thought her a Sinn Féiner in disguise.100 It is dificult to see how O’Farrelly could believe that she could hold the two wings of the organisation together after the publication of the October

94 96 98

95 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 5. National Volunteer, 17 October 1914. Ibid., 24 October 1914. 97 Irish Volunteer, 31 October 1914. 99 National Volunteer, 21 November 1914. Ibid. 100 Ibid., 28 November 1914.

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manifesto, but, by the end of 1914, she was desperately trying to prevent rifts in both Cumann na mBan and the Gaelic League. She was losing both battles. The Keating branch of the Gaelic League censured her in September for comments about the Volunteers.101 Denying the right of the branch to reprimand her while she addressed a meeting which had not gathered under the auspices of the Gaelic League, she urged the Volunteers ‘not to leave Ireland under any pretext’. She also admitted that her sympathies were with the allies, though her primary concern was for Ireland and the need to keep it from ‘outsiders’.102 She continued to insist that Ireland’s salvation ‘must come from within, not without’, but she nonetheless refused to condemn the British war effort, believing it to be a separate issue from Ireland’s position on the war.103 By December, she was begging Gaelic Leaguers to resist the politicisation of the organisation, a position unlikely to win her much support within advanced political circles.104 The inal break with Cumann na mBan came at the Convention held in early December, when the attempts of O’Farrelly and a number of other moderates from the Ardpatrick branch to temper the radicalism of Cumann na mBan failed.105 They were opposed by a vocal majority led by Mary MacSwiney and Madge Daly, sister of Kathleen Clarke. O’Farrelly resigned, and the remains of Cumann na mBan prepared to soldier on, depleted and slightly bruised, but unencumbered at least by the strain of maintaining a false unity. Jennie Wyse Power subsequently stated that the ‘decision cleared the road for the work of Cumann na mBan’, and it was certainly the case that some clarity was quickly brought to what was becoming an increasingly bewildering array of women’s groups and initiatives which had sprung up in association with or in support of the Volunteers.106 Bridget Dudley Edwards, a trained nurse, had been asked by the committee of Cumann na mBan to form an ambulance corps for the Volunteers in May, and the organisation had attempted to organise irst-aid and ambulance classes through its branches.107 Subsequent irst-aid classes were held under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI), which issued certiicates to those who passed.108 With the outbreak of war, however, the situation became much more complicated, as a number of patriotic women who were unaligned to Cumann na mBan, 101 103 105

106 108

II, 7 September 1914. 102 Ibid. FJ, 4 August 1914. 104 II, 9 December 1914. Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 5; and McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 36–7. 107 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 5. FJ, 11 May 1914. Irish Volunteer, 26 September 1915, and First-Aid Certiicate of Captain Mary Rafferty (Mary J. Walsh), 1915, NLI, MS 29,943.

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but wished to aid the Volunteers, began to suggest the establishment of women’s auxiliaries and nursing organisations. Elizabeth Tennant, for instance, was asked to form a Volunteer medical auxiliary which would care jointly for the wounded of the National and the Ulster Volunteers.109 The United Irishwomen proposed a nursing corps for the National Volunteers, while other women suggested irst-aid and nursing companies which would work with local Volunteers in their own counties.110 One Kildare woman even argued that Irish women had ‘not spoken’ and were going to be left behind in the good cause of arming and otherwise aiding the Volunteers.111 Cumann na mBan was compelled to remind the Irish public on a number of occasions that ‘an organisation working with the Volunteers does exist’, urging ‘various women’s volunteer associations’ to afiliate to Cumann na mBan ‘for the sake of union and solidarity’ and insisting that its ‘work already covers the ground mapped out by suggested Societies’.112 After the split, such duplication of effort became much easier to avoid as Cumann na mBan was the only women’s group working with the Irish Volunteers. It openly shunned any organisation which trained women in irst aid and nursing as part of the Allied war effort, insisting by 1917 that ‘no woman can be a member of Cumann na mBan, who is a member of an organisation doing any kind of work for the English enemy’. This included the British Red Cross and Soldiers’ Aid societies.113 But at the same time it continued to undertake similar training and took advantage of wartime conditions which allowed members for a time, for example, to take irst-aid training under the DATI scheme.114 It refused, however, to enter into a formal arrangement suggested by the Red Cross because that would have meant working with the War Ofice. Yet it insisted at the same time that ‘whenever the Red Cross was needed we would use it without permission from anyone’.115 What is interesting here is that the Red Cross offer was rejected before the split in Cumann na mBan on the grounds of the Red Cross connection with the war effort. The separatist wing was clearly shaping policy, though in August it had no formal right to do so. The Dublin Red Cross classes did not appear to get under way until around the end of August 1914, when the Women’s National Health Association began to organise sessions for women only. Women who completed successfully the irst-aid courses were given a certiicate and 109 112 113 114 115

FJ, 7 August 1914. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 6 August 1914. Ibid., 7 August and 2 July 1914; and Sinn Féin, 15 August 1914. Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution. Irish Volunteer, 29 August, 26 September and 7 November 1914. Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 4.

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invited to join a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) under the Red Cross Society. This was valuable training indeed, and Cumann na mBan might well have got its initial idea for afiliation with the International Red Cross after hearing of similar schemes in operation in the north of the country. Certainly, Jennie Wyse Power admitted that the methods of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council were believed by the founders of Cumann na mBan to be ‘in the main practical and worth considering’.116 Nevertheless, as the war dragged on and positions hardened, Cumann na mBan distanced itself from the organisation, as it did from any society connected with the Allied war effort. Soon after beginning her medical degree at University College Galway in 1915, Brigid Lyons was asked to join the Red Cross branch. Having refused, she suggested instead a branch of Cumann na mBan. She was ‘jeered and laughed at’, a response symptomatic, she thought, of the institution’s ‘apathetic and pro-British atmosphere’.117 By 1915 the organisation had agreed that a VAD scheme be adopted with the provision that private training be provided in addition in ‘musketry skill, irst aid and marching’.118 After the Volunteer split, the Redmondite women were also compelled to reconsider their own allegiances and to redeine themselves institutionally. Choosing a side effectively meant declaring a position on Ireland’s involvement in the war effort, and many nationalist women did that very vocally. Nora McClosskey, for instance, secretary of the Belfast Cumann na mBan, declared that her organisation was proud of the Irish men who were ighting for their country at the Front and wanted nothing to do with the Dublin executive.119 Constitutional women were able to take full advantage of all training schemes available under various organisations, as they had no objection to being associated with one of the organisations allied to the Joint War Committee. The women who remained loyal to the National Volunteers were active in a number of relief and quasimilitary organisations. One of these was the Volunteer Aid Association, which Jennie Wyse Power dismissed as consisting ‘exclusively of fashionable women followers of the Irish Party’.120 It had actually been formed before the split, for men and women, and had provoked some controversy as its critics argued that it was encroaching on Cumann na mBan’s territory.121 Nevertheless, Cumann na mBan had conferred with this ‘vague and exclusive’ society before the split, though Wyse Power claimed that 116 117

118

119 120

Ibid. Handwritten account of the involvement of Dr Brigid Lyons in republican politics, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1414(5). Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1915, Eoin MacNeill Papers, UCDA, LA1/H/10/5. National Volunteer, 17 October 1914 and 13 November 1915. 121 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 4. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 39.

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the brightest idea it had was to distribute drinks to Volunteers en route marches, and the drink procured by one ‘notable lady’ consisted of a ton of cocoa obtained from an English manufacturer.122 Its work was more serious than Wyse Power claimed and included irst-aid training in connection with the St John Ambulance VADs.123 It also worked in close consultation with the Provisional Council of the Irish Volunteers.124 Its committee did consist of a large number of grandees, including the Countess of Fingall and Viscountess Gormanston, and it never rivalled Cumann na mBan in terms of membership, but Redmondites formed new organisations which almost certainly picked up disgruntled former members of Cumann na mBan.125 Bridget Dudley Edwards was one of the most remarkable of these women. A committed suffragist, she participated in a number of womenonly or women-dominated ventures during the war years. She undertook the management of the Women’s Training Centre, which provided instruction in cookery and other aspects of domestic economy to girls.126 She also established the Women’s National Corps and organised the Women’s National Council, a fundraising body which appeared to have had little effect.127 More interestingly, she was a member of the women’s section of Dublin’s 4th Battalion of the National Volunteers, formed in late March 1915. This section boasted at least sixty members, who collected money, learned irst aid and organised themselves into a ‘woman’s ambulance company’.128 Though its numbers were small, there was simply no equivalent in the Irish Volunteer battalions, which consisted entirely of men.129 Some women did train with male Irish Volunteers, but no oficial women’s sections existed. Some National Volunteers, in contrast, appeared to have been somewhat more at ease with female militarism, even featuring a photograph of ‘Ladies shooting at the Belfast Ladies’ Rile Range in connection with the National Volunteers’ in early 1915.130 Other constitutional women launched their own organisations: a group of Waterford women set up a Ladies’ Ambulance Corps, their counterparts in Limerick established a Ladies’ National Volunteers Association, while a Derry-based Irish Women’s Council raised funds for the Volunteers.131 Redmondite nationalist women also became very active fundraisers for the Irish regiments, including the Royal Munster Fusiliers, the Leinster Regiment and the Royal Dublin Fusiliers in particular, and they were 122 124 126 128 130 131

123 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 4. IT, 4 August 1914. Ibid., 29 June 1914. 125 II, 10 August 1914. IT, 12 December 1914. 127 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 39. National Volunteer, 17 April 1914. 129 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 38. National Volunteer, 2 January 1915. Ibid., 8 May and 6 November 1915 and 18 March 1916.

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also involved in various recruiting and relief organisations in individual counties. 132 The Dublin City and County Recruitment Committee had a ladies’ branch which collected comforts and acted as a bureau of information and advice for soldiers’ wives and dependants.133 This kind of work lacked a central organising body and was mainly done in the name of the war effort rather than on behalf of or in aid of Irish nationalism. Cumann na mBan, on the other hand, was largely centrally organised and single-minded in its aim. This was to serve both the organisation and separatist nationalism well over the coming years. III Unsurprisingly, Cumann na mBan’s work changed in line with shifting political circumstances. Members were involved in many kinds of undertakings, but these always relected the society’s four main aims. The most important remained fundraising, organising the training of members in irst aid, drill, ambulance work, message- and weapon-carrying, weapons procurement and propaganda work. The expansion and professionalisation of the membership changed the way members went about their work. The introduction of a uniform at the 1915 Convention relected the growing militarisation of Cumann na mBan. Because of its cost, however, the uniform remained optional, and many, if not most, members did not possess one. Most did, however, buy the cheaper (8d) oficial badge, which featured a gun crowned with the letters ‘C na mB’.134 The political allegiances of the members who did wear the uniform, and were sometimes known as ‘grasshoppers’ because of its colour, were more easily identiied, and uniformed members were thus open to abuse from opponents, including the wives of men serving in the British Army, as Pauline Keating found on Easter Tuesday 1916.135 But this kind of taunt could go the other way, too. Mary Leahy, postmistress at Rochestown, County Cork, and apparently a ‘very disloyal subject’, would ‘insult’ the women who called into her post ofice to collect their separation allowances, losing ‘no opportunity of ridiculing the British Army and glorifying the enemy’.136 Rosamond Jacob recalled one local Waterford member who was ‘found to be going with a navyman’ being asked to ‘explain’ it to Cumann na mBan or to resign.137 Given that Cumann na mBan had declared at its 1917 Convention that ‘no woman can be a member of 132 134 135 136 137

IT, 27 November 1915. 133 II, 6 January 1915; and FJ, 21 April 1915. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 46. Ibid.; and BMH WS 432: Pauline Keating. Mary Leahy ile, PRO, CO 904/207/238. DRJ, 27 May 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582 (33).

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Cumann na mBan, who is a member of an organisation doing any kind of work for the English enemy’, this is hardly surprising, but it does suggest the existence of a degree of social scrutiny which operated on both sides of the political debate.138 What emerges from members’ memoirs is a picture of an organisation which was no doubt serious and dedicated, increasingly so as the months passed, but was also, at times, chaotic. In 1915, a serious row broke out between the Central branch and the executive over the publication of three nationalist pamphlets. This fundraising activity was spearheaded by Kathleen Clarke, who asked Patrick Pearse to write the irst booklet on the subject of Wolfe Tone.139 The pamphlets sold for a penny each and were, according to Clarke, ‘a great success’.140 The executive ordered the Central branch to cede control to the organisation’s governing body, but the Central branch refused on the grounds that each branch had been asked to come up with schemes which would ‘keep branch members busy’. The two ‘very angry’ women who interrogated Clarke left the meeting ‘with rather rufled feathers’.141 Clarke herself, though a member of the executive, claimed that in 1916 she had ‘no intimate knowledge of the work of the other branches of Cumann na mBan in Dublin or throughout the country’, giving some indication of the often quite separate identities and even activities of various branches.142 Other factors contributed to the organisation’s rocky start, not least the split, which slowed down the organisation further. But amidst the chaos, serious efforts were made almost at once to provide irst-aid training, which absorbed the energies of most members in the early months.143 This made perfect sense in the context of the First World War, and it continued to make practical sense as the Volunteers prepared for battle in 1916 and beyond. The First World War provided an important context for the organisation both directly and indirectly, shaping the way it trained members in military and quasi-military activities. Irish women from all walks of life were, from mid 1914, making bandages, collecting mosses, learning to tend to wounded men: Cumann na mBan hardly stood out in this context, just as their uniformed and armed Volunteer comrades looked less conspicuous in 1914 Ireland than they would have in 1912. In addition, irst-aid training was deemed to be suitable for women and women could themselves offer instruction in it. By September 138 139 140 141

142

Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution. Cumann na mBan, The Spanish War by Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1915). Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, pp. 49–50. Ibid., p. 50. The Central branch went on to publish Why Ireland Is Poor: English Laws and Irish Industries (Dublin, 1915) and Dean Swift on the Situation (Dublin, 1915). Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, pp. 68–9. 143 Irish Volunteer, 26 September 1914.

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1914, Dublin’s Central branch was running three irst-aid classes.144 By October 1915, irst-aid training had taken on a more systematic form under Mimi Plunkett and Captain O Conaill of the Volunteers, who organised six irst-aid squads, each to be attached to a Dublin Volunteer battalion. These squads participated in manoeuvres with the Volunteers, one being ‘lucky enough’ to have had three casualties to deal with.145 The women who made up these squads were considered to be very fortunate indeed by their Cumann na mBan associates; according to Áine Ceannt, only the ‘very pick’ of the branches was selected for this, mostly among from the Central branch membership.146 This development relected the gradual professionalisation of the organisation, but it was not without its critics. Jennie Wyse Power of the Central branch argued at the 1915 Convention that the plan, which she described as a VAD scheme, had been a great success and urged other branches which had already been put through irst-aid courses to adopt it. This would mean, in effect, closer co-operation between branches of Cumann na mBan and Volunteers in the same areas.147 Wyse Power’s VAD scheme had been part of a raft of proposals put forward by the Inghinidhe branch, suggestions which collectively called for closer cooperation between Cumann na mBan and the Volunteers in an effort to elevate Cumann na mBan’s position within the broader Volunteer movement. Other proposals included giving titles to oficers of the organisation, taking steps to have a squad of Cumann na mBan working with each battalion of the Volunteers throughout the country and that Cumann na mBan should produce its own newspaper or, failing that, secure an ‘oficial page’ in the Irish Volunteer.148 This was not the irst time advanced nationalist women had aspired to a newspaper of their own, and some of the women of the Inghinidhe branch had been involved with Bean na hÉireann. But once again it was not to be. The Irish Volunteer carried notices and some articles for and about Cumann na mBan, but such pieces rarely ran to more than a column or two, let alone a page. Despite the efforts of some of the more feminist and activist members of the organisation, Cumann na mBan never did achieve equal status with the Volunteers and was always perceived to be at best the junior partner in the movement. Pledges of co-operation and support went only one way, and there was little sense that the Volunteers saw Cumann na mBan as collaborators rather than helpers.149 144 146 147

148

145 Ibid. Ibid., 16 October 1915. Brennan, History of Cumann na mBan. Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1915, Eoin MacNeill Papers, UCDA, LA1/H/10. 149 Ibid. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 49–50.

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The fact remains, however, that most women were willing followers who valued their work in their own terms. Afirmation for them came from the fact that the Volunteers allowed the women to help them, sometimes by taking on often risky and unconventional work, but also because of their willingness to perform more traditional tasks which the Volunteers had neither the resources nor the inclination to do themselves. As Lily Brennan argued: The Volunteers depended on the women for their dispatch work, for much of the Red Cross outits for the men, and we know that many a woman cleaned the gun of her hard working husband, who worked by day and drilled by night, to keep his own home on the one hand free from want, and on the other hand to help Ireland be free.150

This did not guarantee equality within the organisation of the kind that feminists like Hanna Sheehy Skefington had stipulated; neither, it seems, did members demand it. Membership of Cumann na mBan had more to offer women than the satisfaction of working for the freedom of Ireland. It allowed, like the Gaelic League had before it, opportunities for men and women to mix, sometimes at close quarters and sometimes in activities which the Gaelic League had itself fostered. Volunteers often drilled or otherwise trained women, and skills were sometimes displayed or shared in quasisocial settings, such as in 1915 when the Central branch held a Military Carnival, during which a competition in drilling between Cumann na mBan, the Volunteers and the ICA took place.151 Fundraising remained a vital Cumann na mBan task, and this encompassed organising socials and ceilidhes where young nationalists could meet, collect donations, sell rafle tickets and lags and stage auctions. McCarthy has argued that Cumann na mBan began to diversify into rile practice and gun maintenance after the moderates had left the organisation.152 This may have been because the advanced women were more comfortable with the idea of moving beyond an auxiliary and into a more combative role than their constitutional counterparts. But, given that some Redmondite women also took up rile practice with the National Volunteers, women’s access to weapons was more likely to be the result of a combination of the availability of arms and instructors at different times. Some members of Dublin’s Inghinidhe branch, for example, were given instruction by Constance Markievicz, herself a crack shot.153 It appears, however, that weapons training was more usually given under 150

151 153

Lily Brennan, History of Cumann na mBan, Ceannt-Brennan Papers NLI, MS 41,496/1, p. 33. Spark, 8 August 1915. 152 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 47. BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara.

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the guidance of local Volunteers. Brigid Lyons described how ‘some of the Volunteers used to come over from their H.Q. in the Square to ensure that the drilling was done seriously’.154 Belfast branch members appeared to enjoy much more regular weapons training than most other branches, being, by December 1915, ‘engaged in drilling and shooting, for the most part in the open air’.155 Some members of Cumann na mBan were more familiar with guns than others. Target practice was optional, and it is dificult to see how this could have been otherwise given the scarcity of arms across the country. By 1916, the Irish Volunteers had about 15,000 members and probably fewer than 2,000 riles: training Cumann na mBan in arms use could hardly be a possibility, let alone a priority.156 One Belfast member, for example, was taught how to shoot, but only with a miniature rile – ‘the service riles were too precious to be used for practice’.157 Cleaning and care of the rile and practice in loading and unloading were, however, considered to be a compulsory part of ambulance training, and this is probably as close as many women got to irearms.158 Although what was available was almost always earmarked for the Volunteers, some women did seek out training in what was to hand, and some clearly did obtain weapons. Maire Comerford, for instance, managed to sneak away from her family during a visit to Dublin after the Rising. She made her way to Liberty Hall, where Marie Perolz offered to sell her a revolver for a pound.159 Helena Molony had her own Sam Browne belt, revolver and ammunition, and Maeve Cavanagh, also of the ICA, also had her own .22 revolver and ammunition.160 Some women learned how to shoot in strange circumstances. Margaret Skinnider, a Glasgow woman, was trained ‘in one of the rile practice clubs which the British organized so that women could help in the defence of the Empire’.161 Other women’s exposure to arms was much more limited. Kitty O’Doherty, who joined a Dublin branch of Cumann na mBan two months after its inception, was no stranger to advanced politics as her husband was a Fenian and a Volunteer. She maintained that ‘there were no arms whatever. I know of claims that were made afterwards but I can only say what I know and can stand over; no arms were used.’162 Min Ryan presented the use of weapons as very much a last resort, recalling that 154 155 156 157 159 160 161

Brigid Lyons’s account in Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1414(3). National Volunteer, 11 December 1915; and BMH WS 179: Elizabeth and Nell Corr. Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916 (Oxford, 2010), p. 110. 158 Taillon, When History Was Made, p. 9. Irish Volunteer, 8 January 1916. Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/11(6). BMH WS 391: Helena Molony; BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. 162 Skinnider, Doing My Bit, p. 6. BMH WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty.

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women were being ‘trained for war, even to take up arms if necessary’.163 More women cleaned, carried, hid and procured weapons than learned to use them with any real proiciency. Aine Heron stored ammunition in her husband’s shop in Phibsborough before 1916 and kept it there safely for two years.164 Her life went on generally as usual while the guns lay hidden in her house. But some women had to behave in ways which were highly unusual in their efforts to procure weapons. They often had to be inventive and brave. Two weeks before the Rising, Grace O’Sullivan, a teacher, travelled from London to Dublin with ‘the accoutrements for a wireless apparatus’ strapped to her body. She returned to Dublin with guns and ammunition in time for the Rising itself.165 Margaret Skinnider and a ‘Miss O’Neill’ of Glasgow’s Cumann na mBan branch travelled between Scotland and Dublin with many guns and ammunition for several months before Easter 1916.166 Marie Perolz, who procured guns for the Citizen Army, remembered buying pieces of machine-guns from a soldier she would meet in public houses.167 She appeared to be untroubled by this, as was Brigid Lyons when she happily agreed to carry revolvers to the Volunteer students at University College Galway: ‘Of course I took the parcel and set off. It was more of a trick to visit a male student’s “digs” than to be caught carrying arms.’168 Other women were, however, less comfortable with behaving in ways they ordinarily would not have countenanced. Mary McGeehan, another London-based member, had to pretend on one occasion that she and a stranger were lovers at King’s Cross station so that he could pass on guns and ammunition to her. He was not ‘a bit perturbed by this’ but she was mortiied. She appeared to have resigned herself to the disreputable task because ‘all the girls did jobs like that’.169 Some women were absolutely central to the movement of guns, especially the relations of prominent Volunteers. Áine O’Rahilly, sister of Micheál and, usefully for the Volunteers, one of the irst women in Ireland to drive a car, was deeply implicated: I used to help Michael at his ofice work in connection with the purchase and distribution of guns. We always worked in his house. Some of the guns were kept in our house. They mostly came from Birmingham as did the ammunition and pullthroughs. On one occasion, when a lot of guns arrived we were to expect men 163 165 166

167 168 169

BMH WS 399: Josephine Mulcahy. 164 BMH WS 293: Aine Heron. BMH WS 945: Sorcha McDermott. Ann Matthews, ‘Vanguard of the Revolution? The Irish Citizen Army’, in R. O’Donnell (ed.), The Impact of the 1916 Rising among the Nations (Dublin, 2008), pp. 24–36, at pp. 29–30. BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. Brigid Lyons’s account, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1414(6). BMH WS 902: Mary McGeehan.

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from the country to purchase some of them. That evening a knock came to the door and I saw four men and thought that they were the men from the country, so I welcomed them. But they were G. men who searched the house and took away all the guns they found. Fortunately, as the house – 54 Northumberland Road – was very large, they overlooked one room on the return containing a big proportion of the guns. This was very fortunate as the same room contained a list of the quartermasters from the country who were to collect them. Our problem then was how to remove these guns. We decided we would form an orchestra. Various people, including the Plunketts and Diarmuid O’Laoghaire came, bringing their instrument cases into which we itted the revolvers. They were got away safely. That was the irst raid we ever had, it was also the irst occasion on which we had a quantity of arms delivered to the house. Michael Staines used to come to Michael’s house regularly to arrange about getting guns. He would bring the money for them. He seemed to be a very earnest worker. I used to sign some of the receipts in Michael’s name, if he was extra busy. One day, he told me as I had been working so well, that he would give me a treat. He took me one Sunday morning to Howth, and when we were near our destination he said there were guns being brought in. The yacht was in the bay and it was a lovely sight. The Volunteers were all there before us. Michael illed the car with ammunition so I came back by bus.170

This sort of task fulilled the organisation’s constitutional aim to ‘assist in arming and equipping a body of Irishmen for the defence of Ireland’ and it probably satisied the desire of some of the more militant members to take on work which was not generally considered suitable for women. Others of the more radical and unconventional women, however, appear to have gravitated towards the Citizen Army, where, some historians have argued, ‘women were treated equally as comrades in arms with the men’.171 Though some members of the ICA would no doubt have agreed with this assessment, the reality was in fact much more complex. IV The Irish Citizen Army was formed in late 1913, largely as a result of James Connolly’s call for the establishment of a trained and armed militia composed of trade unionists and their allies. He was aided in this by a distinctly odd collection of people, which included Jack White, an upperclass former soldier in the British Army, Constance Markievicz and Francis Sheehy Skefington, a paciist who nonetheless became one of the irst of the reorganised Irish Citizen Army Council’s vice-presidents in March 1914.172 Women were involved in the organisation from the 170

171

BMH WS 333: Áine O’Rahilly; Áine O’Rahilly obituary, O’Rahilly Papers, UCDA, P102/632(1). 172 McCoole, Guns and Chiffon, p. 17. Yeates, Lockout, p. 564.

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outset, their participation stemming primarily from two sources: trade unionism and nationalist activism, more usually a combination of the two. Estimates of the size of Citizen Army membership, male and female, vary, mainly owing to the scarcity of surviving records, but it almost certainly never stretched to beyond 400. One roll-book records a membership of 334 in early 1916.173 The name of only one woman, Constance Markievicz, appeared on that list, but whether the other women who participated in various ICA activities, up to and including the Easter Rising in 1916, were never oficial members, as Ann Matthews has argued, remains, if not debatable, then at least open to interpretation.174 Oficially or otherwise, a number of women unambiguously considered themselves to be members. Although there was no explicit call to arms for women trade unionists, neither was there any question that women were ever barred from the organisation. Helena Molony, Marie Perolz and Maeve Cavanagh certainly believed themselves to be members of the Citizen Army.175 Madeleine ffrench-Mullen was adamant on the point, referring to ‘we of the Citizen Army’ in her very detailed account of the ICA activities in which she was involved in the lead-up to and during the Easter Rising.176 Lynn unequivocally stated that ‘I belonged to the Citizen Army’, and that was how she described herself to the soldiers who arrested her at City Hall in 1916.177 The vast bulk of ICA membership was working class. Most scholars agree that there were about thirty female members, or at least around thirty who were ‘out’ in 1916, and that their social and economic proile placed them squarely in Dublin’s large working-class population.178 Notable exceptions were, of course, the more prominent female members: Markievicz, Lynn, ffrench-Mullen, Perolz, Nellie Gifford, Molony and Winifred (‘Winnie’) Carney, who worked as James Connolly’s secretary. None of these women could be described as working class, though their collective wealth and social standing has perhaps been overstated. Markievicz was, of course, a member of the prominent and rich AngloIrish family, the Gore-Booths, while ffrench-Mullen, Gifford and Lynn had been raised in very comfortable professional families. The others, 173 174 175

176

177 178

ICA Roll Book, William O’Brien Papers, NLI, MS 1,573(1) part 10. Matthews, ‘Vanguard’, pp. 28–9. BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz; BMH WS 391: Helena Molony; BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. Transcript of Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, written in Kilmainham and Mountjoy Gaols, 5–20 May 1916, Allen Library, 201/File B. BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. Celia Anthony, ‘The Women of the Irish Citizen Army’, M.Stud. thesis, University of Oxford, 2010, pp. 47–8; McCoole, No Ordinary Women, pp. 216–39; and Matthews, Renegades, pp. 336–42.

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however, were the daughters of lower middle-class parents, bordering on working class in some cases. Molony’s parents had been grocers, while Carney’s similarly lower middle-class family had been shattered by marital breakdown and emigration. She lived with her mother, who ran a sweet shop on the Falls Road.179 She identiied with workers, especially Belfast’s women workers, but even she admitted in 1918 that, although she knew ‘as much about the spinning room as anyone’, she had ‘never worked in one’.180 Like Molony, Perolz appeared by 1913 to be living a hand-to-mouth existence, working at that time in a fruit shop and living in a household in which only one of the six inhabitants worked for a wage, the priority being unpaid nationalist and socialist activism of one form or another. Lynn had her medical practice, and ffrench-Mullen and Gifford presumably had some kind of private income, but none of these women was wealthy, not even Markievicz, who had been anything but careful with her family money. What they did have in common and what set them apart not only from the other women in the ICA but in Irish society more generally was that they lived deeply unconventional lives. Strikingly, they were all, apart from Molony and ffrench-Mullen – the former very lapsed, the latter devout – either Anglicans or the daughters of mixed marriages. They associated with artists, feminists, socialists and republicans, male and female. They lived public lives, frequently appearing in the press or on political platforms, and they were all prepared to go to prison, and indeed would do so, for their causes. Their class background, especially in the case of the richer women, may have allowed for this activism in so far as it provided some social conidence, a inancial basis for it and was buttressed, for Markievicz at least, by a general tolerance of aristocratic eccentricity. Overall, however, their political activities in fact eroded and undermined their social standing and their place in respectable society in the long term. This had implications for their professional and personal lives, because, having crossed a social line by moving from respectable society into the political avant-garde, these women could not easily step back into normal life. Many hundreds of male activists were, of course, crossing similar lines, but they enjoyed wide fraternal collaboration and very often had wives, sisters and mothers supporting them by running their homes and families. The women who joined them had neither. All were unmarried or separated, and, tellingly, none would go on to enjoy high political ofice beyond the early days of the Irish revolution. They 179

180

Helga Woggon, Silent Radical: Winifred Carney, 1887–1943 – A Reconstruction of Her Biography (Dublin, 2000), pp. 8–9. Irish News, 5 December 1918.

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were exceptional in their willingness to live against the grain in Irish society, but having been active before they came to socialism – as suffragists, republicans, professional women and artists in many cases – they were, even before joining the ranks of the ICA, unconventional by default. Some women, including Lynn, Perolz and Winnie Carney, belonged to both the ICA and Cumann na mBan, working for and with both at different times and in different contexts. Kathleen Lynn, for instance, gave irst-aid classes in Liberty Hall as well as in Harcourt Street before the Easter Rising, but, like most women who were associated with both, she was out in 1916 with the Citizen Army rather than Cumann na mBan.181 Margaret Skinnider had joined both the Volunteers and Cumann na mBan in Glasgow. As she spent more and more time in Dublin, however, she drew closer to Markievicz and Liberty Hall and fought with the ICA in 1916. Skinnider and Carney were the only women from outside Dublin who became active in the Citizen Army, a relection of the solidly Dublin character of the organisation. Northern women and girls had different options, including the country’s only female branch of the Fianna, having formed a Betsy Gray Sluagh under the leadership of James Connolly’s daughters among others.182 An overlap in membership between many groups was, as we have seen, very common among the nationalist vanguard, and ICA women were no exception. Some, however, notably Markievicz and Molony, did not join Cumann na mBan, at least not until after the Rising in the case of Markievicz, by which time the ICA could not provide the political platform she required. Cumann na mBan was, of course, a much bigger organisation than the ICA, though it was not as unequivocally republican as the Citizen Army, at least not in its irst two years or so. Markievicz was evidently disgusted by both this and what she viewed as Cumann na mBan’s auxiliary status in the broader Volunteer movement. Molony never joined Cumann na mBan but was briely made an honorary member during the Belfast boycott, having refused to join before this time because she was ‘attached to the Citizen Army’.183 Quite why some women joined or became more active in the Citizen Army rather than Cumann na mBan is dificult to pin down. The ICA was founded ive months before Cumann na mBan, but this is not a particularly credible explanation, as any woman was free to move from the Citizen Army to Cumann na mBan. There is no evidence of a wholesale migration to the newer organisation, but there is evidence that at least 181 182 183

BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. BMH WS 919: Ina Heron; BMH WS 286: Nora Connolly O’Brien. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony.

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some female members of the ICA did not hold the Volunteers in particularly high esteem, and this may have inluenced their decision not to join them. Some Citizen Army men had appeared at the Volunteers’ irst meeting in the Rotunda, protesting against the involvement in the new organisation of prominent nationalists who were also strike-breakers. Larkin was hostile to the Volunteers, and relations between the two organisations remained frosty for some time.184 The Volunteers became known within the ICA as ‘the not-yets’, or ‘fan go foills’ as Marie Perolz dubbed them, the suspicion that they were not quite in earnest persevering among ICA women.185 Helena Molony believed that the Volunteers’ agreement to bow to Redmond’s demand for representation relected the ‘half-expressed caution’ of some of its leaders. She claimed that, in contrast, ‘we in the Citizen Army felt proud and conident in our leadership’.186 She was also conscious of the distinctly more egalitarian ethos within the ICA, explaining that Connolly, ‘staunch feminist that he was’, was anxious to welcome women into the ICA ‘on equal terms with men, and to promote them to such rank and position as they were suited for’.186 It was also the case, of course, that left-leaning women were drawn naturally to the ICA, and those who had joined in 1913 remained until the Rising and beyond. There was little reason for them to migrate to Cumann na mBan. The political motivations of members like Molony, who had joined both the SPI and the IWWU before she joined the Citizen Army, were plain, but this was less clear in other instances. Not only are personal accounts from ordinary female members few and far between, but those that do exist tend to focus on the ICA’s role around the Easter Rising rather than on the motivations of the women who joined when it was primarily a defensive, trade unionist association. Strikingly, even in the context of the ICA’s involvement in the Rising, we have very little sense of how, if at all, the Citizen Army’s vision of the ‘free Ireland’ its members were prepared to die for differed from Cumann na mBan’s. We know that Molony, ffrench-Mullen, Rosie Hackett, the Norgrove sisters and Jinny Shanahan – who were all ‘out’ with the ICA in 1916 – were committee members of the IWWU at different times and thus devoted to improving working women’s conditions, but we do not know what social and political systems they hoped the independent Ireland to which their organisation was pledged would adopt. 184 185 186

William O’Brien Papers, NLI, MS 1,573(1), part 9, pp. 9–10. BMH CD 119/3/9: Helena Molony. 186 BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Ibid.

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A palpable sense of camaraderie permeates the memoirs of ICA combatants, male and female. This is hardly surprising, as the Citizen Army was small, entirely based in Dublin and exceptionally clannish as a result. What is perhaps more surprising is that a sense of class solidarity is not a feature of ICA women’s memoirs. This was partly no doubt because some of the female leaders were not themselves ‘workers’ in the conventional sense, or at least they did not do manual work. It may also be because Irish nationalism was more important to them than socialism or trade unionism, or it may simply be a relection of the development of Ireland’s historical narrative in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. This is not to suggest that the women who joined the ICA were politically undifferentiated from their counterparts in Cumann na mBan, but it is the case that precisely how they differed in their views about the political development of an independent Ireland is unclear. They did, however, belong to an organisation which welcomed women and men, and this in itself distinguished the Irish Citizen Army and the experiences of its members from the Volunteers and Cumann na mBan. There were, nonetheless, some parallels between the broader Volunteer and Citizen Army movements. The IWWU, for example, ran ambulance and irst-aid classes, and in October 1915 its committee decided to ‘pick a limited number’ of members who would ‘specialise in this work and be attached to the Citizen Army as a trained and skilled Medical Corps’.188 Interestingly, the Committee also stated that these trained women would in addition be expected to qualify in home nursing and invalid cookery. It was hoped that in a few months there would exist ‘a body of women who will be as eficient in their partial subjects, as the Citizen Army are in theirs’.189 The IWWU, it seemed, was in some ways becoming to the ICA what Cumann na mBan had become to the Volunteers, helpmates rather than comrades in arms. By late 1915, the IWWU had even begun to berate its members for refusing to take on this kind of support role: We workers – women as well as men – have often indulged in sneers at the sham sort of Volunteers who carry dummy riles, and play generally at being soldiers. Yet every one of these corps have an auxiliary body attached to them who are trained in First Aid and Home Nursing, and who work hard in many cases collecting money to defray the expenses of their men. Are the Women Workers going to be the only slackers?190

The IWWU was not of course an oficial auxiliary of the ICA, and the two organisations remained separate, but it is telling that a quasi-women’s section did appear to exist within the Citizen Army, at least unoficially. 188

Workers’ Republic, 2 October 1915.

189

Ibid.

190

Ibid., 25 September 1915.

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This may have suited some of the socialist women – and men – who were uncomfortable with the close co-operation of the sexes within the ICA or who held conventional views about appropriate roles for men and women. But this clearly did not apply to all female members of the Citizen Army or the women’s union, most of whom happily mixed and were used to mixing with men even before the ICA was founded. Some such women found their Cumann na mBan work uninspiring. Maeve Cavanagh, for instance, ‘got tired’ of her Harcourt Street branch of Cumann na mBan ‘as they were only collecting money and such like activities’. She left and ‘went to Liberty Hall for good’ where she took part in all ICA activities including route marches.191 But was Cavanagh typical in her determination to deliberately seek out (and ind) a more inclusive and indeed more exciting experience within the ICA than she had had within Cumann na mBan, and was the Citizen Army generally more progressive than the Volunteer movement? We cannot be sure about individual motivations, but it is clear that, at the very least, men and women were less segregated within the Citizen Army than they were within the Volunteer movement. Frank Robbins, for example, recalled that Kathleen Lynn delivered lectures on irst aid to mixed-sex audiences. He believed that these lectures ‘had a ine psychological effect in so far as they blended the men and women of the Army much closer together’.192 Madeleine ffrench-Mullen told Rosamond Jacob approvingly that ‘there was absolutely no difference made between men and women in the Citizen Army’.193 As ffrench-Mullen knew, men and women mixed easily within the organisation, in Liberty Hall and during military training such as route marches. Rosie Hackett claimed that ‘the girls’ of the ICA took part in night route marches with the men and that she herself missed only one.194 Some, including Molony and Perolz, were also involved in gun-running.195 Cumann na mBan was also heavily involved in gun-running, but members did not appear to have had the same access to weapons for their own use as ICA women. Unusually, Markievicz and Molony carried their own weapons, and were prepared to use them in the service of the ICA; on the eve of the Rising Connolly allegedly distributed revolvers to the nine Citizen Army women who belonged to a party heading towards Dublin Castle.196 Nonetheless, ICA women tended to be more usually involved in irst aid, gathering and preparing food and

191 193 194 195 196

BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. 192 BMH WS 0585: Frank Robbins. DRJ, 20 July 1916, RJP, NLI, MS, 32,582 (30). BMH WS 546: Rosie Hackett. BMH WS: 246: Marie Perolz, and BMH WS: 391: Helena Molony. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony.

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carrying messages than they were in soldiery or in top-level planning and decision-making, and while the military section of the ICA was not closed to women, they did not appear to play a large role in it. We must be careful, however, not to judge the status of the women of the ICA by standards they themselves would not have recognised. It is crucial, irst and foremost, to understand that they did not expect or demand to take on the same roles as their male colleagues and that, in a battle zone at least, they accepted as perfectly normal and legitimate the idea that men took the military lead while women largely provided practical assistance. Assessing the level of equality between the sexes in the Citizen Army via a simple analysis of the sexual division of labour within the organisation provides only a reductive overview of a complex dynamic, especially as a good deal of evidence suggests that the women in the ICA believed that they enjoyed full equality within the organisation, on their own terms. It is important to remember, too, that the fact that women were directly involved in a revolutionary armed campaign in any capacity, let alone as couriers, doctors and even combatants in some cases, was radical by the standards of their day and, in fact, ours. It was clearly the case that, as some historians have argued, ‘there was far less sex segregation within the ICA’ than in other nationalist groups, but this has been exaggerated, or at least oversimpliied.197 As we have seen, contemporary understandings of equality were complex, and, as Celia Anthony has argued persuasively, such historiography has ‘willed the women of the ICA to occupy a situation which better resonates with modern, rather than contemporary, notions of feminism’.198 Women did not join the ICA primarily because it appealed especially to feminists, or because it offered a more active political role. In common with their male counterparts, they joined the ICA mainly because it was only at Liberty Hall that they could work at once towards if not a socialist then at least a more egalitarian and republican Ireland. Some, like Margaret Skinnider, believed that they achieved this, albeit briely. She wore down her senior oficer’s initial refusal to allow her to accompany a man on a mission to throw a bomb into the Shelbourne Hotel during the Easter Rising by reference to the equal status awarded women under the Proclamation of Independence. She was likely the irst republican woman to refer to the proclamation as a guarantor of women’s ‘equality with men’, but, as we shall see, she would not be the last. 197

Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 99.

198

Anthony, ‘Women of the ICA’, p. 1.

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8

The ight

Mothers, wives, sisters, sweet-hearts – all were dragged into that cauldron of self sacriice, where the cost was not assessed or deined by limitations. No neon lights emblazoned on the lives of those faithful individuals, who risked all, aye, even life itself at times, to prove that sex was no deterrent in the National ight.1

I On Easter Monday morning, 1916, Lily O’Brennan awoke ‘fresh and full of energy’, and after returning from early mass, packed irst-aid equipment, rations, water, a comb and a prayer book into her young nephew’s borrowed school bag. She was ready for battle.2 Men and women around Dublin similarly prepared themselves for confrontation with the British authorities, though most were unaware of exactly what it was they were going out to do, let alone how it was to be done. Though better informed than most, Helena Molony ‘did not know what was to take place’ or ‘to which place [she] was going’, even as she marched out of Liberty Hall on Monday morning.3 Yet she, along with about 180 Cumann na mBan and Irish Citizen Army women around Ireland, willingly joined the ight, a ight which they clearly believed was their own.4 A number of women at the heart of the republican movement recalled what Min Ryan described as ‘a sort of seething undercurrent’ during the week before Easter 1916.5 Cumann na mBan and the Volunteers were prepared for major manoeuvres on Easter Sunday, but signs that plans were afoot for something rather more serious were becoming evident to some activists. Preparations were of course being made by a secret military council which had decreed that a full-scale rising would take place 1 3 4

5

2 Conlon, Cumann na mBan, pp. 1–2. O’Brennan, ‘The Dawning’, p. 158. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Cal McCarthy’s igures are the most carefully researched: McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 67–8. BMH WS 390: Josephine Ryan.

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on Easter Sunday. But their plans and the Volunteer movement in general were thrown into utter confusion in the days before the scheduled revolt as new information forced the dispatch of a lurry of orders and counterorders around the country. Faced with a leaked and almost certainly largely forged document which outlined government plans to disarm the Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill authorised the sending out of a general order to Volunteer units around the country, which called on them to resist suppression. Upon learning about the military council’s irm plans for a revolt on Easter Sunday, he drew up three further orders which attempted to restore his own authority over the movement.6 MacNeill appeared to change his mind when he learned the next day that German weapons were bound for Ireland, but changed it again when the news of the sinking of the ship carrying arms reached him on Easter Saturday. He drafted his inal cancellation orders at around midnight on Saturday and placed his notice in the Sunday Independent. The conspirators, in the meantime, pressed ahead with their plans for a revolt, assembling at Liberty Hall on Sunday morning, even before MacNeill’s countermanding order had appeared in the news-stands.7 The military council conirmed MacNeill’s Sunday countermand and issued a new order to rise on Monday. The most obvious and immediate consequence of this series of orders and counter-orders was complete chaos within the ranks of the Volunteers and Cumann na mBan, most of whom had expected to turn out for a large-scale mobilisation on Easter Sunday, but had no idea that a rising had been planned, let alone that it had been rescheduled. Well aware of this, Eamonn Ceannt admitted to his wife on Easter Sunday that ‘[W]e have sent out messages through the country, but as the men have already received at least two other orders, it is hard to know what may happen.’8 Many of these messages were carried by members of Cumann na mBan, and the increased rate of dispatch work in the days before Easter Monday had in fact indicated to a number of them that armed revolt was in the air. Few appeared to ask questions or query their orders and merely did as they were told, just as well-trained soldiers were expected to. Having been told to ind Sean MacDermott on Sunday evening, Marie Perolz immediately ‘hiked off ’ but asked herself, ‘In God’s name … where will I get Sean McDermott?’ She did not say this to Connolly as she was ‘too well trained’.9 Leslie Price emphasised time and time again that she simply ‘did not question anything’, despite the fact that her home was full of odd and clandestine behaviours, as two of her brothers were very 6 7

Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (London, 2005), pp. 134–5. 8 Ibid., p. 138. BMH WS 264: Áine Ceannt. 9 BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz.

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active Volunteers and she herself was heavily involved in Cumann na mBan.10 Kitty O’Doherty was directed to buy blankets, soap and basins from the Army and Navy Stores, before being sent by Tom Clarke with a message to Kilkenny. On arriving at the railway station before leaving Dublin on Easter Thursday, she saw Perolz and Maeve Cavanagh, both of whom were similarly about to embark on relaying messages from Dublin Volunteers to provincial leaders. Knowing the seriousness of their mission and understanding the need for secrecy, they merely winked at one another in quiet acknowledgement at the station.11 Other women were not quite as circumspect. Min Ryan was rather less prepared to deliver messages without commentary. Having been sent to Wexford with MacNeill’s order cancelling Sunday’s manoeuvres, she did as she was told, but all the time had ‘an awful feeling that the Rising would take place’. She relayed her message to J. J. (Ginger) O’Connell and other senior igures in the movement, but told them that ‘my opinion is that there will be a Rising’, and insisted on returning to Dublin in order to be ready to join the ight.12 She was unusual in knowing quite as much as she did. Very few women subsequently claimed that they knew exactly when the Rising would take place, but a great many recalled what Helena Molony described as an atmosphere like a ‘simmering pot’. All those in and around Liberty Hall ‘knew the Rising was coming off ’, though they ‘did not know the exact date’.13 A raid about three weeks before had alerted them to the possibility that further police searches might uncover their caches of weapons and ammunition, so members began to keep up a ‘continuous guard’.14 In the three weeks before the rebellion, Molony, Jinny Shanahan and several other women moved into Liberty Hall, helping to lay down supplies and ‘sleeping at night on a pile of men’s clothes in the back of the shop’. Molony kept all her clothes there, including her underwear.15 A further sign that ‘the climax was near’ was the increased pace and volume of preparatory work demanded of female activists.16 Many women recalled spending the weeks leading up to the Rising making up cartridges, bandages and packages for the Volunteers even while ‘not knowing’ what such work ‘was really for’.17 Nancy Wyse Power explained that over the winter of 1915–16 she gave one or two hours daily to 10 11 12 14 16 17

BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price. BMH WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty; BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. 13 BMH WS 399: Josephine Ryan. BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. 15 BMH WS 546: Rosie Hackett. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. ‘Sighle Humphreys’, in MacEoin, Survivors, p. 338. BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power; BMH WS 399: Josephine Ryan; Skinnider, Doing My Bit, p. 76.

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making up ield dressings for the Dublin Volunteers. As time went on, this became ‘practically [a] whole-time occupation’ until the requisite number of packets was inally ready by the end of Easter week.18 She claimed that during Holy Week it ‘was evident to anyone in touch with the Volunteers that matters were moving towards a climax’, but she was closer to the heart of operations than most, and a meeting of the military council even took place in her home. Some senior oficers, including Sorcha MacMahon, were well informed for practical and personal reasons. She and Kathleen Clarke drew up a list of women who could be relied upon to carry dispatches from Tom Clarke and Sean MacDermott.19 Alice Cashel, who was well connected within Cork republican circles, was told by a Volunteer friend on Easter Thursday about the intended Rising and Sunday’s route march.20 Kitty O’Doherty worked at Volunteer headquarters in Dawson Street and was acquainted with a good many important Volunteers. She ‘knew that the Rising was planned’ and was given a tip by Thomas MacDonagh three weeks before that ‘it would come off ’.21 Ordinary and unconnected members of Cumann na mBan seemed to know less about the impending Rising than their oficers, though confusion reigned even within the higher ranks of both it and the Volunteers, partly owing to changes of plans and partly because of the strict emphasis on secrecy. Kitty O’Doherty was shocked to hear that Leslie Price did not know it was ‘coming off ’ despite the fact that she was ‘of a family that lived absolutely for it’.22 Louise Gavan Duffy, a member of Cumann na mBan’s executive, appeared to have no idea until she was told by a friend shortly before the Rising broke out. Her knowledgeable friend was engaged to be married to a Volunteer but was not herself even a member of Cumann na mBan.23 Gavan Duffy was so used to rumours about imminent revolt that she ignored her friend’s hints until Easter Monday. After the Rising broke out, she went to the GPO, expressed her deep disapproval of the military action, refused to do any ‘active work’ such as carrying dispatches as she felt that she ‘would not be justiied’, but agreed to Pearse’s suggestion that she provide assistance in the kitchen.24 For her, as for so many women, the GPO became a kind of magnet, a place which attracted those without orders, those who disobeyed orders to stand down and even those, like Gavan Duffy, who disapproved of the Rising but wished to support their comrades. Very few appear to have been turned away. 18 20 22

BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power. 19 Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 68. 21 BMH WS 366: Alice Cashel. BMH WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty. BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price. 23 BMH WS 216: Louise Gavan Duffy. 24 Ibid.

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For senior Volunteers, Sunday may have been ‘written off as a day of rueful inaction’ but many rank-and-ile combatants, male and female, were unaware of the orders of MacNeill or Pearse and consequently prepared to assemble as planned.25 Some Cumann na mBan branches had been mobilised for Easter Sunday, but, as far as most ordinary members were concerned, they were to participate in route marches, not full-scale revolt.26 As circumstances changed quickly, many of the plans laid down by the organisation simply collapsed, casualties of the mixed messages emanating from senior Volunteers. Rose McNamara of the Inghinidhe branch, for instance, was given instructions on Easter Saturday to mobilise the next day. She and her comrades did so, waiting as instructed at Mount Street until they were dismissed and sent to Harcourt Street. While there they heard ‘all sorts of rumours’ until they were inally desummoned once again and told not to leave Dublin that weekend.27 Leslie Price of the Central branch remembered a ‘terrible coming and going’ in her home, where she and her brothers waited for news on Easter Sunday. Her brothers received orders that they were to stand by, but she heard nothing, so, like many of her colleagues, she went to Mountjoy Street at the appointed time and waited around until she was sent home. Kitty O’Doherty, also of the Central branch, remembered simply that ‘on Sunday nobody knew anything’. Her own house was abuzz with visitors, rumours and messages, and, while cooking for the various Volunteers who called in, she herself received a mobilisation order which was later contradicted. Her Volunteer husband was faced with the same dilemma. On Easter Monday, he got his mobilisation orders direct from Sean MacDermott, while she continued to host a stream of callers, mostly female activists who sought information, ammunition or other supplies.28 When the Rising inally began on Easter Monday, only the Inghinidhe branch of Cumann na mBan appeared to have been even partially effectively mobilised. This branch had earlier been divided into two sections, with one group attached to the 4th Volunteer Battalion and one to the 3rd, both on the south side of the city. One section mobilised at Dolphin’s Barn and eventually ended up at the distillery in Marrowbone Lane, which fell under Eamonn Ceannt’s South Dublin Union command. The other met and paraded at Merrion Square and expected to join de Valera’s battalion. After a lengthy wait, the women were dismissed and sent home.29 Before Easter week, the Central branch had been attached to Ned Daly’s 1st Battalion and the Fairview to the 2nd Battalion, while the Columcille 25 27 29

26 Townshend, Easter 1916, p. 139. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 53. 28 BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. BMH WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 54–6.

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branch was so new that it had not been attached to any battalion, but was expected to assemble at St Stephen’s Green.30 Though Cumann na mBan members had of course known where they should mobilise for Sunday’s planned route marches, contradictory and disjointed orders meant that many were unsure of where they should turn out on Monday. Some were not mobilised, but it is clear that orders did ilter through to some members in advance of the Rising, most of whom were aware of basic instructions such as not to wear Cumann na mBan uniform or jewellery and to pack twenty-four hours’ worth of rations.31 Eithne Coyle suggested in the 1930s that a hurried order was sent out to some members of Cumann na mBan late on Easter Monday after two members contacted Pearse, Connolly and Clarke in the GPO in order to secure a mobilisation.32 Variants of this story appear to have become the basis for the idea, outlined in several accounts, that Cumann na mBan was forced to extract a mobilisation order from a reluctant Volunteer leadership.33 The evidence for this is very slim and is contradicted by a number of accounts from female activists, among them Rose McNamara, who explained that her mobilisation orders arrived before 10 a.m. on Monday, Éilís Ní Ríain, whose orders reached her ‘early on Monday morning’, and Min Ryan, whose dispatch arrived before midday.34 Maeve MacGarry received her mobilisation orders directly from Sorcha McMahon, who came to her home on Monday morning. MacGarry was given a list of volunteers to whom she was instructed to deliver mobilisation orders. But as her Cumann na mBan mother had already left for Limerick with a message from Pearse, and she was alone in the house apart from two servants and a father who disagreed with the political views of his wife and children, she was reluctant to leave her home until the large volume of ammunition stored in it was collected.35 Improvisation became the order of the day for many women, just as it did for the many Volunteers whose orders similarly arrived late or not at all. This was the logical outcome of profound secrecy and last-minute modiications to plans, both secret and open. Lily O’Brennan, for example, joined 30

31

32

33

34 35

The summary of branch connections with Volunteer battalions and for mobilisation orders is taken from excellent accounts by McCarthy and Matthews: Cumann na mBan, pp. 54–61, and Renegades, pp. 122–9. Though not all. Rose McNamara was mobilised in ‘full uniform and equipment’: BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. Eithne Coyle, ‘History of Cumann na mBan’, An Phoblacht, 8 April and 15 April 1933, reprinted in Luddy, Women in Ireland, pp. 307–8. Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, pp. 107–8; Townshend, Easter 1916, p. 261; McGarry, The Rising, p. 162. Ui Chonaill, ‘A Cumann na mBan Recalls’, p. 272. BMH WS 826: Maeve MacGarry.

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up with local members of the Inghinidhe branch, though her home branch was the central one. Her welcome was initially frosty, but they all soon became close comrades as they attempted to provide assistance wherever they were required.36 She was one of the many activists who found herself in unexpected circumstances because ‘many North side members caught out at the South side reported for duty to the South side Garrison Posts and vice versa for those from South side to North side Posts’.37 Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh was in an even more isolated situation than most, as, having moved out of Dublin, she had established a small suburban branch of Cumann na mBan which was neither attached to a Volunteer battalion nor expected to turn out on Sunday, let alone on Monday. She joined the ight through her friendship with the sisters, Áine Ceannt and Lily O’Brennan; the latter, who had special knowledge through her sister and brother-inlaw, summoned her to Dublin via telegram on Easter Monday morning. Nic Shiubhlaigh wore her uniform, relecting her detachment from central command, and was directed to Cumann na mBan headquarters, before heading to Jacob’s biscuit factory. Thomas MacDonagh greeted her there incredulously, protested that they had not made provisions for ‘girls’ at the factory, but accepted her proposal that she set up a kitchen.38 There was no suggestion in her account that she forced herself on a reluctant MacDonagh – he in fact encouraged her to ind more female assistants – though this too has been suggested in some accounts.39 Nic Shiubhlaigh, like a number of her Cumann na mBan and Volunteer counterparts, took circumstances into her own hands, insisting on joining the conlict, often by taking unilateral and unorthodox decisions.40 Another resolute activist, Cathleen Byrne, effectively kicked her way into the GPO, breaking through a window in her determination to join the ight.41 Leslie Price got no mobilisation order on Monday but she ‘decided’ nonetheless to go to Mountjoy Street. After waiting there for about half an hour, she and her comrades received orders from Ned Daly that they should go home and await further instructions. Believing that Daly wished to spare women the horrors of armed revolt, Price and her friend ‘showed a lack of discipline’ by walking down O’Connell Street and going into the post ofice instead. She was eventually sent to the Hibernian Bank before returning to the GPO later in the week.42 Annie 36 37 38 39

40 42

O’Brennan, ‘The Dawning’, p. 159. Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1404(1). Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, pp. 164–8. Margaret Ward claimed she had to ‘use all her powers of persuasion before she could convince him that the women had an essential role to perform’: Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, p. 109; McGarry, The Rising, p. 162. 41 Townshend, Easter 1916, pp. 152–7. McGarry, The Rising, pp. 161–2. BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price.

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and Lily Cooney received countermanding orders but turned out on the Sunday in any case.43 Having been sent home from her mobilisation point on Monday, Phyllis Morkan and a friend walked instead towards North King Street before being directed to Morkan’s husband, who was serving in Brunswick Street.44 These women were clearly willing and very determined revolutionaries, but their capacity to disobey orders suggested that military discipline within Cumann na mBan was both conditional and unpredictable. Cal McCarthy has argued that the Rising was a signiicant organisational failure for Cumann na mBan, and it is dificult to conclude otherwise. It was clearly not the fault of individual members or even of entire branches that consecutive mobilisation orders had disrupted plans for manoeuvres, but the fact that women deied instructions and wandered the streets looking for a role, unsure of where to go or what to do in such an emergency, suggested that Cumann na mBan was ‘far from an effective military machine’.45 In this, it should be emphasised, they were at one with the Volunteers, as the day’s delay resulted in near chaos for both organisations. As one Cumann na mBan member, who drifted into Liberty Hall on her arrival from Belfast, remembered, she and her companions spent Easter Sunday ‘in desultory wonderings and wanderings which ended with our return to Liberty Hall in time to see a turn-out of the Citizen Army commanded by James Connolly’.46 Some women even went in search of their friends, husbands and iancés, sometimes ‘pestering’ senior oficers in their desperation to know that they were safe.47 Min Ryan made her way to the back of the GPO, where she asked to see Sean MacDermott. In her own estimation, she ‘looked exactly like the complete camp follower’.48 Like the Volunteers, Cumann na mBan proved to be ineficient in part at least because the clandestine nature of the Rising made open preparation impossible. It had, however, been possible to make extra ield and irst-aid kits in advance without attracting oficial suspicion, and these were clearly useful, as medical services in some garrisons were relatively well organised. The presence of Kathleen Lynn, who knew in advance about the Rising and had helped to direct medical preparations in Liberty Hall in particular, no doubt helped. Éilís Ní Ríain described a well-run hospital at the Father Matthew Hall in Church Street where each member of Cumann na mBan was given a white armlet and duties were allotted by senior branch oficers. They did not have a qualiied doctor with 43 45 47

44 BMH WS 805: Annie and Lily Cooney. BMH WS 210: Phyllis Morkan. 46 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 66. Gray, ‘Memory of Easter Week’, p. 282. 48 BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price. BMH WS 399: Josephine Mulcahy.

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them, but they had all had valuable irst-aid training.49 But some medical posts were close to chaotic, and in some women had to establish irstaid stations from the ground up and often with little access to supplies. Phyllis Morkan was asked to prepare an emergency hospital. She and the other nurses gathered material and bedclothes from nearby homes and soon had a ‘ward’ complete with dressings ready. When, however, they received their irst patient, Liam Clarke, who had gunshot wounds in his face, they realised they had no stimulants or changes of clothing. They were then obliged to make their way to Morkan’s home on Arran Quay for these essential supplies, apparently not having expected that more than bandages might be needed. As well as collecting brandy, whisky, socks and shirts, they took several rounds of ammunition from the dining-room, but, owing to the presence of British soldiers at all the crossings on their return route, they never made it back to Church Street.50 Although women had been trained and irst-aid kits had been prepared, it seemed that little consideration had been given to where irst-aid posts might be established and where extra supplies could be found if existing provisions proved inadequate or the conlict lengthy. Other key roles for which Cumann na mBan had been trained were executed in a thoroughly ad hoc manner, especially in the procurement and preparation of food. Members could not have been asked to prepare more than twenty-four hours’ worth of rations without provoking awkward questions, but the secret nature of the revolt also meant that food was not stockpiled or prepared in advance, and shortages of food were to cause signiicant problems in a number of garrisons. The GPO was well supplied because of its proximity to a number of shops and restaurants, but other posts, including St Stephen’s Green, had little or no access to food.51 Some combatants were lucky enough to come across delivery carts and even live animals. The Marrowbone Lane garrison was kept fed through the capture and subsequent slaughter of three calves. Nine live chickens were ‘commandeered’ one day, a ‘load of cabbage’ was captured on another, and milk and bread vans were also intercepted.52 Other garrisons fared much worse, and men and women simply went hungry, partly through over-rationing and partly through the scarcity of food.53 Women were clearly expected to know how to cook, but they did not know where food could be obtained and what should be done if it was not immediately available. Having been mobilised and then dismissed on Monday, Éilís Ní Ríain and a companion disobeyed orders and attempted to volunteer 49 50 52

Ui Chonaill, ‘A Cumann na mBan Recalls’, p. 273. 51 BMH WS 210: Phyllis Morkan. Matthews, Renegades, pp. 130–1. 53 BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. Townshend, Easter 1916, pp. 259–60.

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at the GPO before being sent to a Volunteer post at Reis’s Chambers on the other side of the street. There they found ‘no food or facilities for cooking’ and were thus obliged to cross O’Connell Street, which was ‘a mass of barbed wire and barricades’ in search of rations. On arrival at the GPO, their request for food was at irst denied and then inally granted after they emphasised the dangers in crossing to the post ofice.54 No plans had evidently been made to get food out of the GPO if necessary. When Aine Heron arrived at the Four Courts on Tuesday, she found that the men stationed there had had nothing but tea before then.55 Obtaining and cooking food was sometimes dull, but it need not have been as dangerous or dificult as it turned out to be.56 Food was not rationed in wartime Dublin, and while milk, butter and meat could not have been stored in advance, it is dificult to understand why supplies of tea, sugar and lour, for example, were not stockpiled as arms had been. We cannot know, of course, how Cumann na mBan might have performed their tasks had they been mobilised in force on Easter Sunday, but it is dificult to imagine that medical and food-preparation services would have been much better executed, as neither supplies nor clear plans for their distribution seemed to exist. The dificulties Cumann na mBan faced in carrying out their orders must be considered in any analysis of the impact of MacNeill’s countermanding order and, indeed, of the broader question of whether the rebels believed they had any serious prospect of military victory or at least of a drawn-out ight. The jobs which largely fell to women were not useful but non-essential extras, they were indispensable to the proper functioning of any army or rebel force. Had Cumann na mBan not existed, men would have had to take on these tasks, as they did in other military forces. That food in particular was lacking and that little thought had been given to how buildings could be itted out with kitchens and irst-aid posts suggests not that such considerations were trivial but that the rebels’ plans were seriously and fundamentally deicient and, perhaps, that they did not in fact expect to hold out for long at all. The most dangerous and perhaps the most successful work undertaken by women was dispatch-carrying, which relied more on luck and bravery than it did on forward planning. This was vital work, especially as so many telephone and telegraph wires had been cut, leaving no other reliable way to communicate with colleagues around Dublin and beyond.57 Women carried messages because it was believed that they could slip by 54 55 57

Ui Chonaill, ‘A Cumann na mBan Recalls’, p. 272. 56 BMH WS 293: Aine Heron. Townshend, Easter 1916, pp. 259–60. Clair Wills, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (London, 2009), p. 43.

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police and military authorities, who were less likely to suspect or detain women than men. During the Rising, female couriers may have been in less danger than men as British soldiers were less likely to shoot women, especially if they were wearing white armlets or aprons and could be mistaken for Red Cross nurses.58 Chivalry was, however, not guaranteed. When Elizabeth O’Farrell took a message from Pearse to Colonel Portall, the latter accused her of lying and said, ‘[Y]ou think because you’re a woman you can say what you like; mind you don’t get shot through that little head of yours.’59 Female rebels were un-uniformed and thus inherently less suspicious and identiiable as combatants, and they could hide messages and even ammunition and other supplies in their clothing: some women even hid dispatches in their hair-buns.60 Almost all the women who served as couriers during the Rising were Dubliners who knew their city well. Intimate local knowledge, especially around the GPO, which was surrounded by a warren of small streets and alleys, was vital, and numerous witness accounts are marked by startlingly exact and detailed accounts of precisely where couriers went and how they arrived there.61 Messengers were familiar with the back streets and short cuts which were invaluable for those seeking to move around as quickly and as inconspicuously as possible, and they knew where to go if they needed a safe house, sought information or wanted a message of their own delivered. According to at least one Volunteer, all dispatch work was undertaken by women by Thursday, and the inal and most famous message of all was carried by Elizabeth O’Farrell, who took Pearse’s surrender to the British authorities.62 But dispatch-carrying carried grave risks for the women selected, and it was with a mixture of fear and pride that they took on this work. Some of them preferred other jobs. Min Ryan, for example, objected because being asked to carry messages meant leaving the GPO, but there is no record of any woman refusing to carry a message into dangerous territory.63 Dispatch work was seen as the highest status of the tasks usually undertaken by Cumann na mBan, probably because it was so dangerous and not an inherently female task. Leslie Price and Bríd Dixon were charged with keeping open communications between the GPO and Ned Daly’s post in North King Street and were told ‘not to go into the kitchens or to do washing or anything nor irst-aid’. They had their ‘own special function’, carrying ammunition and messages between the posts, 58 59

60 62

Matthews, Renegades, p. 133. Personal statement about the surrender of the GPO by Elizabeth O’Farrell, Allen Library, Box 180. 61 Cowell, A Noontide Blazing, p. 63. Wills, Dublin 1916, p. 33. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 64–5. 63 Ibid., p. 64.

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sometimes moving under the cover of darkness. This was exceptionally risky work, a fact recognised by rebel leaders, as Price recalled: We had done our midnight job so well and got back so easily that Seán MacDermott said up in the dining room that we were to be treated as oficers. We were promoted on the ield. When we went up to Louise Gavan Duffy oficers were given separate tables, and we were given a table to ourselves. We thought it was marvellous.64

Though certainly elite, ‘being a despatch [sic] carrier was a most miserable job’, according to Price. When Tom Clarke told her she was to cross O’Connell Street with a message on Thursday evening, she almost broke down in tears. II After the Rising, Cumann na mBan claimed that ‘in all the buildings held by the Volunteer detachments, our members assisted in cooking, irst aid and dispatch carrying’.65 This was a clear case of history being rewritten, for women were famously not permitted in Eamon de Valera’s Boland’s Mills garrison, despite the Inghinidhe branch having been assigned to his battalion. The executive presumably chose not to dwell on this in order to promote republican cohesion and, perhaps, because it undermined their own claims to equality. De Valera’s rejection of women was not perhaps as clear-cut as has been asserted, and he may have used some female couriers, but he clearly resisted their presence.66 Whatever the reasons for his decision, it was not forgotten by some activists, including Sighle Humphreys, who noted archly that his ‘garrison did not stand up to the siege as well as in other posts’ because he refused help from women.67 Just over twenty years later, when de Valera once again found himself in debate with feminists, this time over the new Irish constitution, Hanna Sheehy Skefington explicitly linked his alleged mistrust of women to his refusal to accept their assistance in 1916.68 At the time and in subsequent accounts of their involvement in the Rising, however, almost all female participants appear to have paid de Valera’s decision very little attention, presumably because those who wanted to ight simply moved on to a garrison that would accept them. It is rather odd, then, that de Valera’s decision to exclude women from Boland’s Mills is one of the best-known aspects of female involvement in the Easter Rising. Why

64 66 68

BHM WS 1754: Leslie Price. 65 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 6. 67 Matthews, Renegades, p. 123. ‘Sighle Humphreys’, in MacEoin, Survivors, p. 338. Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, pp. 326–7.

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should this be so, given the more pressing – and frankly more interesting – concerns and activities of both men and women? It does indeed appear strange in hindsight that an overstretched garrison refused help from willing female comrades, when others happily accepted it, in fact expected it. But what is perhaps more remarkable is that de Valera was the only leader who explicitly refused to work alongside women, and that historians have tended to emphasise this rather than the obvious corollary. Women were involved, indeed welcomed in most cases, in a rebellion in which they believed they had a personal stake. They were not, except in a small number of cases, actively excluded, and when they were, they usually found ways of involving themselves and comrades who were happy to accept their help. A number of assumptions have underpinned most historiographical accounts of female involvement in the Rising: that women were obliged to force themselves on reluctant male combatants, that social roles were essentially replicated even within the context of armed revolt, that some women were denied the active military roles which they sought and, crucially, that women and men experienced different and separate revolts. The experiences of the women who left accounts of their involvement in the events of Easter week do not, on the whole, support these assumptions, not least because had women’s participation in the Rising truly relected prevailing social norms, they would not have been there at all. As we have seen, most women did of course take on tasks which were quintessentially feminine, especially cooking and irst aid, but the context in which they did so was anything but conventional. As Louise Ryan has argued, ‘even cooking was always mediated through militarism’.69 Making tea and sandwiches was hardly a revolutionary act, but making tea and sandwiches in the midst of armed revolt, in a garrison, often having dodged bullets in order to procure the ingredients for this simple meal, was by default a highly subversive and radical act. It should not surprise us that the women at the heart of the ight did not often stop to dwell on this; neither did many of the Volunteers who only days before picking up their guns had similarly lived relatively normal lives as teachers, labourers and civil servants. The overwhelming radicalism of the totality of the Easter Rising has obscured other expressions of radicalism which existed within it and were inevitably minimised in its shadow. There was no one female Easter Rising experience. There were as many as there were women involved, and, inevitably, those women who were ‘out’ produced disparate understandings of their roles in the events 69

Louise Ryan, ‘“Furies and Die-Hards”: Women and Irish Republicanism in the Early Twentieth Century’, Gender and History, 11:2 (July 1999), 256–75, p. 258.

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of the week. Some women saw themselves as auxiliaries, others clearly believed themselves to have been combatants, while others’ experiences lay somewhere between the two. Whatever the precise nature of their involvement, it was plainly the case that all the women who chose to take part unambiguously understood themselves to have been active participants in a military campaign. Yet they did not, on the whole, measure the signiicance of their contribution on a sliding scale of tasks crowned by soldiery. Although the deeds of the men and women who took up arms, and especially those who died in the process of using them, were valorised – as they are in the context of most wars and struggles for ‘national liberation’ – women appeared to have been more proud of having contributed to the struggle, even in an auxiliary role, than bitter about not having been involved in the gun battles. This is not to suggest that women had not been caught up in the cult of the gun which swept over Ireland in the wake of the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force and which was heightened by the establishment of the Volunteers and the onset of the First World War. The ‘primary characterisation of the Volunteer movement [was] that men must be armed’,70 and Cumann na mBan had been formed with the express aim ‘to assist in arming and equipping a body of Irishmen for the defence of Ireland’.71 An enthusiasm for weaponry and the determination to take up arms against the British state had in fact predated all these developments and had been clearly stated in Bean na hÉireann. ‘If’, as an editorial set out in 1909, the German invasion, so much dreaded by England, actually took place, have we anything to offer Germany in return for her help. Have we one thousand trained men who could shoot straight, or walk thirty miles … Every year, every month, brings new and unexpected changes to international affairs. At any moment England may be in dificulties, and is Ireland making any attempt to be ready to seize her opportunity.72

Cumann na mBan and the women of the Citizen Army took this dedication to preparing and arming Ireland a step further when they began to collect cash for guns and again when they became involved in acquiring them, in storing them and even, in some cases, in using them. A number of women became so involved in the enthusiasm for weaponry that they acquired their own, even, as in the case of Helena Molony and Marie Perolz, if they did not know how to use them. Having a gun suggested commitment to the cause of Ireland’s freedom and the depth of their own involvement in the separatist movement, as much as it relected their 70

Irish Volunteer, 29 May 1915.

71

IT, 3 April 1914.

72

Bean na hÉireann, 15 (1909).

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willingness to bypass conventional social expectations. Some women were more drawn to militarism than others, and some had been drenched in its discursive representations for longer than most. It was probably not a coincidence that some of the most militaristic of the Cumann na mBan and ICA women had passed through the ranks of the Inghinidhe and that that branch of Cumann na mBan had military ranks before 1916, boasting a commandant, quartermaster and section commander.73 Militarism was part and parcel of their political lives before the Rising, but so too was a certain sense of play-acting and even denial of what it was they were training for. Learning to load and clean riles, let alone to administer irst aid, clearly suggested that these women were being prepared for military conlict in which blood would be spilled, but the reality of that did not hit home for some women until very late in the day. Leslie Price reported that when she was told about the imminence of the Rising, the news made a ‘terrifying impression’ on her. She ‘went kind of cold’ as she began to absorb the reality of taking on the British Empire and the deaths that might low from this action.74 Why, however, if some women carried guns and expressed a clear enthusiasm for weaponry and aspects of soldierly culture, did almost no women take on armed combat roles? There can be no question that men’s reluctance played a part in this. Michael Mallin and Daly were only two of the commandants who expressed at times their lack of enthusiasm for armed women, and their views were probably widely held. But it was also the case that those women who did seek active military roles and who were qualiied for them, most obviously Markievicz, seemed to have assumed these without dificulty, just as doctors like Kathleen Lynn took on the tasks for which they were best qualiied without question.75 Margaret Ward has argued that ‘a substantial number of women maintained that equality within the movement included the right to be militarily active on an equal footing with men’.76 If they did, they rarely expressed this position publicly. Certainly, there was no public debate about the issue, with even the steadfastly feminist Irish Citizen failing to urge this kind of equality on the Volunteers or on Cumann na mBan. The Citizen opposed women’s auxiliaries in general as they tended to remove women from the active and decision-making cores of political organisations, and not because its editors believed that the roles and motivations of men and women were primarily the same and ought thus to 73 75 76

BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. 74 BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price. Townshend, ‘Historiography’, p. 10. Margaret Ward, ‘Times of Transition: Republican Women, Feminism and Political Representation’, in Ryan and Ward, Irish Women and Nationalism, pp. 184–201, at p. 187.

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be interchangeable and equally sanctioned and rewarded. The Citizen’s notion of equality rested on the conviction that women’s difference from men should be awarded equal treatment and regard, and this was a widespread view among female activists in the period.77 It was relected in many of their views on their participation in the Rising and in the movement more generally. It appears that most women did not take part in armed combat because they evidently neither wanted nor expected to, and not necessarily because they were prevented from doing so. It might have been the case that few women sought a combatant role because they knew it would be denied them, but it is just as likely that they did not aspire to this status because they largely subscribed to contemporary beliefs about inherent – though not debilitating or inferior – differences between men and women. Judging the status of women within Cumann na mBan or the Citizen Army on the basis, therefore, of how often they ired a gun, issued a military command or insisted on full equality provides an assessment based on expectations which were alien in early twentieth-century Irish political circles, even in feminist circles, and particularly alien to such women as Molony, Perolz and Markievicz, who had famously prioritised the national question over women’s suffrage. They believed that true liberation could only be achieved within the context of a republican and socialist Ireland and that the liberation of their sex would follow in the wake of the liberation of their country. Charles Townshend has recently suggested that because most women did not participate in armed combat, a ‘central and perhaps deining mode of action’, their experiences may have been understood fundamentally differently from participant men’s and may perhaps have been accorded a lower status by themselves or by others.78 This begs a number of questions about the inherent – or otherwise – connections between military service and citizenship. There can be no doubt that those who fought and died in Easter week, especially those who were executed for their role in it, assumed an almost mythical status in Ireland and that the idea of the citizen-soldier gained currency. But while some women appeared to lament their exclusion from the thick of the ight, this should not be read as proof that they were uniformly denied the active roles they sought or the status accorded to those who had been more authentically (militarily) ‘out’. If some women wished that they could have taken up arms alongside the men, they appeared to have been both silent and few and far between. Regrets were more usually expressed about missing ‘the ight’ altogether. Marie Perolz, 77

Offen, European Feminisms, p. 23.

78

Townshend, ‘Historiography’, p. 10.

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for example, who missed most of the week’s events as she had been sent to Cork with dispatches, was ‘proud’ of her work for the Citizen Army but had a ‘bitter feeling of frustration’ that she ‘did not take part in the ighting’. Having given her gun to a Cork Volunteer because she did not need it and did not know how to use it, she evidently had not envisaged taking up arms.79 She simply regretted not having been in Dublin at all. Perolz was not alone in this regret. Those who had been involved believed themselves to be part of a magic circle, the exceptional few who had witnessed the dawn of a new Irish nation. As Eithne Coyle subsequently explained, ‘we women, are proud of the part which our sex played during that ight for the redemption of Ireland’s soul in Easter 1916’.80 This new revolutionary elite was largely centred on Dublin. Any plans for provincial revolt had been shattered by the contradictory orders issued from Dublin, and this resulted in regional Cumann na mBan members being involved in only relatively minor Volunteer operations in Galway and Wexford.81 Though many Dublin women were sent to regional centres with messages, there appeared to be little work for activist women outside the capital. Those who missed some or all of the week’s events watched enviously from the sidelines. Rosamond Jacob, for example, described a sense of segregation when she went to live in Dublin for a time: ‘it was very interesting being in Dublin, and grand to be living at Scoil Éanna, but I was all the time suffering with envy and jealously of the people I met who had been out in the Rising.’82 Those women who had not been there expressed far more disappointment than those who had. Yet Jacob felt the effects of the Easter Rising and was radicalised by it, just as other women were, even if they had not been directly involved. Maire Comerford wandered around Dublin during Easter week, taking in the strange sights of a city in revolt. She wore out her shoes making what was surely one of the irst Easter Rising pilgrimages, as she visited sites where rebels had fallen, talking to participants, watching ‘very tired looking women’ carrying ‘sacks of things’ and going to the main garrisons. She was utterly transformed by what she saw, so much so that when she returned to Gorey she found herself to be ‘completely cut off ’ from her surroundings. She thought only of how ‘to get back somehow and join the Movement’. The executions stiffened her resolve.83 79 80 81 82 83

BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1226(10–12). McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 62–3. DRJ, 31 December 1916, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(30). ‘Maire Comerford’, in MacEoin, Survivors, pp. 39–41.

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III Versions of women’s experiences in the Rising began to circulate very soon after the event. Some were no doubt embellished as women attempted to exaggerate their contributions. Kathleen Clarke told Rosamond Jacob that she did not ‘believe half’ of what one woman had told a Cumann na mBan meeting about her experiences.84 One of the earliest published memoirs was Margaret Skinnider’s remarkable chronicle, produced while she was in the USA in 1917. This account presented the Rising as an inclusive event, an episode in which men and women engaged collectively. ‘We’, she argued, ‘were convinced of the justice of our cause, convinced that even dying was a small matter compared with the privilege we now shared of ighting for that cause.’85 Her narrative was unusual, however, as most women’s accounts were published many years after the revolutionary decade. Most of the narratives produced soon after the events seemed determined to play down the radicalism of women’s participation. The Catholic Bulletin, for example, ran a series on ‘the events of Easter week’ in 1917, declaring itself ‘glad to be able to publish’ brief biographical sketches of some of the women whose ‘sacriices have imprinted themselves indelibly on Ireland’s story’. Apparently these women were ‘wives and mothers’, and the two singled out for immediate attention – Markievicz and ‘Mrs Joseph Plunkett’ – were ‘converts to Catholicism’. Other proiled women included the mothers of Pearse, Plunkett, Ned Daly and John MacBride: those who were neither mothers of martyrs nor Catholic converts appeared not to warrant attention.86 The journal was determined to show that Markievicz in particular was well liked and honourable, but, above all, pious and devotedly Catholic.87 This was to be the irst of many attempts to slot her into versions of the national story, usually by insisting that she was attention-seeking and ostentatious but also, as in this case, by catholicising her. Further accounts followed broadly similar patterns, and it is striking how often women’s experiences were published in religious periodicals, as though their activism could be processed and presented only through a religious lens.88 Even women at the very heart of Cumann na mBan and ICA activity appeared to conform quickly to the need to present socially palatable accounts of their work. When Kathleen Lynn told Sinn Féin’s 1917 84 85 86 87 88

DRJ, 23 November 1916, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(30). Skinnider, Doing My Bit, pp. 99–100. ‘Events of Easter Week’, Catholic Bulletin, January to December 1917. Ibid., p. 129. Examples include: Catholic Bulletin (April and May 1917) and articles in Capuchin Annual in 1936, 1948 and 1966.

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Convention that ‘[t]here would have been no Easter Week had it not been for the women who urged them to take action boldly’, she did so as part of an explicitly feminist resolution. Jennie Wyse Power endorsed the resolution but added that: I think we are all clearly satisied that the same status must be given to women as to men in Ireland. I do not agree with what Dr Lynn said that only for the women of Ireland you would have no Easter Week. The women cheered and encouraged the ighting but the men went out and fought.89

This did not correspond with Wyse Power’s normally explicit insistence on the feminist motivation and aims of Cumann na mBan. She might have felt obliged to pander to the prejudices of the vast majority of Convention delegates, who were male, but it is more likely that her declaration relected her own Easter experiences more closely than most people knew. Wyse Power’s involvement in the insurrection was minimal, as she had apparently lost her nerve, called the Rising a disaster, left the city and advised her fellow members of Cumann na mBan women to stay away.90 The publication of individual memoirs and, above all, the release of the witness statements collected by the Bureau of Military History have allowed historians to begin to piece together a more systematic account of women’s participation. The stories which emerged reveal not only many kinds of speciically female experiences, but also that despite the evident differences in training, status and expectations, the experiences of male and female participants in the events of Easter week were in many ways remarkably similar. As recent work by Charles Townshend and Fearghal McGarry has shown, men were, by turns, excited, frightened, confused and apprehensive. Women experienced similar emotions and, in common with male combatants lived through periods of terror, pride and bone-crushing exhaustion. Like men, some women went days without sleep and food. Louise Gavan Duffy’s feet were so swollen from a lack of rest that she limped, while Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh was ‘on the verge of being hysterical’ through lack of sleep before being put to bed at the end of the week by Min Ryan.91 Though men and women were often separated within the garrisons in which they served, they were also very often in close proximity, sharing meals, prayers and even the inal moments before death in some cases. They lived a kind of surreal existence for about a week, inhabiting a world in which one could run into old friends on barricades and exchange greetings while dodging British bullets, and in which it seemed important to wash one’s blouse in preparation for 89 90

Sinn Féin Convention, 1917, cited in Ward, In Their Own Voice, p. 84. BMH WS 399: Josephine Ryan. 91 Ibid.

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Sunday mass, while taking the time to watch the city burning in the near distance.92 The strange ordinariness of so many accounts, the matter-of-fact way that women described life-and-death situations and tried to attend to everyday chores in the midst of a revolt, was as much an attempt to bring some stability to an extraordinary situation as it was a genuine relection of the collision between the old world and the new which was played out in garrisons around the city. Some social conventions and everyday manners and expectations survived alongside the bloody products of war. Leslie Price, for instance, described how she was asked to tend a wound in a man’s thigh because she was a ‘married woman’.93 But others were set aside for the duration. Rose McNamara begged God’s forgiveness for eating meat on a Friday while not apparently batting an eyelid at having earlier searched a female spy while armed with a knife.94 Having been sent to fetch a priest to minister to the dying and injured, Leslie Price recalled how Father John Flanagan described the men in the GPO as ‘murderers’ and refused to go back there with her. She stood her ground until the priest consented to accompany her, but on the way he refused to offer absolution to a dying man they encountered because he ‘had drink taken’. He then gave it to another man, who had also been shot but was ‘respectable’. She was so horriied by his attitude that she told only Jennie Wyse Power about it, noting that ‘it took a certain amount of courage to ight a priest’.95 Women’s accounts suggest a strong sense of shared purpose between participants of both sexes, Volunteer or Citizen Army, combatant or auxiliary. Min Ryan, for example, refused to heed Jennie Wyse Power’s advice that she stay away from the centre of Dublin, as ‘we were determined to get back. It would be absolutely idiotic not to; if the men were to die, we would too; that is the way we felt.’96 On being ordered to evacuate the GPO on Thursday morning, the women in that building refused and informed Pearse that they would not go. Pearse supported them because ‘he did not think he had any right to prevent anybody taking part in the Rebellion who wanted to stay’.97 One of the reasons for this strong sense of shared purpose was that for women, no less so than for men, the experience of republican activism was a family affair, though a distinctly gendered model of familial revolutionary activity pertained. Almost all the women who provided accounts of their political activism to the BMH had close relations who were similarly 92 94 96

BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. BMH WS 399: Josephine Ryan.

93 95 97

BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price. BMH WS 1754: Leslie Price. BMH WS 216: Louise Gavan Duffy.

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involved in the movement.98 Yet, while hundreds of fathers took up arms, few mothers were ‘out’ at all, and certainly not the wives and children of the married leaders, many of whom had their families sent out of Dublin for safety. Kathleen Clarke had left her children in Limerick in advance of the Rising, and though she was desperate to join the rebels in the GPO, she remained at home, bitterly resigned to the task of providing assistance in the aftermath of the revolt.99 Markievicz was the highest-proile mother who took part, but her children were similarly safely out of harm’s way. Many male participants recalled their mothers and fathers wishing them well as they set off, even encouraging them to join the ight,100 but this was much rarer for women, possibly because they were seen to be in less immediate danger, or perhaps because parents had long since made their peace – or otherwise – with their daughters’ political activities. Some women did buck this trend; Aine Heron admitted that although ‘the time was not really opportune’ as her third child was due in August, she nonetheless ‘wanted to be in it’, and turned out on Good Friday and again on Easter Sunday before joining the ight in earnest on Monday.101 Nora O’Daly of the Fairview branch left her three children with her sister as she set out to join her comrades at St Stephen’s Green.102 Kitty O’Doherty was probably more typical of the female combatants with children: she delivered messages shortly before the Rising, fed Volunteers and passed on information, but felt she could not leave her three small children.103 Áine Ceannt organised her husband’s ‘well-illed knapsack’ and carried dispatches on Easter Sunday, but, though ‘keyed up’ for it, she did not join the ight.104 The bulk of the women of 1916 appeared to have been young and unmarried, and their co-revolutionary female relatives were more likely to be sisters and cousins than mothers or aunts. At the Marrowbone Lane garrison alone there were ive sets of sisters, including the Cooneys, the Quigleys and the Byrnes.105 Some women were taken into the ight by male relatives. Brigid Lyons, for example, travelled from Galway with her proud Volunteer Uncle Frank to join the Rising as soon as they heard it had begun, and other men and women travelled from as far as Belfast to join the ight.106 Other determined women had to overcome resistance closer to home in their determination to do their bit. Mary McLoughlin, a ifteen-year-old Clan na Gael scout, was locked into her bedroom by 98 100 102 104 105 106

99 Morrison, ‘The Bureau’, p. 66. Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 78. 101 McGarry, The Rising, pp. 125–6. BMH WS 293: Aine Heron. 103 McCoole, No Ordinary Women, p. 37. BMH WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty. O’Brennan, ‘The Dawning’, p. 158; BMH WS 264: Áine Ceannt. McCoole, No Ordinary Women, p. 39. Brigid Lyons’s account, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA P106/1414(8).

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her mother when she called in at home between delivering messages. She escaped through her window and quickly resumed her duties.107 The Rising would have gone ahead with or without the participation of Cumann na mBan and the women of the ICA. Their presence was neither decisive nor essential, though the tasks they undertook were. But assessing their role purely in terms of their military contribution can result in only a very partial understanding of how they viewed their own involvement and what this meant to developing ideas about citizenship in the new Ireland, established at 1916. Some members maintained that participation in the revolt was so crucial that at the irst Cumann na mBan Central branch meeting after the Easter Rising, they proposed that the women who had not fought should be expelled.108 A stormy debate followed, but the motion was defeated, largely, one suspects, because communications before the Rebellion had been so confusing that many willing women had surely stayed at home through lack of information rather than lack of spirit, and also because Kathleen Clarke insisted that MacNeill’s ‘treacherous action’ had ‘upset all plans’. The fact, however, that such a resolution was even contemplated is important, for it relected the growing sense of the centrality of the Easter Rising, both in the evolving republican chronicle of national liberation and in individual understandings of citizenship. The latter was especially important for politically active women, who found in the Rising, and particularly in the Proclamation of Independence issued by its leaders, a concrete guarantee of equal citizenship within the Irish Republic. The Proclamation of Independence, issued in ittingly dramatic surroundings on Easter Monday, 1916, had been explicitly addressed to ‘Irishmen and Irishwomen’ and guaranteed ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’. In the midst of the devastation wrought by the Rising and the rapid political change which followed it, it can be easy to overlook both the uniqueness of the Proclamation of Independence and what it very quickly came to signify for activist Irish women. Elizabeth Bloxham summarised feminist republican thinking when she emphasised that ‘in 1916 the aim of the signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish republic was to establish “a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland, and elected by the suffrage of all her men and women”’.109 The fact that the majority of republicans and Sinn Féiners clearly did not dwell on that part of the document was irrelevant for most 107 108 109

Wills, Dublin 1916, p. 70. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 102; and Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 133. Elizabeth Bloxham, A Call to Irishwomen (Dublin, [?]1917) (Bloxham’s emphasis in the quotation).

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feminists, who singled it out, highlighted it and insisted on it repeatedly, for here at last was a guarantee of the equality they had long maintained would be part and parcel of any advanced nationalist settlement. The egalitarian impulses of the signatories were emphasised repeatedly, and many of the men of 1916 came to occupy a place in the feminist pantheon as well as in its republican equivalent. According to the Irish Citizen, for example, James Connolly deserved ‘a shrine in the heart of every suffragist’. The links between the other signatories and the suffrage movement were also highlighted, and with good reason. Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh were married to IWFL members; Patrick Pearse was a supporter, as were Thomas Clarke and Eamonn Ceannt. Pearse had in fact speciically stated in early 1916 that ‘every man and every woman within the nation has normally equal rights’, his words held up by Irish feminists as testimony to his broader democratic principles.110 While acknowledging that some of the leaders of 1916 were ‘rather narrow-minded as far as women in public life were concerned’, most, argued Eithne Coyle, ‘were great believers in women of worth and inluence and were at all times prepared to give them equal rights and opportunities with the men’.111 Kathleen Clarke took this one step further, intriguingly recalling in her autobiography that the Proclamation fairly represented the views of all the signatories apart from one, ‘who thought equal opportunities should not be given to women’.112 She refused to reveal who this was. Hanna Sheehy Skefington likewise recalled that ‘six out of the seven 1916 signatories were our supporters. I have Connolly’s word for it about a week before the Easter Rising that there was only one dissentient (and he did not persist) to the full citizenship clause for women in the 1916 Proclamation. That was an achievement.’113 Her own IWFL embraced the signiicance of the Proclamation, declaring that it relected both the increasing popularity of the women’s suffrage cause and the declining popularity of John Redmond.114 The question of why such an inclusive and bluntly feminist language appeared in parts of the Proclamation has never been adequately addressed. There is no doubt that some of the signatories were genuine supporters of women’s suffrage. But the fact that such a concern, so often dismissed by advanced nationalists as irrelevant or even suspiciously English, and such 110

111 112 113 114

Patrick Pearse, ‘The Sovereign People’, in The Collected Works of Patrick Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin, 1922), p. 338; and ‘Patrick Pearse and His Message’, Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,817(4). Eithne Coyle, lecture at UCD, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1226(8). Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 69. HSS, ‘Looking Backwards’, Distributive Worker, 20:12 (December 1941), p. 202. Margaret Connery, New Ireland, 2:61 (15 July 1916), p. 365.

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an emphatic declaration of equality of the sexes made it into the document is in itself remarkable, given all the other considerations the document’s authors had to take into account. None of the leaders relected on this intriguing aspect of the proclamation, probably because such liberal views were not widely held within the broader Volunteer movement, and many of those who had espoused them were executed before they could be questioned on this aspect of the Proclamation. It may be that it relected the eccentricity of Pearse, who was the main author of the Proclamation, or the egalitarianism of Connolly, or it may simply be that the rebels sought as wide a support base as possible. The latter is, of course, unlikely, but it seems safe to assume that historians have largely underestimated the impact on the thinking of some of the key republicans of that era of the women’s movement and indeed of the women with whom they associated in political, cultural and social circles. It is striking that Connolly’s socialist inluence on the proclamation has been noted many times, despite the fact that he alone was a socialist, while all but one of the signatories were active suffragists. Before the foundation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Volunteers and the Citizen Army, the most dynamic and openly advanced political movement in Ireland was, after all, largely composed of women who not only fundamentally challenged the British constitution but who were prepared to take violent action and pay for it with a prison sentence and starvation if necessary. More than the Irish Party, Sinn Féin or even the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the pre-1916 era, Irish suffragettes displayed the characteristics and political commitment usually associated with the Fenians and Land Leaguers. It is unsurprising that Pearse, with his love of display and symbolic sacriice, admired them and that he and MacDonagh had worked towards advancing women’s claims within the Volunteers.115 In her own tribute to the leaders of the Rising, and especially to the men she was ‘proud’ to call friends – Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, Plunkett – Hanna Sheehy Skefington praised their ‘high idealism’ and their proclamation which ‘gave equal citizenship to women, beating all records, except that of the Russian Revolutionists, and their Revolution came later’.116 Sheehy Skefington was soon to learn that just as in the Russian Revolution, feminist aspirations would be one of the early casualties of the new dispensation.

115 116

IC, 22 May 1915. HSS, British Militarism as I Have Known It (Tralee, 1946). Originally written in 1917 in the form of a lecture to be given while she was in the USA.

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9

After the Rising

After our release, our activities were more or less routine. For us, it was only a matter of taking up the gun again.1

I Shared revolutionary experiences stretched beyond the Easter Rising, helping to shape the political consciousness of a generation of Irish republicans, male and female. One of the most potent of these was imprisonment, which Irish women experienced in two very distinct ways. In the most direct sense, about seventy-seven women were themselves arrested after the Rising: most were released in early May, though ive were interned or deported and Markievicz was tried by court martial.2 Many of the arrested women were members of the Inghinidhe branch of Cumann na mBan who had been stationed at the Marrowbone Lane garrison and who had been the only group of women who insisted on surrendering with their male colleagues.3 Rose McNamara recalled how she and twenty-one other women formed fours before marching through the front gate with the Volunteers. Thinking that the women would go home in order to avoid arrest, the Volunteers gave them their small arms, presumably as souvenirs. The women instead carried them proudly as they ‘all marched under military escort to Richmond Barracks, the girls singing all the time amidst the insults of the soldiers and the people along the route’.4 Kathleen Lynn, who was arrested alongside eleven other Citizen Army women at the City Hall garrison, had a slightly different experience as her group was marched via Thomas Street to Richmond Barracks: ‘great ovation as we marched along, only separation women

1 2 3 4

BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Matthews, Renegades, p. 148; and McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 72. Matthews, Renegades, p. 154. BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara, and Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,817(5).

194

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hooted’.5 Nellie Gifford agreed about the ICA women’s experience at the City Hall. When they asked their commandant, Michael Mallin, what they should do if they were met by a hostile crowd, he urged them to remember that ‘you are soldiers, and bear yourselves as such. Hold your heads up, and march as smartly as if you were on parade – taking no notice of anyone, and looking neither to right or left.’ The women did so and in the event were greeted by some of the women who lined their route with cries of ‘God bless you girls.’6 The spectre of the ‘separation women’, women who received an allowance while their husbands served in the British military, loomed large in the lives of a number of republicans during and in the immediate aftermath of the Rising. Plunkett described the ‘furies’ who hurled glass and abuse at the Volunteers in the GPO, while Áine O’Rahilly was compelled to hurry to her brother’s house immediately after the surrender ‘to take away his wife’ as they were ‘told the house was going to be attacked by the separation allowance women who had gathered around the place’.7 Madeleine ffrench-Mullen’s group appeared to have avoided these women, or at least not to have antagonised them; as they left the College of Surgeons, they received a great ovation from a crowd of about 400.8 They would all soon see that reactions among Dublin’s population were varied and inconsistent. The fact that there was little particular commentary about female prisoners marching alongside their male colleagues was no doubt a relection of the extraordinariness of the overall event. But it also suggests that Dubliners had by this time ceased to regard the spectacle of militant women as remarkable. Although the majority of the women imprisoned after the Rising had not been gaoled before, most appeared to have a strong sense of what prison would be like and the place it occupied in the history of Irish political resistance. There was no shame attached to being incarcerated on account of involvement in the Rising; if anything, the opposite was the case. Marie Perolz recalled that when she saw her comrades from the ICA being marched to Richmond Barracks, she attempted to join them, but was sent home as she might be needed elsewhere. She obeyed these orders, but left her hat and coat on as she expected to be arrested at any time. Helena Molony similarly saw imprisonment as a sign of 5

6 7

8

Kathleen Lynn, Diary, 1 May 1916, Dublin, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. I am deeply indebted to Dr Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, who generously provided me with the entire transcript of Lynn’s diary. Sidney Czira Papers, NLI, MS 18,817(5). Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, All in the Blood: A Memoir of the Plunkett Family, the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence, ed. Honor O Brolchain (Dublin, 2006), p. 223; and BMH WS 33: Áine O’Rahilly. Transcript of Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, written in Kilmainham and Mountjoy Gaols, 30 April 1916, Allen Library, 201/File B.

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great commitment to the republican cause; so much so that her friends joked that her short post-Rising stay in prison had been ‘specially hard on her’ as she had ‘looked forward to it all her life’.9 Republican prisoners had a strong sense of not being ‘like ordinary criminals’, because, as ffrench-Mullen claimed, they maintained from the outset that they were ‘not convicts but Prisoners of War’.10 The social background of some inmates contributed to their sense of their own elevated status: when, for example, Brigid Lyons refused to share a cell with an ‘undesirable person’ (a prostitute), she was moved into her own room, suggesting that her gaolers similarly endorsed the existence of social segregation within the prison.11 Their conidence in political status was, however, largely down to their faith in the ongoing republican project and in the long history of Irish insistence on political prisoner status. After a particularly upsetting episode in Kilmainham Gaol, ffrench-Mullen took comfort in thinking about ‘the Fenians some of them 5 years without a letter 7 and 10 years without a visit’ before she settled down to ‘bear [her] solitary coninement with Philosophic calm’.12 Markievicz expressed a similar view when she explained to her sister that although her life in Mountjoy was ‘not exactly a bed of roses’, when she thought ‘of what the Fenians had suffered’ she realised that she was ‘extremely lucky’.13 The tradition of Irish political imprisonment was not an exclusively male one and had also been profoundly shaped by the more recent experiences of Irish suffragettes, who had ploughed this particular furrow before republican women – with the exception of Helena Molony – came to experience incarceration. Suffragettes had in fact taken the notion of political imprisonment one step further than their nationalist predecessors by collectively engaging in hunger strike, and this of course would soon be taken up by republican prisoners, male and female. The Irish Citizen highlighted the pioneering work of women when a version of the Cat and Mouse Act was applied to hunger-striking Sinn Féiners in 1919, arguing that women’s efforts had largely rendered the Act ineffective in Ireland.14 While relecting on the death of Thomas Ashe in 1917, Kathleen Lynn reminded Sinn Féin delegates that he had followed ‘the lead of noble women’,15 but this link between two political movements was not strongly emphasised outside feminist circles. As William Murphy 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

DJP, 20 July 1916, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(30). BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn; and ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, May 1916, Allen Library, 201/File B/8. Cowell, A Noontide Blazing, p. 96. ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, 9 May 1916. Markievicz to Eva Gore-Booth, 16 May 1916, in Sebestyen, Prison Letters, p. 140. IC, October 1919. Sinn Féin Convention Report, 1917, NLI, MS 21,523(1).

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has persuasively argued, this was in large part because many of the male republican prisoners who went on hunger strike were not keen to be associated with a ‘women’s weapon’.16 The connections between nineteenth-century Irish nationalists and suffragettes had been earlier emphasised by many suffragists, who, for example, reminded John Redmond in 1912 that ‘there is a stronger and purer Nationalism in Mountjoy Prison at this moment than any of Mr Redmond’s followers can boast’.17 Hanna Sheehy Skefington had a particular stake in this tradition and asserted that she would not have missed her own prison experience ‘for anything’. She endorsed Michael Davitt’s view that prison had been ‘his only University’ and argued that ‘prison for politicals is not deterrent’ because they ‘enter novices, to emerge consecrated and vowed to the cause in whose service they have graduated’.18 She had herself irst entered Kilmainham Gaol as a visitor to her imprisoned Land League father and uncle as a child. Those men were allowed political treatment, and her generation of Irish rebels insisted on the same. The Land League prisoners had been catered for by the Ladies’ Land League, which provided meals in ‘small wicker baskets for the individual prisoners’.19 The Ladies’ Land League had, in addition, organised the Political Prisoners’ Sustentation Funds, establishing another tradition which future generations of nationalist women would perpetuate. During her own time in Mountjoy, Sheehy Skefington was visited by Molony and Markievicz among others and had their support in attempting to secure political status for suffrage prisoners. Her own prison diet was supplemented by Jennie Wyse Power, who supplied food from her Henry Street restaurant.20 This tradition was revived in the wake of the Easter Rising. The female prisoners in 1916 were generally initially surprised by the quality of food, having ‘read tales of Prison food’,21 but it quickly deteriorated as the reality of food shortages set in.22 ffrench-Mullen recalled ‘good soup with pieces of meat and vegetables’ and sometimes bread, cocoa and potatoes and cheese,23 while Lynn recalled a ‘good dinner’ on her irst evening in Ship Street.24 Elizabeth O’Farrell described being ‘fairly comfortable’, having been given supper and lodged ‘as a guest’ in a sleeping apartment in the Castle hospital.25 Molony remembered being given 16

17 19 20 21 22 23 24

William Murphy, ‘Suffragettes and the Transformation of Political Imprisonment in Ireland, 1912–1914’, in Ryan and Ward, Irish Women and the Vote, pp. 114–35, at p. 129. IC, 13 July 1912; Lane, Rosamond Jacob, p. 54. 18 IC, 10 August 1912. HSS, Dublin Memories, SSP, NLI, MS 33,618(5). HSS, ‘Reminiscences’, pp. 20–1. ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, 4 May 1916. Matthews, Renegades, p. 155. ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, 4 May 1916. BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. 25 O’Farrell, ‘Events of Easter Week’, p. 270.

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‘a dish of fried bacon and bread’ by the Dublin Fusiliers who guarded her in Ship Street. Soon, however, she was given ‘nothing except hard biscuits and dry bread’. Though appalled by this, she and her comrades were cheered by the news that that was all the soldiers had for themselves: ‘We were delighted that they were cut off from supplies. They were only getting bully beef. That caused us more joy than anything else.’26 Lynn, Molony, Perolz, ffrench-Mullen and others were soon transported to Mountjoy, where, according to Lynn, they were ‘hailed rather with joy by the wardresses because we were interesting prisoners. We were not like ordinary criminals.’27 Not only did they beneit in Mountjoy from the work of earlier suffragette prisoners who had drilled little holes in the plaster under the pipes in order to be able to communicate with the woman in the next cell, they were also allowed free association and visitors and parcels. This led, as it had for the suffragettes before them, to an inundation of ‘all sorts of presents of luxuries’. They had many varieties of bread and cakes but longed apparently only for ‘clean bread and butter’.28 Lynn described Mountjoy as ‘clean and comfortable’. She missed ffrench-Mullen and others of their ‘special set’ who had been sent to other prisons, and she despaired of the boredom of prison life, but found most prison staff to be kind and was inundated with ‘many gifts of fruit, lowers etc.’, which had been sent by friends.29 There were incidents of ill treatment, usually on account of being put in overcrowded and little-used dirty cells, and many women were mocked by soldiers and prison oficials. Elizabeth O’Farrell was strip-searched by two female prison wardens. Chris Caffrey of the ICA told Margaret Skinnider that she had been strip-searched by soldiers, but the majority of testimonies refer to generally civil conditions and even some episodes of real kindness during incarceration. Such assessments did not constitute effective propaganda and did not often make it into the public realm until some time after the Rising. Molony, for example, told Perolz and her fellow inmates not to admit that they were well treated at Lewes prison.30 There were, of course, episodes of genuine privation in prison, especially in Ship Street, where Lynn and other Citizen Army women were given ‘blankets thick with lice and leas’ and expected to make use of appalling ‘lavatory accommodation’.31 Lynn was nonetheless accorded some privileges on account of her status as a medical doctor and was even permitted to inspect the men of the Citizen Army who were also held at Ship Street.32 She was evidently permitted to keep some medical 26 28 30

BMH WS 381: Helena Molony. 27 BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. Ibid. 29 Lynn, Diary, 1, 9, 10 and 17 May 1916. BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. 31 BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn.

32

Ibid.

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supplies as she gave morphine to the ‘nearly mad’ prostitute who was thrown into their cell, having just learned that her brother had been shot.33 By the time she was taken to Kilmainham, she had managed to de-louse herself, ffrench-Mullen and Molony, and had even arranged for the women to have ‘some sort of wash’. Because she was ‘the doctor’, Lynn used the one basin of water allowed daily irst; ffrench-Mullen followed and Molony took her turn last. This was almost certainly because as the doctor Lynn had to maintain as high a level of hygiene as possible and not, as has been suggested, a relection of her elevated social standing. All the arrested women lived in a state of suspended animation in the days following their arrest, many of them at Kilmainham hearing from their cells the ‘terrible sounds of shots’ as some of the rebel leaders were executed. Louie Bennett described the ‘terrible, tragic look’ of Helena Molony when she went to visit her in Mountjoy.34 At the same time, they had very little sense of what was unfolding outside their prisons and exchanged rumours as they attempted to keep up their spirits. Singing and Irish dancing played an important role in this: the walls of Kilmainham at times ‘echoed to Die Wacht am Rhein and Deutschland über Alles’.35 At other times, the women cleaned, sewed, read and took exercise, but for many the greatest comfort came from religious observance. ffrench-Mullen, who denied that the ICA was composed of atheists, complained bitterly on 7 May that it was ‘the second Sunday I have been kept from Mass by the British government’.36 Lynn also sought solace in her religion. She and her fellow Anglican imprisoned ICA women, Emily and Annie Norgrove, insisted on a ‘celebration’ conducted by a visiting Church of Ireland clergyman, who at irst claimed he could not conduct it in Ship Street as there was no place for it there. They inally got a ten-minute service, but Lynn did not get the prayer book she asked for.37 Though ‘kindly’, the clergyman who ministered to her in Kilmainham was unsympathetic to her situation, telling her that it was ‘a pity Protestants should be mixed up in Revolution’.38 The politicising impact of incarceration was felt well beyond prison walls, largely through campaigning about the status and conditions of prisoners and the personal contacts between prisoners and their families and friends. Mabel FitzGerald, whose husband Desmond was imprisoned after the Easter Rising, explained to George Bernard Shaw how the 33 34 35 36 38

Lynn, Diary, 29 April 1916. Louie Bennett, ‘With Irish Women Workers’, Irish Economist (August 1922), p. 294. ffrench-Mullen, Memoir/Diary, 4 May 1916. Ibid., 7 May 1916. 37 Lynn, Diary, 29 and 30 April 1916. Ibid., 6 May 1916.

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imprisonment and treatment of so many nationalists had altered political consciousness in Ireland: Like a large number of women in Dublin now I have become familiar with the inside of nearly every Barrack and Prison in the city from following Desmond around. You can have no idea how strong the feeling about these things is in Dublin … If we did not win the Rebellion we have won hundreds of thousands of recruits to our ideals and aspirations since then, and the military have not only failed to endear themselves to the Irish people … but have very seriously prejudiced whatever sympathy the Allies had in non-Unionist circles in Dublin. Such a policy of savage repression was bound to have that result in Ireland and is amazingly short-sighted for the authorities to have pursued it.39

Women’s organisations campaigned on behalf of all prisoners, but made particular efforts where female prisoners were involved, especially Constance Markievicz, who was incarcerated for longer than any other republican woman. Cumann na mBan was especially active in this area, organising demonstrations, writing letters to the press and regularly emphasising the political status of republican prisoners.40 Even Louie Bennett, paciist and non-nationalist feminist, rallied her Irishwomen’s International League behind Markievicz, expressing deep concern about the conditions in which she was kept and urging the Home Secretary to take into account Markievicz’s ‘pure motives’ and ‘unblemished’ moral character.41 The Irish Citizen joined Cumann na mBan in demanding political status for Markievicz, linking her position to the suffragettes who had also campaigned for political status.42 Protesting on behalf of female prisoners was not always straightforward, however, as Hanna Sheehy Skefington learned in 1918 when she accused Cumann na mBan of failing to campaign vigorously enough for Markievicz’s release. Jennie Wyse Power explained to her that while Cumann na mBan wished to have its president freed, Markievicz had herself objected to any special treatment or special efforts made on her behalf as a woman.43 Appealing to British authorities posed the usual sorts of ideological dilemmas to activists. ‘S’, for example, noted in 1916 that nationalists should protest in Dublin against the treatment of women prisoners, but reminded readers that ‘there must be no appeal to the English Prussians in this matter’ as this would apparently constitute ‘playing into 39

40

41 42 43

Mabel FitzGerald to G. B. Shaw, 23 May 1916, Desmond and Mabel FitzGerald Papers, UCDA, P80/1559(2). Letter from Niam Ni Pluingceid and Maire Ni Rian, honorary secretaries of Cumann na mBan, New Ireland Review, 5 (May 1917), p. 421. Louie Bennett to Home Secretary, 17 February 1917, PRO, HO 144/1580/316818/20. IC, June 1917, p. 263. Jennie Wyse Power to HSS, 1 March 191[9], SSP, NLI, MS 22,689.

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their net’.44 Some activists ignored this directive, including the labour groups and the Irish Citizen, which highlighted the incarceration of Molony and Carney.45 Their case was taken up by the Dublin Trades Union Conference, which managed to have questions asked about the women in the House of Commons, and by the IWWU, which argued that they had been kept in Aylesbury Prison for so long because it was feared that their release would ‘stimulate Trade Unionism among Irish working women’.46 The release or return of prisoners to Ireland provided a key propaganda opportunity to a number of organisations, including Cumann na mBan and the IWWU, especially when women were freed. Lynn recalled Markievicz’s homecoming in 1917 attracting greater crowds than royalty.47 Lynn, Perolz and Molony met her at Aylesbury and accompanied her to Dublin alongside her sister, Eva Gore-Booth. When they arrived they were met by huge crowds of women, many of them displaying Sinn Féin colours and carrying lowers tied with green, white and orange ribbons.48 II Such joyful reunions provided welcome relief from the despair into which nationalist Dublin had been plunged after the executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising and the imprisonment of hundreds of their comrades. As the excitement of revolt and repression began to fade and the grim facts of who had survived, who had been arrested and who had been killed became known, nationalist organisations began to take stock, rebuild and address pressing social and political issues. While some activist women reported the period between the Easter 1916 and the conscription scare as relatively quiet, many became exceptionally busy with a new phase of fundraising, which served as a mechanism for the reorganisation and revitalisation of Cumann na mBan and post-Rising nationalism more generally. The vast majority of republican women did not experience prison directly as inmates or even as visitors, but political incarceration became a fact of life for most activists, largely because these fundraising initiatives became centred on supporting prisoners, detainees and their families. Women were of course well used to raising money for political causes by 1916. The organisation of plays, rafles, at homes and even fancy dress balls had been central to all Irish women’s organisations, whose subscription lists rarely met their expenses: donations of 44 46

47

New Ireland, 5 (9 December 1916), p. 78. 45 IC, December 1916. Letters between Dublin Trades Union Congress and W. C. Anderson and offprint of House of Commons debate, BMH Contemporary Documents 119/1/3(a–c); New Ireland, 6 (23 December 1916), p. 113. Lynn, Diary, 21 June 1917. 48 II, 22 June 1917.

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time, money and goods had long been absolutely essential to the survival of many of these organisations, and women’s early training in thrift and inventiveness proved valuable. As we have seen, women were also very active fundraisers for mixed societies or even for organisations like the Volunteers, which excluded them. In the immediate aftermath of the Rising, women once again initiated and led what became very extensive and successful fundraising campaigns on behalf of republican prisoners and the dependants of combatants, living and dead. Campaigners quickly found that the need for relief was great, but also that Irish nationalists were willing to give. Sorcha McDermott of Cumann na mBan remembered that ‘money was rolling in at that time. You could get money for anything. People had not yet got over the feelings inspired by the Rising.’49 Kathleen Clarke, who had been given a sum of £3,000 by her husband before the Rising, spearheaded the new relief effort. Tom Clarke had speciied that the money should be used to provide aid to the families of combatants, and Kathleen Clarke found herself attending to his wish on the evening she heard of her husband’s execution. She formed a committee to oversee the Irish Republican Prisoners Dependants’ Fund and remembered distributing the money she had immediately to some of the women who came to her house looking for news of their relations in the days after the Rising.50 Clarke claimed that the women knew to come to her for assistance because all Volunteer commandants had been instructed to tell their men to pass on this information. This was not a Cumann na mBan committee, but it appeared at irst to be run entirely by Clarke and her closest friends from the Association, particularly Sorcha MacMahon, a fellow member of the Central branch. That committee soon afterwards became the Irish Volunteer Dependants’ Fund (IVDF). Clarke was named president, MacMahon was appointed secretary, and most other executive committee posts were taken by fellow members of Cumann na mBan. The only exception to this was Margaret Pearse, who was clearly asked because of her status as a powerful representative of the Easter dead. Cumann na mBan itself appeared not to contribute to the IVDF on an institutional basis, though it subsequently claimed a central role in republican fundraising. Neither did it ally on this basis with the Irish National Aid Association (INAA), a body with aims similar to the IVDF which also boasted a strong Cumann na mBan presence from its foundation in May 1916. This was no doubt partly due to the fact that Cumann na mBan was in some disarray after the Rising, possessing neither an 49

BMH WS 945: Sorcha McDermott.

50

Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 121.

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ofice nor a fully functioning organisational structure in Dublin, let alone across the country. Even its once powerful and active Central branch had to be ‘restarted’ after the Rising.51 This relected the relatively parlous state of the organisation before the Rising as well as the impact of the chaos of its immediate aftermath and the uncertainty of the position of the entire Volunteer movement, let alone Cumann na mBan. Many individual members, almost all of them Dublin women, had been arrested or taken for questioning; some, including Jennie Wyse Power whose Henry Street premises had been badly damaged during the ighting, had suffered serious inancial loss, while others were left to mourn husbands, brothers, sons and friends. Kathleen Clarke herself lost her husband, her brother and, in the weeks after their executions, her own health and her fourth child, who was stillborn. Shock and grief understandably paralysed many of these women, and the utterly chaotic and, at times, surreal atmosphere which settled on Dublin contributed to a situation in which decisive action was dificult. Members of Cumann na mBan responded to the new circumstances in ways which were replicated across the country, by reaching into their pockets in an effort to help those who had been affected, by offering prayers and by trying desperately to gather information. What remained of an executive immediately spent its modest £200 kitty on stemming ‘the need of the irst week’s want and misery’,52 leaving it powerless to make a further sizable inancial contribution on an institutional basis. Jennie Wyse Power told Áine Ceannt that Cumann na mBan had given ‘whatever money they had’, but it could not begin to cover the expenses involved.53 Instead, the organisation’s most active members, especially those based in Dublin, threw their energies into fundraising for the IVDF and the INAA.54 Given that Cumann na mBan had worked hard at collecting money for the ‘Defence of Ireland Fund’, and had in fact put fundraising at the heart of its agenda, it is worth asking why members looked beyond the organisation when attempting to collect cash for a cause which was directly related to supporting the Volunteers and in which so many individual members were involved. Cal McCarthy has argued persuasively that Clarke and others launched a new fundraising organisation in the spirit of an ‘all hands on deck’ approach, presumably believing that an exclusively women’s organisation could not attract the breadth of membership and support necessary. In addition, Cumann na mBan had not established branches in a number of counties across Ireland and thus 51 53

Ibid., p. 133. 52 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 6. BMH WS 333: Áine O’Rahilly. 54 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 6.

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could not provide a strong and truly national base for the new venture.55 This was no doubt true, and the early involvement of men, including John Reynolds – a Volunteer who had been in the GPO during the Rising – who gave the IVDF crucial ofice space in central Dublin as well as organisational assistance, was vital. But there may have been other considerations at play, among them a tacit recognition that not all Cumann na mBan members could be trusted to carry the sacred republican lame in the way that Clarke and her closest allies believed was itting. Clarke was herself driven by an almost pathological, if understandable, suspicion of, among others, Eoin MacNeill and the Irish Parliamentary Party. She explained that in forming the IVDF she had ‘especially selected the women relatives of the executed men, knowing that John Redmond and his party dared not say boo to us’.56 She was deeply suspicious of the INAA, which was more broadly based than her own organisation and whose executive consisted of people from the entire nationalist spectrum, from the recalcitrant Fenian, F. J. Allan, to the IPP’s former Lord Mayor of Dublin, Lorcan Sherlock, to Louise Gavan Duffy of Cumann na mBan. Kitty O’Doherty, fellow Cumann na mBan member and co-worker in Clarke’s IVDF, shared her suspicion, describing the INAA as ‘a rival organisation’.57 They could not have been pleased when the INAA quickly surpassed the IVDF in terms of staff and amount of money collected. The recollections of Cumann na mBan members suggest that while most agreed that ‘there was little Cumann na mBan activity outside the work of the National Aid Association’, exactly which aid association individuals collected for is unclear.58 The tendency of members to use various names for both organisations and for the one which resulted from their eventual amalgamation further complicates the picture. But organisers of both the INAA and the IVDF agreed that Cumann na mBan took on the bulk of collecting and distributing money. Kathleen Clarke described how Cumann na mBan had divided Dublin city into areas, assigning each patch to a member who collected and distributed, as well as making ‘thorough investigations of each case’. This work was done on top of a day’s paid work by most.59 Aine Heron remembered that: The work was then starting for the Volunteer Dependants’ Fund. We found it very hard to get the necessary information. When we called at the houses sometimes the inhabitants denied all knowledge of the Volunteers in question, as they did not know us and they thought we might be setting traps for them. Gradually 55 57 59

McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 73–4. 56 Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 137. BMH WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty. 58 BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power. Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 132.

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it became easier as the sympathy of the public had veered round to the victims of the Rebellion. Especially the Masses for the men of Easter Week did a good deal to give courage to all these people. They gave them the only opportunity they had of coming together and exchanging news from the various prisons.60

Nancy Wyse Power of the INAA testiied similarly that ‘the Dublin members of Cumann na mBan carried out all the relief distribution’.61 As these accounts testify, a duplication of effort within Cumann na mBan and within the broader Volunteer aid movement quickly became the norm, though it was clear that the INAA had made the most successful start. According to the Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the INAA had raised almost four times as much as the IVDF by June 1916, and nine times more by the end of the following month.62 Giving to the INAA had become so entrenched in Irish nationalist life that by July 1916 the names of those refusing to contribute were ‘being noted’ by collectors.63 A good indication of the turning of the political tide could be seen in the fact that Agnes O’Farrelly, so shortly before persona non grata in Cumann na mBan, was herself fundraising for the INAA in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.64 Kathleen’s Clarke’s determination to restrict her organisation to the very faithful few meant that the IVDF simply did not have the breadth of appeal that its rival enjoyed. As Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid has shown, the INAA expanded quickly, establishing lively county branches as well as a number of committees which organised particular aspects of its relief work.65 By contrast, the IVDF did not expand very much beyond its initial membership despite its executive’s hope that it would. By early July 1916, the organisation was reminding nationalist Ireland that ‘the Committee of the Irish Volunteers Dependants’ Fund desire to point out that their Organisation was the irst established to help the dependants of the men who took part in the recent insurrection’.66 It seemed that their pleas for support fell largely on deaf ears. It is unsurprising that, as Kathleen Clarke herself admitted, she was approached ‘from many quarters’ to amalgamate the two societies.67 She refused repeatedly because she objected to the involvement in the INAA 60 62 63

64

65

66

BMH WS 293: Aine Heron. 61 BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 76. ‘The State of Public Feeling in Ireland’, July 1916, Joseph Brennan Papers, NLI, MS 26,182. Minute Book of the Executive Committee of the INAAVDF, 28 April 1918, INAAVDF Papers, NLI, MS 23,468. Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, ‘The Irish National Aid Association and the Radicalization of Public Opinion in Ireland, 1916–1918’, Historical Journal, 55 (September 2012), 705–29, at p. 714. II, 3 July 1916. 67 Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, pp. 131–2.

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of ‘the British soldiers, the MPs and Mr Sherlock whom [she] looked upon as a nominee of John Redmond’.68 Sorcha MacMahon agreed with her, telling Rosamond Jacob, who collected for the IVDF in Waterford, that the INAA did not misuse the money it collected, but that ‘the personnel on the committee’ were ‘objectionable’.69 Áine Ceannt came to favour a merger as she believed that the worst of the committee men had left the army and that the participation of Sherlock in the INAA was a ‘sign of repentance’, but stalwarts, including Jacob, MacMahon and Clarke, insisted that ‘if they really repented they should say so openly’.70 Although even her sister and fellow IVDF committee member Madge Daly disagreed with her, Clarke continued to refuse, insisting that the INAA executive was contaminated by the involvement of people who were ‘enemies of the executed men’.71 Considerable pressure was placed on Clarke until she inally capitulated in September 1916. Nancy Wyse Power’s account of the INAA’s development presented Clarke and the IVDF in a less than favourable light, describing the rival organisation as ‘an unfortunate diversion’ which interfered with the work of the INAA. She described the ‘many months’ of negotiations which lead to the amalgamation of the two groups as ‘tedious’.72 Wyse Power’s rather scathing version of events was of course constructed in the aftermath of the Treaty split, and it is probably no coincidence that, as McCarthy has noted, the distribution of Cumann na mBan members between the two organisations mirrored their subsequent Treaty positions.73 While Clarke was joined by MacMahon, Áine Ceannt, Mary MacSwiney in Cork and Madge Daly in Limerick, Jennie Wyse Power and Louise Gavan Duffy became the two highest-proile Cumann na mBan members associated with the INAA. It was also clear that the INAA had managed to appeal much more widely to nationalist Ireland, and this was precisely what it had hoped to do. Kathleen Clarke may not have supported the involvement in the rival organisation of women like Agnes O’Farrelly, but while the IVDF was more selective, it was also less successful in doing the job for which it had been established.74 This was, in its own small way, a test run for the Treaty debates. Quite why Clarke inally agreed to amalgamate with the INAA is unclear, but it may well have had something do to with the fact that, as Nancy Wyse Power claimed, the IVDF’s money quickly began to run very low.75 Before they amalgamated in August 1916, the INAA had 68 70 72 74 75

Ibid., p. 132. 69 DRJ, 20 July 1916, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(30). Ibid., 22 July 1916. 71 Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 132. BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power. 73 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 78. INAAVDF Minute Book, 1916–22, NLI, MS 23,468. BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power.

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raised £13,415, while the IVDF had managed to collect only £4,459.76 Pressure was also brought to bear on her by a Clan na Gael man who angrily insisted that large sums of American money would be more rationally distributed by one organisation, by the realisation that the existence of two bodies had split the clergy and had thwarted the organisation of a parish church collection throughout the country and by repeated entreaties from the INAA.77 Clarke may have been persuaded by the INAA’s pledge that the distribution of aid would be left to its ‘ladies’ committee’, presumably guaranteeing that no party men would be permitted to make decisions about precisely who would receive aid.78 She argued that the amalgamation had taken place entirely on her terms, but precisely what those terms were is unclear. Certainly, they were attractive enough to allow her to work in harmony with what became known as the Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund (INAAVDF). While she did not attend herself, she described the meeting at which the two societies merged as ‘stormy’, but it is dificult to see why it should have been, as most of those present were in favour of the union. The minutes reveal a very thorough, careful and orderly transition.79 In inancial terms the amalgamation was clearly very successful. By October 1916, the INAAVDF had collected more than £41,000 and boasted a weekly collection total of an average of £1,400.80 Even government informers admitted that the fund was well and properly run and that money was given on the basis of genuine need rather than to fund political initiatives.81 Money was raised in a variety of ways, including door-todoor and church-door collecting, fêtes, jumble sales and concerts, lag days and even the rafling of revolvers.82 The most spectacular fundraising event was an INAAVDF Gift Sale, held in April 1917. More than 400 items were donated, some of them exceptionally valuable and rare. These included paintings and sketches by Jack Yeats and John Keating, blank canvasses by William Orpen and John Lavery and irst editions of works by W. B. Yeats, Pearse, Grifith and Thomas MacDonagh. Items associated with the Easter dead were prominent, as one would expect, but so too were gifts of valuable jewellery, art and furniture.83 The exceptional nature of many donations as well as the large sums of money raised for all the goods relects the scale of sympathy for the casualties of the Easter 76 77 79 81

82 83

‘Report of the INAAVDF’, Catholic Bulletin, 9 (August 1919), p. 416. 78 Matthews, Renegades, p. 162. Ibid. INAAVDF Minute Book, NLI, MS 23,469. 80 II, 21 October 1916. ‘Report of the Results of an Investigation into the Accounts of the Irish National Aid and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund’, c. 1920, PRO, CO 904/180/4. Brigid Lyons’ account, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1414(7). Catalogue of Gift Sale, April 1917, INAAVDF Papers, NLI, MS 24,333.

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Rising and the willingness of nationalist Ireland to back up this sympathy with cold, hard cash.84 Large sums of money continued to lood in from America, including £4,650 from the Irish Relief Fund on amalgamation and the promise of a similar amount a week later.85 By February 1917, it had amassed £86,431, and by the time it was permanently closed in 1918, the INAAVDF had raised £137,808. Monies raised were spent on supporting the dependants of men who had died in 1916 or had been imprisoned as a result of their involvement in the Rising. As the fund expanded, so too did its remit, and soon committees dedicated to particular aspects of relief were formed. These included education sub-committees, victimisation committees, investigation committees and committees for graves, tournaments, St Enda’s school and entertainments. Women featured on a number of these committees, but the authority Clarke and her colleagues had enjoyed in the IVDF ebbed away. The new president and vice-president were men, as were three of the four treasurers. Jennie Wyse Power, Sorcha MacMahon and Katherine O’Doherty were appointed to a special grants committee which would deal with American donations, and Louise Gavan Duffy, Miss O’Hanrahan and O’Doherty became secretaries. They were all members of Cumann na mBan. The female members of the executive were instructed to bring together a ladies’ sub-committee.86 Two men, Thomas Farren and Daniel O’Hegarty, were subsequently added to the ladies’ committee in a consultative capacity, in order to prevent duplication of effort and as a result of the wishes of some beneiciaries.87 Many women, including Clarke herself, sat on one or more of the INAAVDF’s sub-committees, but the bulk of female involvement in the organisation was conducted by and through the Ladies’ (Distribution) Committee. Gavan Duffy served as its very active secretary and oversaw teams of women who took charge of various city districts, collecting information about dependants and making recommendations for cash grants as well as boots, milk, railway fares and the release of articles which had been pawned.88 The Employment and Investigation committees sent reports to the Ladies’ Committee, but most of the information they gathered about want in Dublin appeared to derive from the lady visitors who went to private homes in each of Dublin’s twelve wards. Members of Cumann na mBan’s Inghinidhe branch were assigned to districts in the city. Rose McNamara, for example, was given North Strand, where 84 86 87 88

85 Ibid. Nic Dháibhéid, ‘The Irish National Aid Association’, p. 713. Matthews, Renegades, pp. 163–4. ‘Report of the INAAVDF’, p. 428; and INAA Papers, NLI, MS 23,469. ‘Report of the INAAVDF’, p. 428.

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she remembered that the ‘majority of the dependants received [them] with gratitude, although there were a few who were dificult to please … They all had a hard struggle to keep their homes in the absence of the bread-winners’.89 The Irish Women’s Workers Union attempted to provide work for union men who had been unemployed on account of their connection with the Rising, by reitting a workroom and draper’s shop in Liberty Hall.90 Citizen Army families were catered for by their own female district oficer,91 though Helen Chenevix had served as the ICA’s investigator from at least June 1916, reporting on cases of hardship and organising the payment of rent for the dependants of two Citizen Army men who had been deported after the Rising.92 As a member of the Women’s Reform League, Chenevix was no stranger to this kind of social investigation. She, like all her fellow women investigators, worked in a political culture which, while clearly nationalist in ethos, also owed much to the philanthropic and social reform context in which activist Irish women had long been involved:93 visiting, compiling often quite complex sociological assessments, dealing speciically with welfare needs and distributing funds formed the bedrock of the INAAVDF’s operations. But it was precisely because this work was dominated by women, and thus feminised, that it did not receive the recognition that the women at the heart of the organisation demanded. In April 1917, the Ladies’ Committee was not given representation at the INAAVDF’s Annual Convention, apparently because this would have been ‘impossible under the Constitution’.94 The Committee’s executive was outraged by this, penning the following resolution in protest: That we strongly protest against the fact that the Distribution Committee has not been granted representation at the following Convention in view of the amount of national aid work of which we alone have knowledge.95

Their plea fell on deaf ears, but a small consolation might have been the indirect impact of their work in Dublin and around the country, where Cumann na mBan women were prominent in local INAAVDF committees. Cumann na mBan’s involvement in this and in memorialising the Rising through the organisation of masses, parades, lag days and commemorations raised their proile in a period when the allegiances of 89 90

91 92 93 94 95

BMH WS 482: Rose McNamara. Letter attached to an envelope addressed to ‘Miss ffrench-Mullen, Mountjoy Prison’, Allen Library, Box 105/125. INAAVDF papers, NLI, MS 24,342. Citizen Army Families’ investigator report, William O’Brien Papers, NLI, MS 15,703. Nic Dháibhéid, ‘The Irish National Aid Association’, p. 727. ‘Report of the INAAVDF’, p. 429. LDC Resolution, 16 April 1917, INAA papers, NLI, MS 24,384(20).

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nationalist Ireland were rapidly shifting.96 They were also adept at raising money and gaining publicity abroad, usually working with the INAAVDF to send their own members, including Margaret Skinnider, Min Ryan and Nellie Gifford, on American fundraising and information-gathering trips.97 Though not a ‘slave woman’ herself, Hanna Sheehy Skefington nonetheless took a message from Cumann na mBan to President Wilson when she undertook a propaganda tour of the USA in the aftermath of her husband’s murder. The organisation appealed through her for Wilson’s help in recognising the Irish Republic and explicitly linked the rights enshrined in the Proclamation of Independence to America’s positive record on women’s suffrage.98 This was a sign of things to come. III The often tedious and time-consuming work of fundraising, propagandising and nationalist administration of various kinds had to be squeezed in alongside paid work and family responsibilities for most republican women. This became increasingly dificult in the context of the unfolding of a series of political crises triggered by the First World War and the Easter Rising. Ireland’s rapidly evolving political situation placed great demands on active women, but so too did the basic fact of economic hardship. Women’s employment opportunities were generally squeezed by the First World War, but for republican women workers the situation was often even more acute than for most. Job loss on the grounds of political afiliation was not uncommon in these years and was heightened in the wake of the Lockout and the Easter Rising. Nell Corr, for instance, was dismissed as a typist at Belfast’s Central Public Library because she was a member of Sinn Féin, and Pauline Keating lost her job at Brown Thomas as a result of her involvement in the Easter Rising.99 Mary Rooney was even sacked from her job in London’s GPO for ‘showing Sinn Fein tendencies’: her appointment in any other government service was soon vetoed on account of her political activism.100 Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen were moved to revive Liberty Hall’s Co-operative in an effort to ind employment for the Citizen Army women who had been involved in the Rising.101 At the same time, Lynn’s 96 97

98

99 101

McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 79–80. Joanne Mooney Eichacker, Irish Republican Women in America: Lecture Tours, 1916–1925 (Dublin, 2003), p. 58. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 81–3; and Cumann na mBan, Letter to the President and Congress of the USA ([Dublin], no date). 100 BMH WS 432: Pauline Keating. Miss M. J. Rooney ile, PRO, CO 904/214/386. BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn.

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own inancial circumstances became increasingly precarious. Although ‘tremendous representations’ had been made on her behalf by ‘all sorts of people’ including ‘loyalists and unionists’ because her patients wanted her back after her arrest in 1916, within two years Lynn admitted that she ‘had largely lost her practice owing to her connection with Easter Week’ and was in inancial dificulty.102 The INAAVDF kept records of a number of women who were dismissed in the aftermath of the Rising: one was sacked for ‘singing rebel songs’, while another lost her job after objecting to her employer’s abuse of priests and Volunteers.103 Most republican activists were paid workers as well as revolutionaries, relecting the social and economic status of their generation of nationalist radicals. The loss of income could have dire consequences for these men and women. In common with their Volunteer counterparts, most female republicans appear to have been upper working or lower middle class, but the case of Lynn shows how even those few women who held professional jobs were at risk of inancial hardship.104 Public servants, even minor ones, had to be especially careful. In early 1915 a Mrs Somers became the irst civil servant to be sacked for involvement in nationalist activity, along with her daughter, post ofice assistant Elizabeth Somers.105 They were discharged from their jobs at the Dalkey post ofice for distributing seditious literature. Both dismissals took place as part of a wider crackdown on postal employees under the Defence of the Realm Act, and both caused real hardship for the Somers family.106 Elizabeth Somers pleaded with authorities to reverse the decisions and even offered to leave home if her mother could be reinstated.107 Mrs Somers herself begged the Irish Under Secretary, Matthew Nathan, to arrange to have her son, also a civil servant, transferred to Dublin ‘without sacriice of prospects of promotion’ so that he could keep the family together.108 Elizabeth Somers inally personally called on the Under-Secretary, denying that she had used the post ofice to distribute Cumann na mBan literature, or even that she had ever seen any there. In an extraordinary and surely disingenuous statement, she claimed that she had only joined Cumann na mBan ‘on account of 102 103 104

105 106

107

108

Ibid.; and INAAVDF Minute Book, 26 January 1918, NLI, MS 23,468. Victimisation Cases Report Book, INAAVDF Papers, NLI, MS 23,500. Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–23 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 190–1. Matthew, Renegades, p. 103. Ben Novick, ‘Postal Censorship in Ireland, 1914–16’, Irish Historical Studies, 31:123 (May 1999), 343–56, at pp. 344–5. 3 April 1915, Nathan Memoranda of Interviews, Matthew Nathan Papers, vol. II, Bodleian Library, MS Nathan 468. Matthew Nathan to A. H. Norway, 28 July 1915, Matthew Nathan Papers, vol. III, Bodleian Library, MS Nathan 464.

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the Ambulance classes held there under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction’.109 Her fellow worker at the post ofice declared on the contrary that both Mrs and Miss Somers had frequently said they hoped the Germans would win the war and that suspicious literature was being distributed through their post ofice.110 Elizabeth Somers, who was usually known in advanced circles as Eilis Lasairfhiona, was in fact very active in Cumann na mBan: she had presented the organisation’s constitution at its inaugural meeting, went on to become secretary of the Central branch and was one of the most vocal anti-Redmondites in that branch. Politics aside, however, she and her family had to live, and the dismissals prompted a torrent of post on the subject to the Irish Under-Secretary. For his part, Nathan undertook a thorough review of the case. He was told by oficials that what Elizabeth Somers had told him about her involvement in Cumann na mBan was ‘absolutely false’, and that it was ‘not easy to believe’ that Mrs Somers did not know that seditious literature was being distributed through her post ofice.111 Extraordinarily, Nathan took it upon himself to try to secure employment for Elizabeth Somers, describing her to Elizabeth Browning, of the Irish Central Committee for the Employment of Women, as ‘a capable young woman’.112 Nathan’s muniicence was not the stuff of good propaganda. By the time of her death in 1935, a new version of the story was in circulation, one in which Somers ‘upbraided’ Nathan ‘with fearlessness worthy of Judith … in stinging eloquence, with the injustice of depriving her mother of her livelihood because of her own activities’. Further, Nathan was apparently so moved by her eloquence that he wrote to the Post Ofice secretary to say that Mrs Somers must be reinstated after the war.113 Most other female activists encountered no such support, and some lived a genuinely precarious existence. Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh, for instance, combined acting and republican organising with teaching elocution, while Helena Molony made a living as an Abbey actress but survived from hand to mouth and spent a good deal of time in the homes of friends.114 Her work as secretary to the Co-operative at Liberty Hall and as an unpaid organiser of the IWWU added to her radical credentials, 109

110 111

112

113 114

3 April 1915, Nathan Memoranda of Interviews, Matthew Nathan Papers, vol. II, Bodleian Library, MS Nathan 468. Statement of Kathleen Sweeney, 15 December 1915, PRO, CO 904/215/412. 8 April 1915, Nathan Memoranda of Interviews, Matthew Nathan Papers, vol. II, Bodleian Library, MS Nathan 468. Matthew Nathan to E. A. Browning, 4 June 1915, Matthew Nathan Papers, Bodleian Library, MS Nathan 463. ‘The Late Miss Elisabeth Somers’, Catholic Bulletin, 25 (March 1935), p. 222. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Splendid Years, p. 161.

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but hardly to her inancial stability. Gonne had been concerned about Molony’s inancial situation from as early as 1909 and had asked Yeats to try to secure her friend a job as secretary in the United Arts Club.115 He did not manage this, and Molony, who had next to no help from her family, evidently relied heavily on friends for support. She moved to Belcamp, Raheny, to live with the Markievicz family, as did Hobson, and from their commune they ran a sort of training camp for the Fianna. Markievicz’s stepson claimed that they were ‘installed there like gypsies with only a few of the rooms furnished and with one servant and a gardener’: Miss Helena Molony irst came to live with us at Belcamp and helped mother with the housekeeping. Bulmer Hobson also lived there for months, and his room, I recall, was one mass of printing material, papers and the like: I think the reader will have a fair idea of our life there if I mention that in spite of being in the country, we continually had to fall back on tinned milk for our tea! (although afterwards it transpired that the servant had kept the milkman in the house for ive or six months!), and our fare on Christmas morning was black pudding and sausages! Between one thing and another, I was quite glad to get back to school.116

This bohemian lifestyle did little to reconcile the women to more staid nationalists, who looked in despair at their unconventional lives. Rumours about Molony’s relationship with Hobson, her excessive drinking and, later, of Markievicz’s inappropriate relationship with James Connolly did little to enhance their reputations in nationalist circles. Fellow social and political radicals found their living arrangements fascinating and exciting: Sidney Gifford described how visitors to the Markievicz home never knew when they ‘entered that house whether you were going to walk in on a rehearsal for a play, a piece of real life drama, a political discussion, or a placid domestic scene’.117 Rosamond Jacob, a close friend of Molony, found her friend and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, another close friend, ‘there as usual: Emer [Molony] sitting on Madeleine’s bed and Mrs Ginnell visiting and complaining of the Countesses [sic] casual visitors and their ways’.118 On another occasion she found ‘Emer and her friend inishing what they called their breakfast at a quarter to two. They thought it was much earlier, and of course none of the clocks in the house were right.’119 Molony moved in around 1913 to the home of Kathleen Lynn, who informed Jacob that Molony had had a nervous breakdown.120 In 1914 she went to live in France at the invitation of 115

116 117 119 120

Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, June 1909, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne– Yeats Letters, pp. 273–4. Markievicz, ‘Life of Constance Markievicz’, Part II, NLI, MS 44,619, pp. 160–1. Czira, Years Flew By, p. 56. 118 DRJ, 11 December 1912, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(33). Ibid., 26 July 1912, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(23). Ibid., 15 December 1913, RJP, NLI, MS 32, 582(26).

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Maud Gonne, who apparently oversaw her cure.121 This may have been the case, but by 1915, she was back in Dublin and living with Marie Perolz, who claimed that Molony went home only ‘for her letters and [she] sleeps God knows where’.122 A certain disregard for convention and a resignation to recurrent periods of poverty appeared to go hand in hand with activism, indeed to have made it possible. Marie Perolz and several of her relatives lived a similarly spartan and peripatetic existence, working almost exclusively and unremittingly for ‘the movement’: The people at home never knew what I was doing. I hardly ever had a meal those times, a cup of tea here and there. I always found a glass of milk and a couple of pieces of bread and butter waiting for me whatever time I came home at night. There were ive or six of us and no one was earning except my brother-in-law, Matt McNamara. I did not look for a job because I was all the time engaged in something or another for Kate Houlihan.123

When she decided inally to apply for a job as an assistant accountant at Singers after a long period of unemployment, Connolly told her ‘it wasn’t worth it as the Rising would soon take place … and after that I would have a choice of all the jobs in Dublin’.124 This paradise of choice and plenty did not develop but she bore no resentment: ‘[T]hose were great times and I would crawl on my knees to do it all again. Of course I am poor but I am not bitter.’125 Molony and Perolz were activist veterans, having been members of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, an organisation which prided itself on the independence of its members. Early members were all, with one exception (presumably Maud Gonne) ‘working girls’,126 and the basic fact of having to earn a living had to be kept in mind when political activities were planned and executed. Maud Gonne noted that Arthur Grifith and Charles Oldham had warned her against encouraging her fellow Inghinidhe members to take unnecessary risks, the latter telling her rather bluntly, ‘It is all very well for you who are independent to carry out your wildest schemes, but you should think of what arrest might mean to girls earning their living.’ Gonne claimed to be acutely aware of this, but replied that she ‘had taught Inghinidhe the meaning of the word Solidarity. I knew that we were all equally resolved that an injury to one was an injury to all and, so long as any of us had means, we would never allow any of 121

122 123 125

Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats, 9 July 1914 and 25 July 1914, in MacBride White and Jeffares, The Gonne–Yeats Letters, p. 343 and p. 344. DRJ, 21 March 1915, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(28). 124 BMH WS 246: Marie Perolz. Ibid. 126 Ibid. Bean na hÉireann, 20 (1910).

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our members to suffer want. But I was generally careful and very lucky and, so far, none of the Inghinidhe had ever been arrested.’127 Clearly, the Inghinidhe were careful not to attract unnecessary police attention, but members lirted with danger on many occasions, such as during lagburning episodes, one of which, according to Gonne, almost landed herself and Maire Quinn in prison for the night and could have resulted in Quinn being dismissed from her job as a typist in a unionist irm.128 The risk that radical political activity could lead to dismissal from employment thus became part of the reality of the female activist’s life, and the necessity of becoming accustomed to this and learning how to avoid it helps to explain why many were able to maintain a delicate balance between respectable employment and political agitation. A system of unoficial patronage also helped. Maud Gonne believed that even if an Inghinidhe member were dismissed, ‘our organisation was popular and had enough inluence, I thought, to secure other jobs for members who might be victimised for national activities’.129 Anecdotal evidence supports her theory, as many women testiied to using political contacts to ind employment and temporary assistance in times of unemployment. Maire Comerford explained that ‘thousands’ of ‘Irish boys and girls’ lived a rootless life like her own at that time: ‘If I was not at a meeting with Cumann na mBan at 25 Parnell Sq., or at an Irish class, I was pretty sure to pick up a job.’130 The women who remained in employment over these years often found that calls on their time and energy were relentless and demanding. War and revolutionary events had placed extra burdens on women, some of whom simply did not have enough hours in the day to fulil their patriotic and professional duties. Rosamond Jacob, for instance, described how Cumann na mBan irst-aid classes were cancelled soon after they began in Waterford because the regular trainees were ‘all so busy in their shops and schools, there seems no use in trying to do anything until after Christmas’.131 The organisation of stalls, meetings, aid and propaganda literature required time, a great deal of it, and it is important to consider how these women survived from day to day, while devoting so much of their days to unpaid political work. Jacob was dependent on her mother, an invalid for whom she cared. Unusually, Markievicz and the Plunkett women had some private income, though this was fast disappearing in the case of the former. The Gifford sisters 127 130 131

BMH WS 317: Maud Gonne MacBride. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/17(15). DRJ, 17 November 1914, RJP, NLI, MS 32,532(27).

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probably received some family support, but they all worked for their own money: ‘John Brennan’ (Sidney Gifford) as a journalist, Nellie as a domestic economy teacher and Grace as an artist. These jobs were hardly lucrative and could be unstable, particularly in the case of Nellie, who was dismissed from her post after her involvement in the 1913 Lockout.132 Their father remembered them in his will when he died in 1916, but they were not to receive this family money until his wife died.133 On their mother’s death in 1932, Sidney, Nellie and Grace were left nothing, though Mrs Gifford died a relatively wealthy woman.134 Kathleen Clarke and Jennie and Nancy Wyse Power had incomes from family business interests, but they were unusual in enjoying some inancial stability, and it was of course undermined by periods of very grave personal and political anxiety, and, for Clarke at least, periods of real inancial hardship.135 Still others made their livings in literary and artistic Dublin and London at various levels: Mabel FitzGerald, as Mabel McConnell, had worked for George Bernard Shaw and George Moore for a time, while Maire Comerford found herself ‘near the heart of the revolution’ through her job as secretary to the historian and nationalist Alice Stopford Green.136 Several of these women worked as teachers, most notably Hanna Sheehy Skefington, Min Ryan, Mary MacSwiney, Elizabeth Bloxham and Louise Gavan Duffy. Women teachers, especially those educated to degree level, were disproportionately represented in a number of political movements at this time. This is not surprising, given that education and employment opportunities were inextricably linked, and women’s associations had played an active role in securing rights for expanding numbers of female teachers. By 1911, 63 per cent of all Irish teachers were female, by far the largest class of professional occupation open to women.137 According to the Irish Citizen, three-quarters of female graduates became teachers,138 but teaching could, as a number of activists learned, be an unstable profession where tenure depended on more than an ability to do one’s job. Hanna Sheehy Skefington had learned this to her cost when she was dismissed from her teaching post at Rathmines School of Commerce in 1912. A public outcry ensued, for, despite the excuses offered by the school, there was ‘no doubt’ that 132

133 134 135

136 137

Anne Clare, Unlikely Rebels: The Gifford Girls and the Fight for Irish Freedom (Cork, 2011), pp. 202–3. I am grateful to Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid for this information. Clare, Unlikely Rebels, p. 244. I am grateful, once more, to Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid for information about Clarke’s precarious inancial situation. Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/16(7). 138 Cullen Owens, A Social History, p. 231. IC, 11 July 1914.

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the dismissal was a response to Sheehy Skefington’s arrest for militant suffrage activity.139 Sheehy Skefington later explained that the school committee members had told her that ‘one lost caste’ when one went to jail.140 Even friends and associates who disapproved of militancy, including Mary Hayden, Agnes O’Farrelly and Celia Harrison, came to her defence, denouncing the idea that one could be dismissed for political offences.141 Jennie Wyse Power even led a small committee which presented Sheehy Skefington with a silver tea service as a ‘mark of indignation felt at her dismissal’.142 But even fellow activists could prove ruthless in this regard: much to the disgust of the Sheehy family, for instance, on hearing about Hanna Sheehy Skefington’s sacking, Min Ryan apparently instantly replied ‘Oh, is that a good job? Would I have any chance of it?’143 Another teacher and a WSPU member, Mabel Small, had a very different experience, as she was permitted to keep her Belfast teaching job on condition that she restrict her militant activity to school holidays.144 Belfast may have appeared unusually liberal in this regard in 1914, but as Ireland’s political crisis deepened and more and more women attempted to balance employment with political activism, tolerance appeared to wane and livelihoods were increasingly threatened. Elizabeth Bloxham, in common with a number of activists, itted her Cumann na mBan work around her job as a domestic economy teacher at Newtownards.145 While working at a County Down school, she had submitted a signed letter to the Newtownards Chronicle, objecting to an anti-Catholic sermon she had heard in her local church. This led to some students withdrawing from her classes and some social ostracism, but this was minor compared with the reaction to a speech she subsequently made at a public meeting in Galway under the auspices of Cumann na mBan. Her Galway address was reprinted irst in the Irish Volunteer and then in the Newtownards Chronicle. The result was a boycott on her return: the principal of her school and his wife refused to speak to her and the owners of the house in which she lodged asked her to leave. She kept her position but was sent a letter of dismissal after the end of the teaching session in June 1916, the Rising having apparently rendered her employment untenable. Bloxham had attempted to keep her political views to herself in the aftermath of the Rising, but this had evidently not been enough.146 Catholic institutions were not 139 141 143 144 145

140 Ibid., 5 October 1912. HSS, Dublin Memories, SSP, NLI, MS 33,618(5). 142 II, 30 December 1912. Ibid., 13 March 1913. DRJ, 10 October 1919, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(36). Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 103. BMH WS 632: Elizabeth Bloxham. 146 Ibid.

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always kinder to nationalist women: Mary MacSwiney, for instance, was dismissed from her teaching job at St Angela’s in Cork. She had insisted that she would not discuss politics in the classroom, but her arrest by a British soldier while she gave a maths class at the school was no doubt more than the nuns and many parents could tolerate.147

147

Fallon, Soul of Fire, pp. 32–4.

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10

Feminism and republicanism

Cumann na mBan is proud that its members rallied under the Republican lag in Easter Week, 1916, and claims that by taking their places in the iring line, and in every other way helping in the establishment of the Irish republic, they have gained for the women of Ireland the rights that belonged to them under the old Gaelic civilisation, where sex was no bar to citizenship, and the capacity with which they were endowed; which rights were stolen from them under English rule, but were guaranteed to them in the Republican Proclamation of Easter Week.1

I Cumann na mBan became more explicitly feminist as it expanded after the Easter Rising, or at least its feminist members found it easier to present the organisation in a more progressive light. It is dificult to see how this could have been otherwise given the Proclamation’s guarantee of equality. This assurance became absolutely vital for a number of women because it was so unequivocally imbedded in what they considered to be the nation’s foundation document. Republican women at last had an explicit guarantee of equality and this demand could now be unambiguously inserted into Cumann na mBan’s programme. Even if not all members agreed with or particularly cared about this guarantee, the fact remains that enough of them did to insist on its being woven into the constitutional ibre of the organisation. By 1917 the organisation was pledged to the policy of the Republican Proclamation by seeing that women take up their proper position in the life of the nation. Members of Cumann na Ban should participate in the public life of their locality, and assert their right as citizens to take part in the nomination of candidates for Parliamentary and local elections. Branches should take steps to educate women by means of lectures, literature, debates, and classes in the conduct of public affairs, so that they may be acquainted with the

1

Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution (c. 1919).

219

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correct forms of procedure to be followed at all meetings in which they take part, and may be itted to occupy public positions.2

This was reiterated in subsequent publications, but quite how this insistence would or even could be translated into wider Irish political life remained problematic, and republican women quickly learned that vigilance and persistence were essential if the equality promised in the Proclamation were to be realised. The careful monitoring of women’s status in Ireland’s key political organisations therefore continued, nowhere more vigorously than in Sinn Féin, which established its position as Ireland’s leading advanced nationalist organisation and guardian of the legacy of the Easter Rising. Most of the women who campaigned for Sinn Féin candidates from 1917 did so through Cumann na mBan or from within Sinn Féin itself, and the insistence on adequate representation emanated from women in both organisations despite real resistance at times. Sinn Féin liked to proclaim its feminist credentials when it suited the organisation, and it was sometimes prepared to put its money where its mouth was when pushed, but it remained, despite some real progress, a very male-dominated organisation, especially in rural areas, where the sex segregation common to many aspects of Irish society was extended to political life. Even the Rathfarnham Sinn Féin club, hardly a rural backwater, was an inhospitable place as far as women were concerned. As C. S. Andrews recalled of his local branch: The membership included some very old men, usually tradesmen and labourers, as well as women of various ages and conditions of life. There were girls who served in shops or worked in laundries and some secretaries. Other of the women members were housewives with very strong feelings on the subject of women’s rights. Although they never had any clear notion of what those rights should be they had a feeling that something was wrong with the status of women in the community. In the beginning they wanted the vote, which they got in 1918 (but only on reaching thirty years of age). This was a suficient grievance on which to hang many a debate. The men in the club were astonishingly conservative not merely on that issue but on all sorts of social questions. It might be expected that men who were prepared to support a rebellion against the political status quo would have shown some liberality of view but they had no sympathy for any campaign to rectify the disabilities suffered by women. It was surprising to me, who at that time had no ixed ideas on the subject, how bitter a debate could become on the matter of women’s rights. The Suffragettes were not popular in the Brothers’ Pearse Cumann.3

Such lingering hostility notwithstanding, the reality was that increasing numbers of women were becoming involved in Cumann na mBan and 2 3

Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution (Dublin, 1918). C. S. Andrews, Dublin Made Me: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1979), p. 100.

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Sinn Féin. McCarthy has estimated that the membership of Cumann na mBan grew from a maximum of 1,700 active members in late 1915/ early 1916 to up to 19,800 by early 1919.4 The total number of Sinn Féin members, let alone the number of female members, is harder to judge, but Michael Laffan has estimated that by October 1917 the organisation had in the region of 120,000 to 130,000 members.5 It is impossible to know how many of these were women, but as Sinn Féin supporters made up the majority of the nationalist population by 1918, and women played an increasingly public role in the organisation, it is safe to assume that the number of women members grew, especially in the aftermath of the conscription crisis.6 This was good news for the female members who advocated the greater involvement of women in Irish political life, but an unwelcome by-product of Cumann na mBan’s involvement in advanced nationalist politics, at least as far as its executive was concerned, was the apparently growing public perception that Cumann na mBan was a women’s Sinn Féin organisation. There is no question that the relationship between the two organisations strengthened during the years after 1916 and especially in the lead-up to the general election of 1918. A number of prominent activists within Cumann na mBan were also well-known Sinn Féiners, Jennie Wyse Power, Constance Markievicz and Louise Gavan Duffy being among the best known. The two organisations shared space and resources as well as personnel. The Inghinidhe na hÉireann branch of Cumann na mBan had retained its old headquarters at 6 Harcourt Street, continuing to share this address with Sinn Féin and at times sharing staff and equipment.7 Alice Cashel, for example, full-time organiser for Cumann na mBan from 1918, did not remain long as they were ‘constantly being asked for her services on loan by Sinn Fein and ultimately she transferred herself to a department of Dáil Éireann’.8 Cashel in fact appeared to be working for several republican organisations at the same time, and it is sometimes dificult to be sure on whose orders she operated. By 1918, she was establishing provincial Cumann na mBan branches on the orders of ‘Sinn Fein H.Q.’, but at the same time she organised Sinn Féin Clubs, participated in electioneering and, by 1919, was helping to found local Volunteer groups. Once again, we see that the lines between various organisations could sometimes be very blurred, particularly when

4

5 7

McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 112–13. Note that McCarthy himself warns that these igures, though as carefully calculated as possible, are necessarily approximate because they must be compiled from ‘widely divergent sources’ (p. 108). 6 Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 185. Ibid., p. 188. 8 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 85. BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power.

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a number of organisations shared membership, resources and even an address in the case of Cumann na mBan and Sinn Féin.9 That the two organisations were sometimes seen to be one and the same is hardly surprising, but Cumann na mBan never merged with Sinn Féin, though public perceptions appeared to suggest otherwise. Even well-informed commentators contributed to this misconception. P. S. O’Hegarty, for example, referred to the society as ‘the women’s organisation of the later Sinn Féin’, but as Cumann na mBan’s most ferocious critic, his error may well have been a deliberate attempt to minimise the organisation’s signiicance.10 Nonetheless, he was certainly not alone in conl ating the two.11 Alarmed at the notion that their organisation was for some people becoming indistinguishable from Sinn Féin, the leadership decided in 1918 to send a circular entitled ‘Military Activities’ to branches, advising them to put themselves under the orders of local Volunteer corps. This was done to counter the notion that ‘the main reason for which we were established was in danger of being lost sight of. The spread of Sinn Fein clubs and the series of byelections in which members of Cumann na mBan take a prominent part occasioned an impression that our branches were women’s Sinn Fein’s clubs.’12 Despite the existence of a shared membership and ideology in many cases, Cumann na mBan did not oficially urge its members to join their local Sinn Féin clubs until early 1919, and the numbers who eventually did so most likely remained relatively low.13 In the same year, the organisation emphasised once again in its constitution that ‘although working in co-operation with other associations having the same objects, it is independent of them’.14 The relationship of the women of Cumann na mBan to Sinn Féin raises a number of questions about the role of women in republican politics in the period, not least why the women of Cumann na mBan did not join Sinn Féin as readily as their Volunteer counterparts appeared to. This was in part a relection of the society’s determination to remain independent, and it surely relected the fact that it was only in Cumann na mBan that women could work as nationalists in an all-female environment, undoubtedly an important consideration, particularly in socially conservative rural Ireland. Men and women were segregated in some provincial Sinn Féin clubs, and women were even 9 11 12

13 14

10 BMH WS 366: Alice Cashel. O’Hegarty, Victory of Sinn Féin, p. 39. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 202–3. Cumann na mBan, Annual Convention Report, 28 and 29 September 1918, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1128(2). McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 86–7. Cumann na mBan, Rules and Constitution (Dublin, 1919), p. 1.

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obliged to form completely separate ladies’ branches in some areas.15 As Michael Laffan has shown, while Sinn Féin’s record on equality between the sexes was unsurpassed in this period, the fact remained that rural Sinn Féin was much less liberal than its Dublin and other urban counterparts. Evidence is very patchy but it is clear that women rarely made it into top positions in regional branches, and the vast majority of the women who were elected to committees and executives lived in cities and towns.16 Even in Ireland’s urban centres, however, equality remained partial and conditional. The gains that women achieved in post-1916 republican circles were most certainly won and not easily granted, and the women who secured them had a better idea than most that equality had to be demanded and could quite easily be ephemeral. Vigilance remained vital on a number of levels. A Miss Grifin, for example, told Rosamond Jacob that she demanded at her own Sinn Féin club at Kilkee that they have one female oficial and committee member for every male, but she owned the rooms in which her local club met and thus had the power to insist on this.17 Jacob herself served as an elected delegate for her local Sinn Féin club in Waterford, but she lamented that there was ‘a lack of feminism among Sinn Fein women in the provinces’.18 Her experience seemed to mirror the views of other political women outside the large urban centres, where female political activism was much less remarkable than it was in provincial Ireland. Hoping for deeper commitment from Dublin women, she urged her friend Hanna Sheehy Skefington to stand as a Sinn Féin candidate in 1918: ‘[W]omen in most parts of the country are too scattered to be able to do much, but the Dublin women ought to be able to insist on enough to get a start made anyhow. It seems to me the important thing for Irish suffragists to be doing at present.’19 Yet, as Jacob and Sheehy Skefington were increasingly to ind, old prejudices were dificult to shift, and, as Laffan has argued, Sinn Féin clubs, especially rural ones, were hardly conducive to the involvement of women, let alone to their espousal of feminist aims within the clubs.20 As Sinn Féin expanded, it became increasingly important for women to monitor their status within the organisation. This was not easy, not least because Ireland’s political situation was exceptionally luid in the months and years following the Rising. In common with their male counterparts, politically active women experienced 1917 in particular as a year of 15 17 18 19 20

16 Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 203. Ibid., pp. 203–4. DRJ, 27 October 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). Ibid., 23 August 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(34). Rosamond Jacob to HSS, 1918, SSP, NLI, MS 24,108. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 203–4.

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reorganisation of the national movement, when allegiances were tested and ideologies debated. Keeping women’s issues alive in this unstable political context was neither easy nor especially welcome at times. Count Plunkett made the political running by announcing a national assembly which would be held in April 1917. This heated assembly contained all the ingredients for a classic Irish split: Áine Ceannt described how ‘matters were getting pretty hot at the time, and it looked as though a split were imminent’.21 But the factions managed to come to an agreement which saw the Grifithite and Plunkett wings represented on an executive committee, and Josephine Plunkett included in this committee to represent the interests of women.22 Over the course of the year, it appeared that Grifith’s Sinn Féin was heading off the challenge of Plunkett’s Liberty League. This certainly caused tension within Cumann na mBan, as evidenced by serious divisions in Cork, where a separate, unambiguously republican branch of the organisation was founded.23 However, as the two factions merged after shadowy talks in May and June, Cumann na mBan moved with the bulk of advanced opinion in endorsing Grifith’s wing, though not necessarily his entire programme. Grifith was left in charge and the dual monarchist idea nominally retained, but Sinn Féin policy and leadership were to be reviewed at a Convention in October. The support of women activists was hardly a priority for either camp, but the question of whether to support Grifith or Plunkett was a live one within women’s political circles. How much inluence women had behind the scenes is dificult to gauge, partly because most women’s memoirs of the period tend to focus on the activities of Easter week, but it is clear that their support was canvassed in some cases at least. Helena Molony remembered, for example, that de Valera sought the opinions of Lynn and herself ‘as certain representatives of Liberty Hall’ on the eve of the Convention.24 In the end, the Convention agreed on a formula which appeased both the republican and dual monarchist wings of the advanced nationalist movement: Sinn Féin would commit itself to securing a republic, but once freedom had been won, would allow the people of Ireland to choose between the republic and a monarchy.25 In common with the Volunteers, Cumann na mBan had not been formed with the aim of founding or aiding in the foundation of an Irish Republic, but, like the Volunteers, separatists had been prominent in its leadership from its inception, and its republicanism became more pronounced after the Easter Rising. By the end of 1917 the group’s political allegiance was clear, as its new 21 23 25

22 BMH WS 264: Áine Ceannt. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 90–3. 24 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 89. BMH WS 391: Helena Molony. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 118.

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constitution stated that ‘Cumann na mBan is an independent body of Irish women pledged to work for the establishment of the Irish Republic, by organising and training the women of Ireland to take their places by the side of those working and ighting for a free Ireland.’26 At the same time, the most active female republicans remained deeply concerned about the role of women within the expanding Sinn Féin movement and in any future republic. The luid political context in which Sinn Féin policy and ideology was being developed in 1917 provided them with an ideal opportunity to press for the formal recognition of equality between men and women within the movement. II In response to the reorganisation of Sinn Féin, in April 1917, Inghinidhe na hÉireann instigated a gathering of women’s groups. The conference met at the home of Countess Plunkett, who had been appointed to represent women’s interests on what she described as the ‘council of nine’, the group assembled to represent the two main factions of the separatist movement.27 Plunkett’s own faction, the Liberty League, had been declared ‘very satisfactory from a feminist point of view’ on account of its declaration that ‘men and women shall have equal rights and duties as members of the Liberty League’. Although its provision for male only clubs was less welcome, the fact that it had explicitly addressed the question of women’s rights was in itself a sign of the times.28 This meeting represented one of the very few times that the Inghinidhe had operated as an independent organisation since 1911, signifying the gravity of the situation and a new momentum among activist women. Its representatives attended the irst meeting alongside delegates of Cumann na mBan, the IWWU and Citizen Army women. They styled themselves the ‘Conference of Women Delegates to the All-Ireland Conference’ (WDAIC) and agreed that the organisation should meet from time to time to discuss ‘those subjects of importance to women which might arise’.29 Margaret Ward has claimed that the women at the irst meeting ‘represented a considerable cross-section of opinion’ but they in fact represented only advanced nationalist women, and then only the most active and organised wing: most were republicans.30

26 27 29 30

McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 104. 28 Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 93. IC, June 1917, p. 265. Minute Book of the WDAIC of 19 April 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). Margaret Ward, ‘The League of Women Delegates and Sinn Féin’, History Ireland, 4:3 (1996), 37–41, at p. 38.

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Women’s suffrage was discussed at this irst meeting, and once again the centrality of the Proclamation of Independence was apparent: Plunkett declared simply that ‘the Republican Proclamation granted equal rights to all citizens men and women and such being the case there could be no talk of struggling for the vote after English or other methods the vote had already been granted to Irishwomen by Irishmen’.31 But reciting the relevant section of the proclamation mantra-like was not in itself enough to guarantee equality. Having heard that the executive appointed in April would shortly be expanded, the women met again in July, and ‘it was thought that, in these circumstances women should have a larger representation on that Committee, Countess Plunkett being at present the sole representative of the Women of Ireland’.32 They demanded a representation of six women on any expanded Sinn Féin executive, and, although it was made clear at the next meeting that they had been misinformed about the imminence of a meeting of the executive formed in April 1917 – their confusion itself a sign of a fast-moving political context – they nonetheless reiterated their claims for a representation of six women. Their anxieties about the paucity of female representation were surely increased by the news that Cumann na mBan’s application for representation on the executive committee had been rejected by Sinn Féin. As secretary of the WDAIC, Alice Ginnell was accordingly instructed to write to the secretary of the Sinn Féin National Council, explaining that their ‘claim [was] also based on the risks Irish women took, equally with men, to have the Irish republic established, on the necessity of having their organised co-operation in the further struggle to free Ireland, and the advantage of having their ideas on many social problems likely to arise in the near future’.33 The six women nominated – Kathleen Clarke, Áine Ceannt, Jennie Wyse Power, Kathleen Lynn, Helena Molony and Alice Ginnell – were all well known and highly regarded within the movement. Some sense of the confusion which affected all political groups in the period can be seen in the minutes of the WDAIC’s September meeting, when a discussion took place about the advisability of forming Sinn Féin clubs ‘in view of the doubt that exists as to what is now meant by Sinn Féin’.34 They inally agreed that they would form them, with Miss Plunkett unsurprisingly dissenting. The level of feminist consciousness was clearly very high within this group. At that same September meeting, the secretary 31

32 33

34

WDAIC meeting, 19 April 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). A copy of the proclamation was pasted into the front cover of the WDAIC Minute Book. Special meeting of WDAIC, 23 July 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). Copy of the letter sent to the Secretary, Sinn Féin Executive, 1 August, 1917, written by Alice Ginnell; WDAIC meeting, 30 July, 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). WDAIC meeting, 17 September, 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47).

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was instructed to draft, with Dr Lynn, ‘a resolution to be brought to the Sinn Féin Executive ‘laying stress on the fact that in the Sinn Féin organisation “men” is understood to mean men and women and that in all speeches, lealets etc. … men and women should be mentioned, the idea being to get the Executive to bring the resolution forward at the Convention as an Executive Resolution’.35 This very modern-sounding objection to non-inclusive language was not uncommon within women’s groups in the period. Marie Perolz, for example, had insisted in 1916 that ‘and women’ be added to resolutions about workers’ rights when she attended the annual meeting of the Irish Trades Union Congress as a delegate of the IWWU.36 Her friend Rosamond Jacob found the practice particularly offensive, noting that de Valera, for example, ‘had the usual way of saying men and every man etc., as if there were no women in the country’. She ‘didn’t expect it of him’, and when he protested that he ‘wished he always had someone to prompt him on that point when he was going to speak’, she replied that ‘she didn’t think he should require prompting at this time of day’.37 Evidently, even allegedly progressive men did. The WDAIC redoubled its efforts as the October Convention drew closer, and it met with some success. Áine Ceannt recalled that ‘the women decided that they also should have representation on the executive committee, and asked that a deputation be received by the standing committee’, but this simple account belied the amount of effort they put into their aim.38 After lobbying via a deputation, the Sinn Féin executive agreed to co-opt four women so long as they were members of a Sinn Féin branch and represented no organisation. Áine Ceannt, Helena Molony, Miss Plunkett and Jennie Wyse Power were duly coopted, and work continued on the drafting of an unashamedly feminist resolution which they hoped to have ratiied by the executive at the October Convention. The tone of the resolution was inluenced strongly by Kathleen Lynn, who replaced Josephine Plunkett at Sinn Féin executive meetings. This was reputedly down to Plunkett’s illness, but her daughter, Geraldine, claimed that her mother was politically naïve and had been ‘persuaded’ to give up her place to Kathleen Lynn.39 Plunkett had not been involved in politics to any signiicant degree before 1917 and had probably alienated the more radical women when she opposed the 1913 scheme to remove temporarily the children of striking workers to London. She had, in addition, provoked ‘much surprise and dissatisfaction’ among the other women delegates for failing to keep them informed about important developments concerning the merger 35 36 37 38

WDAIC meeting, 17 September 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). Jones, Obstreperous Lassies, pp. 22–3. DRJ, 11 November 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). 39 BMH WS 264: Áine Ceannt. Plunkett Dillon, All in the Blood, p. 259.

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between Sinn Féin and the Liberty League.40 Lynn, on the other hand, was trusted and respected and had a sturdy record of feminist activity, having belonged to and sympathised with a number of organisations working towards women’s suffrage. She become interested in the women’s suffrage movement through the work of the Haslams, but sympathised with ‘the militant side of it’.41 She became a guarantor of the Irish Citizen in 1916, an admirer of the WSPU and, as a devoted Anglican, a member of the rather pious Church League of Women’s Suffrage. She was joined on the committee by a number of other women with proven track records on women’s rights, including Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Marie Perolz and Rosamond Jacob, relecting once again how vital a role the women’s suffrage movement played in the politicisation of republican women, notwithstanding the very public but also rather misleading quarrels which had occurred between them. At a general meeting held on the eve of Sinn Féin’s important October Convention, the women’s group adopted an Irish name – Cumann na dTeachtaire – and leshed out a constitution which underlined the organisation’s brand of republican feminism. Plunkett’s health had by this time improved, and she was able to represent the group at the Convention. Áine Ceannt withdrew as a delegate in favour of Lynn, who had been so instrumental in drawing up the resolution which the group hoped to see accepted at the Convention. This meant that the society was represented at the Convention by Plunkett, Wyse Power, Lynn and Molony. These women, along with the others who regularly attended meetings, were heavily involved in the national struggle, but even they found the job of persuading their male colleagues of women’s equality less than straightforward. Having, for example, considered the possibility of circulating the members of the Sinn Féin executive ‘as regards their attitude towards the paragraph in the Republican Proclamation guaranteeing equal rights and equal opportunities to men and women’, they decided – after a lengthy debate – that it might weaken their ‘case to appear to think there could be any doubt on the point’.42 Lynn and Wyse Power duly introduced the resolution at the Sinn Féin Convention. It read: Whereas, according to the Republican proclamation which guarantees ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’, women are equally eligible with men as members of branches, members of the governing body and oficers of both local and governing bodies, be it resolved: that the 40 41 42

WDAIC meeting, 23 July 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. WDAIC meeting, 16 October 1917, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47).

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equality of men and women in this organisation be emphasised in all speeches and lealets.43

Arthur Grifith urged delegates to accept the resolution, declaring that ‘from the day we founded Sinn Fein we made no discrimination as to sex for any ofice in the organisation’.44 There was some mild opposition to the wording of the resolution and even some difference in emphasis between Lynn and Wyse Power, but the equality of women and men within Sinn Féin was formalised, and it is signiicant that among all the other matters at hand, activist women were determined to win this guarantee after years of its being operational in a non-formal way. The resolution was passed to general feminist delight, emanating even from the pages of the Irish Citizen, which had been such a ierce critic of women republicans in the past.45 The Citizen acknowledged that Carson had similarly promised equality under his own putative provisional government, but the paper’s admiration was especially focused on the Easter rebels, as so many of them had been, if not active suffragists, then certainly friends of the cause. For the IWFL, just as much as for wider political audiences, Sinn Féin had become the main repository for the legacy of and the successor to the 1916 ‘martyrs’. The Franchise League’s position on Sinn Féin consequently softened in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, in large part because the Proclamation ‘gave equality of citizenship to women and men alike on a human basis’.46 The victory at Sinn Féin’s October Convention, signiicant though it clearly was, was not won lightly and, moreover, had to be fought in addition to a number of other ideological battles – not always popular ones – in which several of the women delegates were involved. Jacob, Molony and ffrench-Mullen, for example, were anxious for the Convention to ‘declare for a republic’ and were further concerned about the ‘danger of Grifith’s non-republicanism and autocratic spirit, and the extreme trouble they had in forcing 6 women onto the executive against the will of Grifith and Milroy etc.’.47 Kathleen Clarke, no admirer of Grifith, claimed that he had been ‘quick to seize’ the chance offered by the incorrect description of the Rising as a Sinn Féin rebellion and used this to expand his organisation.48 She described Grifith’s speech on the history of Sinn Féin as ‘a very clever piece of work’, as he apparently managed to 43

44

45 47 48

Resolution of the League of Women Delegates adopted at the Sinn Féin Convention of 1917, quoted in Ward, In Their Own Voice, p. 84. Report of Sinn Féin Annual Convention at the Mansion House, Dublin, 25–26 October, 1917 (1917), NLI, MS 21,525(1). IC, November 1917. 46 Ibid., September 1916. DRJ, 1 October 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 148.

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ignore ‘its non-existent period from 1908 to 1916, also that the present Sinn Fein was not passive resistance, and that the present situation had any relation to the ight in Easter 1916’.49 Having been told before the Convention that the time was not right for a public attack on MacNeill and his part in the Easter Rising, Clarke refused at irst to support Markievicz, who planned to challenge MacNeill in a speech to the Convention. She changed her mind, however, after witnessing the exceptionally hostile response to Markievicz’s speech. Although she thought Grifith was ‘consistent’ in defending MacNeill, she was less forgiving of de Valera, whose criticism of Markievicz she described as an ‘outrage’. She had never felt so wild as at the treatment [Markievicz] received because she who had gone out in the ight and done a man’s part in it dared to say a word about MacNeill, who no matter what anyone may say to the contrary, acted a coward at Easter 1916. I listened to the angry cries at her of shut up, sit down etc. … and my head felt like bursting with indignation and rage.50

Clarke went home feeling ‘disgusted’ by the experience. In addition, as we have seen, Grifith’s position on women’s suffrage was by no means clear, and the feminists in the audience thought it necessary to force him to declare his hand on the issue in the new political circumstances. Molony urged Jacob to bring up the matter of the franchise at the Convention. Jacob did so and was relieved to ind that ‘Grifith answered plainly that whatever the franchise was, it would include them, which is the straightest statement he has ever made on the point’.51 It should be remembered that securing a formal recognition of equality between men and women within Sinn Féin was done in an atmosphere hardly conducive to a discussion of women’s rights. There were, for example, at least 1,700 delegates of afiliated clubs at the Convention: twelve were women.52 Nonetheless, four women – Lynn, Markievicz, Clarke and Plunkett – were elected to the party’s new twenty-four-person executive. Jacob claimed that it was a ‘disgrace’ that Wyse Power was not elected (but also that it was ‘well only to have 3 priests in the whole set up’), but the election of four women was a signiicant result.53 The four elected women were exceptional by the general political standards of their day and even by the standards of the radicalising Sinn 49

50 52 53

Kathleen Clarke’s report on the Sinn Féin Convention of 1917, Tom and Kathleen Clarke Papers, NLI, MS 49,356/2. 51 Ibid. DRJ, 25 October 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, pp. 118–19. DRJ, 26 October 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). I am indebted to Ann Matthews for clarifying that it was Countess Plunkett and not Grace Plunkett who was appointed to the Sinn Féin Executive.

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Féin in 1917. It is very dificult to compile accurate sociological proiles of the women who became active in Sinn Féin, and focusing too heavily on the best known among them risks distorting the picture still further, but we can gain some insight from studying the women who were most prominent in the organisation by 1917. Michael Laffan has calculated that the average age of those elected to the Sinn Féin executive was thirty-eight, but the corresponding igure for women only was forty-six.54 Lynn was especially unusual as she was one of only two doctors and three Protestants within the entire cohort. A recent convert, Markievicz was older than most, but espoused the majority religion. Even so, the fact that a quarter of the women representatives were Protestant is telling, especially as Sinn Féin was disproportionately Catholic as a whole.55 They were also all Dublin women: Clarke and Markievicz had been raised outside the capital, but all four were by 1918 irmly established there. All four women had also spent periods abroad in common with many members of the ‘revolutionary generation’, especially its leadership.56 But they did not appear to represent the Sinn Féin norm in most other ways, at least as suggested by the composition of the executive. As the only female member of the irst Dáil in 1918, Markievicz would once again stand outside the norm, not only because she was a woman, but because, at forty-nine, she was closer in age to the unionist and Irish Party MPs elected in 1918 than she was to her comparatively youthful fellow Sinn Féiners.57 The social and political backgrounds of all the women who attended as delegates in 1917 is much more dificult to ascertain because it is unclear whether some of the women there represented their local Sinn Féin clubs, the WDAIC or were, like Margaret Connery of the IWFL at least, there as ‘press’. Rosamond Jacob represented her Waterford club, as did Miss Grifin from Clare and Sorcha McDermott of London’s Roger Casement Sinn Féin club. But other women at the October Convention, including Áine Ceannt, Hanna Sheehy Skefington and Kathleen Clarke, may have been there as Sinn Féin or WDAIC delegates or perhaps even in some other capacity. Michael Laffan has emphasised that only delegates of afiliated Sinn Féin clubs were admitted to the Convention, and some people were turned away.58 But while we know there were twelve female delegates, as not all of them spoke, we cannot be sure who they 54

55 56

57

At ifty-nine and forty-nine respectively, Markievicz and Plunkett’s ages must also have raised the overall igure. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 192. Ibid., p. 193; and Tom Garvin, ‘The Formation of the Irish Political Elite’, in Farrell, The Creation of the Dáil, pp. 47–60, at pp. 56–7. 58 Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 191. Ibid., pp. 118–19.

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were. Countess Plunkett hosted a reception for women delegates which was attended by, among others, Alice Ginnell, Winnie Carney, Helena Molony and Bridget Davis of the Citizen Army, but the Dubliners among them at least may have been well-wishers or members of the WDAIC rather than delegates themselves.59 Whatever their afiliation, all these women were active feminists as well as nationalists. More importantly, they were directly involved in the development and direction of Sinn Féin policy. By way of comparison, it is worth noting that these women had more success in their efforts for representation than women at Horace Plunkett’s Irish Convention. Despite intensive lobbying from a number of women’s groups, including the IWFL, the Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation and the Irishwomen’s Reform League, no women were invited as delegates or representatives to the Irish Convention, which was summoned in a last-ditch effort to ind a settlement to the Irish Question.60 A delegation representing several women’s groups went in person to make their case to Horace Plunkett, but this appeared to have no effect.61 Even southern unionist women, including Edith Somerville of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, expressed their outrage at women’s exclusion from this crucial conference.62 Some, including Mary Sheehy Kettle, still in 1917 a supporter of the Irish Party, attempted to gain representation for women through private contacts, but all such attempts to have women included failed.63 This ‘insult’ to women became still another reason for feminists to gravitate increasingly towards Sinn Féin, which, though clearly imperfect, at least appeared to be moving in the right direction.64 But, despite obvious advances, both the belief in the need to remain vigilant and the will to remain so clearly existed among Sinn Féin women. The women delegates met during the Convention, on the evening of the 26th, at the Plunkett home, where they agreed to continue to meet regularly. Countess Plunkett declared that the object of the organisation ‘was to link up all the women in S.F. clubs and encourage them to be active and educate themselves and take part in all the political life of their district and to link up other women’s organisations too and encourage all to do feminist work together’. A committee of twelve was formed.65 Jacob, as a representative of the Waterford Sinn Féin club and with long experience of all kinds of political and cultural organisations in provincial Ireland, thought the Dublin-based women were naïve. Once again highlighting 59 60 61 63 64

DRJ, 26 October 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). IT, 21 June and 25 May 1917, and IC, June 1917. 62 IT, 21 June and 17 August 1917. Ibid., 28 May 1917. W. M. Murphy to Mary Sheehy Kettle, Tom Kettle Papers, UCDA, LA 34/65. IC, July 1917. 65 DRJ, 26 October, 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32).

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the very different experiences of rural and urban activists, she declared that ‘They had a very brilliant idea of women in S. F. clubs in the country – seemed to think all that was needed was for them to join the clubs and then they would work just like men.’ A representative from Clare declared that their ‘irst business should be to teach men modesty, and that their behaviour was sometimes frightful – in the way of talking too much and never giving women a chance to make themselves heard’.66 Over the next few months, Cumann na dTeachtaire continued to organise women. Members considered establishing a women’s newspaper and worked towards having women elected to Sinn Féin’s standing council.67 By early 1918, the group appeared to lag in the face of more urgent demands on the time of individual members. Lynn argued in January that as it was so important for women to attend the next Sinn Féin General Council, a ‘special whip’ would be sent out to all the women delegates, but at least two meetings of the women delegates in December 1917 had been abandoned for lack of a quorum, suggesting that members were either losing interest or were simply overwhelmed by their other commitments. Three women – Lynn, Wyse Power and Markievicz – had been elected to Sinn Féin’s Standing Committee at the December General Council, a deeply signiicant victory for the women as Sinn Féin’s Standing Committee was at that time widely believed to be, ‘to all intents and purpose, the Government of Ireland’.68 Every successive Standing Committee included three or four female members, suggesting once again that feminist ideas had made their mark on the organisation.69 The year 1918 saw the women’s delegates’ interests move in a number of other directions, most notably public health. A major initiative to tackle venereal disease was launched, the position of Lynn as director of public health for Sinn Féin adding to the force of the women’s demands. Cumann na dTeachtaire decided to summon a forum to discuss venereal disease, and a conference of women’s societies was duly held under its auspices in mid March. The WDAIC had invited twenty-eight societies from all over Ireland. Eight replied and nine attended, including representatives from Sinn Féin, the Irish Women’s Reform League, the Wild Geese, the Infant Aid Society, the IWFL, Cumann na mBan, the Women’s National Health Association and Cumann na dTeachtaire itself. The participation of the Wild Geese relected the broad appeal of the conference, as it had served as an organisation for constitutional nationalist women including Agnes O’Farrelly, Mary Hayden and Sophie Bryant 66 68

67 Ibid. Ibid., 21 November 1916, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(30). 69 BMH WS 264: Áine Ceannt. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 202.

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since its foundation in 1914.70 Its participation was another example of how friendships and working relationships could survive between women whose political views did not always correspond. The group’s interest in venereal disease mirrored and encouraged recent efforts by the Local Government Board and public corporations to tackle the issue, and it led ultimately to the founding of the Irish Society for the Combating of Venereal Disease. Many of the names associated with this organisation were by this time familiar, Maud Gonne, Kathleen Lynn, Alice Ginnell and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen among them. Their activities led inally and indirectly to the foundation of St Ultan’s hospital, probably their most important legacy. Though hardly an issue which had been the main concern of the founders of the women delegates’ organisation, public health nonetheless relected the deep interest of many of these women in social questions. Another question which arose for discussion regularly was the possibility of food shortages and the necessity of dealing with this. In mid 1917 the organisation commented on ‘the necessity of having women’s co-operation in dealing with such questions as the food question’, coupling this with the general need for women’s ‘co-operation in the struggle for a new Ireland’. Lynn similarly argued that the appointment of only two women to Sinn Féin’s Food Committee was inadequate as food was a ‘matter so closely concerning women’.71 One could argue that such an interest merely relected traditional ideas about women’s roles, but this would be to misunderstand both the women’s motivation and their understanding of their contribution to the making of a new Ireland. Many of these women were no mere dabblers in such ields: there were genuine experts, not as philanthropists, but as professionals, Lynn most obviously, and as a doctor in this period she could hardly be accused of conforming to type. The same can be said of Jennie Wyse Power, whose interest in local government had a long pedigree, evidenced by her election as a Poor Law Guardian at a time when this was still highly unusual for women. Áine Ceannt was appointed a Poor Law Guardian in 1918, earning the congratulations of the WDAIC and preserving the link between local government and women’s emancipation.72 The approach these women brought to what may be considered feminine ields such as health, education and Poor Law was radical; note, for example, that Lynn dealt openly with the still risqué question of venereal disease, while Perolz, Molony and ffrench-Mullen, among others, had direct and innovative experience of working to alleviate poverty among working-class Dubliners: they were social radicals, not pious do-gooders. 70 71 72

FJ, 24 April 1914. WDAIC meeting, 17 September 1918, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47). WDAIC meeting, 26 March 1918, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47).

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Social questions were, moreover, for many of these women, inextricably linked with political questions, and this had been a feature of a number of women’s political groups. Members of the Inghinidhe, the IWFL and the Irishwomen’s Reform League had not been afraid to get their hands dirty when they campaigned on a number of issues, including child poverty, prostitution and women’s working conditions. Social change was as much an aim for many of them as straight political change. Some of these beliefs were enshrined in Cumann na dTeachtaire’s constitution, formally adopted at its second general meeting in April 1918. It emphasised among its objects its desire to ‘safeguard the political rights of Irishwomen’, to ‘ensure adequate representation of them in the Republican Government’, to ‘urge and facilitate the appointment of women to public bodies all over Ireland’ and to ‘educate Irishwomen in the rights and duties of citizenship’.73 By this time a number of new faces seemed to have joined the organisation, some, like Elizabeth Bloxham and Louise Gavan Duffy, old hands in the suffrage and national movements. The success of the April conference, its emphasis on the nominally non-political issue of public health and the involvement of many women who had continued to belong to women’s organisations which were not necessarily concerned with the national question, contributed to what was probably the most successful period of co-operation between various women’s groups of the period. By early 1918, the women’s delegates group declared that they ‘should be prepared to confer with other Irishwomen’s Societies whenever it can be accomplished without sacriice of principles because they are convinced that the bringing together of all Irishwomen to discuss matters of common interest on a neutral platform could not be but beneicial to all parties’.74 This, and the fact that Cumann na dTeachtaire had expanded beyond its initial remit, relected both the very wide range of issues with which these women were engaged and the active role they expected to play in addressing them in the new political order. Lynn, Molony, Perolz and ffrench-Mullen, among others, had long been involved in social questions, and most other women’s groups had expressed concern at various times with questions usually deemed to be especially suited to women – food, housing and health in particular. As we have seen, the IWFL had worked with the Inghinidhe in its school-meals programme, but the co-operation between women’s groups begun in 1918 was on a much greater scale and was no doubt subsequently encouraged by widespread collaboration on the issue of conscription, another nominally non-party issue. The WDAIC’s decision to send representatives to a conference of 73

WDAIC meeting, 2 April 1918, SSP, NLI, MS 21,194(47).

74

Ibid.

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women’s societies called by the IWSLGA aroused some controversy and was passed by only nine votes to four. This was most likely because of the IWSLGA’s reputation as an extremely conservative if not overtly unionist organisation, but three women, including Lynn, a former IWSLGA committee member, were named as delegates to the conference and instructed to withdraw should anything compromise their ‘political principles’. The subsequent decision to attempt to co-ordinate their own conference with the IWSLGA’s so that they might hold the gatherings on two consecutive days and facilitate the attendance of members at both events relected this new collaborative spirit. Old political differences remained, however. After the IWSLGA conference, the Irish Citizen reported that delegates had agreed that ‘political differences are at present so strong in Ireland that a closer union in a society or federation would be out of the question’.75 Nonetheless, the fact that women from republican, constitutional and unionist backgrounds were able, amicably, to agree to disagree at all was in itself remarkable in the context of Irish politics in 1918. The WDAIC continued their work until about the middle of 1918, sometimes on a seemingly small scale, as when they established a vegetable stall at the December 1917 Aonac.76 They were also involved in fundraising and propaganda work, deciding, for example, to rafle a republican lag in order to pay for the printing of 25,000 copies of the Proclamation. Unfortunately, the minutes of the WDAIC reveal only the bare bones of its campaign, and we have very few private recollections which shed any real light on its workings and on the personal convictions of individual members. The diary of Rosamond Jacob does, however, provide some valuable clues about how the organisation worked, but, perhaps more importantly, it hints at some of the tensions within it. A major point of contention arose, for example, over a pamphlet composed by ffrench-Mullen and meant to be read by the women delegates at the Convention. Both Alice Ginnell and Elizabeth Somers objected to it as it began with a defence of the suffragettes. According to Jacob, Ginnell disapproved ‘of them herself and [thought] it would set people against the W.D.’. Jacob conceded rather archly that it might, ‘considering what most Catholic women are’. Somers wondered why they should bother with the English suffragettes at all, and Jacob retorted that ‘it wasn’t only English ones, and women should help each other all over the world’.77 ffrench-Mullen, an internationalist, insisted that the section remain. Jacob also recorded some views and prejudices which did not make it into the public domain, suggesting both that many of her female 75 77

IC, April 1918. 76 DRJ, 9 December 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(33). Ibid., 14 December 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(33).

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colleagues held much more radical opinions than they publicly revealed and that what went out as oficial policy was the product of careful consideration and even ierce debate. She described, for example, the ‘shocking’ anti-clerical statements made privately by Kathleen Clarke, views which certainly did not appear in Clarke’s autobiography.78 We do not know why Cumann na dTeachtaire ceased to function, but the pressure of new commitments arising from a rapidly changing political situation is the most plausible explanation. The activities of some prominent members were severely curtailed when they were arrested or went ‘on the run’ in order to avoid incarceration. Lynn, for example, managed to avoid arrest during the roundup of Sinn Féiners who were allegedly involved in the spurious ‘German plot’ in May 1918, and remained ‘on the run’ until October. Drawing on her theatre experience, Helena Molony dressed Lynn as a war widow with her ‘hair powdered and dressed up very beautifully’ in a ‘way she did not ordinarily wear it’. Lynn managed, with the help of this disguise, to attend meetings and ‘get about a good deal’.79 Kathleen Clarke and Markievicz were also arrested and imprisoned for their involvement in the same conspiracy. The arrest of the Sinn Féin leadership had been anticipated by its executive, as it had been agreed earlier in 1918 that arrested members would be replaced by a substitute of their own choosing. Markievicz had nominated Nancy Wyse Power, who found that this caused a great deal of unease within Sinn Féin.80 Louise Gavan Duffy and Áine Ceannt were also co-opted onto the new Sinn Féin oficer board, but while this added to their responsibilities it was most likely the demands of working against conscription and canvassing on behalf of Sinn Féin which took up most of their time over 1918. III Conscription was the greatest and inal unifying issue in preindependence nationalist Ireland, and Irish women played a vital role in opposing it. The announcement that Lloyd George proposed to extend the Military Service Bill to Ireland, should the need arise, fostered a level of co-operation and activity not seen since the Catholic Emancipation campaign. Conscription was the one question upon which nationalists of almost all shades agreed, and the opposition of the Catholic Church, Labour, Sinn Féin, the Irish Party and dissident nationalists led to an extraordinary protest movement. Extraordinary though it was, the 78 79

Ibid., 26 October 1917, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(32). 80 BMH WS 357: Kathleen Lynn. MH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power.

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camaraderie this protest movement generated was merely temporary, as it was also the political issue which highlighted par excellence both the ascendency of Sinn Féin and the steep decline of the IPP. Female activists broadly conformed to the larger pattern: virtually all nationalist women opposed conscription, and the proile and membership of Cumann na mBan in particular grew as a response to the crisis. The attempts by more moderate nationalist women to take a leading role in the opposition campaign were pretty comprehensively sidelined by their more radical female counterparts, underlining the fact that little political space existed for constitutionally minded women by this time. The excitement generated by the conscription crisis and the sense of urgency it brought to Irish political life cannot be underestimated. Aine Heron remembered that there ‘was no great excitement until the conscription scare’.81 Josephine MacNeill, who came to believe that her generation ‘had heard the last of the resistance movement’ as 1917 progressed, was moved by the conscription crisis to join Cumann na mBan and became increasingly involved in nationalist activism. Employed at that time as a teacher at a convent school in Thurles, she noted that ‘the Movement’ once again ‘gathered strength amongst the young people’ during the crisis.82 For her, as surely for many other women, conscription posed an enormous disruption to her personal life as well as proving to be a crucial spur to political activity. She agreed to marry her sweetheart immediately should conscription be introduced, knowing that if it were, the Volunteers would ‘take to the hills and ight a guerrilla war’.83 A kind of ‘war fever’ permeated nationalist Ireland, and drastic measures seemed to be called for: the Irish Party withdrew from the House of Commons in protest against the passing of the bill, trade unions organised a one-day strike, nationalists joined together at the Mansion House Conference in April, and the Catholic Church condemned the Bill, allowing churches to be used as sites for the dissemination of propaganda about the opposition campaign and as collection points for the fund initiated to combat conscription.84 As opposition mounted, armed resistance and resulting food shortages should conscription be enforced appeared increasingly to be very real prospects. In such an atmosphere the advanced nationalist groups which had opposed Irish war participation and had even prophesised conscription were in a strong position to capitalise on the crisis. Cumann na mBan clearly beneited from nationalist Ireland’s virtually unanimous opposition to conscription, being well situated to take a leading place in the resistance to it, not least because of their experience 81 83

82 BMH WS 293: Aine Heron. BMH WS 303: Josephine MacNeill. 84 Ibid. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 139.

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of anti-recruitment campaigning. The position the organisation had assumed in nationalist Ireland by mid 1917 was relected in the attendance of the representatives of a number of Cumann na mBan branches at the Mansion House Conference held on 19 April.85 In addition to the Cumann na mBan women, Perolz and Molony attended on behalf of the IWWU, ffrench-Mullen represented the Connolly Co-operative, and even the Inghinidhe sent delegates. Some Sinn Féin clubs also sent women to the conference. By contrast, no woman appeared to go in association with any constitutional organisation.86 Although they were vastly outnumbered by male representatives from various political and cultural groups, the fact that women were invited at all was a sign of the times and an indication of Cumann na mBan’s established position within advanced nationalism. The wave of public opposition to conscription resulted in the ‘phenomenal’ growth of the organisation’s membership and public proile.87 Although it is impossible to be certain about the exact size of the membership, there seems to be little doubt that Cumann na mBan expanded at a swift pace in 1918, largely owing to the momentum generated by the conscription crisis and the general election.88 It was at last able to appoint a full-time organiser, Alice Cashel, who took over some of the voluntary work of members like Bloxham. Her task in the aftermath of the Easter Rising, the growth of interest in the organisation and the release of prisoners was demanding, gruelling and increasingly dangerous: I organised a branch in Newry, which was our election H.Q. While there I received instructions to proceed to Derry to join de Valera and Sean MacEntee. I spoke with them at meetings in Derry and Carndonagh. They were on an organising tour of county Donegal and my instructions were to follow in their traces and organise branches of Cumann na mBan. In this manner I started branches all over Donegal. Subsequently I worked in the Tyrone election, toured Monaghan with Sean MacEntee and Count Plunkett, worked in the Cavan election. In August 1919 I was ordered to go to Clifden to organise Cumann na mBan. Orders had been sent from Sinn Fein H.Q. that on the 15th August a manifesto should be read in public by every Sinn Fein club in the country. On the morning of the meeting I was informed by one of the local R.I.C. that if I held the meeting I should be arrested. We held the meeting near the square, it was broken up by the police, the platform planks on barrels being pulled from under our feet. We stayed on until the last plank was taken. Then I re-organised the women in the street and marched them out of the town and held my meeting on the monument base which stands on a hill outside Clifden. While the police followed me the Secretary 85 86 88

New Ireland (supplement), 3:24 (20 April 1917), no page numbers. 87 Ibid. McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 91 and p. 92. Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1918, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1128/(1).

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of the Sinn Fein club inished the reading of the Manifesto. I then had to ‘go on the run’. The local I.R.A., especially the Hartleys, arranged places of ‘safe keeping’ for me which however were eventually discovered by the R.I.C. … Gerald Hartley then got me safely out of Clifden by night. I cycled to Galway where I continued my organising work until the ‘hue and cry’ reached me there. The bicycle used on these trips was one belonging to Countess Markievicz. On the morning of the Clifden meeting I had a letter from her from Holloway jail in London telling me that she was sending me her bicycle as she knew mine was decrepit – she had used it in the Armagh election. It arrived that morning, just in time for me to ‘go on the run’. I left it, later on, to the Connemara Volunteers.89

Like Cashel, Leslie Price also abandoned her teaching work to become a full-time organiser in 1918. New branches were lourishing, and organisers were in great demand, especially as Alice Cashel’s time was increasingly taken up by Sinn Féin work. In the light of increased police surveillance, keeping open communications between Dublin and the provinces was especially important, and some women took on this job despite considerable personal hardship and risk.90 The task of persuading women to join the organisation remained dificult, even while Cumann na mBan’s reputation spread throughout the country. Brighid O’Mullane recalled that even though she was given only names of ‘reliable’ girls before she called recruitment meetings in and around County Sligo, she had a good deal of prejudice to overcome on the part of the parents, who did not mind their boys taking part in a military movement, but who had never heard of, and were reluctant to accept the idea of a body of gun-women. It was, of course, a rather startling innovation and, in that way, Cumann na mBan can claim to have been the pioneers in establishing what was undoubtedly a women’s auxiliary of an army. I fully understood this attitude and eventually, in most cases, succeeded in overcoming this prejudice.91

As O’Mullane, Price and others travelled around Ireland, usually by train and bicycle, other high-proile members of Cumann na mBan, including Gavan Duffy, Wyse Power and the Plunkett sisters, also criss-crossed the country, ensuring that the executive kept in close touch with provincial branches and acting as couriers and go-betweens for messages and, increasingly, for weapons. The organisation’s 1918 Convention Report claimed that while a hundred branches had been afiliated in December 1917, that number had grown to ‘considerably over 600’ by the following September.92 Both the 89 91 92

90 BMH WS 366: Alice Cashel. BMH WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power. BMH WS 450: Brighid O’Mullane. Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1918, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1128(1).

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old guard and new recruits sensed a shift in the organisation and testiied to a new sense of purpose and resolve. Jennie Wyse Power, for example, recalled that when the ‘Conscription menace’ arose, work at Cumann na mBan headquarters ‘became immense’. In July, the British government declared Cumann na mBan to be ‘dangerous’, and the organisation’s energies were then directed to ‘the work necessary to defeat the proposal to exact the blood tax from Ireland’. Branches all over the country ‘prepared for the struggle under directions from Headquarters’.93 The conscription crisis also allowed for an unprecedented level of open and nominally friendly co-operation between several women’s groups, some of which had been, publicly at least, estranged, mainly because of differences on the national question and militarism. Paciists, feminists and labourites who had been critical of Cumann na mBan’s belligerent stand, as well as its alleged compliance in its subordination by male republicans, could put their reservations aside in the interest of mounting a formidable anti-conscription campaign. Women could register their opposition by promising to resist conscription if it were enforced, by pledging not to take the jobs which conscripted men left vacant and by coming to the aid of the families of the men who resisted the draft. The precise emphasis of various groups depended on the ideological composition and outlook of each one, but the message was broadly analogous. The IWFL described the Military Service Bill as ‘an imperative call to action for the militants’, and on 23 April, the day of the general strike, the organisation hung a banner from its window which read ‘CONSCRIPTION – No woman must take a man’s job’.94 Labour women similarly endorsed the one-day general strike initiated by the Irish Trades Union Congress, and urged their fellow countrywomen to resist the threat.95 Cumann na mBan likewise pledged at its 1918 Convention that ‘because the enforcement of conscription of any people without their consent is tyranny, we are resolved to resist the conscription of Irishmen’.96 This pledge had been composed for ‘Women’s Day’, an occasion of mass resistance and protest organised and executed entirely by and for women. Women’s Day, or Lá na mBan, was one of the most spectacular of all anti-conscription protests and came to be associated almost exclusively with Cumann na mBan, which was widely credited with its inception and organisation. Its origin and success were, however, due to a number of women’s groups, some of them not natural allies of Cumann na mBan. 93 94

95 96

Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 6. Rosemary Cullen Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1889–1922 (Dublin, 1984), pp. 120–1. Irishwomen! How to Defeat Conscription (Dublin, 1917). Cumann na mBan Convention Report 1918.

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The nationalist response to conscription was swift: the Military Service Bill was introduced on 9 April and passed on 16 April; by the end of April, a general strike had been held, and a kind of anti-conscription nationalist Solemn League and Covenant had been signed outside churches across the country. A meeting organised by the paciist Irishwomen’s International League in late April resolved to launch a ‘women’s covenant’ which would advocate passive resistance to the scheme. Women at this meeting included Louie Bennett, Alice Stopford Green and Susan Mitchell, none of them advanced nationalists, and, in the case of Bennett at least, a decidedly lukewarm nationalist, if one at all.97 This involvement of an explicitly paciist element immediately marked out the women’s campaign as different from the broader one which, church and labour involvement notwithstanding, had a plainly nationalist character. Bennett, who announced the irst public meeting, was both a paciist and an internationalist who subsequently expressed her hope that ‘the fact that Ireland has remained free from Conscription may help in securing freedom from it for other countries’.98 By late April, a ‘Women’s Day Committee’ had been formed, consisting of, among others, Louie Bennett, Agnes O’Farrelly and Helen Laird, and working under the leadership of Alice Stopford Green. This committee declared that 9 June would be the date of a women’s protest, coinciding as it did with St Columcille’s Day. The societies represented at the meeting at which this was announced included delegates of the IWFL, Cumann na mBan, the IWWU and the International League, among others.99 This committee was said to represent women ‘of all classes and various political organisations’, but not everyone agreed.100 Margaret Connery queried the temperament of this opposition. She was a radical and a militant member of the IWFL, having been arrested for suffrage activities in 1912. Writing as an individual, she expressed her ‘disappointment at the weakness of the protest against conscription which the women of Ireland [were] invited to carry out’. Connery argued that female organisers had not fully grasped the ‘spirit’ or the ‘need’ of the time, not least because of the ‘sectarian tinge’ the protest bore ‘by being turned into a religious or semi-religious display’.101 The question of sectarianism became a lively one in the public discussion of Women’s Day. Nellie O’Brien, herself a granddaughter of William Smith O’Brien and an active suffragist and Gaelic Leaguer, spoke on 97 99

II, 22 April 1918. II, 1 June 1918.

98 100

Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett, p. 42. Ibid., 5 June 1918. 101 Margaret Connery, II, 5 June 1918.

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behalf of the ‘Protestant anti-Conscription women’, claiming that the protest was connected with no political propaganda.102 This may well have been true, but the press at least equated anti-conscription with nationalism: the Irish Independent, for example, endorsed the notion that women of all creeds and classes should join the campaign, ‘which should include within in its scope all the Nationalist women of Ireland’.103 Protestant women were presumably included in this grouping, but the fact that O’Brien and others felt the need to organise a separate protest suggests that even they were concerned that the campaign might look too much like a purely Catholic exercise. O’Brien’s circular to Protestants outlined this: ‘we the undersigned wish to join our Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen in the strongest possible manner against the application of Conscription to Ireland’.104 Alice Stopford Green, a Protestant, countered Connery’s criticism by pointing out that her committee was mixed and that women were invited to go to the church of St Columcille – ‘the great native spirit revered by all of every creed’ – or to their own parish churches before meeting in Dublin’s City Hall to sign the women’s pledge. In the event it was arranged that Protestant women ‘should take part in the Women’s Day proceedings as a distinct body’. They were asked to meet at Christ Church Cathedral for silent prayer before walking to the City Hall.105 Given that many of the organisations which were listed in the order of events for the day had Protestant members – especially the IWFL, Cumann na mBan, Women of the Citizen Army and the IWWU – it seems strange that this kind of segregation was called for, but it might well have been a reaction against the attempt by Cumann na mBan to control the day’s proceedings. Nancy Wyse Power, by 1918 a very active secretary of Cumann na mBan, had little time for the original organising committee, recalling rather patronisingly that: A number of well-meaning ladies, including Mrs. Stopford Green, Mrs. Helen Curran [Helen Laird] and Miss Agnes O’Farrelly conceived the idea of a ‘Women’s Day’ to show the strength of the opposition to Conscription. They had gathered a committee of odds and ends and the Executive of Cumann na mBan feared that the demonstration might conceivably prove inadequate. We had been invited to send a representative and it fell to me to present and explain that Cumann na mBan proposed to take over the project and run it themselves. Mrs. Green was in the chair and while the original organisers must have felt some irritation at seeing their idea snatched from them they made little opposition as

102 104

II, 29 April 1918. IC, May–June 1918.

103

Ibid., 6 June 1918. II, 8 June 1918.

105

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I pointed out that with our wide-spread organisation we were in a position to arrange a nation-wide demonstration.106

Jennie Wyse Power similarly presented the takeover of the event by Cumann na mBan as almost inevitable.107 There is no question that Cumann na mBan was by this time the largest nationalist women’s group in the country and the one best placed to co-ordinate such a spectacular national event. But it was not the only organisation involved, and its determination to take it over was also surely a protest against the women who had launched the opposition movement and relected a concern that resistance to conscription would become too closely associated with the anaemic nationalism they represented: O’Farrelly, Stopford Green and Laird were known supporters of the IPP, and O’Farrelly was especially out of favour given her advocacy of the Party at the time of the Volunteer split. By 8 June, interested citizens were being asked to write for information to 6 Harcourt Street, Cumann na mBan headquarters.108 Cumann na mBan’s report for 1918 stated only that the organisation ‘took a prominent part in organising Women’s Day’ but also made clear that in Dublin the District Council took ‘entire charge’ of stewarding the City Hall.109 About 700 uniformed Cumann na mBan members were the irst to sign the pledge in Dublin’s City Hall on 9 June, followed by the Protestant anti-conscription contingent, the IWWU and many others. Interestingly, the IWWU, led by Louie Bennett, ‘made the biggest show’ in Dublin, around 2,400 signing, ‘including a large portion of Protestant Labour women’. In total, about 8,000 women visited the City Hall to sign the pledge on the day. The Protestant deputation – which included Stopford Green, Susan Mitchell, Celia Harrison, Nellie O’Brien and Alice Milligan – numbered thirty and handed in a ‘special roll of 75’.110 Controversy surrounding the involvement of Protestant women continued, with one rumour in particular alleging that they had been locked out of Christ Church Cathedral, where they had agreed to meet, and had been forced instead to kneel outside the ‘ediice’ in the pouring rain.111 This was denied by one of the Protestant organisers, Rachel Dix, who claimed that the church had been locked through misunderstanding rather than design and that they had not knelt down in the street at all.112 She signed her letter as co-secretary of the Women’s Day Dublin 106 108 109

110

BMH WS 587: Nancy Wyse Power. 107 Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 7. II, 8 June 1918. Cumann na mBan, Annual Convention Report 1918, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1128(3). 112 II, 10 June 1918. 111 Ibid. Ibid., 12 June 1918.

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Committee, suggesting that resistance to the Cumann na mBan takeover remained to the end. It is in fact entirely possible that the determination of the Protestant women to organise separately was at least in part a reaction to the Cumann na mBan takeover, a way of retaining some independence from the more radical movement. Outside Dublin, however, the inluence of Cumann na mBan was more extensive and religious overtones much more overt, highlighting once again the overwhelmingly urban character of women’s political organisation in early twentieth-century Ireland. The singing of hymns and reciting of the rosary was common in smaller villages and towns, with women from all parts of the country apparently converging on local churches, shrines and memorials to register their disapproval of the Bill.113 Even the Irish Citizen reported enthusiastically on pilgrimages, prayers, talks by priests and devotions that the (presumably) Catholic women enjoyed up and down the country, describing it as ‘a glorious movement at once National, Religious and Historic’.114 The signing of the pledge carried on for some time after 9 June, as women in some areas held their own Women’s Days on different dates for various reasons.115 Women in the south, the north, the west and the east of the country participated in this spectacular, though anti-conscription activity in the north of the country was almost certainly less vigorously conducted than in the rest of Ireland. What protest there was appeared to have been dominated by Catholics in a scattering of locations including Donegal Town, Strabane, Laurencetown and Cootehill.116 The demographic and political proile of Ulster ensured that the pro-war constituency was irmly entrenched, and no anti-conscription demonstration would seem as total as it did in the rest of the country, where by 1918 supporters of the war – let alone conscription – were both beleaguered and composed of pockets rather than masses. The temporary co-operation of the UIL and the Hibernians with Sinn Féin in Ulster in the wake of the Military Services Bill was effective in some parts of the province, but it is generally agreed that the north-east was largely unmoved by the wave of protests and strikes.117 Part of the reason for this was that the Catholic hierarchy pronounced unequivocally against conscription, while the Protestant churches were less clear on this. But the main explanation was that many unionists themselves 113 114 115 117

Ibid., 10 and 13 June 1918; FJ, 18 and 19 June 1918. IC, July 1918, pp. 615–16. 116 McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 94. II, 11 June 1918. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 135. Though Laffan quotes an intriguing report from the Irish Press of the co-operation of Catholics and Protestants in Ballycastle (County Antrim) against the measure.

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believed that recruitment and conscription were essential to national security. Unionist women had held this view strongly throughout the war. The Ulster Women’s Unionist Council had been especially active in recruitment from the earliest days of the conlict, a role urged on it by Carson and other unionist leaders.118 At its annual meeting in 1916, the UWUC voted unanimously to pass a resolution which expressed their ‘deep dissatisfaction at the exclusion of Ireland from the Compulsory Service Act’.119 While their unionist political activity was suspended during the war, the UWUC continued to organise, to fundraise and to urge women to take a more active role in national life. When the war ended, they were therefore poised to return swiftly and eficiently to the business at hand. In the context of an expanded electorate, and one which included women for the irst time, this proved to be important to the unionist cause. With the exception of Cumann na mBan, nationalist women were manifestly unprepared for such a task; partly because the aftershocks of war and rebellion had not yet subsided, but mainly because women’s constitutional activism had hardly been cultivated, and by 1918 it was much too late to begin.

118 119

Belfast Newsletter, 15 October 1914. Urquhart, Minutes of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council, pp. 102–3.

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Triumph and disenchantment

The enthusiasm for the votes of women continues unabated: all political parties humbly sue for women’s favour and the brief memories of politicians are quite touching.1

I In the wake of its comprehensive electoral defeat in 1918, Jennie Wyse Power argued that the ‘dying Parliamentary Party learned to its cost’ that the woman voter had become a force to be reckoned with. The Irish Times claimed that women voted early and in large numbers, in fact in proportionately higher numbers than men.2 We cannot of course know how many of the women who were eligible to vote actually did so, and we can be still less sure about their political preferences. But we do know that many women were deeply involved in the election and not only as voters. As well as voting for the irst time, in 1918, women could and did also propagandise and fundraise on behalf of the competing parties, and this is where the Irish Party fell very short indeed. Although it did have women supporters, they were simply in no position to do the kind of vital donkey work that Sinn Féin, Cumann na mBan and unionist women had by 1918 become so adept in. The Irish Party had managed, moreover, to nurture an actively hostile female opposition led by Jennie Wyse Power, Elizabeth Bloxham and Patricia Hoey, who had as early as mid 1917 recognised franchise reform to be the ‘winding sheet’ of the Party.3 These women were among the many who lined up to chastise the Irish Party in two inal feminist attacks on nationalist MPs in July and November 1917. Two public meetings were held under the auspices of the IWFL, and both attracted a cross-section of the Party’s critics, including suffragettes, trade unionists and republicans. Claiming that the Irish Party had attempted to secure the exclusion of Ireland from the new Franchise Bill, a largely unfriendly crowd emphasised that the 1

IC, December 1918, p. 633.

2

IT, 21 December 1918.

3

II, 16 July 1917.

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Party’s ‘hostile’ attitude towards women would cost it votes and contribute to its decimation at the next election.4 According to Patricia Hoey, the Irish Party’s lack of sympathy for women’s suffrage was ‘instigated by the knowledge that the women would never follow their lead’. William O’Brien of the Dublin Trades Council agreed, adding that the recent nationalist defeat at the East Clare by-election ‘showed what would happen to the Party if the young men of Ireland got the vote’.5 The Party’s supporters denied this, but its enemies used the opportunity to highlight the differences between the old nationalist organisation and its younger, more progressive rival. Jennie Wyse Power told the meeting that Sinn Fein had ‘deinitely declared for the franchise for women’. A letter from Arthur Grifith to the November gathering conirmed this, though he characteristically added that Sinn Féin had never asked ‘for the inclusion of Ireland in English measures’.6 As James McConnel has shown, the Irish Party’s position on the enlarged electorate was in fact far more complicated than these critics suggested. Redmond and Dillon both claimed that they had no interest in attempting to hold on to power by opposing franchise reform. Redmond went so far as to argue that the Irish Party had backed ‘every extension of the franchise’ in Britain and Ireland.7 Party loyalists supported him, the Irish News claiming, for example, that the IPP had ‘consistently and effectively supported the Franchise at all times and under every circumstance’.8 This was of course manifestly untrue, as the Party’s record on the enfranchisement of women was patchy to say the least. But most commentators, Irish MPs included, conceived of franchise reform in terms of the extension of the male electorate, and the Party had indeed supported the extension of manhood suffrage in most circumstances. Women’s suffrage was not part of the equation, but there is little evidence that Irish MPs set out deliberately to block the enfranchisement of women in 1917 and 1918. The Irish Party’s response to franchise reform at this time was nonetheless ambiguous, and this in itself provided ammunition for the collection of critics who maintained that the IPP opposed electoral reform. The leadership of the Home Rule Party was in reality far more concerned with the potential effect on its share of the vote of redistribution than it was with the expansion of the electorate.9 This did not mean that the IPP was unconcerned about the advent of manhood suffrage and the partial enfranchisement of women. Party strategists in 4 7

8

Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 FJ, 1 November 1917. James McConnel, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Defeat of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 1885–1918’, Historical Journal, 27:2 (2004), 355–77, at p. 371. Irish News, 5 November 1918. 9 McConnel, ‘Franchise Factor’, p. 373.

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fact dreaded it, but conceded that attempting to block popular electoral reform was not possible.10 The Irish Party found some support for its stand among its loyal female supporters. Celia Harrison, still a ‘convinced constitutional Nationalist’, appeared at the November Mansion House meeting to defend her party, begging its critics to maintain unity in the face of an attempt to divide the country during ‘a critical moment in Irish history’.11 The moderate nationalist press applauded her, maintaining that both meetings had been called ‘for the purpose of giving certain persons an opportunity of abusing the Irish National Parliamentary party’ and not to support women’s suffrage, as the organisers claimed.12 Margaret Connery reinforced this sceptical view when she told the November gathering that the IWFL had become ‘more and more strengthened in its conviction that the Irish Party was, and is, the open and irreconcilable enemy of the movement for women’s emancipation’.13 Other constitutional women expressed support for their party, but in less absolute terms than Harrison. Agnes O’Farrelly argued that ‘the Sinn Fein Convention the other day emphasised clearly what some of us already knew to be the attitude of Young Ireland on the women’s question. Nor have we anything to fear from any other group of Irishmen if the matter were left to a free vote, uncomplicated by other considerations.’14 This implicit recognition by a party stalwart of Sinn Féin’s advanced position on women’s rights suggested both that a Sinn Féin victory at the next general election now looked to be perfectly possible and that some party loyalists at least had begun to make their peace with this. In some ways, the Irish Party’s long stranglehold on nationalist Ireland proved to be a disadvantage in the run-up to the general election. Not only did issues including the land question – on which it had fought its major campaigns from its earliest days – appear increasingly irrelevant by 1918, its personnel was ageing, its electoral machinery was creaking and the postponement of the Home Rule Bill had eroded the faith of the Irish electorate, old and new. Moreover, the Party was unused to contesting elections on a large scale, as it had had no major nationalist rival for almost the entire period of its existence. Between 1885 and 1918, most Irish constituencies had been uncontested and the registration of electors had largely been neglected except in constituencies where the Party traditionally fought it out with unionists.15 Given the extra pressures of war, the Easter Rising, threatened conscription, the continuing refusal of 10 12 14

11 Ibid., p. 374. FJ, 1 November 1917. 13 Irish News, 5 November 1917. FJ, 6 November 1917. 15 II, 7 November 1917. McConnel, ‘Franchise Factor’, p. 359.

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unionists to entertain all-Ireland Home Rule and the expansion of Sinn Féin, the IPP had a mountain to climb as it prepared for the general election. As it managed to win only six of the 105 available seats, it was clear that the constitutionalists failed spectacularly to secure the conidence of Irish voters, male or female. It might be argued that the Party’s failure to mount an effective campaign for the female vote was understandable given the other calls on its time and resources. There were, one could argue, bigger ish to fry and more valuable votes to pursue in the expanded male electorate. This view fails, however, to take adequately into account the very important potential impact of women voters. About 36 per cent of the new electorate was female, and women were in fact in the majority in some constituencies.16 Women made up about 40 per cent of the electorate in Dublin, 39 per cent in Belfast and just over 39 per cent in Cork.17 Unionists and Sinn Féiners seemed to understand this, and both appealed regularly and speciically to women voters. One Dublin unionist candidate went so far as to announce that ‘this was, to a great extent, a women’s election’.18 James Craig, always a strong supporter of women’s suffrage, welcomed their forthcoming participation in the election and looked forward to the increased involvement of women in the country’s most pressing social questions.19 The press likewise had no doubt about the signiicance of the female vote, but opinion on how women would vote was mixed, largely owing to the fact that enfranchised women were required to be over thirty and to meet a minimum property qualiication or to be university graduates. Would women be more likely than men to turn out and would those who did vote be more likely to vote conservatively? Commentators were unsure about the potential impact of this demographic, but, if nothing else, it was clear that women’s votes were up for grabs and they could have an enormous inluence on the election result.20 Realising this, unionist women organised quickly and effectively, relecting the generally strong state of the UWUC. Having set aside political work for the duration of the war, towards its close the organisation emerged determined to claim a more serious and central role in unionist politics. Having protested against its exclusion from the Ulster Unionist Council, the women’s organisation worked formally towards rectifying this from 1916. The Representation of the People Act gave unionist women more leverage, and male leaders began to take their demands more seriously as a result.21 The UWUC was awarded a modest representation 16 17 19 21

Coakley, ‘The Election that Made the First Dáil’, p. 35. FJ, 26 November 1918. 18 II, 6 December 1918. Belfast Newsletter, 3 December 1918. 20 FJ, 26 November 1918. Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp. 68–71.

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in 1918, the impact of the extension of the franchise having played a key role in this concession.22 The UWUC executive was keenly aware of both the importance and potential impact of the new electorate. It held a special meeting in June 1918 at which the questions of registering and canvassing women voters were discussed. The treasurer was authorised to make payments of up to £5,000 in connection with these aims. The executive emphasised the fact that this work was important for its own sake but also vital ‘as a means of demonstrating the practical usefulness of our women’s Associations’.23 Edward Carson asked the women of Ulster to ‘organise with the men, and to return good and true representatives to the Imperial Parliament’.24 The unionist Northern Whig urged them to ‘rise to the occasion’, warning that women had more to lose than men if a ‘reactionary, ignorant, priestridden government’ were installed in Dublin.25 Ulster unionist women responded in the afirmative, throwing themselves into canvassing, registering and educating women in how to use their votes. Their efforts were naturally focused mainly on the northern counties, but unionist women in the south of Ireland were also very active. Lady Arnott and a number of other female speakers canvassed on behalf of Henry Hanna, who stood as the unionist candidate in St Stephen’s Green, while women also actively supported candidates in other parts of Dublin city and county. Unionist candidates made direct appeals to ‘women’s issues’, including temperance and social reform, understanding that the women’s vote had to be courted.26 Henry Hanna even opened his campaign with a women’s meeting and announced that he believed himself to be the irst candidate to have done so.27 Even the comparatively tiny Labour Party boasted that it been the irst party to ‘back up its support [for women’s suffrage] with action’ in its nomination of Louie Bennett for a Dublin division as a Labour candidate. It recognised the potential of the female vote, breaking down the numbers of female voters in different parts of the country and recognising that candidates were going to be obliged to address directly the issues which were important to women.28 To say that the Irish Party lagged behind in its attempts to court female voters would be a huge understatement. As we know, no women’s constitutional organisation existed, so that when the expanded electorate was 22 23

24 26 28

Ibid., p. 71. Diane Urquhart (ed.), The Minutes of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council and Executive Committee, 1911–40 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 103–4. 25 II, 12 September 1918. Northern Whig, 10 December 1918. II, 2, 7, 10 and 30 December 1918. 27 IT, 2 December 1918. FJ, 20 November 1918. Bennett refused the nomination, probably in protest against the Labour–Sinn Féin deal over the 1918 election: Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett, p. 76.

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conirmed and the election dates declared, there was no body of women ready to undertake the registration and canvassing of women or men. Once again, the UILGB was more advanced than its Irish counterpart in this area. At its 1918 Convention, its executive council speciically urged the establishment of ladies’ branches in order to ‘advise the Irish women’s vote in the best interests of the Irish cause’.29 But even the involvement in the British UIL of prominent women including Sophie Bryant and Alice Stopford Green, both members of the London ladies’ branch, failed to produce a noticeable expansion in women’s involvement in the UIL in Britain or Ireland. The idea that the women’s vote could and would make a difference to the election result did appear to be understood in some constitutional nationalist circles. There is no question, for example, as Diane Urquhart has argued, that the political value of women members of the AOH was more explicitly recognised within the organisation as result of women’s newly acquired voting power from late 1917.30 Whether the AOH adequately adapted to, or even understood, the implications of this shift, however, remains questionable. In a remarkable piece, the Hibernian Journal declared in 1918 that It is generally agreed that the organisation of women in Ireland has been completely neglected, and, unquestionably, many efforts will be made, now that they have secured the franchise, to have the women of the country organised. It has been advanced against women taking part in public affairs that they are not as capable as men, taking them as a body, but that is largely because they haven’t had the same opportunities presented to them and have never been thoroughly organised. It should, therefore, be the aim of those ladies who have taken a prominent part in the Hibernian organisation not to be deterred by the general view held, but, on the contrary, to proceed to organise Divisions of the Auxiliary in all the large centres of population, and in the rural districts to obtain lady Associates in connection with the male Divisions, and thus bring all those of the female sex possible into direct touch with the work of the Hibernian Society.31

It is dificult to know whether this comment was a relection of the Order’s naïvety or merely wishful thinking. In either case, the fact remained that many thousands of Irish women were already well organised, deeply involved in propaganda work and ready to vote against the Hibernians’ preferred party, which was in no position to resist such an onslaught. The UWUC, for example, had an estimated membership of between 115,000 and 200,000 members, while Cumann na mBan had up to 29 31

FJ, 10 August 1918. 30 Urquhart, Women in Ulster, pp. 104–5. Hibernian Journal, April 1918, p. 107.

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19,800 members by early 1919.32 Sinn Féin and Citizen Army women also participated in electioneering in various parts of the country.33 The AOH could not compete with such numbers and had itself been directly responsible for the comparative lack of political organisation within its women’s branches, having argued over the years that women should ‘stand apart from municipal politics’,34 and that they should ‘not necessarily, or even advisedly’ ‘turn politicians’.35 Having espoused nationbuilding for women through non-political means and having urged women down a philanthropic and domestic path, the Order, and the constitutional movement it supported, found itself in a much weaker position than its rivals in 1918. Its detailed explanation of the eligibility of women under the Representation of the People Act was surely a case of much too little, too late.36 By 1919, the Order was declaring that all ‘great organisations’ had ‘always’ had their ‘Ladies’ Leagues, or Ladies’ Auxiliaries in connection with them’. This, it seems, was ‘so with all great political parties, Irish and British’. But this simply was not the case for the Irish Party, and the AOH seemed to have itself forgotten that its own ladies’ auxiliaries, launched only in 1910, were not substitutes in name or activity for a women’s section of the Irish Party. In addition, it was only in 1919 that Hibernian rules were amended so that women were ‘entitled to the full privileges which membership of the order brings with it’.37 As late as 1918, while arguing that women should be brought in ‘direct touch’ with the work of the Hibernian Society, men were advised to help recruit ‘lady associates’, a new class of membership which could exist only in areas where no ladies’ auxiliary operated within three miles. These associates would have to be nominated by men, would be entitled to an associate’s card which would allow them to attend reunions of the male divisions, and, when a suficient number had been recruited, they could be formed into an ‘amusements committee’ which would help to promote the monthly meetings.38 The AOH nonetheless survived well beyond 1918 and remained the most popular nationalist organisation among women in Ulster between the wars.39 This relected the fact that constitutional nationalism retained its hold in the northern counties longer and more successfully than in the rest of the country, and this was in itself partly due to the effectiveness of the AOH. Members of the organisation campaigned around the 32 33 35 37 39

McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, pp. 112–13, p. 108. BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh. 34 II, 26 February 1912. 36 Hibernian Journal, July 1915, p. 29. Ibid., June 1918, pp. 122–3. Ibid., November 1919, p. 63. 38 Ibid., April 1918, p. 107. Urquhart, Women in Ulster, p. 105.

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country in 1918 but were especially active in the north of Ireland. The ‘lady Hibernians’ were, for example, said to be even ‘more zealous’ than their male counterparts in their campaigning on behalf of Joe Devlin.40 Their enthusiasm in West Belfast no doubt helped to secure one of the Irish Party’s very few seats, but the impact of the Order’s campaigning on the results of the general election is dificult to quantify, not least because the Irish Party did not contest every seat in the nine Ulster counties and because Sinn Féin and the nationalists agreed to an election pact which allowed each party to take four Ulster seats.41 Devlin made particular appeals to women voters, both because of his sound suffrage record and because he hoped to appeal to the female workers of West Belfast: he ended his inal rally, for example, with a characteristic tribute to the ‘brave, generous, ever-loyal women and girls of West Belfast’.42 When the results were announced, he received a contingent of mill workers and once more singled out women voters and activists, declaring that ‘this ight has been fought and won by the women’.43 Devlin had been one of the very few Irish Party MPs to engage with the suffrage question, urging newly enfranchised women not to waste their votes by opting for candidates who supported a ‘policy of national disenfranchisement’.44 It is striking, nonetheless, that no women appeared on his platforms, while Alice Cashel, Countess Plunkett and many other women made regular public appearances on behalf of Sinn Féin’s Belfast candidates and particularly on behalf of Winnie Carney, Sinn Féin candidate for Belfast’s Victoria division.45 In the rest of the country, constitutional women generally played a minor role in the election campaign. Some female party loyalists did come forward to provide assistance, but they appeared to be very small in number and largely restricted to Dublin. Mary Sheehy Kettle publicly pledged her support for the Irish Party, urged the UIL to ‘organise the women’s vote’ and offered her assistance to this task.46 She went on to play a limited role in the election campaign, but she was nonetheless one of the most active constitutional women to be involved. She made one speech to a large meeting of women voters in support of the nationalist candidate for South Down, Jeremiah MacVeagh, a liberal constitutionalist, close friend of her late husband and one of the very few successful Home Rule MPs in 1918.47 She was otherwise involved in supporting the candidature of George Moonan 40 41

42 44 46

Irish News, 2 December 1918. B. M. Walker (ed.), Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801–1922 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 185–91, and Coakley, ‘The Election that Made the First Dáil’, pp. 32–3. Irish News, 13 December 1918. 43 Ibid., 30 December 1918. 45 II, 24 September 1918. Irish News, 5 December 1918. FJ, 30 November 1918. 47 II, 11 December 1918.

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in Rathmines, as was her old political ally and fellow Rathmines resident, Mary Hayden.48 Moonan enjoyed more female support than almost any other Irish Party candidate, and even had a ‘ladies’ committee’ working for him.49 Nonetheless, he became embroiled in a minor electoral controversy as rumours circulated about the suffrage positions of both Moonan and his Sinn Féin rival, P. J. Little. Though obviously a committed constitutional nationalist, Mary Sheehy Kettle, who raised the suffrage question, was a feminist irst. She publicly questioned her own candidate about his suffrage views, declaring that she would not have supported him had he been opposed to votes for women.50 In the end, Sir Maurice Dockrell, the unionist candidate, won the Rathmines seat, ably supported by his suffragist wife and her allies. It was a close-run competition, with Dockrell polling only ifty-four more votes than the combined total of the Sinn Féin and IPP candidates. His was the only Dublin seat which Sinn Féin failed to win and the only unionist seat outside Ulster.51 In the nearby St Stephen’s Green constituency, women played a similarly active part in electioneering. Constitutional women backed the Irish Party’s P. J. Brady, who had been a keen supporter of the school-meals campaign.52 Like most of the IPP candidates who appealed directly to women, Brady had been on the ‘right’ side in the suffrage debate. Stephen Gwynn was another such candidate. He referred ‘with great pleasure to the number of ladies present in view of his efforts for woman suffrage’ when he addressed a Galway meeting.53 By 1918, this did not and could not help Gwynn, Brady or many of their colleagues, especially when faced with similarly liberal opponents. Brady’s Sinn Féin challenger, Thomas Kelly, for example, had also been a strong advocate of social reform as chairman of Dublin Corporation’s Housing Committee and a supporter of women’s suffrage; Sinn Féin women were careful to let this be known. Turnout was high, about 80 per cent, and Sinn Féin’s very active election agents, who ‘literally swarmed’ over the area in an attempt to get out the vote, obviously did their work well, as Kelly won in a landslide.54 He in fact polled more than twice as many votes as Brady, who had held the seat since 1910. A similar pattern emerged in the St Michin’s division, where Sinn Féin activists appealed explicitly to women to vote for Michael Staines.55 In South Dublin a number of high-proile women, including Jennie Wyse Power and Albinia Brodrick, turned out for George Gavan Duffy.56 Louise Gavan Duffy appealed 48 50 51 53 55

49 FJ, 7 December, 1918. Ibid., 6 December 1918. Ibid., 5 and 7 December 1918; II, 7 December 1918. 52 Excluding university seats. FJ, 27 November 1918. II, 2 April 1918. 54 FJ, 16 December 1918. 56 II, 2 December 1910. Ibid., 10 December 1918,

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directly to women in the constituency, declaring that if it were true that Irish women were more ‘rabid’ than the men, Ireland was ‘bound to win’. At the same public meeting, Hanna Sheehy Skefington reminded the nationalist candidate, Thomas Clarke, that his party had ‘fought all that they could against women getting the vote. But now women were more than lunatics and imbeciles; they were citizens of Ireland, and they had tenacious memories.’57 Gavan Duffy went on to win that seat, while Clarke came in behind the unionist candidate. II By the time the general election of 1918 had been announced, republican women were an integral part of the organisational machine which had propelled Sinn Féin to victory in ive of the eight by-elections it had contested since 1917. They became even more active during the general election campaign. Many of the recollections of Cumann na mBan members in particular emphasise the crucial role they played in Sinn Féin’s stunning 1918 electoral triumph, standing out in fact for many of them as one of the organisation’s greatest achievements, especially as Cumann na mBan had been proscribed and communications were extremely dificult. Women assumed new responsibilities during the campaign and in the process broke down old barriers, at least temporarily. Brighid O’Mullane, for instance, described being ‘on the run and constantly in danger of arrest’.58 Alice Ginnell became more deeply embroiled in gritty electioneering than she had expected when she was sent on the instructions of Sinn Féin’s Director of Elections to help in the Westmeath campaign: ‘seeing the confusion that reigned there, she had to take on the position of Election agent, the irst woman in the British Isles to occupy that position’.59 One activist argued that Cumann na mBan’s work had ‘won half the battle at least’, and this view of both the scale and the form of the campaigning they undertook was widely shared. For some women, particularly those in the most contentious areas of the country, canvassing was dangerous work: Eilia Ni Chossa remembered the strenuous job of electioneering in Belfast and noted that ‘canvassing there was like going into battle, especially in the Falls Road area, where the Devlinites [sic] attacked us physically as well as verbally’.60 Eithne Coyle, another northern member, recalled having to help the organisation’s 57 59 60

58 Ibid. BMH WS 450: Brighid O’Mullane. BMH WS 982: Alice Ginnell. Letter from Eilia Ni Chossa, 6 June 1968, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1380(1).

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vice-president to her room in a hotel because she was on the point of collapse, having been ‘savagely beaten by an Orange mob, who dragged her off the platform while addressing a public meeting in Cookstown on behalf of our Republican candidate’.61 This was no work for the delicate or the cowardly. The fact that Cumann na mBan shared an address with Sinn Féin helped enormously in the day-to-day running of the election. Maire Comerford recalled of 6 Harcourt Street that ‘the house, from morning to late night was full of the red hot hard work of preparations for the Election which was bound to come’.62 Cumann na mBan’s executive took swift action in an effort to capture women’s votes after the passing of the Representation of the People Act. It digested the Act and sent details of who was eligible to branches, as well as lealets ‘for distribution among women who were not members’, urging them to vote for Sinn Féin.63 One of their 1918 lealets set out the electoral rights and duties of patriotic Irish women as well as providing clear instructions on how to register and where and how to vote. The executive reminded women in no uncertain terms that their votes mattered: Don’t imagine that one vote is of no importance. Every single one matters, and yours might be the one to turn the poll at an election. Generations of Irishwomen have longed to possess the weapon which has now been put into your hands. Show that you value it properly, and do your part in publicising to the world our determination to be free.64

Activist women also prepared for the electoral future in anticipation of a permanently changed electorate. Belfast’s delegate to Cumann na mBan’s 1918 Convention, for example, proposed that in view of the extension of the franchise, ‘special study circles’ should be formed in Cumann na mBan branches which would ‘aid in developing the character and initiative of our women, so as to enable them to participate intelligently in the government of the country, under an Irish Republic’.65 The foundations for future action were being laid at the same time as immediate electoral shifts were consolidated. Republican women campaigned on behalf of Sinn Féin in most parts of the country, their involvement contributing to the general momentum which grew around the organisation in the months and years after the 61 62 63

64 65

Eithne Coyle, Memoir of Cumann na mBan, Eithne Coyle Papers, UCDA, P61/2. Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/12(4). Cumann na mBan Convention (Proceedings), 28 and 29 September 1918, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/1128(2). Cumann na mBan, The Present Duty of Irishwomen (Dublin, no date), p. 3. Cumann na mBan, Annual Convention Report 1918, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA P106/1128/(7).

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Easter Rising. Kevin O’Shiel was only one of many activists to comment on this when describing ‘the large numbers of young men and, more curious still for those days, young women’ who turned out for Count Plunkett during his by-election campaign in 1917. He explained that ‘in all the political meetings and demonstrations [he had] witnessed previously, youth was poorly represented, and women hardly at all’.66 Despite her own growing reservations about the status of women within Sinn Féin, Rosamond Jacob found herself in the middle of the action as Sinn Féin and the Irish Party fought it out at the Waterford by-election in March 1918. Her Sinn Féin club began to prepare for this election and to discuss possible candidates on the day it heard of the death of the sitting member, John Redmond.67 Jacob’s willingness to become deeply involved in the election campaign indicates how political mores had changed in Ireland over a few short years. Having been asked by Hanna Sheehy Skefington in 1914 to heckle John Redmond when he visited Waterford, she refused, explaining that while she knew he ought to be tackled about his suffrage views, ‘the plain fact is, I haven’t the courage to do it. The idea makes me feel sick with terror. I could never do that sort of thing, for the irst time alone, or even as the principal one of two or three women.’68 By 1918, she had no such reservations, partly because she was older, better connected and more experienced, but also because, like so many other republican women, she had become used to public and often gritty political work. In the run-up to the by-election, Jacob asked for the assistance of Cumann na dTeachtaire in the form of women who could campaign for Sinn Féin and organise women voters. This matter was deferred to the Sinn Féin executive, but individual members including Jennie Wyse Power did campaign in Waterford. Jacob’s account of the election campaign provides valuable insight into the developing political machinery of Sinn Féin and the great effort the organisation was by now able to put into its by-election campaigns. Women like Jacob obviously played a large part in the day-to-day canvassing and publicity, and it was clear that women’s local knowledge proved very useful to Sinn Féin. Of particular importance was a hotel run by the Powers, Jacob’s friends and fellow female Sinn Feiners, whose premises had been used as a meeting point for republican couriers – including Maeve Cavanagh and Sean Matthews – during the Easter Rising.69 Waterford was of course always going to be exceptionally dificult for Sinn Féin to win, as it was so closely connected 66 67 68 69

BMH WS 1770: Kevin O’Shiel. DRJ, 6 March 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(33). Rosamond Jacob to HSS, 7 October 1914, SSP, NLI, MS 22,665(ii). BMH WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh.

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with the Redmond family, and it was a rough campaign by any standards, with rival mobs of armed supporters battling it out on occasion.70 Jacob’s account testiies to the often high levels of violence which characterised provincial election campaigns. She reported the Powers’ terrible account of life in the hotel on the last day and night of the election. It was something between a barrack and a fortress, volunteers everywhere, especially in the yard, to guard against attack, and wounded men constantly either coming in or being brought in. There seems at one time to be a bloody man being attended in every corner of the house, and one in the yard.71

Such brutal encounters appeared to be more common outside Dublin than in the capital. While the candidates in Rathmines congratulated themselves and each other on the cordial way in which the contest had been conducted, rural campaigns were often much less harmoniously run.72 During the general election of 1918, one of the Powers women in Waterford suffered a head wound, while the Sinn Féin band there was assailed by stones and bottles.73 In East Mayo, Sinn Féiners were likewise stoned, while nationalists and republicans also clashed in Louth, Belfast, Dundalk, Wexford and Naas.74 Women were frequently involved in these battles, with ‘separation women’ once again most often singled out as the most extreme of the stone-throwers, hecklers and marchers.75 In Loughrea, one Volunteer reported that his comrades were attacked with bottles and sticks by a mob consisting mostly of ‘British ex-soldiers and their wives’, apparently led by Mrs Duffy, the wife of the Parliamentary Party candidate. The women there apparently ‘attacked more iercely than the men’.76 Throughout the campaign, Jacob watched carefully for signs within Sinn Féin that women would be politically side-lined. She noted, for example, that some male politicians had not abandoned old habits, and recorded with disgust that Milroy had included in his speech ‘some stuff about wanting the old women to “cajole” the men, and the young women to use their needles making lags and badges’. She told him that ‘old and young would do more than that’, but by this stage even she was forced to concede that she ‘wasn’t at all sure of it’.77 By May, she noted that it was ‘very hard’ to come up with a woman for each sub-directorship, should conscription be imposed. By December, she was still less positive about the role of women in politics, having heard from Madeleine ffrench-Mullen 70 71 72 74 75 77

Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, p. 126. DRJ, 4 April 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(33). II, 30 December 1918. 73 Ibid., 2 December 1918. Ibid., 2, 3 and 9 December 1918, and FJ, 10 December 1918. II, 2, 3 and 9 December, 1918. 76 BMH WS 1064: Michael Healy. DRJ, 10 March 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(33).

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that the efforts of the women in the Rathmines Sinn Féin club to have Hanna Sheehy Skefington made a candidate for the forthcoming general election had been met with ‘male passive resistance … having to have explanations made ten times over and omitting to call meetings that had been arranged for etc.’78 By early 1920, she was convinced that ‘most of the Sinn Fein men will be just as hopeless about doing anything for the beneit of women as the old crowd were’.79 Feminists had provided all the major Irish parties with lists of potential female candidates and warned them that the party that refused to nominate women would ‘certainly lose women’s votes at the polls’.80 It appeared, however, that the major parties did not listen. Sinn Féin proved, once again, to be the exception to this, but even it failed to live up to the standards of some of its female members. Jacob was not the only female activist to monitor Hanna Sheehy Skefington’s potential candidature in 1918. Having attended the meeting of the Rathmines Sinn Féin club at which her candidature had been discussed, Áine Ceannt reported in a letter to Sheehy Skefington that ‘your name having been proposed and seconded on Sun. the men started to give their reasons for proposing P. J. Little’.81 There was some not unreasonable feeling at the meeting that Sheehy Skefington was ‘too big a person’ to be sacriiced in a constituency where Sinn Féin was sure to be beaten, but Ceannt’s letter also implied a real impatience with her male colleagues and demonstrated the tentativeness with which even a well-known female activist like Ceannt approached the issue of a woman candidate. She concluded that ‘Rathmines is hopeless’ and hoped that a more appropriate seat could be found for Sheehy Skefington.82 Kathleen Lynn described it as ‘schade’ (a shame) that ‘Mrs. S. S. won’t stand’.83 Markievicz later claimed that Sheehy Skefington ‘could have been an M.P. if she had wanted to. A seat was offered her.’ She believed Sheehy Skefington to be ‘not altogether an S.F.’, and she may well have been correct in her estimation: the women thought highly of one another but had clashed swords on the question of suffrage and nationalism on a number of occasions.84 Sheehy Skefington probably did not stand for a number of reasons, including her desire to work for women generally rather than for a political party in 1918, but any parliamentary ambition she might have had was probably 78 79 80 81

82 84

Ibid., 29 October 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(35). Ibid., 18 January 1920, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(36). II, 18 November 1918. Little must have been well known to HSS, as he had been a member of the YIB and her contemporary at UCD. Áine Ceannt to HSS, 1918, SSP, NLI, MS 24,108. 83 Ibid. Lynn, Diary, 25 November 1918. Markievicz, to Eva Gore-Booth, 30 January 1919, in Sebestyen, Prison Letters, p. 192.

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impeded in any case by her radical opinions on a number of social and political questions.85 By June 1918, Cumann na dTeachtaire had begun preparing for the forthcoming municipal and general elections. Believing that women had neglected the opportunity presented by earlier campaigns for the Local Government Board and municipal elections, they endeavoured to write to the Sinn Féin executive with a list of names of ‘suitable women’ candidates’ who should be put forward for ‘double seats’ when they became vacant. The women selected were: Sheehy Skefington, Clarke, Ceannt, Jacob, Cashel, Daly, Carney, Lynn and Countess Plunkett, a formidable list by any standards but also one which was by this time becoming very familiar. Most of these names were to appear time and time again on various lists of signatories, activists and protesters well into the twentieth century. In the event, Sinn Féin nominated three women for the forthcoming general election, Markievicz, Carney – for a virtually unwinnable seat in Belfast – and Sheehy Skefington, though the latter refused the nomination. Kathleen Clarke had hoped for a Sinn Féin nomination in her native Limerick but claimed that while she was in prison, political plotting behind her back had led to a male candidate being put up instead. She declared herself ‘very angry’ when she learned the details of this on her release.86 Her sister told her that Dublin Cumann na mBan had written to the Sinn Féin candidate, asking him to step down so that Clarke could stand, but this had had no effect.87 Jennie Wyse Power believed that ‘Limerick behaved scandalously about Mrs C.’.88 Other women may have been held back for reasons more dificult to substantiate but which were nonetheless decisive. Jacob noted that many people, including Áine Ceannt, were ‘very cold about Maud Gonne … because she divorced her husband. I suppose they blame her more than him, because divorce is irreligious’, though Jacob herself thought Gonne had potential as a good parliamentary candidate.89 A number of other women, including Sheehy Skefington, Lynn and ffrench-Mullen, later became active in local politics: both their ambitions and their highly idiosyncratic sets of interests could be given freer rein at the local political level. When Sinn Féin inally achieved a majority on Dublin Corporation in 1920, Kathleen 85 86 87

88

89

DRJ, 29 October 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(35). Clarke, Revolutionary Woman, p. 164. Madge Daly to Kathleen Clarke, 28 November 1918, Tom and Kathleen Clarke Papers, NLI, MS 49,356/3. Jennie Wyse Power to Markievicz, 7 December 1918, PRO, CO 904/164/4, Postal Censorship 4th Report, 1/12/18–15/12/18. DRJ, 29 October 1918, RJP, NLI, MS 32,582(35).

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Clarke, Jennie Wyse Power and Hanna Sheehy Skefington were among their successful councillors.90 III Cumann na mBan, already well practised at mobilising women and at getting out propaganda, was well placed to marshal women’s votes in 1918, the added incentive being that its president, Constance Markievicz, was up for election. Jennie Wyse Power emphasised the particular work put into Markievicz’s campaign, noting that ‘in Dublin it was natural that our members should in the main devote themselves to the return of Countess de Markievicz for St Patrick’s division. No public meeting of her election Committee was held without speakers from amongst us.’91 The fact that Markievicz and Winnie Carney had strong associations with the women’s suffrage and labour movements as well as with Sinn Féin brought many extra supporters and volunteer canvassers. The IWFL claimed that it supported the ‘women candidates’ and, accordingly, sent speakers to the Carney and Markievicz campaigns.92 One wonders, however, whether the organisation would as readily have supported a female unionist candidate, had one stood. Markievicz famously went on to win her seat, becoming the irst woman to be elected to the British House of Commons, but her election campaign was also signiicant because feminists lined up to oppose her as well as to support her. As a member of the non-party Women’s Civic League, Celia Harrison worked hard to encourage all eligible women to vote,93 but as a party loyalist, she became very publicly involved in the contest for Dublin’s St Patrick’s division. Markievicz was in prison during the contest, and her campaign was run on her behalf mainly by female republicans and suffragists. The IWFL made the running, organising meetings and appointing some of the organisation’s most experienced speakers to canvass for her, as well as drafting in supporters of the IWFL and friends of Markievicz, including Maud Gonne and one of James Connolly’s daughters.94 Feminists including Hanna Sheehy Skefington emphasised the Irish Party’s refusal to back the women’s suffrage campaign, urging electors to vote for Markievicz, a committed suffragist. Markievicz won the election easily, unseating the rather eccentric Parnellite William Field, who had held the seat since 1892. He too 90

91 92 94

Maire O’Neill, ‘Dublin Corporation in the Troubled Times, 1914–1924’, Dublin Historical Record, 47:1 (spring 1994), 56–70, at p. 64. Cumann na mBan, Leabhar na mBan, p. 7. IC, December 1918. 93 FJ, 29 June 1918. II, 7 and 11 December 1918; FJ, 7 December 1918.

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was a suffragist and had also at times supported social reform, but, armed even with a Ladies’ Election Committee, he could not retain his seat.95 It was a matter of ‘great joy’ to the IWFL that Markievicz won her Dublin seat, though privately some members fumed at Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan’s dismal efforts on behalf of their candidate.96 It seemed that supporters from outside the republican movement had provided the most assistance, and one cannot help but wonder whether the result might have been different had the IWFL not stepped in. Margaret Connery of the IWFL, who had been asked by Sinn Féin to manage Markievicz’s campaign, expressed her anger over the way women candidates had been neglected. In a letter to Sheehy Skefington, Connery fumed: Please tell the committee I couldn’t take charge of Madame Markievicz’s election in my present state of health … The very nerve of Sinn Féin sets my teeth on edge. The one woman that they have thrown as a sop to the women of the country has her interest neglected and what is one to say of Cumann na mBan – surely it is their special duty to concentrate on the election of their own President! Why should the work be left to the chance care of ‘outsiders’ as they are so fond of calling us. They are too busy running after the men – the camp followers!!!97

Hanna Sheehy Skefington subsequently told Nancy Wyse Power that she thought that Markievicz had been ‘let down by an ineficient committee’ and that hers was the ‘worst managed constituency in Dublin’.98 Nancy Wyse Power and Hanna Sheehy Skefington had evidently clashed over political issues during the election campaign. Wyse Power thought Sheehy Skefington ‘rather prejudiced’, but Wyse Power’s promise that she would go into ‘all the points you raised in your letter’ after the elections evidently did not soothe relations.99 Jennie Wyse Power maintained her friendship with Hanna Sheehy Skefington in the context of an ongoing public debate in which Sheehy Skefington continued to decry Cumann na mBan for working principally for and in the interests of men, while Wyse Power continued to urge co-operation: I do not expect you to see eye-to-eye with Cumann na mBan – yet there surely is the common desire between us to do what we can for Irish women. At present all our energies are working, to try to get women on public bodies. All reports from our four organizers show the urgent need for education amongst nationalist women. For these ends we work constantly and ungrudgingly in face of great dificulties – ‘mobilising for funerals’ not being one of our main objects.100 95 97 98 99 100

96 II, 10 December 1918. IC, January 1919. Margaret Connery to HSS, SSP, NLI, MS 22,684. HSS to Nancy Wyse Power, 1919, in Ward, In Their Own Voice, pp. 92–3. Nancy Wyse Power to HSS, 1919, SSP, NLI, MS 24,108. Jennie Wyse Paper to HSS, no date, SSP, NLI, MS 24,140.

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Markievicz herself initially had high hopes for her candidature and campaign, congratulating the IWFL on its hard work on her behalf and hoping that her St Patrick’s division could be made into ‘a rallying ground for women and a splendid centre for constructive work by women’. Her optimism for the future appears to have been shared by some women, at least.101 The Irish Citizen hailed Markievicz’s election victory as a sign of Dublin’s progressive credentials, which showed ‘the world how much in advance she is of those who would rule her’.102 Similarly thrilled by the triumph, Jennie Wyse Power proclaimed that women would ‘get their share’ and would be in a ‘position to bargain’ at the next election, but her optimism was to be similarly short-lived.103 Carney’s campaign was doomed from the start, as she ran as a Sinn Féin candidate with her own programme for a workers’ republic, hardly a popular agenda in Ulster, where Sinn Féin in any case struggled against the organisational prowess and political appeal of the AOH and the UIL. She had the support of Belfast’s most prominent republican feminist and socialist women including Marie Johnson, Alice Milligan and Maeve Phelan of Cumann na mBan, but though the Belfast Cumann na mBan was probably more militant and militaristic than most other Irish branches, the organisation itself was comparatively weak in Ulster.104 Carney’s appeal to voters was predictably limited: she managed only 395 votes to the 9,509 gained by the victorious labour unionist Donald Thompson.105 She could ill afford the loss of the £150 spent on her candidature and believed that she should have received more support from Sinn Féin. Urquhart’s analysis of the people who spoke at her election meetings conirms this, and Carney herself complained about this to her friend, Joe McGrath, whose own Dublin electoral campaign had been successful while he was interned in Wales: I was disappointed losing the £150 in my case, which would with workers on the day have been recovered. I had neither election agents, Committee rooms, canvassers or vehicles, and as these are the chief features in an election, it was amazing to me to ind that 395 people went to the ballot on their own initiative, without any persuasion. The organisation could have been better – much better. We had Father O’Flanagan for two meetings, and Sean T. O’Kelly for one – that was the only help we got.106

101

102 103

104 105

Markievicz to HSS, 12 December 1918, PRO CO 904/164/4, Postal Censorship 4th Report, 1/12/18–15/12/18, and IC, January 1919. IC, January 1919, p. 642. Jennie Wyse Power to Markievicz, 7 December, 1918, PRO CO 904/164/4, Postal Censorship 4th Report, 1/12/18–15/12/18. Urquhart, Women in Ulster, p. 112. 106 Woggon, Silent Radical, pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 20.

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Her feminism was unwavering: she told an election meeting, for example, that ‘women had not got the vote for what they had done in the war, but because they had fought for it and many had died in order to get it’. She stated further that she hoped that women voters would show more sense than the men had shown in the past.107 Her iery combination of feminism, socialism and republicanism surely alienated more than the usual number of constituencies, and her considerable political energy and commitment was spent in other ways. The fact that only women over thirty were enfranchised by the 1918 Act surely cost Sinn Féin votes, though it is pretty much impossible to verify this, and, in any case, their votes were hardly necessary for victory. But some determined women did not let even their age stop them from contributing. Maire Comerford, for example, decided that regardless of her ineligibility, she had ‘earned’ a vote and the name of a ‘dead woman’ was found for her. The ‘labour man’ in the polling station knew who she was, heard her case, discussed it with some others and duly allowed her to vote.108 One wonders how many times this might have happened around the country.

107 108

Irish News, 5 December 1918, reproduced in Woggon, Silent Radical, p. 44. Maire Comerford, Memoir, Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/36(33).

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Epilogue

It is my irm opinion that the public welfare can never be judged and good decisions for everybody be arrived at, except from the standpoint of an equal partnership between the sexes. These remarks are addressed to the organisations which give lip service to women’s rights, but fail in performance … Cumann na mBan allowed itself to be pushed aside when the time came to implement the ideals for which we had been ighting – but that is another story.1

Activist Irish women were acutely aware that their country had changed utterly in 1918. As Susan Mitchell argued, that year found Ireland ‘in a greater state of ferment than she has known for half a century’.2 They were not prepared, however, for how quickly changes could be reversed. The phenomenal electoral victory of Sinn Féin spelled the end of the old Irish political order and the onset of a new era in which women, enfranchised and deeply involved in the national struggle, would play their part in the evolution of the new state. The optimism engendered by the election result soon faded, however, as the country was plunged into the Anglo-Irish War, divisive debates about the Anglo-Irish Treaty and, inally, civil war. Republican women were active in each of these phases of the ongoing campaign against British rule, and, like their fellow countrymen, they too were bitterly divided over the Free State settlement. But feminists experienced additional political challenges over these years, as political and social conservatism began at irst to threaten and then to reverse some of the citizenship rights they had won and which, they continued to maintain, had been guaranteed by the Republican Proclamation of 1916. The practical results of the enfranchisement of women and their increasing involvement in Irish political life are dificult to quantify in the absence of exit and opinion polls, but what was clear was that the importance of the electoral inluence of women had been established. 1 2

Maire Comerford Papers, UCDLA, LA18/6 (6). Susan Mitchell, ‘Ireland’, English Woman, 38 (1918), p. 3.

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The suffrage question remained a live one, as extending the franchise to younger women was discussed during the Treaty debates, and a delegation led by Hanna Sheehy Skefington urged leading politicians to include women in any settlement.3 The apparent conversion of some men – including de Valera, who had not been known for his advocacy of women’s rights before the Treaty debates – to extending voting rights to younger women probably owed more to the widely held view that younger women would vote against the Anglo-Irish Treaty than it did to political conviction.4 Nonetheless, the heated discussion about this issue within the Dáil and in Irish political circles more generally was important as it represented the inal public battle over women’s suffrage. The results, especially in the case of pro-Treaty Jennie Wyse Power, who opposed widening the electorate, were sometimes surprising, but they relected the extraordinary political atmosphere of the early 1920s. Although the high political events of these years overshadowed explicitly feminist activity, women remained vigilant in their defence of their hard-won political rights and attempted to advocate their extension. They were vindicated by the Irish Free State’s 1922 constitution, which enfranchised women over twenty-one years of age, equalising citizenship rights between Irish men and women in advance of the United Kingdom, which followed suit in 1928. Nonetheless, the enfranchisement of women did not achieve what many feminists had argued for years would be its principal effect. When discussing what the practical consequences of the Representation of the People Act were likely to be, most feminists had looked forward to a parliament which would legislate increasingly for the ‘protection of children, and equalising the laws as between men and women’. They argued that women would bring a ‘healthier atmosphere’ to parliamentary politics and would discourage war while encouraging co-operation between classes, sexes and nations.5 This did not of course happen in the parliaments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom. The Act changed the law but it did not and could not change the culture of parliamentary politics. In the Free State, women politicians were best known for, on the one hand, their strident denunciation of the Treaty and, on the other, for their keen and uncritical loyalty to their male-dominated parties. It was not the case that all female TDs did little more than recite, mantra-like, views that were forced on them by their male leaders; many were in fact 3 5

Cullen Owens, Social History, p. 125. II, 21 June 1917.

4

McCarthy, Cumann na mBan, p. 187.

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more active than this.6 But the idea of the ‘hysterical’ denunciation of the Treaty by six female TDs in particular has seeped into the historiography as almost emblematic of women’s politics in the 1920s. It is surely no coincidence that opponents of women’s enfranchisement had long argued that this was precisely what would happen if women insisted on intruding into the properly male bastion of parliamentary politics: they would become irrational and the tone of political debate would be lowered. In their deliberate fashioning of themselves as representatives of martyred republicans, the anti-Treaty female TDs behaved both as they were expected to and in one of the few ways in which their views would be taken at all seriously. As Knirck has argued, by adopting and feminising the language and motifs of sacriice – sacriice of their sons, husbands and brothers – they gained ‘political credibility’ which was otherwise unavailable to them in a context where the soldier-politician held sway.7 Feminist observers understood the potential for this strategy to backire. ‘I venture to prophesy’, argued Jennie Wyse Power in 1924, ‘that Ireland will lay the blame for much of the present warfare on the shoulders of the women who, in December 1921, cried, “Traitor” to those who believed that the Treaty afforded a surer path to freedom than the fanatical civil war that followed.’8 Wyse Power’s own Cumann na mBan became one of the irst political organisations to split in the wake of the Treaty debates. Key members, including Louise Gavan Duffy, Jennie Wyse Power and Min Ryan, left the organisation, going on to form the pro-Treaty Cumann na Saoirse (Council of the Free) in 1922. This was a deeply painful break, not least because strong friendships and the camaraderie which had grown out of years of common toil in the republican cause were destroyed in the aftermath of the Treaty debate. Maire Comerford recalled that Cumann na mBan lost some ‘ine’ women, some of whom were ‘foundation members, others executive members who had helped to guide [them] through the war years; all had proved themselves’.9 Some of the women who left did so with very heavy hearts. Mabel FitzGerald, who was married to a Free Stater, ‘crossed the bridge very reluctantly’. She and Comerford managed to sustain their friendship despite this, meeting over coffee in Bewleys over the following years.10 Jennie Wyse Power captured some of republican Ireland’s anguish in her letters to her daughter. Providing a running commentary on the ‘deplorable’ prospect of Cumann na 6

7 8 9

See Jason Knirck, Women of the Dáil: Gender, Republicanism and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (Dublin, 2006), for an illuminating analysis of the role of women in the Dáil. Knirck, ‘Women’s Political Rhetoric’, p. 43. Jennie Wyse Power, ‘The Political Inluence of Women’, p. 161. Maire Comerford Papers, UCDA, LA18/42(4). 10 Ibid.

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mBan and Sinn Féin declaring sides with devastating consequences, she explained to Nancy that she was ‘most depressed’ about a split but could not see how one could be avoided.11 And yet, in the wake of Cumann na mBan’s acrimonious split, not to mention the well-established rifts between constitutionalists and republicans, unionists and nationalists and paciists and militants, Irish women would begin, once again, to organise as feminists, often in the context of public indifference at best, and open hostility at worst. A determination to establish political and social stability is a common feature of post-war and post-revolutionary societies, and independent Ireland proved to be no exception. The fragility of the advances won in earlier years became apparent as Irish feminists began to learn that a return to ‘family’ and ‘traditional’ values would be key components of the new state’s determination to restore this stability. This was seen in a number of legislative measures, most importantly the Juries Acts of 1924 and 1927, the Conditions of Employment Act and the 1925 Civil Service Regulations Act.12 All these attempts to curtail women’s citizenship rights by imposing limits on their right to work, especially in the civil service, and to serve on juries, suggested that hard-won civil liberties were anything but secure. Some female Members of Parliament became involved in opposition to these proposals, but, more strikingly, these assaults on women’s equality prompted in some cases a reinvigoration of the Irish feminist movement and co-operation, even across Treaty loyalties. While some feminist groups had disintegrated by the early 1920s, new ones emerged and some old ones adapted to changed circumstances. The IWSLGA amalgamated in 1923 with the Irishwomen’s Association of Citizenship, becoming the Irish Women’s Citizens’ Association, and it was soon joined by a number of new women’s organisations, most of them devoted to the promotion of equal rights for men and women as well as a number of social issues, including children’s health and wellbeing, peace and the abolition of the sexual double standard.13 The 11

12

13

Jennie Wyse Power to Nancy Wyse Power, 11 December 1921, Sighle Humphreys Papers, UCDA, P106/735(1). Caitriona Beaumont, ‘After the Vote: Women, Citizenship and the Campaign for Gender Equality in the Irish Free State, 1922–1943’, in Ryan and Ward, Irish Women and the Vote, pp. 231–50, at p. 237. The Irish Women’s Citizenship Association was subsequently absorbed into the Irish Housewives’ Association. For good analyses of the fate of the Irish women’s movement after independence, see: Beaumont, ‘After the Vote’; Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘Aphrodite Rising from the Waves: Women’s Voluntary Activism and the Women’s Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in Esther Breitenbach and Pat Thane (eds.), Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (London, 2010), pp. 95–111; and Maria Luddy, ‘The Problem of Equality: Women’s Activist Campaigns in Ireland, 1920–40’, in Hachey, Turning Points, pp. 57–76.

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1920s and 1930s were to witness the return of a number of familiar faces to collective political activism and the renewal of many of the causes which had encouraged Irish women to organise in the opening years of the century. Jennie Wyse Power, for example, became involved with the Women’s Citizens’ Association alongside anti-Treaty women including Rosamond Jacob.14 At the same time, Irish feminists reignited their interest in international women’s movements, especially the peace movement. Lucy Kingston and Rosamond Jacob represented Ireland at the Conference of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom in Vienna in 1922, and a number of by now veteran female peace activists, including Isabella Richardson, Louie Bennett and Helen Chenevix, remained active in the Irish branch of that organisation.15 Other energetic Irish branches of international organisations included Save the Children, a society in which Mary Sheehy Kettle, Helen Laird and Helena Molony, among others, were very active.16 As Rosemary Cullen Owens has shown, relations between women in peace organisations in particular did not always run smoothly, but they did provide the basis and the potential, at least, for the co-operation of women across political lines.17 Such cooperation would reach something of a peak from 1936, when de Valera abolished the upper house and began to discuss plans for the introduction of a new Irish constitution. The unveiling of a draft version of the new constitution prompted the liveliest burst of feminist activism since the suffrage campaign, and brought together, once again, many of the women who had been prominent in feminist circles in the irst two decades of the century. Through organisations including the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers, the IWWU and the Women Graduates’ Association, women argued that the constitution threatened to undermine their citizenship rights.18 The involvement in this campaign of prominent female republicans, including Dorothy Macardle, Maud Gonne and Kathleen Clarke, underlined the genuinely ecumenical character of this opposition, which also included Mary Sheehy Kettle, Mary Hayden, Hanna Sheehy Skefington, Louie Bennett and Louise Gavan Duffy.19 Not only were the faces familiar, so too was 14 16 17

18

19

15 Beaumont, ‘After the Vote’, p. 235. FJ, 1 December 1922. Ibid., 17 September 1921, and IT, 21 February 1931. Rosemary Cullen Owens, ‘Women and Paciism in Ireland, 1914–1932’, in Valiulis and O’Dowd, Women and Irish History, pp. 220–38, at p. 238. See my ‘Feminist Responses to the Irish Constitution of 1937’, in J. Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History (Oxford, 2004), pp. 213–30, for further information on this campaign. Minutes of the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers, National Archives of Ireland, JCWSSW 98/14/5/1.

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their language, with even the women who had been avowedly anti-republican in 1916 insisting in 1937 on the equality promised to women under the Proclamation of Independence. Even Mary Sheehy Kettle referred approvingly to ‘the classic simplicity of the language of the Proclamation of the Republic’, while the Women Graduates’ Association condemned the ‘omission of the principle of equal rights and equal opportunities enunciated in the Proclamation of Independence’ and conirmed in the 1922 constitution, was ‘sinister and retrogressive’.20 Continued women’s activism in social and political questions relected both the inability (or unwillingness) of Ireland’s main political parties to engage with women and their chosen issues and a return to prerevolutionary female campaigns which had been dedicated to social as well as political reform. It also relected the fact that Irish political life had become less rather than more open to women since 1918. It was this, as well as the growing realisation that neither enfranchisement nor independence had in fact conferred on women political or social equality with men that drove women’s political activity in the early years of independence. The utter frustration of women was clear by 1937, when female critics of the new constitution agreed to form an all-female political party which would represent their opinions. By November 1937, the Women’s Social and Political League (WSPL) had been established.21 It attracted few votes and soon collapsed, but its establishment relected the utter estrangement of progressive women from mainstream Irish politics, their disappointment in the failure of the independence settlement to live up to their expectations and, crucially, the continuing determination of women from various party and political backgrounds to organise as feminists. The determination of a small group of women to continue to battle against the Irish State’s misogyny was admirable and in many ways remarkable, given the strength of the opposition they faced from successive governments, senior bureaucrats and the Catholic Church. Whether the fact of the general failure of young Irish women to become involved in feminist politics was a product of the strength of this opposition or of the determination of the old guard to continue to dominate women’s politics is uncertain. The fact remains, however, that while equality remained elusive, Irish nationalist women continued to demand it, their campaigns stretching well into independence and, indeed, beyond the death of this pioneering generation of women.

20

Irish Press, 11 May 1937.

21

Ward, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, p. 327.

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MANUSCRIP T SOUR CES A L L E N L I B R A R Y, D U B L I N

Transcript of Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, memoir/diary written in Kilmainham and Mountjoy Gaols, 5–20 May 1916, 201/File B Personal statement by Elizabeth O’Farrell, Box 180 Letter from M. Quinn to Alice Milligan, Box 386, Folder 8, Item 33 Letter from Jennie Wyse Power, 7 April[?], Box 386/5 B O D L E I A N L I B R A R Y, O X F O R D

Matthew Nathan Papers B U R E A U O F M I L I T A R Y H I S T O R Y, D U B L I N

Captured Documents: Helena Molony and Nancy Wyse Power WS 936: Dulcibella Barton WS 632: Elizabeth Bloxham WS 366: Alice Cashel WS 258: Maeve Cavanagh WS 264: Áine Ceannt WS 286: Nora Connolly O’Brien WS 805: Annie and Lily Cooney WS 179: Elizabeth and Nell Corr WS 1681: Mollie Cunningham WS 359: Aoife De Burca WS 256: Nellie Donnelly (née Gifford) WS 909: Sidney Czira WS 484: Bridget Fay WS 216: Louise Gavan Duffy WS 317: Maud Gonne MacBride WS 546: Rosie Hackett WS 1064: Michael Healy WS 293: Aine Heron WS 919: Ina Heron WS 432: Pauline Keating 272

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273

WS 273: Margaret Keogh WS357: Kathleen Lynn WS 916: Denis McCullough WS 945: Sorcha McDermott WS 826: Maeve MacGarry WS 902: Mary McGeehan WS 482: Rose McNamara WS 398: Bridget Martin WS 391: Helena Molony WS 210: Phyllis Morkan WS 399: Josephine Mulcahy WS 321: Maire O’Brolchain WS 286: Nora O’Brien WS 355: Kitty O’Doherty WS 450: Brighid O’Mullane WS 333: Aine O’Rahilly WS 1770: Kevin O’Shiel WS 246: Marie Perolz WS 1754: Leslie Price WS 195: Molly Reynolds WS 0585: Frank Robbins WS 259: Bridget Thornton WS 541: Nancy Wyse Power DUBLIN CITY ARCHIVES

Dublin Corporation Reports and Printed Documents Minutes of Municipal Council KILMAINHAM GAOL

Helena Molony Papers NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF IRELAND

General Prisons Board Suffragette Papers Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers Papers NATIONAL LIBRAR Y OF IRELAND

F. J. Allan Papers Printed material relating to Elizabeth Bloxham, 1917–18 Joseph Brennan Papers Éamonn and Áine Ceannt, and Kathleen and Lily O’Brennan Papers Tom and Kathleen Clarke Papers Coffey and Chenevix Trench Papers Memoirs of Eithne Coyle Sidney Czira Papers

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Mary Hayden Papers Bulmer Hobson Papers Rosamond Jacob Papers Thomas MacDonagh Family Papers Seumas MacManus Papers Life of Constance Markievicz by Her Stepson: Part II Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh Papers William O’Brien Papers Anna Parnell, ‘The Tale of a Great Sham’ and some letters, 1909–11 Geraldine Plunkett Dillon Papers George Roberts Papers Sheehy Skefington Papers First-Aid Certiicate issued to Captain Mary Rafferty (Mary J. Walsh) by the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, 1915 Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund Papers Minute Book of the Celtic Literary Society Minute Book of the Irish Transvaal Committee Minute Book of the National Directory of the United Irish League, 1904–18 Minute Books of the National Literary Society, Dublin, 1892–1911 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

Colonial Ofice Papers CO 904/164/4 CO 904/207/238 CO 904/210/305 CO 904/214/386 CO 904/215/412 Home Ofice Papers HO 144/1580/316818/20 UNIVER SITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, ARCHIVES DEPAR TMENT

Elizabeth Bloxham Papers Maire Comerford Papers Eithne Coyle O’Donnell Papers Desmond and Mabel FitzGerald Papers Sighle Humphreys Papers Tom Kettle Papers Eoin MacNeill Papers Mary MacSwiney Papers O’Rahilly Papers UNIVER SITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Curran Collection Kathleen Lynn Diary, held at Royal College of Physicians of Ireland; courtesy of Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh

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N EW SPAPERS AN D PERIOD ICA LS An Claidheamh Soluis Bean na hÉireann Belfast Newsletter Catholic Suffragist Common Cause Englishwoman’s Review Freeman’s Journal Hibernian Journal Honesty Irish Catholic Irish Citizen Irish Freedom Irish Independent Irish Monthly Irish News Irish Press Irish Times Irish Volunteer Irish Worker The Nation National Volunteer New Ireland Northern Whig Observer Samhain Shan Van Vocht Sinn Féin Spark Sunday Independent United Irishman Votes for Women Workers’ Republic CONTEMPORARY PR INTED ART ICLES , BO O KS, PAMPH LETS AND REPORTS Bloxham, Elizabeth, A Call to Irishwomen (Dublin, 1917[?]). Butler, Mary E. L., Irish Women and the Home Language, Gaelic League pamphlets (Dublin, no date). Cumann na mBan, Dean Swift on the Situation (Dublin, 1915). Leabhar na mBan (Dublin, 1919). Letter to the President and Congress of the USA (Dublin, no date). Rules and Constitution (Dublin, 1919). The Spanish War by Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1915). The Volunteers, the Women, and the Nation (Dublin, 1914). Why Ireland Is Poor: English Laws and Irish Industries (Dublin, 1915). Cumann na mBan Executive, The Present Duty of Irishwomen (Dublin, no date).

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Dublin Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association, Suggestions for Intending Women Workers under the Local Government Act (Dublin, 1901). Eden, Maud, ‘Irish Women Workers’ Union – Oficial Policy’, New Ireland, ii:70, (23 September 1916), pp. 520–21. ‘Irish Women and Irish Labour’ in New Ireland, ii:68, (9 June 1917), pp. 420–21. Esmonde, E., ‘Women in the New Ireland’, New Ireland, i:23 (16 October 1915), pp. 356–57. ‘Events of Easter Week’, Catholic Bulletin (January to December 1917). Gaelic League, Annual Report for the Year Ending 31st March (Dublin, 1902). Gogarty, Oliver St John, ‘The Need of Medical Inspection of School Children in Ireland’, Irish Review, 2:13 (March 1912), pp. 12–19. House of Commons Debates, 5 November 1912. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, First Annual Report (Dublin, 1901). Second Annual Report, 1901–2 (Dublin, 1902). To the Women of the North Dock Ward (Dublin, 1901). Irishwomen! How to Defeat Conscription (lealet) (Dublin, 1917). Kettle, T. M., Why Bully Women (Dublin, 1906). King, Jessie Margaret, Women and Public Work:Their Opportunities and Legal Status in England, Scotland and Ireland Compared (London, 1902). ‘Miss O’Farrell’s Story of the Surrender’, Catholic Bulletin, 6 (May 1917), 266–70. Mitchell, Susan, ‘Ireland’, English Woman, 38 (1918), 3–10. O’Casey, Sean, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (Dublin: Journeyman, 1919). O’Farrell, Elizabeth, ‘Events of Easter Week’ (continued), Catholic Bulletin, 7:4 (April 1917), 329–34. Pearse, Patrick, ‘The Sovereign People’, in The Collected Works of Patrick Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin, 1922). Pope-Hennessy, R., The Irish Dominion: A Method of Approach to a Settlement (London, 1920). Report of the Executive Committee of the IWFL for 1913 (Dublin, 1914). Report of the Gaelic League (Central Branch, Dublin) for two years ending 30 September, 1896 (Dublin, 1896). ‘Report of the Irish National Aid and Volunteer Dependants’ Fund’, Catholic Bulletin, 9 (1919), 429–35. Rules of the Young Ireland Branch of the United Irish League (Dublin, 1905[?]). Sinn Féin Convention Report (Dublin, 1917). Skinnider, Margaret, Doing My Bit for Ireland (New York, 1917). Tod, Isabella, ‘Municipal Franchise for Women in Ireland’, Englishwoman’s Review, 18 (1887), 289–91. United Irish League, Constitution and Rules Adopted by the Irish National Convention, June, 1900 (Dublin, 1900). United Irish League of Great Britain, Annual Reports and Reports of Proceedings at Annual Conventions, 1906–1909 (Dublin, no date). ‘Vote for Mulcahy and Sinn Féin’ (election handbill) (Dublin, 1918). Walsh, Stephen B, ‘Food and the Hungry School Children’, Irish Review, 2:21 (November 1912), pp. 494–501.

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‘Women and Politics in Ireland, 1860–1918’, in Angela Bourke et al. (eds.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions, 2 vols. (Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 2001), pp. 69–74. ‘Women and Politics in Nineteenth Century Ireland’, in Maryann G. Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women and Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1997), pp. 89–108. Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork University Press, 1995). Lyons, George A., Some Recollections of Griffith and His Times (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1923). MacBride White, A., and Jeffares, Norman A. (eds.), The Gonne–Yeats Letters, 1893–1938: Always Your Friend (London: Pimlico, 1992). McCarthy, Cal, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Revolution (Cork: Collins Press, 2007). McConnel, James, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Defeat of the Irish Parliamentary Party, 1885–1918’, Historical Journal, 27:2 (2004), 355–77. McCoole, Sinéad, Guns and Chiffon: Women Revolutionaries and Kilmainham Gaol, 1916–1923 (Dublin: Stationery Ofice, 1997). No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years, 1900–1923 (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2004). McDiarmid, Lucy, The Irish Art of Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). MacEoin, Uinseann (ed.), Survivors:The Story of Ireland’s Struggle asTold through Some of Her Outstanding Living People (Dublin: Argenta Publications, 1980[?]). McGarry, Fearghal, The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916 (Oxford University Press, 2010). Macken, Mary, ‘W. B. Yeats, John O’Leary and the Contemporary Club’, Studies, 28 (1939), 136–42. McKillen, Beth, ‘Irish Feminism and Nationalist Separatism, 1914–23’, EireIreland, 17:3 (fall 1982), 52–67. ‘Irish Feminism and Nationalist Separatism, 1914–23’, Eire-Ireland, 17:4 (winter 1982), 74–90. McL. Côté, Jane, Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). McMahon, Timothy G., ‘“All Creeds and Classes”? Just Who Made up the Gaelic League?’, Eire-Ireland, 37:3/4 (fall–winter 2002), 118–63. Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910 (Syracuse University Press, 2008). MacPherson, D. A. J., ‘Mary Butler, Domesticity, Housewifery, and Identity in Ireland, 1899–1912’, in J. Hannam and M. Boussahba-Bravard (eds.), The Human Tradition in Modern Britain (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleield, 2006), pp. 171–86. Matthews, Ann, Dissidents: Irish Republican Women, 1922–1941 (Cork: Mercier, 2012). Renegades: Irish Republican Women, 1900–1922 (Cork: Mercier, 2010). ‘Vanguard of the Revolution? The Irish Citizen Army’, in R. O’Donnell (ed.), The Impact of the 1916 Rising among the Nations (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008), pp. 24–36.

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Mooney Eichacker, Joanne, Irish Republican Women in America: Lecture Tours, 1916–1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003). Moriarty, Theresa, ‘Larkin and the Women’s Movement’, in Donal Nevin (ed.), James Larkin: Lion of the Fold (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006), pp. 93–101. Morrison, Eve, ‘The Bureau of Military History and Female Republican Activism’ in Maryann G. Valiulis (ed.), Gender and Power in Irish History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). Murphy, Cliona, ‘“Great Gas” and “Irish Bull”: Humour and the Fight for Irish Women’s Suffrage’, in Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (eds.), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 90–113. The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf , 1989). Murphy, William, ‘Suffragettes and the Transformation of Political Imprisonment in Ireland, 1912–1914’, in Louise Ryan and Margaret Ward (eds.), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), pp. 114–35. Nic Congáil, Ríona, ‘Young Ireland and the Nation: Nationalist Children’s Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Eire-Ireland, 46:3/4 (fall–winter 2011), 37–62. Nic Dháibhéid, Caoimhe, ‘The Irish National Aid Association and the Radicalization of Public Opinion in Ireland, 1916–1918’, Historical Journal, 55 (September 2012), 705–29. Nic Shiubhlaigh, Maire (and Edward Kenny), The Splendid Years: Recollections of Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh’s Story of the Irish National Theatre as Told to Edward Kenny (Dublin: J. Duffy, 1955). Novick, Ben, ‘Postal Censorship in Ireland, 1914–16’, Irish Historical Studies, 31:123 (May 1999), 343–56. O’Brennan, Lily M., ‘The Dawning of the Day’, Capuchin Annual (1936), 157–9. O’Daly, Nora, ‘The Women of Easter Week’, An t-Óglach, April 1926. O’Dea, John, History of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies’ Auxiliary, vol. III (facsimile of edition published by Keystone Printing Company, Philadelphia, 1923, reprinted by the AOH) (University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). O’Dowd, Mary, ‘From Morgan to MacCurtain: Women Historians in Ireland from the 1790s to the 1990s’ in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd (eds.), Women and Irish History (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1997), p. 40. Ó Duigneáin, Proinnsíos, Linda Kearns: A Revolutionary Irish Woman (Nure: Drumlin Publications, 2002). O’Faolain, Sean, Constance Markievicz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934). O’Hegarty, P. S., The Victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin: UCD Press, 1998). Ó hÓgartaigh, Margaret, Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006). O’Neill, Marie, ‘Dublin Corporation in the Troubled Times, 1914–1924’, Dublin Historical Record, 47:1 (spring 1994), 56–70. From Parnell to DeValera: A Biography of JennieWyse Power, 1858–1941 (Tallaght: Blackwater Press, 1991).

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