This is a major new history of the experiences and activities of Irish nationalist women in the early twentieth century, from learning and buying Irish to participating in armed revolt. Using memoirs, reminiscences, letters and diaries, Senia Pašeta explores the question of what it meant to be a female nationalist in this volatile period, revealing how Irish women formed nationalist, cultural and feminist groups of their own as well as how they influenced broader political developments. She shows that women's involvement with Irish nationalism was intimately bound up with the suffrage movement as feminism offered an important framework for women's political activity. She covers the full range of women's nationalist activism from constitutional nationalism to republicanism, beginning in 1900 with the foundation of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) and ending in 1918 with the enfranchisement of women, the collapse of the Irish Party and the ascendancy of Sinn Fein.

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In July 1903 Maud Gonne hung a black petticoat from the window of her Dublin home, insulting her unionist neighbours and provoking what became known as ‘the battle of Coulson Avenue’. Aided by nationalist friends, athletes from Cumann na nGaedheal and her sturdy housekeeper, she defended her ‘flag’ against police and irate neighbours. Gonne’s lingerie — allegedly a mark of respect for the recently deceased pope — flew in stark and defiant contrast to the numerous Union Jacks which lined her street in honour of King Edward VII’s visit to Ireland. This episode heralded a month of spectacular protest which polarised nationalist opinion. Like the visit to Dublin of Queen Victoria in 1900, King Edward’s tour provoked both enormous public interest and rivalry between various Irish institutions which vied to express their loyalty to the crown. But the royal tours also instigated fierce debate within the nationalist community and highlighted the ever deepening rifts between constitutional nationalism and ‘advanced’ nationalism.

Female activists across the United Kingdom had insisted from the late nineteenth century that the employment of women police who would deal with problems specific to women and children could help to address pressing social questions, or at least to offer women some protection within the entirely male criminal justice system. Their campaign for women police was connected to similar demands for the employment of female prison visitors and inspectors and, later, jurors and lawyers, and it was predicated on the idea that neither prisons nor courts afforded women fair and equal treatment under the law. Early victories included the appointment of police matrons and searchers, but the resistance of police authorities and most other civil servants to female officers remained solid into the early twentieth century, feminist campaigning notwithstanding. The outbreak of the First World War, however, provided an ideal context for renewed activism on the issue, not least because commentators across the British Isles predicted that the apparent inability of girls and young women to resist the lure of uniformed men would lead to outbreaks of war-induced sexual promiscuity and a decline in standards of public behaviour.