Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–1918

Abstract

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.

Revolutionary Threads: The Mediation of Gender and Political Identity in the ‘New Irish Dance Costume’, 1917–37

“…It is important to note that while the League empowered many women, their presence was not necessarily welcome at the executive level, nor did their participation in League activities necessarily challenge traditional gender roles. 45 Nonetheless, the gendering of Irish dance as feminine represented an instance of 'relational feminism'-an unprecedented extension of feminine agency in the public domain, even as it was problematically delimited by a masculine administration. 46…”

“…141 Perceptions of Irish dance, as either politically or culturally expressive, were as diverse and inconstant as the ideologies that constituted the Revolution. 142 This diversity has long obscured early dancing costume as political embodiment. While dance was most assuredly cultural, the dancing body resonated with nationalist agendas across party lines.…”

FEMINIST POLITICAL THOUGHT AND ACTIVISM IN REVOLUTIONARY IRELAND, c. 1880–1918

“…39 Suspicion of the Ladies' League may indeed help to explain why, as I have argued elsewhere, no nationalist equivalent of the Primrose League was formed in Ireland and why some Irish Party men remained implacably opposed to women's political involvement well into the twentieth century. 40 Having been pioneers in formally mobilising women, the Irish Party swiftly and determinedly retreated when the women veered off course.…”

“…74 It would be equally incorrect to argue that Sinn Fein provided an unambiguously natural home for feminist women. But it was well in advance of the Irish Party in its opening of membership and executive positions to both sexes equally and in debating and supporting women's suffrage.…”

War Within and Without: Irish women in the First World War era

“…31 From the late nineteenth century, movements for women's rights emerged in Ireland as in Britain, but some organisations had the twin ambitions of liberating both 'their sex and their country' as Senia Pašeta has argued. 32 This proved an additional challenge to suffrage activism, along with the regional, class, and methodological tensions that threatened suffrage movements internationally. 33 Suffragists like Cork's Susanne Rouviere Day and Belfast's Mary Baker, were vocal in their insistence that the suffrage movement should be non-political, at least until the vote was won.…”