HIS825C2X: INTERROGATING THEMES IN IRISH SOCIAL AND

CULTURAL HISTORY SINCE THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

WHAT, IF ANY, IS THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE

OF IRISH GENDER HISTORY?

Word Count: 2373

Student Number:
May 3, 2007
 WHAT, IF ANY, IS THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF IRISH GENDER
HISTORY?

I. Gender History in General

A. Defined

Gender history is a sub-field of history and gender studies which looks at the past

from the perspective of gender, a meld of sociology and history. It is in many ways an

outgrowth of women’s history. It seeks to understand women in terms of relationships

and history, with other women and with men, not of difference and apartness. (Block,

1989) It focuses attention on the relationships between the sexes, how these are structured

and maintained and how they change over time and place. It also directs attention to the

relationships within the sexes, those between different groups of men and women and

between different groups of men. It enables the historian to apply the concept of sex as a

social construction in research and interpretation. Gender does not stand on its own, it

interacts with other factors such as class, colour, nationality, ethnic origin, political

affiliation, religion, age, marital and parental situation and many more, in locating

individuals or groups. It has helped to shift the focus from women to socially and

culturally constructed notions of sexual difference and has stimulated fundamental

critiques of the epistemological assumptions of historiography. (Repina, 2006)

B. How Developed – Woman’s History to Gender History

“The historical study of women first sought to recover ways in which women

participated and were excluded from processes of social transformations and political

change.” (Canning, 2006, p 5) At first, women’s history viewed sex and class as related

forms of oppression by a male dominated society. Feminist scholarship became an early

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term used to describe this militant form of historical approach. This new approach to

historical studies embraced the notion of patriarchy with an emphasis on sexual

exploitation as the primary form of women’s oppression. (Smyth, 1995; Millett, 1972)

This study of patriarchy, its origins and how it was reproduced in society, labor, property

rights and the structure of the family became an important foundation for feminist studies

on women and the family, women and labor, social protest and social transformation.

Women were studied in isolation from men which produced a fragmented and partial

understanding of the workings of sexual difference in society. Labor historians and

political theorists often attempted to fit women into prevalent notions of class. (Canning,

2006)

In the late 1970’s such as Joan Kelly Gadol sought to transcend this theoretical

impasses by formulating a “doubled vision” of society, one that emphasized the ways in

which both men’s and women’s social identities were shaped by sex and class. (Gadol,

1979) Women’s history thus widened the scope of the political to include family and

household, bodies and sexualities, which had been situated until then in the realm of the

private. Then, in 1986, Joan Scott’s essay on gender marked the moment in which

gender gained an analytic status of its own among English speaking historians. (Scott,

1986). Both women’s history and gender history are seen as revisionist history, not in the

sense of being anti-nationalist, but in the sense that it had to strive in order to revise and

change many interpretations and misleading assumptions.

II. Development of Women’s History and Gender History in Ireland

A. An Historical Background

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 The development of gender history in Ireland can only be viewed in light of the

history of women within Ireland, for, as will become evident, Irish gender history has

distinctive features which distinguish it from that of other European countries and the

United States.

Early Irish society was patriarchal and political life was governed by men.

Women had no independent legal capacity. However, in the seventh and eighth centuries

the position of women was made equal to men in many respects, possibly as a result of

the Church or pre-Celtic values. (O’Corrain, 1978)

With the Norman conquest of Ireland in 1169, two societies competed with each

other, one under the Anglo-Norman system of English common law, the other under

Brehon law. Thus, Anglo-Irish women enjoyed advantages at different points which

were not shared by their sisters in the other culture (Simms, 1978)

After the flight of the Earls and the plantation of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries women lacked any formal political rights, their property and inheritance rights

both within and outside of marriage were governed by English common law and they

played a subsidiary role to the male, mostly in a domestic context. While women

contributed to the economy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was

mostly through assisting on the family farm or through the establishment of “cottage “

industries such as making cloth. (Tuathaigh, 1978) In the north of Ireland, the

manufacture of linen became more important than farm labor. (Frader and Rose, 1996;

Haslam , 1995) Much of this remained constant until the mid nineteenth century and “an

gorta mor”.

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 The great hunger of the mid 1800’s greatly weakened the position of women in

Irish society. It delivered a crippling blow to domestic industry, farming became less

labor intensive because of a shift from tillage to livestock and the proportion of

agricultural laborers to farmers fell sharply tilting the balance of economic power within

the family in the male direction. In addition, due to the potato blight, women spent more

time developing alternative cuisine and diet, thereby spending more time in the kitchen

than before. In turn, women’s ability to earn money outside the household diminished,

further decreasing women’s economic status as well as their marriage prospects and

ultimately inspiring to make Ireland an increasingly male dominated society (Lee, 1978)

With the creation of the Irish State in 1922, suffrage was universal, no public

office was barred to women and there were guarantees that none would be. Much of this

change in attitude was brought on by the achievements of women during the struggles in

Ireland from 1916, the “rising”, through the Anglo-Irish war and the civil war that

followed 1921-22, most notably by the Cumman na mBan and Countess Markievicz.

(Manning, 1978, Valiulis, 1995) This era was short lived.

In 1925, the Cosgrave government restricted women’s access to the upper levels

of civil service by passage of the Civil Service Amendment Act and in 1927 enabled

women to opt out of serving on juries in the Juries Bill. In addition the Cosgrave

government enacted the 1925 Matrimonial Act which banned divorce; the 1929

Censorship Act which denied women access to birth control information; and the 1932

ban on hiring married teachers. The deValera government followed suite in 1934 by

prohibiting the sale and importation of contraceptives; enacted legislation in 1935 which

gave the government the power to limit the number of women employed in any given

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industry; and in 1939 enshrined in the new constitution the idea that a woman’s place was

in the home. Of course, the position of the Catholic Church throughout this period was in

strong support of these government policies, arguing that women be denied access to the

public arena. (Valiulis, 1995, Valiulis, 2001, Hill, 2003, Collins and Hanafin, 2001)

These acts and positions met with strong opposition from feminists and their

supporters who constructed an alternative model of womanhood, one wherein “women

should inhabit both the public and private sphere, be mothers and wives but also citizens

who added their perspective and talents to the new state. More than that, feminists

argued that women had an obligation to bring their unique insights and abilities to the

political arena.” (Valiulis, 1995 p 118)

To support their claims that women in Ireland were citizens who had political and

economic rights and responsibilities within the state, “feminists aligned themselves with

modernity, i.e., with the ideas of a post-French Revolution modern political order which

was based on an open and democratic constitution, espousing the idea of equality and

merit and embodying the notion of progress.” (Valiulis, 1995 p 126) However, due to the

strong influence of the Church and the fact that few if any women were involved in

policy-making decisions in the first governments of the new State, the women’s

movement is widely believed to have gone dormant during the period through to the

1970’s when a “second-wave women’s movement” began to emerge.

Strongly influenced by the civil rights’ movements developing in different

countries in the late sixties, a new stronger and more determined voice of women took

up the fight for equal rights and gender equality. This movement was categorized by

Alibhe Smyth into four different phases occurring between 1970 and 1990:

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 a. A growing mobilization and politicization of women
between 1970 and 1974 spearheaded by the founding of
the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement and the contraceptive
train in 1971; the establishment of the Councilfor the Status of
Women in 1972 and the abolition of the “marriage bar” which
had proibited women from continuing to work in the civil
service, local authorities and health boards upon marriage;

b. A period of high energy and radical action between 1974 and

1977 defined by the emergence of the Irish Women United in 1975;

c. A consolidation of the movement towards greater status for

women between 1977 and 1983 with the establishment of the Women’s
Right to Choose campaign, the Rape Crisis Centre network and groups
Like Women’s Aid. During this period, the academic discipline of
women’s studies began to develop within colleges and universities.

d. The years between 1983 and 1990 saw a reversal in previous successes
for the women’s movement including the passing of the Eighth
Amendment to the Constitution in 1983, giving a foetus an equal right to
life with a pregnant woman and the defeat of the divorce referendum in
1986. (Bacik, 2004 pp 8-87)

B. Womens/Gender History in Ireland –Its Distinctive Features

“Ireland is nothing if not contradictory and confusing. It is at once a developed

industrial society, with increasingly secular tendencies, and a traditionalist anachronism

in the Western world.” (Smyth, 1995 p. 38) “Women’s history in Ireland has its own

unique set of problems. Since it is not as well established as it is in Britain and the

United States, historians have to decide what to adopt from the experiences of women ‘s

historians abroad and what in the Irish context will determine their subject matter and

influence their conclusions”. (Murphy, 2001, p 23) Additional consideration must also

be given to nationality, colonial status, religion, class and gender when assessing the Irish

experience, for the climate in which gender history differs considerable from that of

Britain and the United States.

1. Academic Distinctions

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 By the late 1980’s, the amount of research into women’s history had expanded

dramatically, particularly in the United States where most university history departments

had some women’s history courses on their syllabi. By the 1990’s many U.S. universities

had Women’s Studies departments, not only on the graduate level, but also on the

undergraduate level. On the other hand, in Ireland, in the early 2000’s, faculty at the

National University of Ireland, Galway was having difficulty getting Women’s Studies

introduced as a subject at the undergraduate level. There were insufficient cross-listings

available from within other departments within the University and the Women’s Studies

Centre which was attached to the Department of Political Science and Sociology could

not offer an entire range of subjects on its own. An additional obstacle was based upon

the fact that there was continued resistance, at the departmental level, to the idea of

Women’s Studies as a discipline.(Pelan, 2003). Women’s Studies has been suspected of

being too political and not scholarly enough. (Zalewski, 2003) As result Irish women’s

historians lack a solid training in a wider women’s history.

Women’s organizations outside the universities frequently complained that

Women’s Studies, encompassing both Women’s History and Gender History had become

too academic or theoretical and therefore detached from the plight of real women in the

real world.

Conversely, in the United Kingdom, much of the initial investigations into the

history of women and gender history was carried out by left-wing women’s groups and

women who had returned to higher educations as adult learners.

Even universities in these countries offered undergraduate programs in Women

Studies whereas in Ireland resistance was evident and women’s history remains

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marginalized in specialist courses and degrees. The publication of articles and

monographs remains fairly small.

2. Societal Distinctions

Ireland has been described as a first world country with a third world memory

(Gibbons, 1996) Much of this is attributed to Ireland’s post-colonial legacy which views

Ireland as a backward Other, existing in proximate relation to other cultures and other

questions. (Connolly, 2004) Whilst other European states instituted liberalizing reforms

in the 1960’s, Ireland resisted such essentially secularizing legislation. England legalized

abortion in 1967, while Ireland has yet to formally allow abortion other than in those

instances of severe medical necessity.

Britain is represented as a liberal secular state guided by popular Protestantism

(anti-Catholicism) which plays a critical part in British nationalism and has allowed the

development of both women’s studies and gender history. Ireland, conversely, is

represented as postcolonial conservative state influenced by the Catholic church

(Connolly, 2004) in both secular and religious matters (Bacik, 2004), where the political,

social and academic climate has little interest in or impetus to providing intellectual,

institutional or economic support for Irish women’s/gender history.

It has been said that “Northern Ireland was founded on the exclusion of women as

well as Catholics from full citizenship.” (Sales, 1997 p4) As in the Republic, the

Churches, both Protestant and Catholic, have promoted conservative views on social

issues, particualry in relation to the family and sexuality. Additionally, the development

of women’s history and gender history in the North has been undermined and

subordinated to sectarianism and the civil strife from 1969 to 1998. Within the

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nationalist movement, the rights of women have been secondary to the national struggle.

Loyalist and unionist women’s movements have likewise be relegated to secondary status

mainly due to the overwhelmingly male represented public face within these

communities.

Since the 1990’s a social change has come about in Ireland. The abuses within

the Catholic church and the scandals within government have caused distrust in these

institutions. Ireland is becoming more secular and with it women are making more

advances in the areas of education, employment and in politics. Ireland has experienced

two female Presidents and women have become more active in Northern Politics and the

European Union as well.

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