The Princeton History of Modern Ireland

FEMINISM

Maria Luddy

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, CONSIDERED THE EARLIEST of modern feminists, published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, perhaps the most influential text on the ideas informing the nineteenth-century women’s movement. A review of the book appeared in the Belfast newspaper the Northern Star in December 1792, where it was noted as a work that “abounds with ingenious observations … it affords a variety of judicious instruction for the early management of the female mind, and frequently, and pertinently, corrects the assumptions of the tyrant man.”1 Martha McTier encouraged her brother, the United Irishman William Drennan, to read the book. On January 5, 1793, she wrote to ask “Have you read Mrs Wollstonecraft? I suppose not, or surely you would have mentioned her to me—you ought, even as a politician, and she too conspires to make an important change. I wish they would order her book to be burned.” McTier realized that to order a book burned would immediately increase its sales.²

As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, “feminism” refers to “the doctrine of equal rights for women, based on the theory of the equality of the sexes.” The origin of the word “feminist” is still disputed, and as a term it was in use only from the late nineteenth century.³ Using the Dictionary definition this chapter explores the ideas that shaped feminism and feminist action in Ireland from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The history of feminism incorporates women’s fight for educational equality, economic opportunity, political inclusion, legal recognition, and control over their bodies. Throughout the period feminist arguments and actions always provoked a backlash.

The late eighteenth century witnessed a revival of discussions on the place of women in society and the rights that should be made available to them. Revolutions in America and France had opened up new possibilities about reshaping society, introducing radical ideas about politics and the role of the individual in the state. Radical ideas were also put forward about how men and women might relate to each other. Mary Wollstonecraft was not the only significant feminist of the period. Such French women as Olympe de Gouges and Pauline Leon also drew attention to the issue of the rights of women. The American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) were deemed by many women to be relevant to them. They began to argue for the rights of women and for social and political change that would allow women equality with men. It was in the context of these debates that feminists called for a new role for women. Although Irishwomen were not without a public voice in Ireland from the eighteenth century, that public visibility was strongly shaped by patriotism, not the advocacy of women’s rights.4 Whereas the 1790s was a time when the rights of Irish men were constantly being urged there was little public concern in Ireland with the rights of women. But we can see this period as one where modern feminist ideas are being discussed, at least privately, through correspondence and to a limited extent in the press.

Wollstonecraft’s publications were clearly known to some Irish women of the period.⁵ There were several Irish editions of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and it is referred to in particular by a contemporary of McTier’s, Mary Ann McCracken.⁶ McCracken was a keen advocate of women’s rights. In a letter from March 1797 to her brother Henry Joy McCracken, imprisoned for his United Irishmen activities, Mary Ann noted the existence of societies of United Irishwomen and argued for the rights of women. It is evident that her ideas were influenced by the writings of Wollstonecraft. McCracken’s letter is the fullest articulation yet discovered relating to the rights of women in late eighteenth-century Ireland.

I have a great curiosity to visit some female societies in this town [Belfast] (though I should like them better were they more promiscuous as there can be no other reason for having them separate but keeping the women in the dark, and certainly it is equally ungenerous or uncandid to make tools of without confiding in them). I wish to know if they have any rational ideas of liberty and equality for themselves or whether they are contented with their present abject and dependent situation, degraded by custom and education beneath the rank in society in which they were originally placed, for if we suppose woman was created for a companion to man she must of course be his equal in understanding, as without equality of mind, there can be no friendship and without friendship there can be no happiness in society.⁷

Even in the ranks of the radical United Irishmen there is only slight evidence of any concern with the rights of women. Thomas Russell was one of the few United Irishmen, if not the only one, who gave some consideration to the place of women in society. Or at least it appears so from the evidence of some jottings in his journal. “Should,” he pondered, “women be made learn[e]d? Is there a difference of mind? Why not as of body? Has it ever occur[r]ed to anatomists to observe is there any difference in the brains of men and women children [sic]? [Are] women in public offices as clever as men[?]”8

Although McTier was sympathetic to the views of Wollstonecraft, she was not an advocate of women’s rights in the same way that McCracken was. Drennan was also blind to any demand for women’s rights. Indeed, there appears to have been relatively little sympathy for rights being extended to women. The moderate reformer the Reverend William Bruce observed in 1792 that in the light of the rights that were being demanded for Irish men, and particularly for Catholics, “if we follow without restriction, the theory of human rights, where will it lead us? In its principle it requires the admission of women, of persons under age, and of paupers, to suffrage at elections; to places of office and trust, and as members of both Houses of Parliament.”⁹ It was a common argument to be made for decades by those who opposed women’s rights.

How personal experiences could shape feminist thought and action can be seen clearly in the case of Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785–18??), an important figure in early feminism and socialism. Wheeler was from an upper-class Irish Protestant background. She had been married at fifteen, and had given birth to six children, two of whom survived infancy. She separated from her abusive husband and divorced him in 1812. As a consequence of her separation and divorce, she had no financial protection. It was her experiences as a wife that helped develop her ideas about motherhood, economic dependence, and marriage. Between 1818 and 1824 she moved back and forth from London, Dublin, Caen, and Paris. She became closely involved with the Saint-Simonians¹⁰ and was particularly attracted by their feminist ideas. She was also a friend of Robert Owen, William Thompson, and Flora Tristan.¹¹ The collaboration of William Thompson and Anna Wheeler produced the important feminist tract Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery; in Reply to a Paragraph of Mr Mill’s Celebrated “Article on Government” (London, 1825). Although Thompson authored the book and dedicated it to Wheeler, he declared, probably with a great deal of justification, that it was she who was primarily responsible for its ideas. The Appeal was written in response to James Mill’s argument that the franchise need not be extended to women, because their rights were satisfactorily taken care of by their husbands and fathers. Like Wheeler, Thompson was an Owenite, who believed that complete equality could only be achieved through developing a system of cooperative labor and ending competitive capitalism. The Appeal was initially concerned with arguing for women’s right to vote. But having argued for female suffrage, the Appeal goes on to launch a much more radical attack on society. It argued that formal rights, although necessary, were insufficient to bring about sexual equality. How could women achieve equality with men when their duties as wives and mothers prevented them from earning an equal income and thus rendered them economically dependent? Only through the introduction of the Owenite system of cooperation could this evil be overcome. Wheeler and Thompson argued that happiness was the fundamental right of each person, that in contemporary society women were oppressed by their domestic and marital situations, and that rights are necessary for the development of self-respect and self-government.

It had long been argued that one of the reasons women were treated differently in society, and before the law, was the fact that they were different from men. The “nature” argument decreed that women were fit only to be wives and mothers in society. Women’s “nature” then did not allow them to take part in public life or politics. Wheeler and Thompson refuted these beliefs. They argued that women’s “nature” was a construction, something that was made up by society. They argued that women deserved equal freedom with men. Women must have equal rights with men if the greatest happiness of women and men was to be ensured. Wheeler was disillusioned by the failure of the 1832 Reform Bill to give women the vote and despaired that men would ever relinquish any power to women in the way, for example, that Mary Wollstonecraft had hoped. She also complained that most women were unreceptive to feminist ideas, marveling that women’s strength often manifested itself in their willingness to endure oppression, rather than in fighting against it.

There was a common Western belief that women had particular attributes—their maternal instinct, their sensitivity—which made the home, or the domestic sphere, their natural environment. That was to be their world; politics was the concern of men. Once women’s duties to their husbands and families were safeguarded, they could spend their time engaged in charitable works. From the late eighteenth century many Irish women, of the middle and upper classes, engaged in philanthropic endeavors motivated by religious beliefs and humanitarian concerns. In Ireland there were two strands in nineteenth-century women’s philanthropy, a benevolent strand that attempted to alleviate the symptoms of poverty without questioning the underlying causes of that poverty, and a reformist tradition that attempted to initiate legislative measures to improve the lot of the poor.12 In Ireland there was a clear sectarian division in philanthropic work. Among Catholic women most charitable work was left to nuns, and the dominance of religious women in such work relegated lay Catholic women primarily to a fund-raising role. In consequence lay Catholic women were less likely to become active in campaigns for social change in comparison with their Protestant and nonconformist counterparts. Protestant and nonconformist women, who had direct experience of active charity work, were most moved to engage in political campaigns to alter the position of women in society. In establishing, managing, and fundraising for a range of charitable organizations, women, especially Protestant and nonconformist women, developed an awareness of social problems and a critique of public welfare institutions, such as workhouses, where they did not play a managerial role. Involvement in philanthropy allowed these women to develop skills in networking and lobbying, which they were to use in extending their political role in society.

The 1860s saw the beginnings of a range of feminist activism in Ireland. In the late 1860s a branch of the London-based Married Women’s Property Committee was established in Belfast and Dublin to fight for changes in married women’s property acts. A prime mover in this campaign in Ireland was Isabella M. S. Tod (1836–1896), an individual of unique importance in the women’s cause in nineteenth-century Ireland.13 Tod was the only woman to give evidence to a select committee of the House of Commons on this subject in 1868. Feminists, such as Tod, believed that working women could not maintain themselves and their families, because their husbands took their wages from them or more frequently, these husbands ran “up debts at the public houses which the women must discharge, at least under the threat of having their furniture and other property taken to pay it, and the consequences are very bad for all the family.”¹⁴ Feminists believed that women in control of their finances would bring immense benefit to their families and particularly to their children.

Education was a major preoccupation of activist women in the nineteenth century. Before the 1830s, the range of education available to girls in Ireland, as in other European countries, was haphazard. Some were educated in mixed pay-schools, where the emphasis was on reading, writing, and arithmetic. The introduction of the National School system of education in 1831 eventually opened up education to the majority of children in the country. In 1892–1893 the Irish Education Act allowed for free and compulsory education at the primary level.¹⁵ Only a small proportion of the population had access to secondary education in the nineteenth century. Nuns led the way in catering to the needs of the emerging Catholic middle classes who wanted their daughters educated. Feminist activists sought the provision of an education for girls of the middle classes that would allow them some form of employment.

Although convents provided the most extensive secondary education available, it was women from Protestant backgrounds who fought for improvements in the education available for middle-class girls. Activists had to fight to have girls included in the benefits of the Intermediate Education Act; they also had to fight for access to university education. Historians argue that the introduction of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Act of 1878 “revolutionized” girls’ secondary education. Religious as well as academic rivalry increased the numbers of females studying at second and third levels. Catholic middle-class parents pushed for changes to the education their daughters were receiving in the convent schools. Competition among lay and convent schools forced convent schools to meet the new demands.¹⁶ Again it was women of Protestant and nonconformist backgrounds who led the campaign for access to universities in Ireland.¹⁷ Many activists argued that education would make women better wives and mothers and enable them to fulfill their social and moral duties better. But in effect it was these newly educated middle-class women who were to be an important force in shaping early twentieth-century Ireland.18

Educational advances in women’s education were not always well received. Too much study, it was argued, would put a huge strain on women’s nervous and reproductive systems. Feminists argued that without a proper and fitting education, one that would develop their intellectual capacities, women could not play their proper role in society. Parents feared that a daughter so educated might “shape a novel path in life for herself.”¹⁹ For activists, education for girls could only be of benefit to society in many different ways. It would strengthen the religious and moral aspects of a woman’s life. The equality of education for men and women would “allow different but harmonizing modes of action” on social problems. One other great advantage of education for women, it was argued, was that it would also benefit women of the lower classes. As Tod noted, “Who can tell how great an amelioration may take place in the painful conditions of women of the lower classes, when not merely a few, but most, of those in the classes above them have not only the will, but the power, and the knowledge [of] how to help them.”²⁰ Not only was education necessary to develop the full intellectual and spiritual potential of an individual but it was also to serve a social purpose. It was further argued that a proper education for girls would allow them to work and support themselves. In a number of speeches Tod noted the “unreasonableness of the prejudice against change” whether in relation to the secondary or higher education of women. “Before an argument of any kind is offered to us,” she noted in 1875, “we are met with an advanced guard of horrified ejaculations.”²¹ In answer to the arguments that higher education would damage women’s health or refinement, she observed that “the great features of the human mind are the same in both men and women, and that they need the same nutriment, though the development of the natures so fed will differ according to their capabilities.” Against the charge that women were presumptuous in looking for higher education, she stated it to be a “nonsensical charge … [for] if self-preservation be the first law of savage nature, self-improvement is the first law of civilised nature, and we have no notion of disobeying it.”²²

Like many feminist campaigns, that to change women’s education took place over a long time span. From the 1860s mainly Protestant and Quaker women were involved in this campaign, but as more rights were won, convent schools began to take advantage of the new opportunities. In 1877 medical degrees of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons were opened to women on the same terms as men. In 1879 the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) degrees were also opened to women. Alexandra and Victoria colleges opened university departments to prepare girls for higher education. These new collegiate departments prepared girls older than eighteen for the Arts examination of the RUI. One hundred fifty-two women graduated from the RUI between 1884 and 1892. Women students were admitted to Trinity College in 1904. Though women were admitted to the colleges, they did not essentially have equal status with men. Staff appointments and appointments to governing bodies were, as Eibhlin Breathnach points out, still “jobs for the boys.”23

Another major campaign for feminist activists of the nineteenth century was that organized to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts that were introduced in the 1860s. These acts had been initiated to control the spread of venereal diseases among the soldiery. In effect the acts subjected prostitutes who were on the street to arbitrary and compulsory medical examinations and, if infected, to incarceration in a lock hospital or the lock ward of a hospital until they were cured. Feminists opposed the Acts on a number of grounds, but mainly because they applied solely to women, leaving the men untouched. For them the implementation of the Acts marked the legitimation of the double standard of sexual morality that existed in society. In Ireland the areas designated as “subjected” districts were Cork, Cobh, and the Curragh. By 1871 three branches of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act were formed in Ireland at Belfast, Cork, and Dublin. Although the Association was small, it marked a new departure for Irish women. For the first time they were willing to discuss openly matters pertaining to sexual morality and to initiate a public campaign to question and attempt to alter the sexual double standard that existed. It was not until the 1970s that women publicly discussed issues relating to sexuality and began campaigns around issues relating to fertility and other matters regarding women’s bodies. The women who were active in the Contagious Diseases Act movement in Ireland were predominantly Quakers.²⁴

The demand for suffrage was the principal means whereby women fought for political involvement on the same terms as men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A sizable majority of those women who originated the suffrage campaign in Ireland had activist roots in various philanthropic organizations. It was inevitable that women’s regenerative work in philanthropic organizations should lead to a call for the extension of the franchise. With the vote women would regenerate society from a new power base. Their activism ensured that some legislative progress in regard to women’s rights was made before the turn of the nineteenth century. Women who were active in the suffrage campaign also fought for women’s rights in local elections. In Belfast women householders gained the municipal franchise in 1887, before women of other towns in Ireland. This had come about through the introduction of a plan to improve the drainage system of Belfast. Because this scheme would affect every ratepayer, local members of parliament (MPs) argued that the municipal franchise should be extended to all ratepayers, including women. The original bill would have given this vote to women in all municipal authorities in Ireland. However, there was considerable opposition to this in parliament, and eventually only Belfast women won the right to the municipal vote, largely owing to the lobbying efforts of women like Isabella Tod. In 1894 women in the Dublin townships of Dun Laoghaire and Blackrock won the same right. It was not until 1898 that women in the rest of Ireland were enfranchised under the Local Government Act. This Act allowed women the right to vote for local councils and to sit on district councils but not on county councils.25 Through their activism in such campaigns, women became astute lobbyists and created possibilities for change.

In 1896, after a long campaign, and years after English women, Irish women finally received the right to sit as Poor Law Guardians (Poor Law Guardians managed the workhouses that were the main institutions of relief for the destitute poor in nineteenth-century Ireland). By 1899 ten thousand women were qualified to be Poor Law electors, but certain property qualifications had to be met before they could vote. In arguing for such voting rights, arguments based on women’s supposed moral superiority and domestic skills were used. Women were believed to have particular qualities that would enable them to make good Poor Law Guardians. One commentator noted in 1896 that “there was a strong feeling in Ireland, especially in Ulster, that there was a certain sphere of work in which the services of women on boards of guardians would be of great value. Thus they could look after pauper women and children, the training of girls for service, and the food and sanitary arrangements far better than men.”²⁶ Women, it was believed (and indeed women themselves argued), could transfer their domestic and maternal qualities from the home to the workhouse, using the rhetoric of domesticity to further their role in public politics. What is clear in all these campaigns is that nothing was easily won for women. It was only through determined lobbying and campaigning that they were able to impress politicians with their demands.

In 1866 the first suffrage petition asking for female suffrage had been presented to the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill. Of the 1,499 women who signed the petition, 25 were Irish women. One of those signatories was Anna Haslam, a Quaker, who in 1876 was to be the cofounder, with her husband, Thomas, of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association.²⁷ Both men and women could and did become members of this suffrage society. In the north of Ireland, Isabella Tod had already established a suffrage society in 1872 in Belfast. The suffrage campaign reached its height in the years just before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The women involved in these early suffrage societies were middle class, Protestant, and nonconformist. Many of the early suffragists did not desire the vote for all but demanded that women property owners had as much right to the vote as did male property owners. This demand for citizenship did not then extend in practical terms to all women, but all women, it was believed, would benefit from even a limited suffrage. Haslam’s organization’s name changed a number of times to reflect its current campaign. Eventually it became the Irishwomen’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA) in 1901. The IWSLGA campaigned on a number of issues relating to the status of women in Irish society. The first recorded membership of the IWSLGA is available from 1896 when it numbered 43. In 1911 membership had increased to 647, its high point. Its tactics, like those of English suffragists, included petitions, public lectures, letters to the newspapers, and lobbying MPs. By the end of the 1880s the suffrage cause generally had reached a low ebb, and the issue was not debated in the House of Commons between 1886 and 1892.

In the early 1900s the suffrage cause moved into a new phase influenced in particular by the establishment of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in England in 1903. WSPU members were willing to adopt militant tactics, such as heckling politicians at meetings, and attracting as much publicity to the cause as possible. Eventually the WSPU was to use more violent methods to advance their cause.28 In Ireland some frustration was also felt at the lack of progress the older suffrage groups appeared to be making. In 1908 a new suffrage organization, the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), formed by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, her husband Frank, and their friends Margaret Cousins and her husband James. The members of the IWFL were committed to a more aggressive and militant campaign than were the earlier suffrage groups. Both Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins were typical of the newer generation of women activists. They were both young graduates who had married feminists.

The formation of the IWFL was a significant development in the Irish suffrage campaign. Its militancy brought the campaign to the attention of a larger audience. Their first aim was to have votes for women incorporated into the Home Rule bill that was then being fought for by the Irish Parliamentary Party. From its inception the IWFL was open to criticism from those who felt that women’s suffrage should not take priority over the nationalist cause in Ireland. This became a major bone of contention among Irish women political activists. Many nationalist women saw the IWFL as an adjunct of the WSPU. The leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was hostile to the suffrage cause. Sinn Féin, which refused to acknowledge the right of England to rule Ireland, also had difficulties with the suffrage campaign. Although women were represented on the executive of Sinn Féin, support for suffrage was ambivalent, as Home Rule legislation seemed threatened by the suffragists insisting on the inclusion of female franchise. Arthur Griffith declared that Sinn Féin was “not particularly interested in the suffragette movement.”²⁹ Once again women’s rights came second to national rights. Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was to note that women, like Constance Markievicz, “whose natural sympathies should have been with us,” instead adopted a position of opposition in terms of priorities and strategies.³⁰ In Belfast the IWFL was thought to be tainted by nationalism.

Other tensions developed in the suffrage community. Irish and English suffragists had much in common; they both wanted votes for women, and they read and shared the same suffrage papers. In Ireland, however, suffragists were looking for the vote from a parliament of a different country, so the question of imperial domination was an important one. Unionist women, who opposed Home Rule for Ireland, found their loyalties sorely tested, and the campaign for the vote was often abandoned. Nationalism was also a complicating factor. Constance Markievicz argued that Irish women should first of all fight for Irish freedom rather than seek the vote from an English parliament.

Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) was formed by Maud Gonne in 1900 and included in its membership such women as the actress Sara Allgood and Jennie Wyse Power, who had been active in the Ladies’ Land League and went on to become the president of Sinn Féin and a senator in the Irish Free State government. Nationalism, rather than feminism, held the first allegiance of this group, and few of its members joined the suffrage campaign. It argued that looking for the vote from the British parliament was a betrayal of Irish aspirations for independence. Suffragists responded to these arguments by claiming that it was in the women’s and the nation’s best interests, as an oppressed group, to fight for the vote as a true symbol of citizenship; otherwise the new Ireland would be created without the influence of half the population, its women. Cumann na mBan (Irishwomen’s Council) was formed in 1913 as an auxiliary to the Irish National Volunteers. Although some members of Cumann na mBan were feminist and had been involved in the suffrage campaign, they put their energies into the nationalist cause.

There was much public opposition to women’s suffrage. Women were heckled at suffrage meetings. Many Catholic bishops and clergy opposed the cause and saw suffragettes as acting “contrary to God’s law.”31 Among the horrors was that the “feminist movement created a tendency to withdraw woman from the home and plunge her into the glare and light of the world.”³² Even though Catholic women were active in the suffrage campaign it was not until 1916 that the first Catholic suffrage organization was founded; named the Irish Catholic Women’s Suffrage Association, it operated “under the patronage of St. Brigid and the inspiration of Pope Leo XIII.”³³ The press in Ireland was generally unsympathetic to the cause. However, one individual who became a strong suffrage supporter was the Labour leader James Connolly, who observed that “in its march towards freedom, the working class of Ireland must cheer on the efforts of those women who, feeling on their souls and bodies the fetters of the ages, have risen to strike them off.”³⁴

The IWFL made its voice heard through the pages of the Irish Citizen. The Irish Citizen was, in reality, the third in a line of feminist publications produced in Ireland. The first was The Woman’s Advocate, which was published in 1874 by Thomas Haslam. This publication advocated women’s suffrage, and was influential in Ireland and England. The next was Bean na hÉireann, which ran from 1909 to 1911 and was the weekly paper of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, edited by Helena Molony. Molony had stated that she had wanted a newspaper that would be a “woman’s paper, advocating militancy, separatism and feminism.”³⁵ The Irish Citizen first appeared in May 1912. It was edited by Frank Sheehy Skeffington, the husband of Hanna, and James Cousins, the husband of Margaret Cousins. Most of the contributors to the paper were women. By June 1912, after the publication of its fifth issue, the editors claimed that three thousand copies were circulated each week and that more than ten thousand people read it. The paper, which ran for eight years, was seen as a means of communication among Irish suffragists and as a means of propaganda. Through the pages of the newspaper the ideas and aims of the suffrage movement would be explained to the public. The paper contained features on the progress of the suffrage cause, particularly in England and America, and reported on meetings of local suffrage societies in Ireland. It thus linked the Irish suffrage campaign with the international suffrage movement. It covered employment issues for women and contained articles on unionism, nationalism, the Irish Parliamentary Party, Home Rule, the First World War, and the 1916 rising. All major feminist themes and issues of the day were discussed in the paper.

The suffrage campaign in Ireland, strongly urban based, claimed to have a membership of three thousand by 1914. It opened the eyes of a number of suffragists to the problems faced by women of the working classes. Louie Bennett, for example, organized the Irish Women’s Reform League to draw attention to the social and economic conditions of women workers and their families. The League investigated conditions in Dublin factories, campaigned for school meals, and organized a committee to monitor legislation affecting women.36 For feminist activists equality in the labor market was always contentious. Concern about women’s paid labor in the nineteenth century was often less about their right to work than the conditions under which they worked. Thus legislation tended to focus on “protection,” limiting, for instance, women’s working hours and attempting to improve actual working conditions. Economic independence for women rarely surfaced as a sustained campaigning issue for Irish nineteenth-century feminists.³⁷ The establishment of the Irish Women Workers’ Union in 1911 by Delia Larkin and her brother James was a major development in supporting women’s working rights. The most notable development of the women’s movement in Ireland, Louie Bennett was to observe in 1918, was the growth in trade unionism among women workers.³⁸ The expansion of women’s trade unionism was believed to be “the best possible contribution to the whole cause of feminism. There can be no real freedom or independence for women until they are economically free.”³⁹ The growing numbers involved in the trade-union movement allowed women to express their needs as workers, and also in many cases to successfully challenge their exploitation.

The outbreak of the Great War saw suffrage societies in Ireland and Britain faced with a major dilemma. Should they support the government war effort and suspend their political activities, or should they refuse to give up on their demands and continue the campaign? For example, the English WSPU disbanded immediately and threw its efforts into supporting the government in its war effort. Nationalist women took the view that “England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity,” and groups like Cumann na mBan increased preparations for separatist action. Many suffragists were also pacifists and were horrified at the outbreak of the war. By late 1914 Louie Bennett, for example, was fearful of the breakup of the suffrage movement in Ireland. Some suffragists continued to campaign for the cause. Louie Bennett described the three main areas of suffragist work during the war years as those engaged in relief work, those devoted to suffrage only, and those engaged in peace work. Many members of the IWFL were involved in peace work, and many were strong pacifists. Their general belief was that until women were enfranchised, it would be unacceptable to submit oneself to a “state power which excludes women from the decision making process while, at the same time, uses and exploits their services.”40

In January 1918 the Representation of the People Act came into force in Ireland. This Act granted the vote to women older than thirty who were householders, the wives of householders, were possessed of a £5 occupation qualification, or were graduates. The Irish Parliamentary Party and the unionists opposed the extension of the 1918 Act to Ireland, but for Sinn Féin the newly enfranchised woman voter was seen as an important figure. Constance Markievicz became, while in prison, the first woman to be elected to the Westminster parliament, though she did not take her seat. Under the Irish Free State Constitution of 1922, all citizens over the age of twenty-one were enfranchised. In Britain, it was not until the enactment of the Equal Franchise Bill of 1928 that women older than twenty-one were entitled to vote.

Irish women’s political activism continued through the period of the fight for independence. The nature and extent of women’s activism in the struggle for independence was primarily focused on achieving independence rather than on feminist issues as such. Women’s involvement in the campaign for independence would suggest that they were well placed to benefit from the roles they had played in that struggle. However, from its beginning, women’s political, economic, and social rights were gradually eroded in the Free State. It was always going to be difficult to dislodge the generally held views that women’s lives must remain centered around the home and the family. From the foundation of the Free State there is no doubt that both the state and the church emphatically presented women’s place as being in the home and the ideal role of the Irish woman as mother. Whatever equality might mean, it was always circumscribed by this belief in the domestic nature of women.

Several feminist organizations existed in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. The National Council of Women of Ireland was formed in 1924 by a group of Irish feminists, many of whom had been active in the suffrage campaign. It lobbied for the appointment of women police officers whose role would be the protection of children and adolescent girls.⁴¹ The formation of the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers in March 1935 brought the Mother’s Union, the Irish Guild of Catholic Nurses, and the Irish Women Citizens’ Association along with other groups together to promote and lobby on “matters of mutual interest affecting women, young persons and children.”42 This was an important campaigning body that also sought, among other things, to secure women police for the South of Ireland. Just how entrenched views of women’s place in society can be is revealed by the fact that this campaign for women police began during the suffrage period, and the first female police officers appeared on the streets of Dublin in 1959. There was criticism of these organizations, and an article in Christus Rex, a Catholic journal of sociology, asked whether such groups “really represent the women and housewives of the country?”⁴³

Equal citizenship had been guaranteed to Irish men and women under the Proclamation of 1916. Active lobbying, particularly by women, saw all Irish citizens over the age of twenty-one enfranchised under the Irish Free State Constitution enacted in June 1922. Ideas of equality and equal citizenship became central in many women’s minds to understanding their significance and place in an independent Irish State. How equality was understood, or expected to work in practice, was not always clearly articulated, and as a concept equality was often framed or understood in gendered and class terms.

Much of women’s political activism in the 1920s and 1930s was informed by their understanding of both the 1916 Proclamation and certain articles in the 1922 Constitution. From the 1916 Proclamation the phrase “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens” was the standard against which government policy, particularly where it affected women, was measured. Article 3 of the 1922 Constitution, which guaranteed equality to all Irish citizens, strengthened the position outlined in the Proclamation.⁴⁴ The ideals of equality implied by both these documents held a vital place in the vocabulary of feminists in the 1920s and 1930s.⁴⁵ Invoking both the 1916 Proclamation and the relevant sections of the 1922 Constitution, women campaigned against government attempts to limit their rights as citizens and specifically their rights as workers. These phrases, particularly that from the Proclamation, offered a fundamental and irrevocable foundation for campaigns of equality. The language of equality expressed in the Proclamation, sanctified by the deaths of the 1916 rising’s leaders and the campaign for independence, and consolidated in the 1922 Constitution, offered women activists an essential understanding of their status in Irish society. Although it was a status continually under attack, these phrases remained an enduring legacy for activist women.⁴⁶

The right to work remained of central importance to women trade unionists and to feminist activists from the foundation of the Free State. Attempts to restrict women’s access to employment were strongly resisted by women activists. Feminists fought significant campaigns around the Civil Service Amendment Bill (1924), the Marriage Bar, the Conditions of Employment Bill (1935), and the campaign against the draft Constitution of 1937. In 1937 the Irish Women Workers’ Union organized a fourteen-week strike of women laundry workers, eventually winning the right to a two-week annual holiday for all industrial workers.⁴⁷

The implementation of restrictive legislation in the economic and political spheres found echoes in the social sphere. For instance, divorce, previously available through an act of parliament, was banned in 1925; the 1927 Juries Act made it difficult for women to sit on juries. The 1929 Censorship of Publications Bill prohibited the advertisement of contraceptives, while the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act prohibited the sale of contraceptives. There was some opposition to these legislative changes from women in the Irish Senate, Jennie Wyse Power being one of the few women in either house of the Oireachtas who retained her strong feminist credentials.

In Northern Ireland women’s activism from the 1950s saw a range of protests not only against the state but also about society’s general understanding of women’s place in it. Many women in Northern Ireland used street protests, marches, and sit-ins to get their messages across. Keenan-Thomson argues that the kind of activism evident from women in the 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for “second-wave” feminism in Ireland.48 She reveals how, for instance, in 1963 working-class women from Dungannon led a housing protest and engaged in civil disobedience to draw attention to their demands. Women also became involved in street activities as the civil rights movement evolved in Northern Ireland from the 1960s. Women such as Bernadette Devlin emerged from this environment. Echoing the establishment of women’s organizations in England and Ireland, lesbian groups became active from 1974, with the establishment of telephone helplines; Belfast Women’s Aid was set up in 1974 to offer advice and shelter to victims of domestic violence. In 1977 the Belfast Women’s Collective was formed to encourage feminists to work together on a wide range of issues.⁴⁹ Between 1978 and 1981 the Women Against Imperialism group was active, also in Belfast. But what was clear is that attempts to bring women together as feminists were undermined by the political crisis of the “Troubles.” Sectarian violence and its effects made working together across the political and denominational divides difficult. The Troubles saw feminism take a backseat to other problems, and the relationship between feminism and nationalism was sorely tested during the period of the Troubles. Particular tensions surfaced in relation to the “dirty protest” conducted by women republicans in Armagh prison.⁵⁰ The Women Against Imperialism Group, for instance, believed that the Armagh women’s protest was an issue that was of central importance to feminist politics. Others saw it only in terms of the women following the main protest by the men. How feminist views evolved in the unionist community has been little researched, with one commentator arguing that “the possibility of unionism accommodating any form of feminism did not take place until the early 1990s.”⁵¹

Social issues that involved family life, reproduction, and economic equality provoked campaigns by women throughout the period from the 1920s. The Irish Housewives Association (IHA) was formed in 1942 and originally sought to demand fair prices and fair distribution of goods during the Emergency, and it proved to be an effective pressure group throughout the second half of the twentieth century.52 Comparable organizations in Northern Ireland were the Women’s Institute and the Northern Ireland Housewives League. These organizations acted as consumer advocacy groups. However, as the decades passed, the IHA became more feminist in its actions, unlike the Northern Ireland groups. In the 1950s the IHA began to campaign for women jurors. It was closely allied to the International Alliance of Women, and the IHA was later instrumental in encouraging the government to establish a Commission on the Status of Women in March 1970.⁵³

In 1970 the establishment of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) brought a new generation of women to embrace political and social activism. The IWLM was begun by a group of twelve women, six of them journalists, and its members knew how to get media attention. The manifesto of the IWLM, “Change or Chains: The Civil Wrongs of Irish Women” (1971) demanded equal pay; an end to the marriage bar;⁵⁴ equal rights in law; rights for widows, deserted wives, and unmarried mothers; equal opportunities in education; and access to legal contraception.⁵⁵ Such demands were similar to those made by feminists in Europe, except on the subject of abortion, which continues to remain a divisive issue in Irish society. One of the major issues pursued by the IWLM was contraception, a campaign that brought it infamy and publicity, particularly when on May 22, 1971, a group of women made a trip to Belfast to purchase contraceptives, which they openly and blatantly brought back to Dublin.⁵⁶

The pill had been available in Ireland, as a menstrual-cycle regulator, from the 1960s with a doctor’s prescription. The Irish Family Planning Association was formed in 1969. Family-planning clinics were established, with one operating in Limerick city from 1976. Catholic Church leaders condemned the enterprise, as did local conservative politicians, and the Limerick Leader, the major local newspaper, refused to print any advertising relating to the clinic. Such local and grassroots activism is an often forgotten feature in feminist activism in Ireland from the 1970s.⁵⁷ It was not until 1979 that anti-contraception laws were removed from the statute books.

It was difficult for any women’s organization in the period to ignore the subject of contraception. Such organizations as the Irish Country Women’s Association (ICA; originally founded as United Irishwomen in 1911) were concerned with developing rural life; fostering traditional arts and crafts; and providing courses on cooking, domestic skills, and public speaking for its members. The ICA did not consider itself a political or feminist organization. The ICA networked with similar international organizations and beginning in the 1950s it became an effective lobbying group. However, in 1972 the ICA conducted a survey among its members on attitudes to family planning and discovered that 80% of respondents were in favor of some form of national family-planning service.⁵⁸ This issue brought organizations like the ICA into feminist politics. With the IHA, it lobbied for the Commission on the Status of Women, and its members later played an active role in the Council for the Status of Women, formed in response to the Commission.

The IWLM had disintegrated by September 1971, but one of its founders, June Levine, noted its achievement. “We’d broken the news. We’d told Ireland about the women’s movement, we’d turned women on, we’d revealed the underground anger in women’s lives, we’d blown the cover.”59

Irish Women United (IWU) was formed in 1975 and was a more radical grouping of left-wing feminists and socialist activists. It consisted of three distinct feminist strands: radical lesbians, socialist feminists, and radical feminists.⁶⁰ This group initiated the Contraception Action Programme. IWU disintegrated under internal divisions in 1977, and many of its members went on to be active in other organizations and campaigns. Many women active in these early movements established a range of organizations to fight for women’s rights. Rape Crisis Centres began to appear from 1977; Women’s Aid, for domestic violence, emerged in 1974; the Well Woman Centre operated in Dublin, providing health advice to women; AIM (Action, Information, Motivation) was founded in 1972 and lobbied for family-law reform; and Cherish, which provided support to single parents, was formed in 1972. The Women’s Progressive Association (later to become the Women’s Political Association) was formed in 1970 to support women’s attempts to forge political careers.

The Commission on the Status of Women published its final report in December 1972, outlining forty-nine areas of discrimination against women in Ireland.⁶¹ The report provided a focus for legislative reform in several areas, including employment, social-welfare taxation, and property rights. The Council was to monitor the implementation of the Commission’s recommendations and also be alert to other areas where women might face discrimination. Through vigorous campaigning the Council for the Status of Women has been influential in shaping government policy and action in areas relating to, among other issues, equality legislation and domestic abuse. ⁶²

What was evident in feminist activism from the 1970s was the diversity of that activism, the variety of political ideologies that shaped the discourse, and the longevity of women’s activist involvement. Irish feminist activism, from its earliest period, was never insular. Women were aware of what was happening in the wider world; they created networks of feminist action with their peers in England and the United States. In Ireland, throughout the period, many feminist activists knew one another, often worked on the same campaigns, and respected one another’s differences of political or social opinion. It was only during the Troubles that a constant tension developed among feminist activists. Political divisions influenced the development of the women’s movement in Northern Ireland and the relationship that existed with the women’s movement in the South. Feminist issues had entered the mainstream of Irish political life by the 1980s. Not only had national organizations been established to cater to aspects of women’s interests and needs—such as formal political involvement or advice on health issues—but also women in rural Ireland established consciousness-raising groups that encouraged the development of local support groups. While the 1980s saw Ireland in difficult economic circumstances, the early 1990s saw real and symbolic changes in Irish feminism. The first woman president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, was elected in December 1990 after a difficult campaign: in 1997 she was followed by a second female president, Mary McAleese. Both women had had distinguished political and academic careers. Symbolically much had changed, though on the ground the campaigns continued, and for feminist activists new issues were to emerge with the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger.