De Valera's Irelands

by Dermot Keogh

  In any case, this extra income seems to have had an almost immed­iate effect on women’s health and nutrition. Money sent home from Eng­land, from about 1940, is remembered by people as far apart as John Healy in Mayo and Frank McCourt in Limerick city as having brought about a big change in the spending power of the small farming/working-classes. Emigration of some family members would also have eased pressure on slender resources at home.53The improvement in mothers’ health was not dramatic and according to the National Nutrition Survey carried out in the 1940s and published in the early 1950s, the more child­ren in a family, the poorer a mother’s nutrition.54Still, the maternal mor­tality rate went from 4.98 in 1932 to 1.88 in 1948; a decline which, accord­ing to Loudon, compares well with other countries. If poverty and want are the major maternal killers,55a significant step was already being tak­en towards the reduction of maternal mortality before 1953.

  I haven’t discussed the ban on contraception in 1935 because this was not an issue taken on by women’s organisations in these years, and this discussion is focused on the relationship between the public issues and what was actually happening. ‘Reproductive rights’ as defined to­day were an unknown concept in the western world in general of the 1930s and 1940s, when the flip side of the reproductive freedom of the rich and powerful was often the coercive sterilisation of the poor, powerless and ‘racially unfit’ – and not just in fascist countries.56Support for birth con­trol or ‘voluntary motherhood’ in Europe in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s was sometimes clouded by association with eugenicism.57One of the ad­denda to the Emigration Report which dissented from the main report’s encouragement of large families, did so on chillingly eugenic grounds.58

  However, the main report and Dr Cornelius Lucey’s Minority Re­port, also chillingly dismissed the discomforts, dangers and chronic bad health (well-documented at this stage) risked by ‘grande multi­paras’ – women with large numbers of children – without even discuss­ing them.59Cormac Ó Gráda has uncovered some Irish correspondence to Marie Stopes, which prompts many questions about women’s own attitudes to the issue of pregnancy prevention.60I did not, in the personal testimony I sought, find any sense of grievance at constant pregnancy but plenty of complaints about conditions surrounding childbirth and childrearing. Mary Healy, an ex-domestic servant married to a county council worker who had six children in the 1940s, states: ‘I never consid­ered the rearing of my family a burden’ but confesses she found it a great financial strain.61This is not to say that others shared her opinion. This entire area needs its own very sensitive and thorough historian. We must never forget that many married women in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s did not have any choice about pregnancy, that this lack of choice some­times cost them their lives or their health.

  In conclusion, I would argue that ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ was a period when Irish women’s lives changed significantly, often for the better, especially at the lower income levels. Women’s work and authority in the domestic sphere or spheres was so diverse and changed so signif­icantly in these years that it is difficult to speak generally about ‘women’ and the ‘do­mestic sphere’. We could be talking about farm women (on big, little or small farms, on good or bad land) and if farm women, the woman of the house or the assisting relative; domestic servants or domestic servants’ employers, urban middle, lower-middle or working-class women and if working-class, women living in dwellings with or without an indoor water supply, women in towns whose husbands were in England, women on small farms whose husbands were in England, single women going out to work or staying at home, married women staying at home or going out to work. The improvements in housing in this period also, arguably, lightened women’s burden of work: an aver­age of 12,000 local authority houses a year were built 1932–42.62What­ever the social disadvantages of the new housing estates it cannot be denied that a single standard of hous­ing was being slowly established in this period, and tenements/slums increasingly seen as shameful. The implications for women’s household work were enormous and nobody who spoke or wrote to me about it, was in any way nostalgic for the old ways.63

  The problem with Eamon de Valera’s vision of women in Ireland was that he envisaged a single recognisable ‘domestic sphere’ and ideal­ised it in an opportunistic way to justify having introduced some gender-specific labour legislation. The fact that he had to justify is itself impor­tant. One could argue that he did go some way toward realising the prom­ise implicit in article 41.2 when he introduced Children’s Allow­ances but these were officially paid to fathers of families/breadwinners and explicit­ly intended to bolster the father’s position, as the corres­pondence and debate on whether to pay the mothers or the fathers shows.64The fact that they were collected by mothers, for the most part, and understood by ordinary people as payments to mothers, shows per­haps how out of touch Eamon de Valera was with the Ireland inhabited by most women and men.

  Given that women’s lives were so different, can we talk about ‘wom­en in de Valera’s Ireland’ at all? We have to, because de Valera and some other public figures who tried to limit women’s participation in paid work and public life set this agenda for us. One of the most serious re­sults of their failure to discriminate between different kinds of women is the danger that historians and others looking at the past will take their ignorance as a matter of fact, and assess women in the past as a mono­lithic group, ignoring their differing, often conflicting, interests.

  1 Journalistic examples are numerous, in the journalism of, e.g., Emily O’Reilly, Fintan O’Toole, Kathryn Holmquist, Nuala O’Faolain (to name but four) in the Irish Times, Sunday Business Post, Irish Press, Sunday Press, 1990–1997. Lichfield, John, ‘Ireland’s comely maidens are doing it for themselves’ in Independent on Sunday 15 September 1996, is one example of the genre. There are several other examples of this doom-laden scen­ario in the fields of sociology and political science, and women’s studies; see, for example, Rose, Catherine, The Female Experience: the Story of the Woman Movement in Ireland, Arlen House, Galway, 1975; Mahon, Evelyn, ‘Women’s Rights and Catholi­cism in Ireland’ New Left Review, no. 166 (November–December 1978), pp. 53–78, and ‘From Democracy to Femocracy: the Women’s Movement in the Republic of Ireland’ in Clancy, P., et al (eds), Irish Society: Sociological Perspectives, IPA, Dublin 1995, pp. 675–708; Beale, Jenny, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1986; Gardiner, Frances, ‘The Unfinished Revolution’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp. 15–39. Rose’s and Beale’s books are very thoroughly researched and each was ground-breaking when it first appeared. It is impossible to disagree with Beale’s summary of the first fifty years after independence as ‘fifty years of in­equality’, however much one might disagree with some of her other conclusions. Pro­fessor Joseph Lee in his Ireland 1912–85: Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 335 uses the William Trevor short story ‘The Ballroom of Romance’, published in 1972 and actually set in 1971, to underline women’s parti­cularly hard lives in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.

  2 See, for example, Wieners, Amy, ‘Rural Irishwomen, their Changing Role, Status and Condition’ Eire–Ireland, Earrach–Spring 1994, pp. 76–91. It is Maryann Valiulis how­ever who proposes most vigorously that Ireland in the 1920s and 30s was a proto-fascist state as far as women were concerned; see Valiulis, M., ‘Defining their Role in the New State: Irishwomen’s Protest Against the Juries Act’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp. 43–60; ‘Power, Gender and Identity in the Irish Free State’ Journal of Women’s History, vols 6/7, nos 4/5, Winter/Spring 1994–5, pp. 117– 136; ‘Neither Feminist Nor Flapper: the Ecclesiastical Construction of the Ideal Irish Woman’ in O’Dowd, M. and Wichert, S. (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen? Studies in Women’s History, Institute of Irish Studies, Belfast, 1995, pp. 168–78.

  3 Scannell, Yvonne, ‘The Constitution and the Role of Women’ in Farrell, B. (ed.), De Valera’s Constitu
tion and Ours, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1988, pp. 123–36; Clancy, Mary, ‘Aspects of Women’s Contribution to Oireachtas Debate in Ireland 1922–37’ in Luddy, M. and Murphy, C. (eds), Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the Nine­teenth and Twentieth Centuries, Poolbeg, Dublin, 1990, pp. 206–32.

  4 The argument set out in this paper is developed more fully in Clear, C., Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland 1921–1961, PhD, NUI (UCD), 1997, chapters 1–7 inclusive. See also Clear, C., ‘The Women Cannot be Blamed: the Commission on Vocational Organis­ation, Feminism and “Home-Makers” in Independent Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s’ in O’Dowd, M. and Wichert, S. (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen?, pp. 179–86.

  5 Macardle, Dorothy, ‘Irish Women in Industry’ Irish Press, 5 September 1931.

  6 Woman’s Life: the Irish Home Weekly, 1936–1954 (National Library of Ireland).

  7 Laverty, Maura, Never No More: the Story of a Lost Village, Longmans, London, 1942; Kind Cooking, ESB, Dublin, 1946; Lift Up Your Gates, Longmans, London, 1946.

  8 Curtayne, Alice, ‘The New Woman’: text of a lecture given in the Theatre Royal, Dublin, 22 October 1933, under the title, The Renaissance of Woman, np, Dublin, 1933, with an imprimatur by the Bishop of Ferns. I am grateful to Alan Hayes for this reference.

  9 ‘Clarion Call of Lenten Pastoral – Clonfert’, Connacht Tribune, 17 February 1934.

  10 L’Observateur, ‘Causes and Consequences of Depopulation: Notes from France’, Catho­lic Bulletin vol. 15, January–December 1925, pp. 911–8, and ‘Paternal Authority in the French Family’, Catholic Bulletin, vol. 28, January–June 1938, pp. 299–303.

  11 See, for example, MacDonagh, W. F., SJ, ‘The Position of Woman in Modern Life’, Irish Monthly, vol. 67, June 1939, pp. 389–99; Hayden, Mary, ‘Woman’s Role in the Modern World’, Irish Monthly, vol. 68, August 1940, pp. 392–402; Guthrie, Hunter, SJ, ‘Wo­man’s Role in the Modern World’, Irish Monthly, vol. 69, August 1941, pp. 246–52.

  12 Stafford, Brigid, ‘Equal Pay for Women’, Irish Monthly, vol. 79, July 1951, pp. 308–14; Shannon, Rev. G. J., ‘Woman: Wife and Mother’ Christus Rex, vol. 5, 1952, pp. 155–74.

  13 ibid.; for stories and articles disapproving of fashion, clothes and work in cities and towns, see Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart, 1924–1940, passim, e.g., Bauer, Maria, ‘Dress and Fashion’, ibid., vol. xlix, August 1936, p. 87; Dease, A., ‘Those Nuns!’, ibid., vol. xl, October 1927; O’Connor, E., SJ, ‘The Pope Speaks to Women Workers’, ibid., vol. lxiv, February 1951, pp. 109–10, see also editorial comment p. 1.

  14 The personal testimony which I solicited for this research brought me into contact with many women who were running houses in Ireland in this period, and who have only been made aware of the constitution in recent years, see Clear, C., Women of the House, 1997. It is interesting that while women’s organisations (see below) protested strongly against the constitution for the limits they feared it would place on women’s work, a sweep through the two largest selling daily newspapers, the Independent and the Press for 1937, did not reveal any letters from individual women objecting to this. And it is not that women did not write to newspapers; see the long-running controversy on ‘Can Irish Girls Cook?’ in the Irish Independent (March–May 1938) for a sample of the articulacy of women of the house from a variety of social backgrounds.

  15 Valiulis, ‘Power, Gender and Identity’, p. 120.

  16 Clancy, Mary, ‘Aspects’ loc. cit.; Clear, C., Women of the House, 1997, chapter 4; Beaumont, Caitriona, ‘Women and the Politics of Equality: the Irish Women’s Movement 1930– 43’ in O’Dowd, M. and Valiulis, M. (eds), Women and Irish history: Essays for Margaret MacCurtain, Wolfhound, Dublin, 1997, pp. 173–88.

  17 The Irish Countrywomen’s Association, the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (a 28,000-strong organisation in 1940), the Catholic Federation of Secon­dary School Unions (past-pupil) and the National Council of Women in Ireland, all gave evidence to the Commission on Vocational Organisation in 1940, the ICA in a session on its own, the other three together. For ICA see Minutes of evidence, 12 November 1940, NLI 930, vol. 9. The evidence given by the other three organisations is also in NLI 930, vol. 9.

  18 Tweedy, Hilda, A Link in the Chain: the Story of the Irish Housewives Association 1942–1992, Attic, Dublin, 1992, and The Irish Housewife (annual publication of the IHA, vol. 1, 1946).

  19 Lucy Franks, Maire MacGeehin (Or Máire F. Nic Aodháin, as she also signed herself) and Louie Bennett were the three female members of the twenty-five-strong Com­mission on Vocational Organisation, which delivered its report in 1943 (Report of the Commission on Vocational Organisation, K76/1); Louie Bennett and Agnes Ryan (later replaced by Brigid Stafford) were members of the Commission on Youth Unemploy­ment (R/82) which reported in 1951 (18 members in all); Mrs Agnes McGuire and Mrs Frances Wrenne were members of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (1956), R/84 (24 members in all).

  20 Correspondence between Department of Education and INTO, 1932–54, National Ar­chives S7985, A, B, C, D. See also O’ Leary, Eoin, ‘The INTO and the Marriage Bar for Women National Teachers 1933–58’, Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, vol. 12, 1987, pp. 47–52.

  21 Daly, Mary E., Industrial Development and Irish National Identity 1922–39, Syracuse University Press, New York, 1992, and ‘Women in the Irish Free State 1922–39: the Interaction between Economics and Ideology’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 6/7, no. 4/5, Winter–Spring 1994–5, pp. 99–116.

  22 Kessler-Harris, Alice, ‘Gender Ideology in Historical Reconstruction: a Case from the 1930s’, Gender and History, vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 31–49.

  23 Jones, Mary, Those Obstreperous Lassies: a History of the Irish Women Workers Union, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1988, chapters 7–9.

  24 See Clancy, Mary, op. cit., and Daly, Mary E., Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, pp. 122–7.

  25 ibid.; Scannell, Yvonne, op. cit.; also McGinty, Mary, A Study of the Campaign for and against the Enactment of the 1937 Constitution, MA, NUI (UCG), 1987. Article 41.2 reads ‘In particular the state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.’

  26 For an invaluable breakdown, country by country, of the climate of opinion on women’s working rights and citizenship, see all the articles in, and the editorial introduction to, Bock, Gisela and Thane, Pat (eds), Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, Routledge, London, 1991; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Rise of Welfare States, Routledge, London, 1993 is also useful. On Irish women and emigration, see Travers, Pauric, ‘Emi­gration and Gender: the Case of Ireland 1922–1960’ in O’Dowd and Wichert (eds) Chattel, Servant or Citizen, pp. 187–99.

  27 See note 20.

  28 Dublin Opinion, June 1941, p. 3. This cartoon, like so many others on this theme, was by the editor Charles E. Kelly. Kelly’s daughter, Pauline Bracken, in her autobiographical Light of Other Days, Mercier, Cork, 1994 tells us that the Kellys always had maids.

  29 Census of Ireland 1926, 1936, 1946, 1951, 1961: occupational tables for the country as a whole; ‘No Wives For Farmers’, Irish Times, 18 December 1936. I am grateful to Anne Byrne, agricultural journalist, Co. Wicklow, for bringing this news item to my attention.

  30 Help Wanted’ advertisements, Irish Independent, 27 September 1950.

  31 Anon, ‘I am a Model Mistress but where are the Model Maids?’ Irish Independent, 12 May 1947.

  32 Bennett, Louie, ‘The Domestic Problem’, The Irish Housewife, vol. 1, 1946, pp. 29–30; ‘Joan’, ‘The Homefront’, The Irish Housewife, vol. 4, 1950, pp. 103–5; ‘Statement by Miss Louie Bennett Regarding her Refusal to S
ign the Report’, Youth Unemployment Com­mission Report, 1951, pp. 51–2.

  33 Emigration Commission Report, pp. 171–3, and Roberts, Ruaidhri, Reservation, no. 11, pp. 247–56. In most of the personal testimony which I collected for the thesis, and in my own family (lower middle-class/skilled working-class) I never heard a whisper of the shortage of servants being a problem, there had never been any servants to begin with. Clear, C., Women of the House, chapter 1 and passim.

  34 Boyle, Elizabeth, ‘A Plan for the Northern Houseworkers’, The Irish Housewife, vol. 1, 1946, pp. 31–3, is typical of the tone of such well-meaning recommendations.

  35 Census of Ireland, 1926–1961, occupational tables; Bourke, Joanna, Husbandry to House­wifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland 1890–1914, Oxford Univer­sity Press, Oxford, 1993.

  36 Census of Ireland, 1926–61, occupational tables; see also Hannan, Damian, ‘Patterns of Spousal Accommodation and Conflict in Traditional Farm Families’, Economic and So­cial Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 1978, pp. 61–84, and ‘Changes in Family Relationship Patterns’, Social Studies: an Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 2, no. 6, December 1973, pp. 550–63.