1916
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… [our claim] to be represented is based mainly on the republican Proclamation of Easter week 1916, which of course you are determined to uphold, [and] on the risks women took, equally with the men, to have the Irish Republic established.44
Their request was refused. The group considered sending a deputation to Sinn Féin, but initially decided against this, believing that ‘women have applied to them often enough and the matter should be left for Cumann na mBan for the present to see what they could do’.45 Cumann na mBan, however, had also been refused representation. Records of the women delegates’ group indicate that an article written by Dr Kathleen Lynn at this time, urging women to assert their political rights, had been sent to Nationality but not published. Eventually the women did form a deputation to the Sinn Féin executive who agreed to co-opt four women, on condition that none of them represent any organisation and that all be members of a Sinn Féin branch.46 The four women so co-opted were Jenny Wyse Power, Áine Ceannt, Helena Molony and Mimi Plunkett. A resolution was prepared by the women for consideration at a national convention of Sinn Féin in October 1917. This strongly worded resolution referred unambiguously to the clauses of the republican Proclamation which had guaranteed equal rights and opportunities to all citizens, and equality of women with men in all branches and executive bodies, asking that ‘the equality of men and women in this organisation be emphasised in all speeches, leaflets and pamphlets’.47
Before the convention the women considered circularising Sinn Féin members already proposed for the new executive regarding their attitudes to that paragraph in the Proclamation, but decided not to ‘for fear that it would weaken our case to appear to think that there could be any doubt on the point’.48 After some minor changes the women’s resolution was accepted. Four women were elected to the new Sinn Féin executive – Constance Markievicz, Dr Kathleen Lynn, Kathleen Clarke and Grace Plunkett. The Irish Citizen congratulated delegates to the convention for ‘embodying in their new constitution, in the most unequivocal terms, the democratic principle of the complete equality of men and women in Ireland’.49 The paper regretted there was so few women delegates, and hoped to see this inequality rectified at future conventions. At this stage the women delegates organised themselves formally into Cumann na dTeachtaire, a society to consist of women delegates to all future conferences held by Irish republicans. Its aims were: to safeguard the political rights of Irishwomen; to ensure adequate representation for them in the republican government; to urge and facilitate the appointment of women to public boards throughout the country; and to educate Irish women in the rights and duties of citizenship.50
The formation of this society was most significant. Many of its members had been active in some aspect of the suffrage campaign, and in many ways it appears to have filled a void for committed nationalist feminists. Its formation at this particular time indicates unease amongst such women about their role in the emerging new Ireland. Later events would prove that such unease was not unfounded.
Post-1916 a new co-operative spirit emerged between various women’s groups. A number of factors contributed to this. The constitution of Cumann na dTeachtaire noted its preparedness to confer with other women’s groups ‘whenever it can be accomplished without sacrifice of principle [as] the bringing together of all Irishwomen to discuss matters of common interest on a neutral platform could not but be beneficial to all’.51 Links between the suffrage and labour movements were strengthened when Louie Bennett took over the running of both the IWWU and the Irish Citizen, resulting in increased coverage of labour issues. The IWFL in particular was close to Cumann na dTeachtaire – in many cases women were members of both – and even the more conservative IWSLGA had links with the new nationalist group, again through some joint membership. Increasingly, the pages of the Irish Citizen showed a more nationalist bias, supporting the demand for political status for republican prisoners, and condemning forcible feeding. Both Cumann na dTeachtaire and the IWWU adopted St Brigid as their patron, the former declaring that ‘such a good suffragist should get recognition’.52
A number of significant issues emerged in 1918 that led to much cooperation between women’s groups. Chief among these was the attempt to introduce conscription into Ireland that year. Among the many meetings and demonstrations organised against this measure was a mass meeting of women at Dublin’s Mansion House, at which women from Cumann na mBan, the IWFL, and other women’s organisations pledged resistance.53 The other major issue on which women’s groups co-operated was the campaign against venereal disease and the related implementation of regulation 40d under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). In 1907 Arthur Griffith had drawn attention to British army medical reports that confirmed that there was a higher incidence of venereal disease among soldiers in Dublin than elsewhere in the United Kingdom.54 Concern amongst women’s groups about the issue had been evident for some time in the pages of the Irish Citizen. In March 1918 Cumann na dTeachtaire organised a conference of women’s societies to consider ‘this serious menace’, which it noted ‘was a matter on which women of every shade of political opinion could unite to discuss the best measures to combat this evil’.55 The implementation of regulation 40d of DORA in August 1918 ‘to safeguard the health of soldiers’ was denounced by the Irish Citizen as an attempt to revive the notorious contagious diseases acts which had been repealed in 1886 following strenuous agitation by Irish and English suffragists.56 Under its terms any woman could be arrested by the police ‘on suspicion’ and detained until proven innocent by medical examination. A woman could also be held by police on a verbal charge made by a soldier. Some weeks later, the Irish Citizen reported the first case taken in Ireland under the Act – that of a Belfast woman given six months hard labour ‘for communicating disease’ to a Canadian soldier. Deploring the one-sided and discriminatory nature of this regulation, the paper concluded that the real purpose of the Act was ‘to make the practice of vice safe for men by degrading and befouling women’.57 Again, women’s groups came together to protest against what the IWFL described as ‘the state regulation of vice’. During 1918 co-operation between women’s groups was at its highest since 1912. In their emphasis on promoting the political education of women, legislation for the benefit of women, the election of women to government, local boards and councils, all these organisations shared similar objectives.
1918 proved a watershed for the women’s movement in Ireland. That year women over thirty years with certain property qualifications obtained the parliamentary vote, thereby achieving the primary aim of suffrage groups while removing the one goal common to all. At the same time the vote was also extended to men of twenty one years. The age provision avoided the immediate establishment of a female majority in the electorate, particularly significant in a population depleted by huge troop losses during the Great War. Despite its limitations, the franchise extension created a demand for more female involvement in national affairs. With a forthcoming general election, the Irish Citizen reported that women were much in demand as speakers on party platforms, noting the disappearance of posters such as that formerly published by the Irish party reading ‘Public admitted – ladies excluded’.58 The Labour party was the first to nominate a woman candidate (Louie Bennett) for the election, although she did not run.59 Sinn Féin also sought the support of the new women voters, asking Irish women to ‘vote as Mrs Pearse will vote’, promising that ‘as in the past, so in the future the womenfolk of the Gael shall have high place in the councils of a freed Gaelic nation’.60
This is not quite the way things worked out! Even before the election, there were signs that all was not well. At a 1917 Sinn Féin convention, two resolutions were proposed asking that no candidate be selected for any by-election ‘other than a man who took part in the fight of Easter Week’.61 When the precise question of women candidates in the general election was raised, Sinn Féin’s standing committee vacillated as to whether it would be legal. In the event, the party ran only two female candidates – Co
nstance Markievicz in Dublin and Winifred Carney in Belfast – leading the Irish Citizen to comment caustically that ‘it looks as if Irishmen (even republicans) need teaching in this matter’.62 Women in fact played a crucial role in this election, both as voters and as party workers, a fact acknowledged by Sinn Féin when they sought ‘a woman speaker’ for their victory celebrations in Pembroke division. Their request to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington in this regard was made ‘in view of the fact that the women voters were the most important factor in our polling district’.63 In addition to the Sinn Féin landslide victory at that election, there was another particularly sweet victory for Irish women. Although she never took her seat, Constance Markievicz became the first female MP elected to the British House of Commons. Commenting on the 1918 election results, the IWFL noted:
Under the new dispensation the majority sex in Ireland has secured one representative. This is the measure of our boasted sex equality. The lesson the election teaches us is that reaction has not died out with the Irish party – and the IWFL, which has been so faithful to feminist ideals, must continue to fight and expose reaction in the future as in the past.64
What was of particular concern to feminists, however, was the fact that, unlike the women of Cumann na dTeachtaire, so few republican women post-1916 held or articulated feminist ideals. In 1917 an article in the Irish Citizen highlighted a key weakness in the attitude of many Irish women:
Many of you stand aloof from feminism because of the political movement. But you have not justified your abstention from the women’s struggle by becoming a force within the new movement. You are in revolt against a subjection imposed from without, but you are tacitly acquiescing in a position of inferiority within.
It went on to warn that:
If in the course of time the new national movement becomes wholly masculine and stereotyped … you cannot escape your share of responsibility for such a disastrous state of things. If you leave men alone to carry out the task of national creative endeavour, you will have no right to complain later that there are flaws in construction.65
To the number of women involved in the nationalist movement before and during the Rising of 1916, many thousands more were added in its wake. From this point up to the bitter political divisions caused by the Treaty in 1921–2, such women played a significant role in the development of the emerging state. Whereas many nationalist women active before 1916 held feminist beliefs, opting to put equality demands ‘on hold’ until independence was attained, most of those who joined post-1916 did so primarily on nationalist grounds. Although young women now flocked in their thousands to join the organisation, few articulated feminist concerns. Both Rosamund Jacob and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington were concerned at the ‘lack of feminism among Sinn Fein women in the provinces’.66 Cumann na dTeachtaire can be seen as an attempt by some nationalist women to bring feminism within their political remit. In the aftermath of 1916, with large-scale imprisonment of male republicans, Cumann na mBan took on a more active and aggressive role. Its work on behalf of prisoners’ dependants, and its determined and focused propaganda campaign to keep the memory and ideals of the executed leaders constantly before the public eye, led Brian Farrell to note that in the year after the Rising ‘it was the women who were the national movement’.67 As late as 1919 however, the Irish Citizen was still critical of Cumann na mBan’s status within the republican movement:
The women are emphatically not a force in the popular movement – they have no status and no influence in its local councils … and are looked upon rather in the light of an ornamental trimming – useful to give a picturesque touch on occasion and, of course to carry on the traditional role of auxiliaries which so many generations of slave women have been content to accept.68
Margaret Ward has pointed out that while Hanna Sheehy Skeffington joined Sinn Féin in 1918, she did not join Cumann na mBan, believing that ‘it had not shaken off its auxiliary to the men’s status’.69 In the final issue of the Irish Citizen in 1920, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington commented: ‘There can be no woman’s paper without a woman’s movement, without earnest and serious-minded women readers and thinkers – and these in Ireland have dwindled perceptively of late.’70
Suffragists had always maintained that possession of the parliamentary vote would give women the power to influence government. That influence – or perhaps fear of that influence – was very real in the early days of the new state. Adult suffrage had been included in the 1916 Proclamation and, in the spirit of that Proclamation, was included in the Irish Free State constitution of 1922, under provisions of which all citizens of twenty one years and upwards were enfranchised. This last phase of franchise extension to women, however, was not attained without a final struggle. During the acrimonious Treaty debates of the Second Dáil in 1921–2, the issue of women’s suffrage received heated discussion. Until the provisions of the proposed constitution became law, only women of thirty years could vote. Both pro- and anti-Treaty sides claimed the support of the majority of Irish women, yet it would appear that, as in 1918 when John Redmond’s party had feared the effect of a new female electorate, now the pro-Treaty side feared the effect of granting adult suffrage to all citizens over twenty one years. The vociferous anti-Treaty reactions of many women within the nationalist movement, including the majority of Cumann na mBan, did little to reassure them in this regard. Ward has pointed out that ‘for feminists, women’s issues were firmly back on the agenda’.71
In March 1922 pro-Treaty women formed an organisation – Cumann na Saoirse (League of Freedom) – to publicise their position. Keen to play a role in the establishment of the new state, the group included many wives and relatives of Free State government members.72 The forceful commitment of women on both sides of the Treaty issue left a bitter legacy for many years. In particular, the role of republican women during the civil war was viewed by Free State supporters as unwomanly, turning them into ‘unlovely, destructive minded, arid begetters of violence’.73 In 1924 P.S. O’Hegarty declared that during the civil war ‘Dublin was full of hysterical women [who] became practically unsexed, their mother’s milk blackened to make gunpowder, their minds working on nothing save hate and blood’. On the other hand he argued:
Left to himself, man is comparatively harmless. He will always exchange smokes and drinks and jokes with his enemy, and he will always pity the ‘poor devil’ and wish that the whole business was over…. It is woman … with her implacability, her bitterness, her hysteria, that makes a devil of him. The suffragettes used to tell us that with women in political power there would be no more war. We know that with women in political power there would be no more peace.74
Were women in political power? From the perspective of one writing of a newly born state in which equality of citizenship was included in the constitution, it may indeed have appeared so. It was not long before the issue was put to the test.
WOMEN AND THE IRISH FREE STATE
The equality of rights and opportunities of all citizens guaranteed in the 1916 Proclamation had been endorsed in the Free State constitution of 1922. Yet early hopes that women would play a significant role in the new Ireland were soon quashed as a series of restrictive measures were introduced by government.
The first intimation that was given of such intent came in 1924 when a juries bill was introduced providing for the exemption of women from jury service on application. Women’s groups were alarmed at the proposal to exempt women purely on the grounds of sex, arguing that to allow women to evade the duties and responsibilities of citizenship was ‘unfair to the men citizens and derogatory to the women’. They denounced this ‘retrograde step’ which, they feared, ‘would open the door a little wider to the forces of reaction’.75 Their fears were justified. 1925 saw the introduction of the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) bill, and 1927 a further Juries bill, both designed to curtail the role of women. The former was an attempt to restrict women from entering higher-ranking civil service posts solely on the grounds of sex, while t
he latter proposed to exempt women completely from jury service.
In the Seanad both Eileen Costello and Jennie Wyse-Power (Cumann na nGaedhael) strongly opposed the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) bill. In her trenchant opposition to the bill Wyse-Power pointed to the unjustness of this ‘sex discrimination [being] made by a male Executive Council and by practically a male Dáil’ without any consultation with any women.76 Drawing on her long involvement in nationalist politics, she noted the changing response to women’s participation in public affairs, regretting that such a bill had come ‘from the men who were associated in the fight [for freedom] with women when sex and money were not considerations’.
The Juries bill of 1927 provides a keen insight into the attitude of the Free State government towards the participation of women in public life. The Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins’ view was quite clear in articulating separate spheres for men and women. In the Dáil debate he argued that ‘a few words in a constitution do not wipe out the difference between the sexes, either physical or mental or temperamental or emotional’.77 In the Seánad he described women’s reproductive capacity as ‘women performing the normal functions of womanhood in the state’s economy’.78 Consistently in both Dáil and Seánad the government saw no contradiction in taking away from women rights which they already enjoyed under the constitution. Inside and outside parliament, women who demanded the right to jury service became increasingly categorised as ‘abnormal’, with ‘normal’ women being defined as those who accepted that their primary role was within the home. It was argued in the Dáil that: