Wild Irish Women: Gender, Politics, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century

  • Tamara L. Hunt
Chapter

Abstract

In an essay written in 1923 to mark the birth of the Irish Free State, author and poet Susan Mitchell declared:

Men playing alone at their moss-grown games of politics have made a mess of human society. The entrance there, not of two or three, but of two or three hundred women partners, might take the game into wider fields and fresher airs, broadening the humanity of Government. Women would come into the game, not to herd together and fight in a feminine corner, to triumph over man and force a petticoat government on him; not to use their sex as a weapon to fight sex, or as a lure to snare it. As men and women working together, they need not attempt the impossible in trying to efface sex, nor the unnecessary in insisting on it. But they might find in it a clue to the wider understanding of each other’s nature. Thus should woman move graciously to her place in Irish politics; for only when the petticoat goes out of politics can the Woman come in.

Mitchell’s concern that women were seen as gendered beings and not rational individuals was a reaction to the existing political ideology that depicted women as frivolous, weak, and helpless. This view, however, was not one that was native to Ireland; rather, it had its roots in the colonial era, as English, then Irish, leaders sought to forge images of women that would serve male leaders’ political agenda.

Keywords

Irish Woman Male Leader Tenant Farmer National League Irish Language 
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Chapter 4 Wild Irish Women: Gender, Politics, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century

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© Tamara L. Hunt 2002

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  • Tamara L. Hunt

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