Abstract
A substantial number of women who wrote about Irish history did not pursue academic careers in the Free State period. Although most had obtained a university education, they took different career paths as writers, journalists, teachers, archivists, and museum professionals. As writers of innovative works on women’s, religious, early modern, and contemporary Irish history, they were significant in demonstrating the diversity of historical scholarship in Ireland, produced in both academic and non-academic contexts, at a time when the Irish historical profession was undergoing modernization and consolidation in the universities. The careers of these women show parallels with those of women historians outside of Ireland in the interwar period in terms of their influences, research interests, and social and political engagement.
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Notes
Louis J. Walsh was a contemporary of James Joyce at University College, and later appeared as the character MacAlister in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I am indebted to Ann Walsh for this information. My analysis in this section owes much to discussion with Sheila, Maria and Ann Walsh. See also Louis J. Walsh, “With Joyce and Kettle at UCD”, Irish Digest, 12 (1942), 27–9
Patrick Maume, D.P. Moran (Dundalgan: Dundalgan Press, 1995), pp. 17
Helena Concannon, Makers of Irish History (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1918).
Helena Concannon, Irish History for Junior Grade Classes, 1460–1660: Defence of Our Gaelic Civilization (Dublin: Fallon’s, 1921), 11.
Helena Concannon, Women of’98 (Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1919)
Julie des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 16–20
Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Maxine Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116–23.
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 126.
Donna L. Potts, “Irish Poetry and the Modernist Canon: a Reappraisal of Katherine Tynan”, in Kathryn Kirkpatrick, ed., Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identity (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000), 89–90.
Terry Eagleton, “Revisionism Revisited”, in Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 310.
G. Pierse, review of Women of’98, Irish Theological Quarterly, 14 (1919), 380.
See, for instance, Helena Concannon, “The Caritas Socialis in Austria”, Irish Monthly, 51 (1923), 157–64.
Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Margaret Preston, Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy, and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 2004)
Caitriona Clear, “ The Women Cannot be Blamed:’ The Commission on Vocational Organisation, Feminism, and ‘Home-makers’ in Independent Ireland in the 1930s and ‘40s” in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wiehert, eds, Chattel, Servant, or Citizen?: Women’s Status in Church, State, and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), 184
Anne O’Connor and Susan M. Parkes, Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach: Alexandra College and School, 1866–1966 (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1984), 109.
Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic: a Documented Chronicle of the Anglo-Irish and the Partitioning of Ireland, With a Detailed Account of the Period 1916–1923. With a Preface by Eamon de Valera (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937
Dorothy Macardle, Children of Europe (London: Gollancz, 1949)
J.J. Lee, Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 270.
W.J. Jacob, “The Dublin Family of Jacob”, Dublin Historical Record, 3 (1939-40), 134–7.
Leo McCabe, Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen: For and Against Christ (London: Health Cranton, 1937).
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© 2006 Nadia Clare Smith
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Smith, N.C. (2006). Non-Academic Women Historians, 1922–1949. In: A “Manly Study”?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596481_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596481_6
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