Abstract
This chapter examines how women in the rural reform movement responded to the idea that their domestic role could form the basis of an Irish identity. The United Irishwomen, founded in 1910 as the female division of the IAOS, argued that women’s domesticity provided them with the knowledge and experience to engage in the public sphere; the home, far from limiting women, gave them justification for intervening in Irish public life. The construction of these ideas was not simply the preserve of men such as AE or Horace Plunkett, examined in the previous chapter. On the contrary, women’s involvement in debates over domesticity and identity was significant, and this chapter addresses women’s contributions within the co-operative movement to the construction of an Irish identity centred on women’s role in the home. The United Irishwomen focused on improving the lives of the rural poor, providing its largely middle-class membership with a role in public life and a position from which to contribute to debate about Irish identity. By engaging in practical, daily work in their own homes, or helping other women to improve theirs, the United Irishwomen created a ‘banal’ sense of Irish identity rooted in everyday life. The United Irishwomen’s work in providing a cheap milk supply or campaigning to brighten Irish homes focused their public activism on women’s day-to-day lives. This kind of activism, while based on domesticity, promoted women’s agency in public life, especially in local government and Poor Law Guardian work, and should be seen as part of the more immediate, ‘community sphere’, in which Irish women played a key role.1
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Notes
L. Earner-Byrne, ‘“Aphrodite Rising from the Waves”? Women’s Voluntary Activism and the Women’s Movement in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in E. Breitenbach and P. Thane (eds), Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (London: Continuum, 2010); K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain 1815–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 17–18.
Quoted in A. Heverin, The Irish Countrywomen’s Association: a History 1910–2000 (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000), p. 53.
S. McNamara, Those Intrepid United Irishwomen: Pioneers of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (Limerick, 1995), p. 19.
Ibid.
E. Pilkington, ‘An Irish Guild of Countrywomen’, Irish Homestead, 9 April 1910, p. 291.
Ibid., p. 294.
The United Irishwomen, The Society of the United Irishwomen. Annual Report 1912 (Wexford, 1913), p. 2.
D. Ferriter, Mothers, Maidens and Myths: A History of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (Dublin: FAS, 1995), p. 3.
J. Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 239.
K.F. Purdon, ‘The United Irishwomen’, The Englishwoman, 40:120 (1918), p. 110.
Ibid.
See Higgs’ work for extensive discussion of how occupational classifications can be used to establish socioeconomic class, along with the many pitfalls of such an approach. E. Higgs, A Clearer Sense of the Census: the Victorian Censuses and Historical Research (London: HMSO, 1996), pp. 134–8 and ‘The Linguistic Construction of Social and Medical Categories in the Work of the English General Register Office, 1837–1950’, in S. Szreter, H. Sholkamy and A. Dharmalingam (eds), Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 86–106.
Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery, pp. 26–7. The debate about the utility of the census for establishing female occupations in Ireland is summarized in M. Luddy, ‘Women and Work in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ireland: An Overview’, in B. Whelan (ed.), Women and Paid Work in Ireland, 1500–1930 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 44–57.
For the largely middle-class status of Protestant women who were engaged in associational activity, see O. Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin: Philanthropy, Politics and Education in the Early Twentieth Century (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), p. 42.
L. A. Clarkson L. Kennedy, E. M. Crawford and M. W. Dowling, Database of Irish Historical Statistics: Occupations, 1831–1911 (Colchester, 1997).
Ibid. Only 770 women fell into the ‘Schoolmistress, Assistant’ occupational category in the 1911 Census.
E. C. Paterson, ‘Crafting a National Identity: The Dun Emer Guild, 1902–1908’, in E.A Taylor FitzSimon and J. H. Murphy (eds), The Irish Revival Reappraised (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 106–18; K. and C. Ó Céirín, Women of Ireland: a Biographic Dictionary (Kinvara: Tír Eolas, 1996), p. 199.
Census of Ireland, Dublin 1911, http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai000139102/, accessed 20 June 2011. For suffrage organizations’ campaign against the 1911 Census, see J. Liddington and E. Crawford, ‘“Women Do Not Count, Neither Shall They be Counted”: Suffrage, Citizenship and the Battle for the 1911 Census’, History Workshop Journal, 71:1 (2011), pp. 98–127.
F. Clarke, ‘Bennett, Louisa (“Louie”)’, in J. McGuire and J. Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a0581, accessed 20 June 2011. Recent work on female suffrage campaigners in Ireland has stressed the interconnection of different women’s and Irish revival groups and how individuals accommodated tensions between them. See L. Lane, ‘Rosamond Jacob: Nationalism and Suffrage’, in L. Ryan and M. Ward (eds), Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), p. 17.
Female occupations were heavily under-enumerated in the 1911 Census. See Luddy ‘Women and Work’, p. 45. According to the Agricultural Census of 1912, women comprised almost a quarter of the work force on Irish farms. See M. E. Daly, Women and Work in Ireland (Dundalk: Dundalgen Press, 1997), p. 22.
F. Campbell, The Irish Establishment 1879–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Ibid., p. 17; for Eulalia Berridge, see Census of Ireland 1911, http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/reels/nai002373400/, accessed 20 June 2011.
C. Wills, ‘Women, Domesticity and the Family: Recent Feminist Work in Irish Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies, 15:1 (2001), p. 55.
For a comparable analysis of Catholic middle-class strength in the case of the Gaelic League, see T. G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: the Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 103.
H. Plunkett, E. Pilkington and G. W. Russell (AE), The United Irishwomen: Their Place, Work and Ideals (Dublin: Maunsel, 1911).
Quoted in Pat Bolger (ed.), And See Her Beauty Shining There. The Story of the Irish Countrywomen (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1986), p. 9.
J. Vernon, ‘The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: the Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain’, American Historical Review, 110:3 (2005), pp. 693–725; P. Atkins, ‘School Milk in Britain, 1900–1934’, Journal of Policy History, 19:4 (2007), pp. 418–9; A. H. Ferguson, L. T. Weaver and M. Nicolson, ‘The Glasgow Corporation Milk Depot 1904–1910 and its Role in Infant Welfare: An End or a Means?’, Social History of Medicine, 19:3 (2006), p. 446.
M. P. Ryan, ‘Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), p. 264.
United Irishwomen, Leaflet for Branches (Wexford: The People Printing Works, 1913), p. 2.
V. Crossman, Politics, Pauperism and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 183–216.
L. Mayhall, ‘Household and Market in Suffragette Discourse, 1903–14’, The European Legacy, 6:2 (2001), p. 194.
H. Pyle, Red-Headed Rebel: Susan L. Mitchell, Poet and Mystic of the Irish Cultural Renaissance (Dublin: The Woodfield Press, 1998), p. 134.
For Cousins, see C. Candy, ‘Margaret Cousins (1878–1954)’, in M. Cullen and M. Luddy (eds), Female Activists: Irish Women and Change 1900–1960 (Dublin: Woodfield Press, 2001), pp. 113–41.
On the political nature of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, see G. Scott, ‘“As a War-Horse to the Beat of Drums”: Representations of Working-Class Femininity in the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War’, in E. J. Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 196–219.
M. Spring Rice, ‘Diary of the Asgard, 1–26 July 1914’, in F.X. Martin (ed.), The Howth Gun-Running and the Kilcoole Gun-Running (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1964), pp. 79–80, 95.
P. J. Mathews, Revival: the Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003).
N. Gubbins-Hurley, ‘Irishwomen Waking Up’, Irish Homestead, 25 February 1911, p. 157.
A. Milligan, ‘Work for United Irishwomen’, Irish Homestead, 18 March 1911, pp. 218–19.
S. Brady, ‘Home and Away: the Gaelic Games, Gender, and Migration’, New Hibernia Review, 11:3 (2007), p. 34.
For a brief discussion of camogie in Britain see J.M. Bradley, ‘The Gaelic Athletic Association and the Irish Diaspora in Scotland, 1897–1947’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 16:3 (1999), p. 141.
For the Irish Housewives’ Association, see C. Clear, Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland 1922–1961 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000) and Earner-Byrne, ‘“Aphrodite Rising from the Waves”?’.
M. Smitley, The Feminine Public Sphere: Middle-Class Women and Civic Life in Scotland, c. 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
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© 2012 D. A. J. MacPherson
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MacPherson, D.A.J. (2012). The United Irishwomen. In: Women and the Irish Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284587_4
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