Ariadne’s Thread: Writing Women into Irish History (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ariadne’s Thread: Writing Women into Irish History Margaret Preston Ariadne’s Thread: Writing Women into Irish History by Margaret Mac Curtain, pp. 400. Galway: Arlen House, 2008. Distributed by Syracuse University Press. $34.95 (paper). Margaret Mac Curtain’s Ariadne’s Thread allows the author’s many devotees not only to have her choicest essays in one collection, but also to see the progression of an intellectual career. Irish women’s history and literature are the common themes that tie these essays together, but, taken as a whole, the volume displays Mac Curtain’s range as a scholar, with chapters that span from Early Modern Ireland to the present day. This capstone of an academic career challenges all scholars to be willing to move beyond their narrow research interests, and to push the limits of intellectual discourse. In introducing the collection, Maureen Murphy offers an insightful biographical essay. There are some surprises here—who else among us can claim that we turned down an opportunity to study with J. R. R. Tolkein, which Mac Curtain did in 1949 when Tolkein invited her to study medieval literature with him at Oxford? A Dominican sister for more than fifty years, Mac Curtain has been an extraordinary, not to say unconventional, nun; in 1964 she successfully refused to give Archbishop McQuaid her lecture notes for her course on the Counter-Reformation, on the grounds of academic freedom. Later, Mac Curtain would win an injunction against her employer, University College Dublin, which sought to reassign her classes arbitrarily when she became prioress of her community; and in the late 1990s the Irish Times would call her a “maverick nun” because of her support of the “Right to Remarry Campaign.” Mac Curtain’s intellectual career has often been spent seeking to break the traditional ties that sought to bind her to her position as solely an Early Modern historian. Given her activism, some readers might have preferred the book’s cover present the image, described in Murphy’s foreword, of Mac Curtain in her Dominican habit standing on a table addressing students in sympathy of their [End Page 140] rights. But the cover art is Leo Whelan’s famous 1926 painting The Kitchen Window, which shows a young woman at a kitchen window in a domestic scene in which everything is highly proscribed. Mac Curtain explains that, just as Ireland was facing great uncertainty having earned its position as a Free State, so too were Irish women looking out at an uncertain future in a world that, for them, would not be especially liberating. Gender Studies, and in particular Women’s Studies, were not warmly welcomed by Ireland’s academic community, though this is admittedly not unique to Ireland. Mac Curtain also explains her title; “Ariadne’s thread,” which Theseus used to lead him out of the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur, is a metaphor for the struggle experienced by the women’s history project as it sought to find recognition from the scholarly community. It was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that women’s history in Ireland began in earnest, but Mac Curtain had been making the case for the discipline much earlier. In 1978, Mac Curtain and Donncha Ó Corráin published Women in Irish Society, to which she contributed a major essay on Irish women’s participation in the suffrage movement and in the Easter Rising. One remarkable dimension of this early essay is how little evidence Mac Curtain had to work with, while supplying a groundbreaking piece of scholarship nonetheless. Mac Curtain continued to lead the charge to pursue sources, including nontraditional ones, that allow women’s history to be integrated into Ireland’s history. As Ariadne’s Thread follows Mac Curtain’s career, the essays reflect her understanding of the important changes that Irish society, and particularly Irish women, were experiencing as prosperity improved and the Catholic church’s influence diminished. In the late 1980s—as Ireland haltingly struggled out from under years of economic hardship and church domination of nearly every aspect of Irish life—a series of events occurred that seemed to reflect the confusion and uncertainty felt by many. In 1985, a...