Commemorating Women's Histories during the Irish Decade of Centenaries

Abstract

Commemorating Women's Histories during the Irish Decade of Centenaries Mary McAuliffe (bio) In 2016 the Irish state marked the centenary of the Easter Rising with exhibitions, parades, projects, new heritage sites, and readings of the 1916 Proclamation in every primary school in the country. During the same year another commemoration was marked by a multidisciplinary, interinstitutional conference at UCD and NUI Galway. 1916: HOME: 2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of the closing of the last Magdalen laundry in Ireland. Scholars, artists, and activists gathered to consider "the history of the state since 1916 and the ways in which the ideals of the 1916 Rising were betrayed by the realities of the state and in particular by the treatment of, and attitudes to, women's bodies over the course of the last one hundred years."1 The event created spaces that enabled reflections on the histories of what remain, even now, largely invisible lives. Marginalized in most histories of the state, the accounts of institutionalized women and their children were central to 1916: HOME: 2016. In her keynote speech memory-studies scholar Marianne Hirsch spoke of her interest in seeing how, on her visit to Dublin, the Irish state would commemorate 1916. She felt that while many exhibitions "interrogating aspects of a foundational, if complex and contested, past [did exist] … , [the] official reckoning failed to reach more troubling aspects of the Irish past."2 This article focuses on the relative success of demands for the inclusion of women's histories in commemorative events over the [End Page 237] Decade of Centenaries (2012–23). It analyzes how this development has transformed both the commemorative landscape and how we write histories of the Irish revolutionary period. It also questions the contribution of commemoration to our understanding of other, more troubling aspects of Irish women's history. To what extent has it led to a broader inclusion of inconvenient female bodies in modern Irish history, shedding further light on the physical, emotional, sexual, obstetric, and institutional violence done to women both in the revolutionary period and in the postrevolutionary Irish state? Fintan O'Toole, cultural commentator and journalist, has written that "the successful occlusion of some of the darkest aspects of Irish life" that have allowed us ignore the evidence of those histories remains a facet of our national understanding of ourselves. "Those lies," he wrote, "are toxic."3 The toxicity of those darker aspects of modern Irish history continues, I would argue, to confound commemorative practices in twenty-first-century Ireland. Cultural-memory scholars Jan and Aleida Assmann have outlined the differences between "communicative" and "cultural" memory. Communicative memory is transmitted in embodied form "from grandparents to children and grandchildren" across a century at most prior to its institutionalization "in archives, museums, memorials, and ritual commemorations." This cultural memory, however, is also shaped by political and ideological concerns and, as I argue here, gendered hierarchies of importance. Who, what, why, and how we choose to commemorate remain contested and influenced by societal, political, cultural, class, and gender demands. It is this institutionalized memorialization of the Rising that struck Hirsh on her visit to Dublin in October 2016. She noted that many of the 2016 exhibitions and memorials that she visited institutionalize "memory in complex ways that serve present-day national interests." Consequently, there were very obvious occlusions in "official" memory; occlusions, particularly, of troubling aspects of the recent Irish past.4 [End Page 238] The question here is why the Decade of Centenaries was characterized by such shortcomings? Contemporary politics influence how we "do" commemoration, who we remember, and why—as well as what—we commemorate. The "capitalist confidence borne" of the Celtic Tiger era allowed, as Oona Frawley notes, cultural imperatives to shift "toward narratives of success and achievement, while simultaneously feeling a newfound freedom to address far more grim, buried moments of the past."5 The latter reflected in no small way the impact of a revitalized feminist movement, contemporary concerns about violence against women stemming from campaigns such as #MeToo, and the ongoing revelations of the specifically gendered nature of violence of institutionalization in Magdalen laundries and Mother and Baby institutions.6 At the same time a...