Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV)

Abstract

Studies • volume 106 • number 422 221 Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV) Sean Brophy Women and the independence movement The narrative of events in the movement to Irish independence is largely concerned with men: poets, soldiers and politicians. This is odd, given that the Fenian manifesto of 1867 and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 espoused gender equality. Moreover, despite the fact that women over thirty only got the right to vote in 1918, many women participated in all phases of the movement. In its cultural phase, the so-called Irish Revival, we encounter the pioneering contribution of the writer and historian Emily Lawless. She wrote on the famines of 1846 and 1847 and the social conditions of rural Ireland in the run up to the first Home Rule Bill. It is arguable that her rhetoric and forensic attention to detail made more impact on William Gladstone than had Daniel O’Connell in his day on Robert Peel. She uses the idea of a Famine road to capture images of a county inspector in Galway picking up 150 bodies of families who had just lain down and died on a single stretch of road. Her prose is heartbreaking: Think of the separate hell gone through by each individual father and mother of all that starving multitude. And when all hope was over, that end that must have been so welcome, because there were none left to live for, think of the lying down to watch the vanishing away of this familiar green landscape in the last grey mists of death.1 Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne Lady Augusta Gregory was another major figure in the Irish Literary Revival who was determined to show her compatriots how they could find their own voice and shed their mask of what O’Connell might have described as cowering people, acting their part as quarrelsome, vulgar, rollicking buffoons to entertain their imperial masters. Her most notable contributions were her play Cathleen Ní Houlihan, first produced in collaboration with WB Yeats in 1902, and the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1905. Gregory blended ideas from the United Irishmen of 1798, the Fenians of Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV) 222 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 1867 and a non-materialist Celtic spirituality in her play, an allegory in which Ireland features as an old woman, who inspires heroic male figures. The first production, with Maud Gonne as the old woman, was a great success. Gonne herself had founded Inighinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900 to raise the consciousness and cultural ideals of young women towards complete independence of Ireland. As early as 1902 we see that the seeds of revolution were being sown by her and Lady Gregory. Cathleen Ní Houlihan represents the Irish nation. The character Michael questions her about what hope she has to hold on to and she replies, ‘The hope of getting my beautiful fields back again: the hope of putting the strangers out of my house’. How will she do that? Michael, who epitomises the young men who will eventually fight in the failed Rising of 1916 and what followed, asked. The Old Woman speaks of ‘the good friends who will help me’. Now she must go to meet them. ‘I will go with you’, Michael says.2 Kathleen Lynn Almost 100 women served alongside the men during the Easter Rising, in medical, catering and military roles. Some went on to participate in the political phase that followed. Kathleen Lynn, for example, was active in the women’s suffrage movement and the 1913 labour troubles. She was chief medical officer to the Irish CitizenArmy at the time of the Rising and secondin -command to Sean Connolly of the garrison in City Hall. She took over command after he was shot and led her volunteers until they were ordered to surrender. After the Rising she was jailed in England and, on her return home, became vice-president of the executive of Sinn Féin and was elected a Sinn Féin TD in 1923 but did not take her seat because of her opposition to the Treaty. Aside from politics, she...