Irish Women and the Great War by Fionnuala Walsh

Abstract

Practioners of Irish history have often been criticized for ignoring or lagging behind wider historiographical trends and developments. Happily, this perception does not apply to Walsh’s new monograph on Irish women’s experience of World War I. Her work engages with international scholarship relating to cultural, comparative, and gender history and challenges the insularity and partisanship that continue to dog the historiography of Ireland’s revolutionary period (1913–1923). Walsh describes her book as focusing “on the nation-state through a transnational framework.” She argues persuasively that public interest in World War I and its impact on Ireland has grown steadily since the 1980s. The once pervasive “amnesia” and “aphasia” in relation to Irish involvement in the British war effort has seriously diminished. In line with increasing numbers of Irish historians, Walsh characterizes World War I as an integral part of the Irish experience in the Edwardian period and a crucial context for understanding the political upheavals that took place.This impressive study, grounded in extensive archival research, is primarily concerned with exploring the “everyday life” of Irish women of all classes and backgrounds across the island. Each of the monograph’s six chapters deal with a different theme— mobilization; family, welfare, and domestic life; social morality; and politicization and demobilization. Walsh employs traditional primary sources, contemporary journals, newspapers, statistics, and census material in combination with “ego documents” like diaries, memoirs, letters, and contemporary fiction (written mainly by middle- and upper-class women). This strategy allows her to analyze and document overall characteristics and patterns of behavior as well as private, personal, subjective experience. Walsh explores the conflict’s contradictory impact on the lives of Irish women and paints a nuanced picture of their involvement in the war effort.In both Britain and Ireland, the war provided new opportunities for women to engage in public life and paid employment. Greater state intervention in the form of price controls, allowances, and relief efforts was accompanied by widespread surveillance of, and concern about, their public conduct. Women’s lives were changed irrevocably by their experiences, but the conflict ultimately reinforced dominant gender norms relegating them to the domestic sphere. Walsh’s research shows that Irish women were afforded comparatively fewer “ancillary benefits” associated with active support for the British war effort while still experiencing much of the war’s hardship. Nonetheless, popular support in Ireland was remarkably high, involving more women than either the suffrage or radical nationalist campaigns. It continued throughout the conflict despite the worsening political situation after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, a short-lived, unsuccessful revolt by radical nationalists. Ultimately, however, John Redmond’s and other Irish constitutional nationalists’ support for Britain in the war did not achieve its goal of uniting the unionists and nationalists. The conflict further entrenched, rather than bridged, existing divides between Protestants and Catholics and between Ulster and southern unionists. The government paid “separation allowances” to the wives of men serving in the British military during the War. These working-class “separation” women and radical nationalists were also at odds.Walsh’s analysis does not cross wider interdisciplinary boundaries, but it does draw freely from a range of approaches within the discipline of history. It is firmly rooted in the deeply empirical “new” Irish history engendered by the opening of archives in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, her focus on subjective, individual experience engages with the cultural and linguistic turns in international historiography. Her wide-ranging, careful research is a welcome addition to the growing canon of Irish studies of World War I. Overall, her book confirms Igger’s recent, hopeful conclusions regarding twentieth-century historiography in the twenty-first century: “There is no dominant model of historical studies today, and that is good.”1