NADIA CLARE SMITH. A "Manly Study"? Irish Women Historians, 1868-1949. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. Pp. vi, 216. $69.95

Abstract

Nadia Clare Smith's book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on women's historical writing, offering a painstaking and carefully researched survey of Irish women historians through a series of case studies. It exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of such a methodology. While it offers a more detailed coverage of the research field pioneered by Mary O'Dowd and Jennifer Ridden, Smith has to work hard to produce an integrated overview. Much of the unity of the book is achieved through her focus on exploring her subjects' careers and publications within the context of developments in specifically Irish historiography and politics: she is more interested in them as historians of their country, than as either women historians or historians of women. But that is the direction in which scholarship on women historians and women's historical writing is increasingly turning. Smith takes us on a fascinating journey which begins with late nineteenth-century Unionist historians such as Mary Agnes Hickson, who intervened in the debate between J. A. Froude and W. E. H. Lecky on the 1641 depositions, the main historical source for the Ulster Rebellion of that year, by producing Ireland in the Seventeenth Century (1884), “an inversion of partisan Catholic histories” (p. 18). She then introduces us to nationalist historians of the same period, notably Alice Stopford Green, whose work challenged Unionist representations of the medieval Irish as barbarians in need of English civilization and colonization. The portrait of the politically engaged Green—who supported the War of Independence (1919–1921) and the new Irish Free State, being subsequently elected as a senator—is succeeded by chapters on early twentieth-century academic historians in the National University of Ireland (such as Mary Hayden and Sile Ni Chinneide, largely republican and politically active individuals) and Trinity College, Dublin (such as the moderate southern unionist, Constantia Maxwell). Drawing on Bonnie G. Smith's perceptive analysis of the impact of disciplinary professionalization on academic career opportunities for women, Smith suggests how the emergence of a “scientific” school of Irish historical studies in the 1930s under R. Dudley Edwards and T. W. Moody served to marginalize or exclude women. Accordingly, in chapter five, she charts the role of nonacademic women historians in the mid-twentieth century, such as the socialist and feminist republican historian, Rosamond Jacob, author of The Rise of the United Irishmen (1937), which won but an “ambivalent” review from Edwards (p. 145).