Republicans and Widows: Women's Political Participation and Representation in Ireland, 1918-1973

Abstract

This paper examines the gendering of the early Irish party system and women’s political roles during the first fifty years of Irish independence. McNamara and Mooney (2000) identify two phases of women’s participation over this period: ‘Republican Women’ and a ‘Vote for the Widow’. The research draws on these themes but offers a more extensive and critical analysis of women’s participation as party members, candidates and representatives until the 1970s, when spaces for female descriptive representation began to open up. Older institutions carry on the gendered practices associated with their establishment. Norms around gender roles ‘stick’ and prove difficult to shift, even in modernising societies. Thus, to fully understand women’s continued underrepresentation in Irish politics, we must appreciate the wider gendered histories of party organisations and political institutions (Galligan & Wilford, 1999; McGing, 2014).The paper has a number of sections. First, the role of women in Ireland’s suffragist and nationalist campaigns is examined and the tensions that would emerge between the two, often overlapping movements, analysed. The second section looks at the gendered establishment of the Irish Free State. It finds that though women had come to expect a place at the table for state-building, they found themselves virtually excluded from public life. The 1920s and 1930s were a conservative period in Ireland and women’s citizenship rights suffered a roll-back. As the third section shows, the consequences of this gender regime were seen for half a century as female seat-holding in the Dail remained in single digits. Of the small numbers of women TDs elected up until the 1970s, there was a near-persistent pattern in their routes to office – most were relatives of deceased male TDs, mainly widows. Reflecting the now-entrenched disposition towards men in power, women relied on their connections to well-known local males to be elected. This was also an era in which women’s activism in parties was mainly confined to supportive roles.