Sisters in Arms: Ireland, Gender and Militarisation, 1914–1918

Abstract

Remembering the 1914–18 War has a complex and contentious history in Ireland. Recent scholarship has re-examined the complexity of the Irish experience during this period, both by addressing the place of Irishmen in the Allied Forces and by retrieving the contribution of women towards the formation of the Irish Free State. However, the reinstatement of the female experience within the nationalist narrative has overlooked other female experiences of wartime in Ireland which were significantly different from those of their British counterparts. This essay examines an aspect of the ‘Home Front’ in Ireland when women's involvement in war industries, particularly in the Dublin munitions factories, are seen as crucial to the European war effort. Though the revolutionary, armed female volunteer is recognisably a figure of modernity, the female munitions worker, operating within the technological machinery of warfare, is also one. This essay explores the mobilization of women within the Irish war industries and suggests that there is still much work to be done in uncovering the extent of Irishwomen's contribution to the military war effort. Considering the complexities and contradictions of these parallel frameworks for modern Irish womanhood, this essay addresses how the Irish case adds important new dimensions to our understanding of the war's wide-ranging impacts on concepts of gender and the public roles of women that continue to resonate as the twentieth century unfolds.