Sources and Resources for the Study of Irish Women's History

Abstract

Despite—or perhaps because of—the longstanding Irish tradition of personifying the nation as woman (Cathleen ni Houlihan or the Sean Bhean Bhocht), the history of real Irish women has received tittle scholarly attention until relatively recent times. In this respect Irish women have shared the double invisibitity of other colonized women, their experiences etided first into those of their Engtish overlords and secondly into those of Irish men. The interest in EngUsh women's history generated by the late Vidorian and Edwardian campaign for women's suffrage found no paraUel across the Irish Sea, even though, as Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O'Dowd point out in their exceUent introduction to Women in Early Modern Ireland, the early twentieth century was a time when Irish women historians received greater recognition and status than they have ever done since (p. 1). Mary Hayden and Mary Donovan O'Sultivan were the first professors of history at University CoUege, Dublin, and University CoUege, Galway, appointed in 1911 and 1914 respectively. Like their subsequent colleagues Constantia MaxweU, Alice Stopford Green, Eleanor Knott, and Ada Longfield, Hayden and O'Sultivan did pioneering research in Irish sodal and economic history which occasionaUy touched on the role of women in sodety, but none diose to explore the topic in any depth (p. 1). After partition the Irish historical profession became increasingly the preserve of men whose research shifted away from sodal and economic topics to poUtical ones. Women, already marginalized as subjeds of study, were also marginalized as scholars. In the 1970s these trends began to be reversed by the Irish women's movement and the concomitant revival, within the Irish historical profession, of interest in sodal and economic issues. The three volumes under review testify to the extent and variety of research into Irish women's