"Uncharitable Tongues": Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

Abstract

"Uncharitable Tongues": Womenand Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Cara Delay In 1914 the Catholic priest of Rosmuck, County Galway, reported on the status of his parish to Bishop Thomas O'Dea. He described a general state of peace, with one notable exception: "[wjomen," he explained, "sometimes say uncharitable things."1 One year later, another Galway priest informed his bishop that, although the parish could boast of having few problems or abuses, "some women of the parish have uncharitable tongues."2 Like the Galway priests, Irish legal authorities of the time also commented on the strange and troubling phenomenon of sharp-tongued women. In August 1911, one magis trate expressed his frustration when yet another case of abusive lan guage appeared in his court: "It is a strange thing that we never have a man here charged with that offence," he said. "It is all women ... I am sorry to say... that are charged."3 Indeed, just as Ireland's priests and bishops mulled over the problem, the secular courts busily pros ecuted thousands of women for abusive and threatening language. Priests' and magistrates' concerns testify that authorities, both colonial and Catholic, viewed verbally abusive women as a problem in early twentieth-century Ireland. On the one hand, such fears did reflect realities: many Irish women used their words to police each other, navigate community conflicts, and assert themselves within families and kin groups. As they scolded and defamed, such women, who were mostly poor or working class, followed well-established FeministStudies39, no. 3. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 628 Cara Delay 629 local traditions. On the other hand, anxieties about women with "uncharitable tongues" took on greater meaning from 1900-1915, a key time in Ireland's nation-building process. By the dawn of the new century, the nation was closely tied to the ideal of silent, peace ful, and benignly influential Catholic womanhood. Rural, Catholic, Gaelic Ireland—increasingly defined as the "real" Ireland—relied on a depiction of women as private and domestic.4 The wife and mother emerged as the nurturer of the family, poised to civilize men and children, in this Catholic and nationalist creation. As women's stud ies scholar Ursula Barry reminds us, women were constructed at the heart of Ireland, as "the standard bearers, the holders of the cul ture, the representatives" of the nation's soul.5 By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Catholic discourse, which was deeply implicated in nation-building, fashioned Irish women as not only essentially private but also, in the words of Jesuit W. J. Lockington, "low-voiced."6 Women's "uncharitable tongues" presented a vocal, vis ible challenge to the ideal of modern Irish womanhood and thus to the emerging Catholic nation. In this article, I examine the ways in which poor Irish women in the early twentieth century used their voices to denounce and abuse their neighbors and kin. I assess the ensuing public distur bances and the responses that such disturbances provoked. After situating women's words and language, including gossip and scold ing, in a larger historical context, I focus on southern and western Irish women who were summoned to court for the criminal charge of abusive and threatening language during these years. My analy sis here draws on the records of the petty sessions courts, the lowest level of courts in Britain and Ireland, which dealt mostly with minor offenses. The charge of "abusive or threatening language," which was almost always leveled against women, reminds us of the ways in which women, by denouncing and cursing their neighbors, used their words to deliberate effect. My emphasis on Ireland's southern and western counties, and particularly Galway and Kerry, allows us to assess how poor women far away from significant urban centers interacted with each other and their communities. It also allows us to examine the disconnects between gender ideals and the realities of women's lives in the part of Ireland—the rural heartland—that con temporary commentators constructed as the "real" Ireland.7 630 Cara Delay I argue here that, although poor women were in fact using their words to regulate each other's behavior, newspapers and courts paid...