Twentieth-century Ireland Research Articles

‘Their proper place’: women, work and the marriage bar in independent Ireland, c. 1924–1973

ABSTRACT Until 1973, women in the Irish civil service were legally required to retire from employment after marriage. Certain lower grades were female only, and pay grades were demarked by both marital status and gender. The marriage bar was also observed informally in teaching and in the private sector. For women who remained single, it was difficult and unusual to achieve promotion in most fields. This article explores the complex history of the civil service marriage bar in independent Ireland, and in relation to marriage bars in teaching and certain spheres of private employment. It argues that the Catholic social concept of a ‘family wage’ was central to the prevalence of the marriage bar in twentieth-century Ireland. A single-income household was seen as the ideal, with female workers often viewed by a patriarchal government and religious hierarchy as a threat to male breadwinners. While protest and opposition to the marriage bar was not always widespread, the ‘family wage’ model of employment, although idealized from Irish independence, did not fit with economic reality and the lived experience of many women. Finally, this article highlights female activism associated with the marriage bar, its eventual abrogation, and its problematic legacy for women in Ireland.

THE TRIUMPH OF WOMAN OVER PREDICAMENT IN SEAN O’CASEY’S JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK: A FEMINIST READING

This paper deals with the predicament of women in the narrow-minded Irish society of earlier twentieth century Ireland, the researcher in this paper sheds light on the oppression of women, their sufferings, the malfunctioned society and the mistaken views about the woman. Moreover, the researcher delineates women’s issues in the work environment, exploitation and other domestic pressures and concludes that women can succeed and achieve victory by being unconventional. The play that the researcher has selected for this paper is Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey, the play that offers the best revolutionary examples of the female characters Juno and her daughter Mary. The paper uses feminist criticism for the analysis.

From ‘Opium Smoking Orgies’ to ‘Junkie Babies’: Representations of Heroin-Use in Ireland, 1915-90

ABSTRACT Heroin had a profound impact on Twentieth Century Ireland. This article explores the changing narratives around heroin-use during three phases: 1920–60, when heroin was represented as a distant and exoticised problem; 1960–80, when the first synthetic opiate-users came to public attention, and were depicted them as an imported British problem; and 1980–90 when heroin-users, and the working-class communities that they were assumed to come from, were stigmatised as an existential danger to society. This article argues that these unstable narratives reveal more about the construction of, and anxieties about, Ireland’s discursive self-image, than about heroin-use itself.

Nature as Space: Gender Roles and Subversion in Edna O’Brien’s “A Scandalous Woman”

The rigid social conventions for women in rural twentieth century Ireland, specifically that of the nun and the mother, are illustrated and subsequently subverted by the figures of the scandalous woman and the witch in Edna O’Brien’s short story, “A Scandalous Woman”. Most of the scholarship on this short story and O’Brien’s work in general has been focused on the gender roles in terms of women’s rights. The purpose of this paper, however, is to explore the interrelationship between both the accepted and subversive roles of women, and at the same time demonstrate how social conventions are made subversive by the natural surroundings, outlining both the conventional and subversive nature symbolism which underpins conventional morality. Nature takes on various guises in the story: it has symbolic importance as spiritual sustenance, it has an underlying psychological component, and finally it is present in both erotic and esoteric situations. Spaces are inexorably intertwined with religion and the role of the women in the story, specifically in the context of Eily, the protagonist, and her progression from an innocent girl to a scandalous woman. These connections also serve to illustrate the main character’s progression from innocent girl to scandalous woman in terms of the interactions of gender, nature, and space.

Redefining twentieth century ideals of Irish womanhood: Dorothy Tyrconnell Forrest, Erina Brady, and early Irish modern dance

ABSTRACT This article explores the experiences of two women choreographers working with modernist dance forms in Ireland during the early twentieth century. Through an analysis of reviews, photos, and archival film, I demonstrate how these women navigated the moral panic surrounding modernist dance forms in early-to-mid twentieth century Ireland. I argue that the obstacles these women negotiated were directly related to societal norms and legislation centered on kinesthetic control of women’s bodies and sexuality. These norms resulted in associations of modern styles of dancing with improper sexuality – meaning any sexuality outside the confines of heteronormative married relationships – and suspicion of any dancing that was seen to undermine the ideals of Irish womanhood as a uniquely chaste identity.

Fashion and Faith: Girls and First Holy Communion in Twentieth-Century Ireland (c. 1920–1970)

With a focus on clothing, bodies, and emotions, this article examines girls’ First Holy Communions in twentieth-century Ireland (c. 1920–1970), demonstrating that Irish girls, even at an early age, embraced opportunities to become both the center of attention and central faith actors in their religious communities through the ritual of Communion. A careful study of First Holy Communion, including clothing, reveals the importance of the ritual. The occasion was indicative of much related to Catholic devotional life from independence through Vatican II, including the intersections of popular religion and consumerism, the feminization of devotion, the centrality of the body in Catholicism, and the role that religion played in forming and maintaining family ties, including cross-generational links. First Communion, and especially the material items that accompanied it, initiated Irish girls into a feminized devotional world managed by women and especially mothers. It taught them that purchasing, hospitality, and gift-giving were central responsibilities of adult Catholic women even as it affirmed the bonds between women family members who helped girls prepare for the occasion.

Irish Gymnasts on Tour: The Women’s League and Women’s Exercise in 1940s Ireland

In 1949 the Irish branch of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty travelled to Stockholm, Sweden to take part in the second annual Lingiad Festival. Created the previous decade to celebrate the gymnastic system of Per Henrik Ling established in the early nineteenth-century, the Festival was a multisporting cultural event open to groups from around the world. One such group was the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. Founded in London in 1930 by the Irish-born Mary Bagot Stack, the League marked the decade’s most expansive form of exercise for women. Owing to the League’s Irish connection, the first League branch came to Belfast in 1930 and was followed by a Dublin branch some years later. Open to women across the life cycle, the League was targeted at both the working woman and the stay-at-home mother. Where previous studies have examined the creation of the League in Ireland, this piece focuses on the League’s appearance at the 1949 Lingiad. Despite numerous appeals for government funding, the League was forced to raise its own funds for the trip, a point which rankled many journalists both before and after the tournament. There was an inherent tension in the League’s involvement. On the one hand, it offered new opportunities for female exercise and provided a fillip for further engagement. That withstanding, the ongoing difficulties experienced by the League in actually making it to Lingiad highlighted the secondary, and often forgotten, nature of women’s exercise in Ireland at this time. Using memoirs, film and newspaper articles, the piece positions the League’s Lingiad trip as symbolic of both the advances and restrictions inherent in women’s exercise in mid twentieth-century Ireland.

‘Nobody Will Even Remember It’: An Oral History of the Contribution of the Teaching Religious in Ireland (II)

‘Nobody Will Even Remember It’: An Oral History of the Contribution of the Teaching Religious in Ireland (II)* Brendan Walsh The impact of free education What the experience of working with the religious was like for their lay colleagues between the 1940s and the late 1970s largely depends upon time and place. Bryan MacMahon recalled how in the 1940s and 1950s a Brother would, each year, visit the school ‘seeking postulants’ and ask ‘the children who would like to join our order [to] please come out into the corridor one by one’, adding that ‘invariably some of the happiest rascals in the school’ would ‘relieve the tedium of the school day by volunteering’ for ‘a chat with the august visitor’.1 Yet even MacMahon’s reservations about the religious are qualified. It is ‘the greatest mistake’, he commented, to ‘pass judgement on “then” in the context of “now”’. ‘Superficial’ media commentators and ‘historians of the shallower kinds’ were too often tempted to secure a ‘cheap laugh’ at the expense of ‘the Catholic Church’.2 The reflections of Fr McQuillan of St Columb’s College are pertinent in this regard: ‘[W]e were paid by the State but ... told to keep £120 for the year and the rest we signed over to the Bishop ... [t]his money was used to keep the board and tuition fees very low ... [allowing] the State to save millions...’.3 The religious interviewed here often raised this subject, in particular regarding their role in implementing the free education scheme. Sister Evelyn’s comments are illustrative: ‘I don’t think it could have happened … except for all the work the religious did ... we would have had maybe three first-year classes and all of a sudden there were six but the Department had no idea ... they had no inspector that understood the running of a school and there was nobody in the government that understood it ... I don’t know where the money came from, we had to buy desks and chairs ... I don’t think the department was awake enough to realise the [change]’.4 As enrolment numbers grew after the introduction of free education, Studies • volume 110 • number 438 201 Sister Boniface and a fellow Sister spent summers in the 1970s painting classrooms, recalling that ‘it wasn’t fair on the pupils and teachers’ to have ‘crowded, tatty’ rooms.5 It was ‘very difficult’ to get money from the Department, the ‘nun’s salary went into the school and we hadn’t half enough’. Indeed, writing of the Belvedere Jesuits, Paul Andrews noted that most Catholic secondary schools in nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland ‘were almost all subsidised by a religious community’, adding that ‘money did not enter into the motivation of individual Jesuits ... there was no such thing as looking for … remuneration for work done’.6 Sister R recalled that ‘we were very poor when I entered ... we had nothing, we had a habit and we had to mend it ... until it disappeared ... we never had a penny’. The cost to the religious, the saving to the Exchequer and the history of the transition as it impacted on fee-paying schools has yet to be ascertained. The relationship between the teaching religious and their lay colleagues was influenced by school type, the traditions of the order, the disposition of management, the absence of controversy such as school closures, capacity to adapt to social change and the strength or otherwise of professional relations. A 1968 article by Seán O’Connor, then Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education, reflected the contemporaneous dynamic of transition. Writing in the Jesuit journal Studies of the ‘problem’ of church/state relations ‘in respect to education’ and the position of the lay teacher, he concluded that ‘[n]o one wants to push the Religious out of education ... [b]ut I want them in it as partners, not always as masters’. The article caused intense public debate resulting, for example, in the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch proclaiming that ‘a religious spirit should vivify the whole work of the school’.7 Indeed, responding to O’Connor’s description of the lay teacher in religious schools as ‘always the hired man’, one...

The death of Veronica L.: intellectual disability and statutory welfare in mid twentieth-century Ireland

AbstractVeronica L., a woman with an intellectual disability, died of starvation in 1961 while the recipient of a Disabled Person's Maintenance Allowance (D.P.M.A.) from the Dublin Health Authority. Her death occured after a prolonged period of deficient care, a neglect that was exacerbated by flaws in statutory welfare. During the preceding decade the state intervened in disability provision to an unprecedented degree through the expansion of institutional care and social welfare reform. Yet, these services remained characterised by a chronic pressure on resources and a reluctance to intervene in potentially neglectful family situations, which allowed cases of failing care to go unaddressed. Drawing on contemporary documents, in particular the depositions collected for the coroner's court inquest into Veronica's death, this article offers an insight into the exigencies underlying the later life of one woman with an intellectual disability. In doing so, it explores the way in which this singular case provides a distinctive avenue for better understanding the experiences of the intellectually disabled more broadly, including the nature of community care and the operation of statutory welfare during the mid twentieth century.

Natural Law in Early Twentieth Century Ireland – State (Ryan) v Lennon and its Aftermath

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between natural law and Irish law held by constitutional drafters, academic commentators and judges in the early twentieth century. References to natural law values in interpreting Irish law were not acceptable before 1922 when the entire island of Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. The emergence of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922 did not immediately change this position and natural law was limited to a peripheral position during the drafting of the first Irish Constitution. This article examines how and why the use of natural law by the Irish courts became increasingly acceptable by the middle of the twentieth century. It will also examine the connection between the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State and the 1934 judgment of the Supreme Court in State (Ryan) v Lennon. This provides a new perspective on the judgments delivered in this case and on the origins of the use of natural law in interpreting Irish constitutional law. The article will also examine the legacy of State (Ryan) v Lennon, the position of natural law in the 1937 Irish Constitution and the evolving position of natural law in the decades that followed.

‘Help to win the war’ or ‘Ireland above all’?: Remobilisation, politics, and elite boys’ education in Ireland, 1917–18

AbstractWhile scholars have rightly recognised that the First World War transformed twentieth-century Ireland, this article queries assumptions regarding the scope and scale of public support for hostilities during 1917 and 1918. Eleven elite boys’ schools are used as case studies to assess civilian reactions to the ongoing war effort, food shortages, and the 1918 conscription crisis within specific institutional communities, illuminating the importance of socio-religious affiliations and political aspirations in determining late-war behaviour. Drawing on school magazines and newspaper coverage of college events, it is argued that alternative visions of statehood underpinned divergent reactions to the conflict; Protestant schools clung to fundraising and militaristic activities seen to support continued union with Britain but Catholic establishments rejected such endeavours in the wake of increased separatist sentiment. This research also casts new light on the interplay between conflict, educational socialisation and politicisation in revolutionary Ireland. Constitutional nationalist reputation aside, wartime mobilisation in elite Catholic schools proved extremely lacklustre, while the unionist expectations their Protestant counterparts had for the post-war world ultimately went unfulfilled. Prestigious colleges across the denominational spectrum demonstrably navigated late-war pressures on their own terms, shaping Ireland's political landscape both throughout and beyond the conflict's most contentious years.

The “Haunting Silence”: autobiographical accounts of secondary teaching in twentieth-century Ireland

ABSTRACT This article employs five teacher autobiographies in an attempt to examine their contribution to the history of teaching in Ireland. The article argues that such autobiographies provide significant insights into the history of the classroom and often represent subversive and disruptive narratives. As such they represent a valuable but overlooked source.

Natural Law in Early Twentieth Century Ireland – State (Ryan) v Lennon and its Aftermath

This article examines the perceived and desired relationship between natural law and Irish law held by constitutional drafters, academic commentators and judges in the early twentieth century. References to natural law values in interpreting Irish law were not acceptable before 1922 when the entire island of Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. In this period the concept of natural law was largely championed by the Catholic church but was also used by Irish nationalists to justify calls for independence. The emergence of the self-governing Irish Free State in 1922 did not immediately change this position and natural law was limited to a peripheral position during the drafting of the first Irish Constitution. This article examines how and why the use of natural law by the Irish courts became increasingly acceptable by the middle of the twentieth century. The article will also examine the connection between the drafting of the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State and the 1934 judgment of the Supreme Court in State (Ryan) v Lennon. This provides a new perspective on the judgments delivered in this case and on the origins of the use of natural law in interpreting Irish constitutional law. The article will also examine the legacy of State (Ryan) v Lennon, the position of natural law in the 1937 Irish Constitution and the evolving position of natural law in the decades that followed.

Irish Theatre in the 21st Century

My research examines the staging contexts of these case studies, locating them among the traumatic histories they were drawn from, which centre on women saying, sometimes loudly, and sometimes quietly, #MeToo. However, they said this traditionally in isolated historical contexts, dominated by the overwhelming power of the Irish institutions of church, family, and nation, and without the immediate collective community that one can access online today. For the women depicted in these productions, there was little opportunity to challenge the normalised patterns of abuse they were subjected to as part of conservative ideologies regarding gender, the family, and religion that were inextricably linked to the strong relationship between church and state in twentieth century Ireland.

‘The iron rusted and decayed in our clubs’: the failure of weightlifting in early twentieth-century Ireland

ABSTRACT As a branch of sport history, the historiography of weightlifting lags behind other areas. The field is growing but much work needs to be done on its origins. Seeking to provide some context as to the origins of organised weightlifting in Europe, the following article uses Ireland as an ideal case study. The first two major efforts to form an Irish weightlifting organisation in the 1910s and early 1920s failed owing to a series of material and ideological problems. Exploring this point, the article begins with a discussion of weightlifting as an informal sport in Ireland in the nineteenth century before discussing the failure to establish an Irish weightlifting organisation in the early 1910s and early 1920s. Where one organiser, a Mr. W.A. MacPherson failed owing to a lack of material resources and a poor network of contacts, those following him, like the Irish weightlifter Michael Stokes, were hampered by warfare and political conflict. For historians of sport, a study of Irish weightlifting in this vein reiterates the many factors needed to establish formalised pursuits and serves as a timely reminder of the many barriers facing individual athletes wishing to compete.

Marching Forwards or Backwards? Physical Education and the Army in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

This article examines systems of physical education implemented in Ireland in the period 1890-1939, their origins and underlying messages. The systems used to train children’s bodies were not ideologically neutral but reflected wider societal ideals surrounding health, fitness, warfare and modernity. There is a particular focus on the first decade of the twentieth century when systems of military drill based on British Army practice were brought into Irish classrooms, and also on the 1930s, when the Irish Free State Army and some Irish schools, briefly trialled the Sokol System of Physical Culture from Czechoslovakia. While the motivations for introducing these programmes reflected changed circumstances, the underlying messages spoke to much greater continuities. There is a particular emphasis on the symbolic function of physical education in Ireland in the four decades spanning independence and partition. It was seen as a means of protecting the nation’s health, improving children’s intelligence and as a defence against undesirable aspects of social change.

Construction of Ireland in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Written with Ireland as the setting of the novel, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, brings forth different aspects of the power dynamics that characterised the twentieth century Ireland. It was the ‘age of the empire’ and the different European powers were busy colonising more and more territories. The status of Ireland as both the coloniser as well as the colonised, by the British, is what makes the case of Ireland unique whenever it comes to discussing the ideas of nationalism and colonialism. Joyce in his novel puts forward the unique Irish experience through the life of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who finds himself enmeshed in the political conflicts of the day and struggles his way in his quest for artistic autonomy. Stephen’s uneasiness about the political controversies and his ambivalent stand regarding Irish political leaders can be seen as Joyce’s own rejection of Irish nationalism and his choice for artistic autonomy.

Introduction: religion and political thought in Irish history

ABSTRACT Historians of nineteenth and twentieth century Ireland have often overlooked the role of ideas, preferring instead to focus on socio-economic, political and demographic factors. This is never more pronounced then when religion is addressed, and where the influence of religious thought and theology is often folded neatly away into issues of sectarian division and institutional power. This article introduces a collection of essays that attempt to rectify this issue, by drawing out some of their corresponding features and locating them in shared thematic debates. It sets out the historiographical background and examines Ireland’s tangential position within the wider field of intellectual history. Looking specifically at the ideologically symbiotic relationship between Catholic and republican political thought, it argues that developing forms of neo-Thomism which sought to establish a rights-based defence of individual personality against the perceived incursions of both the market and the state, aligned closely with popular radical and republican notions of economic value and justice in Ireland.

Political and religious ideas during the Irish Revolution

ABSTRACT Intellectual historians have tended to focus either on shifts in sensibility or, more analytically, on the substance and structure of thought. They might usefully, however, examine both, as well as the reciprocal action of the one upon the other. This applies equally to political and religious ideas. In early twentieth-century Ireland, it was the relationship between religion and politics that stirred controversy. How would the institutions of church and state function, respectively, under Home Rule and the Union. Opposing camps advanced competing prognostications. This contest forces us to rethink the claim that revolutionary insurgency in Ireland was a species of ‘political religion’. The evidence points to a more complex picture while at the same time highlighting the persistence of sectarian attitudes in the historiography of the period.

Performing Hospitality in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love

Performing Hospitality in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love Sarah Harsh (bio) For Elizabeth Bowen, the Big House was always a haunted house. Yet this haunting could be a source of comfort. For Bowen and like-minded Anglo-Irish writers, traces of the ancestral past legitimized the Ascendancy's presence in twentieth-century Ireland. In her 1940 essay "The Big House," Bowen welcomed "the indefinite ghosts of the past" who lent a house its history and imposed upon its living residents a sense of purpose.1 Within the walls of Bowen's Court, she argued, "the dead who lived here and pursued the same routine of life in these walls, add something, a sort of order, a reason for living, to every minute and hour." Bowen celebrated how "each house seems to live under its own spell," exuding a sense of mystery. She was so enchanted that she even wanted to share the magic of the Big House with her countrymen. She issued a call for the remaining owners to throw open the doors of their Big Houses. The Big Houses themselves, she claimed, beg to be a part of a modern, inclusive Ireland: "'Can we not,' the big, half-empty rooms seem to ask, 'be as never before, sociable? Cannot we scrap the past, with its bitterness and barriers and all meet, throwing in what we have?'" ("BH" 76). Bowen assumed that her colonial counterparts, the "Irish-Irish" as she called them, would be equally willing to overlook the traumas of history and take similar delight in Ascendancy pleasures. Bowen's open-doors enthusiasm would prove short-lived. In her essay for The Bell, Bowen claimed the Big House was "planned for spacious living—for hospitality above all" ("BH" 73). Yet Bowen was envisioning a very specific form of hospitality bound by Ascendancy conventions and limited to Ascendancy values. The Anglo-Irish, in other words, would entirely dictate the terms of this hospitality. Following her interest in living "life with the lid on," Bowen's version of Anglo-Irish hospitality was one where civility reigned.2 In this social setting, individual opinions are not welcome. "What is fine about the social idea," she wrote, "is that it means the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal" ("BH" 76). This meant that debates about contentious topics, like history and politics, were off the table. Rather, "in the interest [End Page 100] of good manners and good behavior," Bowen claimed, "people learned to subdue their own feelings" ("BH" 76). Bowen's insistence on decorum over emotion precluded the possibility of any meaningful dialogue. Ultimately, Bowen's Anglo-Irish hospitality is a hollow performance that upholds colonial power structures. Big House novels, like Bowen's The Last September and A World of Love, may resist or reaffirm this colonial authority. The latter novel, in particular, reveals an under-studied aspect of the Big House genre: the ways in which the performance of a culturally specific and exclusive type of hospitality reenacts colonial violence. The Big House has long been a prism through which to view the colonial past. Seán Ó Faoláin commissioned Bowen to write "The Big House" for the inaugural issue of The Bell, his magazine intended to offer "a survey of Irish life." In her contribution, Bowen explored her ancestral past while presenting a vision of an inclusive Ireland that fit with The Bell's mission. In newly independent Éire, the team behind The Bell was more interested in bridging the colonial divide than reaffirming tribal loyalties. Ó Faoláin articulated this mission in his introduction to the first volume with language that explicitly invokes Bowen's essay: "Whoever you are then, O Reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House, The Bell is for you."3 In this editorial preface, Ó Faoláin signaled his own shift away from his republican activism and toward an aesthetic production of cultural harmony.4 Ó Faoláin's broad-minded inclusivity in The Bell anticipates by fifty years the revisionist turn in Irish studies scholarship. In the 1990s, as scholars scrutinized the ways in which the Irish canon had been shaped by nationalist narratives, Bowen proved...