Inventing Ireland (56 page)

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, newly widowed, visited the women in Holloway and stepped up her own nationalist activities. The Irish Parliamentary Party MP John Dillon wrote to warn her that the British were now in an ugly mood: "if you are imprisoned again, it may very well be your last adventure". She met this kindly warning with a withering scorn: "I wonder what you would have thought in the old days, when prison was still an 'adventure' to you, if a friend suggested that you retire into private life to save Britain the trouble of assassinating you".
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Zeal such as this was what Cathal Brugha had in mind
when, years later, he recalled that it was the women, in the depressing aftermath of 1916, "who kept the spirit alive, who kept the flame alive and the flag flying".
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Not all of Mrs. Skeffington's witticisms were premeditated. With the
threat by the British to conscript Irishmen into the war effort, she went into overdrive. Her ringing declaration that "the women of Ireland will not tolerate the taking-away by force of their men-kind",
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though it carried a personal poignance, must have occasioned some guffaws among radical feminists who might have been forgiven for seeing in such a policy the chance of a restored Celtic
matriarchy. The vote had finally been given to women over thirty in February of that year, and, despite the fears that it would be used to buttress the
status quo,
the reverse happened. Women voters, united against conscription, helped Sinn Féin to a famous victory; and Constance Markievicz became the first female MP elected to the House of Commons. She would soon become the first Irishwoman in government, as Minister for Labour of Dáil Éireann in 1919.

Throughout 1919 and 1920, women served as Sinn Féin magistrates, shunning the wigs and gowns of the British dispensation. They also spoke out strongly against the constant raids by British forces on republican homes, almost fifty thousand in 1920 alone. Traditional rhetoric concerning "the sanctity of the family" proved a potent resource in such resistance: and some women, moving beyond mere rhetoric to active involvement with the military campaign, were described by one republican ironist as "able to work from the home".
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In this way, few were traced or arrested. Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington toured England, explaining to meetings that the Black-and-Tan campaign was a direct consequence of World War One: "men with shattered nerves" had been sent "to create terror".
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This was a somewhat more charitable construction than other Irish nationalists were putting on events. Speaking at the
Oxford Union, W. B. Yeats said that "not law, but English law, had broken down in Ireland".
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Like Mrs. Skeffington, he supported the
Democratic Programme of the 1919 Dáil, arguing that "Sinn Féin brought justice into his part of Ireland for the first time in centuries". She would probably have endorsed his further comment that "the only complaint against Sinn Féin was that it protected property a little too rigorously". She warned her English audiences, composed mainly of Labourites and feminists, that forces like the Tans might be used in time against their own people, if unemployment and discontent increased.
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When the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was put to Dáil Éireann for
ratification, all six women deputies spoke trenchantly against it. During the long and heart-rending debate, Cumann na mBan attempted to hoist a Union Jack over the building, as a mordant commentary on what was being proposed. The unbending stance of many of the women delegates was put down to the fact that, as bereaved relatives of national martyrs, they were allowing their hearts to rule their heads: but they indignantly denied this, arguing the case on its merits. Speaking in all for more than four and a half hours,
Mary MacSwiney, sister of the
hunger-striking lord mayor of Cork, said she would "have neither hand, act nor part in helping the Irish Free State to carry this nation of ours, this glorious nation that has been betrayed here tonight, into the British Empire". Her performances lived long in the memory of those who witnessed them: one of her interventions took more than two hours. "If England exterminates the men, the women will take their places . . . and if she exterminates the men, women and children of this generation, the blades of grass, dyed with their blood, will rise, like the dragons teeth of old, into armed men and the fight will begin in the next generation". She spoke with unconcealed contempt for what she saw as a compromise: "I ask the Minister of Defence, if that is the type of soldier he has, in heavens name send the women as your officers next time".
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The suggestion that the Treatyites were unmanned touched a raw nerve: one outraged soldier derided Mrs. MacSwiney and her five sister republicans as "women in men's clothing". This was in truth a "dastardly remark", as Constance Markievicz averred in demanding its retraction; but it was one that signalled the end, in practical politics at any rate, of the dream of an androgynous sexuality. Her response was to appeal for justice "to these young women and young girls who took a man's part in the terror".
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Cumann na mBan in a formal statement insisted that its members had "regained for the women of Ireland the rights that belonged to them under the old Gaelic civilization, where sex was no bar to citizenship, and where women were free to devote to the service of their country any talent and capacity with which they were endowed; which rights were stolen from them under English rule, but were guaranteed to them in the Republican Proclamation of Easter Week".
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It was a forlorn hope. At a vast meeting in Cork in 1922, Michael Collins, leader of the pro-Treaty forces, thanked the women for their work, but offered no clear vision of their part in shaping the new Ireland. When Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington went to meet him, she found a man with "a touch of the dictator", whose ideal Ireland was
"a middle-class replica of the English state (certainly not an ancient Gaelic Ireland)". She detected in him "the usual soldier's contempt for civilians, particularly for women, though these had often risked their lives to help him".
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Her campaign to have the franchise extended to women over twenty-one was beaten in the Dáil, in her opinion because the Treatyites feared that most younger women would follow the female deputies in opposing the settlement. During the following year, that decision was reversed and the 1922 Constitution gave women full voting rights, seven years before their sisters in Britain and Northern Ireland: but the inveterate opposition of women deputies to the Treaty had deeper long-term consequences. It prompted the government's propagandists to caricature political
women as "hysterical", a term used by W. B. Yeats as well as by P. S. O'Hegarty: the latter said that "they busied themselves with nothing but the things of death".
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Yet, by a paradox which seems to have escaped O'Hegarty's notice, it was those same republican women – "republicans without malice" as Lady Gregory inventively dubbed them – who made a last-ditch attempt to broker a peace between the two sides as they slipped into a futile Civil War.
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They were not thanked for their efforts. In the hostilities that followed, most of them, perhaps predictably, took the republican side and many found themselves summarily imprisoned by the military courts, which took an even less sentimental line
on the incarceration of women than the British had done during the War of Independence. When they protested against the humiliating conditions in which they were held, they were condemned by
the
Catholic clergy: more than one, in going against the bishops, cited the example of Joan of Arc.
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The young Minister for Justice, Kevin O'Higgins, sounded the familiar notes of male resentment when he derided "hysterical young women who ought to be playing five-fingered exercises or helping their mother with the brasses".
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Joan of Arc was not to be mistaken for Cathleen ní Houlihan.

Through the decades after the Civil War, woman's role was redefined in purely maternal and domestic terms. Though republicans like Kathleen Clarke and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington opposed this tendency, they were now portrayed as cranks in the popular press. The exodus of talented writers and radical
intellectuals from the state left them no more than a peripheral force. Remarkably few women spoke out against the repressive laws introduced in respect of deserted wives, widows' allowances or the rights of unmarried mothers. For a full half-century after political independence in the twenty-six county state, only three women actually served on a jury, so that – in the words of
Mary Robinson – "the assessment of criminality has been an entirely male assessment".
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Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington mocked the underlying thinking: that women should not serve on juries, lest they be compelled to hear evidence that would most definitely not be "nice". She opposed the ban on married women in the professions on the same grounds advanced by W. B. Yeats: that it would discredit the institution of marriage. And, like Yeats, she rather mischievously pointed out that classics of literature, such as
the Bible or
Romeo and Juliet,
might have to be banned under censorship legislation against texts "which excite sexual passion".
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Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the numbers of women at work or active in public life continued to drop sharply.

The rise to power of Fianna Fail in the early 1930s did little to change things. Some more innovative branches of the party fielded female candidates in elections, but all did badly at the polls. "If they are not supported by their own sex", said one politician, "it is difficult to see what we can do".
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When Éamon de Valera came to write his Constitution of 1937, his former comrades of a feminist disposition were outraged at its treatment of women: the man who had rebuffed Cumann na mBan in 1916 had learned nothing in the meantime. In theory, his new Constitution was designed to sever all remaining, degrading connections with the British Empire; in practice, it served to copper-fasten partition and to secure the allegiance to the new state of many whose support, up until that moment, had been conditional. The problem of legitimating the uncertain state structures overrode the concerns of women, and also those of Protestants, intellectuals, artists, northern nationalists and republicans, all of whose
rights were either curtailed or excluded. If the partition of 1921 had ensured a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people in Belfast, its logical corollary was a Catholic Dáil for a Catholic people in Dublin. The very existence of the twenty-six county state suited the conservative elements of the Catholic Church very well, since it permitted the passing of clericalist legislation without a significant debate such as might have been expected in a pluralist republic.

Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, true to form, accosted de Valera. So did the veteran Protestant republican,
Dorothy Macardle. So did the Association of Women Graduates, led by three professors: Mary Hayden,
Agnes O'Farrelly and
Mary Macken. Pointing out that his own Constitution was markedly less liberal in its attitude to women than the Collins Constitution of 1922, they demanded the retention of articles from the earlier document: otherwise women would be treated as "halfwits".
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Even this rather cautious request was refused. Dorothy Macardle
wrote in a letter to de Valera on 21 May 1937: "The real crux is the question of employment. The language of certain clauses suggests that the sate may interfere to a great extent in determining what opportunities should be open or closed to women; there is no chance whatever to counterbalance that suggestion or to safeguard women's rights in that respect".
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A "feeble" attempt during the constitutional debate, to challenge that part of Article 41 which stated that "woman by her life within the home gives the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved" to include also "women outside the home", was easily deflected.
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Dorothy Macardle was uncompromising in outlining the implications: "I do not see how anyone holding advanced views on the rights of women can support it, and that is a tragic dilemma for those who have been loyal and ardent workers in the national cause".
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De Valera was immovable.
Securing the state and its borders was now the major concern of a man who had once fought for a poets' republic but who, in more recent times, had come to regard poets with almost as much distrust as he displayed towards women.

The worst fears of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington had been realized: what was on offer in the new state was – according to her friend, Helena Molony – "a sorry travesty of emancipation".
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The histories of that new state purported to explain how it came into being and, in the process, they omitted anything like a full account of the central part played by women up until the liquidation of the revolution in 1921. The cautious, clericalist nationalism which these histories promoted was "a carefully constructed bulwark against a resurgence of a radical anti-imperialism, that, drawing on the grievances of the artificially-created minority of the north, might fuse with the disappointment of small farmers, women, workers and intellectuals in the south",
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in order to reopen the possibilities of liberation.

Those who continued to raise the unresolved national question, although they were accused by some feminists of distracting attention from bread-and-butter issues, had a point: there may have been a link between the partitioning of Ireland and the curtailment of women's rights as citizens. Had Ireland remained a single political entity, including almost a million and a half Protestants, it would scarcely have been possible for de Valera to take the following sentiments, expressed in a letter from the President of Blackrock College,
John Charles McQuaid, as a basis for his legislation and for his answers to the republican women: "These feminists are very confused. Both
Casti Connubi
and
Quadragesimo Anno
answer them". Men and women had not equal
rights to work of the same kind, said the cleric but "equal rights to
appropriate
work".
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What was seemly for women was to be found in the home.