1916 (36 page)

1918 proved a watershed for the women’s movement in Ireland. That year women over thirty years with certain property qualifications obtained the parliamentary vote, thereby achieving the primary aim of suffrage groups while removing the one goal common to all. At the same time the vote was also extended to men of twenty one years. The age provision avoided the immediate establishment of a female majority in the electorate, particularly significant in a population depleted by huge troop losses during the Great War. Despite its limitations, the franchise extension created a demand for more female involvement in national affairs. With a forthcoming general election, the
Irish Citizen
reported that women were much in demand as speakers on party platforms, noting the disappearance of posters such as that formerly published by the Irish party reading ‘Public admitted – ladies excluded’.
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The Labour party was the first to nominate a woman candidate (Louie Bennett) for the election, although she did not run.
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Sinn Féin also sought the support of the new women voters, asking Irish women to ‘vote as Mrs Pearse will vote’, promising that ‘as in the past, so in the future the womenfolk of the Gael shall have high place in the councils of a freed Gaelic nation’.
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This is not quite the way things worked out! Even before the election, there were signs that all was not well. At a 1917 Sinn Féin convention, two resolutions were proposed asking that no candidate be selected for any by-election ‘other than a man who took part in the fight of Easter Week’.
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When the precise question of women candidates in the general election was raised, Sinn Féin’s standing committee vacillated as to whether it would be legal. In the event, the party ran only two female candidates – Constance Markievicz in Dublin and Winifred Carney in Belfast – leading the
Irish Citizen
to comment caustically that ‘it looks as if Irishmen (even republicans) need teaching in this matter’.
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Women in fact played a crucial role in this election, both as voters and as party workers, a fact acknowledged by Sinn Féin when they sought ‘a woman speaker’ for their victory celebrations in Pembroke division. Their request to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington in this regard was made ‘in view of the fact that the women voters were the most important factor in our polling district’.
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In addition to the Sinn Féin landslide victory at that election, there was another particularly sweet victory for Irish women. Although she never took her seat, Constance Markievicz became the first female MP elected to the British House of Commons. Commenting on the 1918 election results, the IWFL noted:

Under the new dispensation the majority sex in Ireland has secured one representative. This is the measure of our boasted sex equality. The lesson the election teaches us is that reaction has not died out with the Irish party – and the IWFL, which has been so faithful to feminist ideals, must continue to fight and expose reaction in the future as in the past.
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What was of particular concern to feminists, however, was the fact that, unlike the women of Cumann na dTeachtaire, so few republican women post-1916 held or articulated feminist ideals. In 1917 an article in the
Irish Citizen
highlighted a key weakness in the attitude of many Irish women:

Many of you stand aloof from feminism because of the political movement. But you have not justified your abstention from the women’s struggle by becoming a force within the new movement. You are in revolt against a subjection imposed from without, but you are tacitly acquiescing in a position of inferiority within.

It went on to warn that:

If in the course of time the new national movement becomes wholly masculine and stereotyped … you cannot escape your share of responsibility for such a disastrous state of things. If you leave men alone to carry out the task of national creative endeavour, you will have no right to complain later that there are flaws in construction.
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To the number of women involved in the nationalist movement before and during the Rising of 1916, many thousands more were added in its wake. From this point up to the bitter political divisions caused by the Treaty in 1921–2, such women played a significant role in the development of the emerging state. Whereas many nationalist women active before 1916 held feminist beliefs, opting to put equality demands ‘on hold’ until independence was attained, most of those who joined post-1916 did so primarily on nationalist grounds. Although young women now flocked in their thousands to join the organisation, few articulated feminist concerns. Both Rosamund Jacob and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington were concerned at the ‘lack of feminism among Sinn Fein women in the provinces’.
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Cumann na dTeachtaire can be seen as an attempt by some nationalist women to bring feminism within their political remit. In the aftermath of 1916, with large-scale imprisonment of male republicans, Cumann na mBan took on a more active and aggressive role. Its work on behalf of prisoners’ dependants, and its determined and focused propaganda campaign to keep the memory and ideals of the executed leaders constantly before the public eye, led Brian Farrell to note that in the year after the Rising ‘it was the women who were the national movement’.
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As late as 1919 however, the
Irish Citizen
was still critical of Cumann na mBan’s status within the republican movement:

The women are emphatically not a force in the popular movement – they have no status and no influence in its local councils … and are looked upon rather in the light of an ornamental trimming – useful to give a picturesque touch on occasion and, of course to carry on the traditional role of auxiliaries which so many generations of slave women have been content to accept.
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Margaret Ward has pointed out that while Hanna Sheehy Skeffington joined Sinn Féin in 1918, she did not join Cumann na mBan, believing that ‘it had not shaken off its auxiliary to the men’s status’.
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In the final issue of the
Irish Citizen
in 1920, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington commented: ‘There can be no woman’s paper without a woman’s movement, without earnest and serious-minded women readers and thinkers – and these in Ireland have dwindled perceptively of late.’
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Suffragists had always maintained that possession of the parliamentary vote would give women the power to influence government. That influence – or perhaps fear of that influence – was very real in the early days of the new state. Adult suffrage had been included in the 1916 Proclamation and, in the spirit of that Proclamation, was included in the Irish Free State constitution of 1922, under provisions of which all citizens of twenty one years and upwards were enfranchised. This last phase of franchise extension to women, however, was not attained without a final struggle. During the acrimonious Treaty debates of the Second Dáil in 1921–2, the issue of women’s suffrage received heated discussion. Until the provisions of the proposed constitution became law, only women of thirty years could vote. Both pro- and anti-Treaty sides claimed the support of the majority of Irish women, yet it would appear that, as in 1918 when John Redmond’s party had feared the effect of a new female electorate, now the pro-Treaty side feared the effect of granting adult suffrage to all citizens over twenty one years. The vociferous anti-Treaty reactions of many women within the nationalist movement, including the majority of Cumann na mBan, did little to reassure them in this regard. Ward has pointed out that ‘for feminists, women’s issues were firmly back on the agenda’.
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In March 1922 pro-Treaty women formed an organisation – Cumann na Saoirse (League of Freedom) – to publicise their position. Keen to play a role in the establishment of the new state, the group included many wives and relatives of Free State government members.
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The forceful commitment of women on both sides of the Treaty issue left a bitter legacy for many years. In particular, the role of republican women during the civil war was viewed by Free State supporters as unwomanly, turning them into ‘unlovely, destructive minded, arid begetters of violence’.
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In 1924 P.S. O’Hegarty declared that during the civil war ‘Dublin was full of hysterical women [who] became practically unsexed, their mother’s milk blackened to make gunpowder, their minds working on nothing save hate and blood’. On the other hand he argued:

Left to himself, man is comparatively harmless. He will always exchange smokes and drinks and jokes with his enemy, and he will always pity the ‘poor devil’ and wish that the whole business was over…. It is woman … with her implacability, her bitterness, her hysteria, that makes a devil of him. The suffragettes used to tell us that with women in political power there would be no more war. We know that with women in political power there would be no more peace.
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Were women in political power? From the perspective of one writing of a newly born state in which equality of citizenship was included in the constitution, it may indeed have appeared so. It was not long before the issue was put to the test.

W
OMEN AND THE
I
RISH
F
REE
S
TATE

The equality of rights and opportunities of all citizens guaranteed in the 1916 Proclamation had been endorsed in the Free State constitution of 1922. Yet early hopes that women would play a significant role in the new Ireland were soon quashed as a series of restrictive measures were introduced by government.

The first intimation that was given of such intent came in 1924 when a juries bill was introduced providing for the exemption of women from jury service on application. Women’s groups were alarmed at the proposal to exempt women purely on the grounds of sex, arguing that to allow women to evade the duties and responsibilities of citizenship was ‘unfair to the men citizens and derogatory to the women’. They denounced this ‘retrograde step’ which, they feared, ‘would open the door a little wider to the forces of reaction’.
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Their fears were justified. 1925 saw the introduction of the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) bill, and 1927 a further Juries bill, both designed to curtail the role of women. The former was an attempt to restrict women from entering higher-ranking civil service posts solely on the grounds of sex, while the latter proposed to exempt women completely from jury service.

In the Seanad both Eileen Costello and Jennie Wyse-Power (Cumann na nGaedhael) strongly opposed the Civil Service Regulation (Amendment) bill. In her trenchant opposition to the bill Wyse-Power pointed to the unjustness of this ‘sex discrimination [being] made by a male Executive Council and by practically a male Dáil’ without any consultation with any women.
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Drawing on her long involvement in nationalist politics, she noted the changing response to women’s participation in public affairs, regretting that such a bill had come ‘from the men who were associated in the fight [for freedom] with women when sex and money were not considerations’.

The Juries bill of 1927 provides a keen insight into the attitude of the Free State government towards the participation of women in public life. The Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins’ view was quite clear in articulating separate spheres for men and women. In the Dáil debate he argued that ‘a few words in a constitution do not wipe out the difference between the sexes, either physical or mental or temperamental or emotional’.
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In the Seánad he described women’s reproductive capacity as ‘women performing the normal functions of womanhood in the state’s economy’.
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Consistently in both Dáil and Seánad the government saw no contradiction in taking away from women rights which they already enjoyed under the constitution. Inside and outside parliament, women who demanded the right to jury service became increasingly categorised as ‘abnormal’, with ‘normal’ women being defined as those who accepted that their primary role was within the home. It was argued in the Dáil that:

Between the ages of twenty and forty the majority of women … [have] a much more important duty to perform to the state than service on juries, that their functions were motherhood and looking after their families, and they objected to these other women, who have missed these functions, and who wanted to drive to serve on juries those who have something else to do.
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As a result of the women’s campaign and strong opposition within the Seanad, the government accepted an amendment to the bill which, although exempting women as a class from jury service, allowed individual women to have their names included on jury lists on application. Male ratepayers would be automatically called for jury service, women ratepayers would be eligible but had to volunteer. In this form the bill became law and remained in force until 1976.

These bills did not take place in isolation. Rather, they were introduced against a backdrop of social restrictions implemented during the first fifteen years of the Irish Free State focusing on censorship and control. The legislation of the 1920s regarding women’s role in society was but a foretaste of what would follow during the following decade.

The 1930s saw the introduction of significant social and employment legislation that would impinge on Irish women for some forty years. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 1935 dealt with the age of consent, contraception and prostitution. A significant consequence of the debate on the issues contained in the bill – and of unease at the resulting legislation amongst women’s groups – was the formation in March 1935 of the Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (JCWSSW).
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Women’s employment was the initial focus of legislation during the 1930s. A ban on married female primary school teachers in 1932 was followed six years later with all women teachers being compelled to retire at age sixty rather than sixty five. A similar marriage bar was soon applied to the civil service. Pointing out that this measure was also detrimental to single women, by ruining their promotional prospects, Mary Kettle, a consistent campaigner for the removal or modification of the ban, argued that ‘women from their entry [to the service] until they reach the ages of 45 or 50 are looked on as if they were loitering with intent to commit a felony – the felony in this case being marriage’.
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