A women’s movement

Renegades: Irish Republican Women 1900-1922

Prior to the formation of the Gaelic League the social system did not allow single women to mix in company with men without a chaperone.

In an interesting and insightful study of the role of republican women in Irish society during the years leading up to independence, Ann Matthews throws a broad new light on events and convincingly challenges some of the myths surrounding a number of the more prominent personalities.

The real role of the women is often misunderstood because the movement engaged in the “misleading iconography of the women republicans” — especially Maud Gonne MacBride and Countess Constance de Markievicz.

Maud Gonne was an English woman who spent only a very short part of her young life in Ireland. She claimed that she founded Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Ireland), but this was untrue. Her autobiography “was a self-aggrandising fantasy” in the opinion of Ann Mathews, who went on to describe the book as “a masterpiece of self-deception”.

Although highly critical of Countess de Markievicz — whom some characterised as “the Cracked Madam” — Matthews does seriously question the prosecutor William Wylie’s depiction of her in the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion. “She curled up completely,” Wylie wrote.

“I am only a woman,” she said. “You cannot shoot a woman.”

“She never stopped moaning while she was in the courtroom,” Wylie said. “I think we all felt slightly disgusted. She had been preaching death and glory, die for country, etc, and yet she was literally crawling. I will not say any more it revolts me still.”

Most of the women who took part in the rebellion were promptly released afterwards. The widows, sisters, and mothers of the men who were executed initially played a major role in keeping the flame of rebellion alive, by focussing public attention and sympathy on the families left behind.

Tom Clarke’s widow was left with three sons between six and 12 years of age. James Connolly left five children, the youngest of whom was 15, while Thomas Mallin left a pregnant wife and five children, the eldest of whom was only 12. All told the executed men and the 75 Volunteers killed in the rebellion left 67 children under the age of 16.

The women also engaged in a high-profile campaign against venereal disease, which they associated with men returning from the Great War.

Syphilis had been “unknown in Ireland outside of British military centres,” they said. Artane was full of war babies and some of them were “syphilitic infants,” said Maud Gonne. She and others engaged in a reprehensible campaign.

“The women became very concerned with motherless infants in various workhouses and those boarded in the community with families,” according to the author.

“Effectively they labelled all children born outside marriage with the disease, as well as those infants boarded out from the workhouses and those residents in the workhouses and orphanages.” They depicted those infants as “a terrible danger to the families who receive them”.

Although women were afraid to walk the road in rural areas in 1920 and 1921 “because the Black and Tans were out for drink and women”, there was no suggestion that they ever raped any Irish women.

Of course, any women who complained that she had been raped was likely to be branded as syphilitic.

Such ignorance not only forced those women to suffer in silence, but also exposed all women to the ravages of Black and Tans.

Picture: FANTASY REVOLUTIONARY: Maud Gonne — according to Ann Matthews her autobiography “was a self-aggrandising fantasy” and “a masterpiece of self-deception”.