Creating a meaningful space for women’s voices to be heard

The difficulties inherent in commemorating the granting of votes for women must be confronted and not elided, says Linda Connolly.

Ireland is now in the throes of the decade of commemorations. A process of collective remembering and reflecting on the tumultuous events that led to the foundation and establishment of the Irish State has ignited public debate and new academic scholarship on the revolutionary period.

The outputs of the first stage in the Government’s Decade of Centenaries programme, 1912-16, have been most impressive.

Access to fascinating historical sources such as the Bureau of Military History files, as well as public engagement projects such as the ‘Women of the South’ Project in the Farmgate Café, in the English Market, in Cork city, have inspired a whole new generation of scholars and generated a new conception of public history.

The second phase of the programme, 1917-22, is, of course, going to be different.

Continued robust debate among the historical establishment, funded documentaries and commissioned articles in the media are to be expected in the coming years given the particularly prominent role history, historians and politics are generally afforded in the public sphere combined with the significance of the Civil War, the War of Independence and Partition in the State’s formation, North and South.

In 2018, it remains to be seen in what manner gender will take centre stage in the commemoration agenda. In February 1918, the British parliament granted the vote to Irish and British women over 30.

But, will this be remembered in a celebratory or in a critical way? Remembering and marking the centenary of votes for women in 2018 is very important, in and of itself.

Events to mark the important contribution of those women who were and are elected representatives, for

instance, have been scheduled by the Government for 2018 as part of the #Votáil100 initiative.

However, the centenary of suffrage also raises many critical questions to do with both understanding the past and the present at a moment of commemoration, not least for women in Ireland.

A number of existing texts written by the historians and scholars of the Irish women’s movement have long catalogued in detail the achievements, difficulties, and legacy of a long campaign fought for women’s right to equal citizenship.

The complexity of how progress was made by the women’s movement on the issue of the vote and in numerous other subsequent campaigns is explicated in great detail in a number of meticulously researched books that have appeared since the 1980s.

Yet women’s academic labour is often eclipsed in the public arena. Ongoing research by Lucy Keaveney, for instance, demonstrates how women’s historians and women’s studies scholars who have typically spent years in archives doing careful research continue to have difficulty getting access to prominent television and radio shows and the national newspapers, for instance.

Women remain vastly underrepresented as media commentators, in general, as Twitter feeds like @ManelWatchIre demonstrate on a daily basis, including in areas where women are manifestly the noted experts.

The implication of this is that careful work conducted by female scholars risks being talked about in the media without credit given for that work.

Professor Diarmaid Ferriter opened the centenary of suffrage by strongly arguing in The Irish Times (December 30) that the Centenary of Votes for women should give women a “high place in the councils” of a free Ireland.

Prominent scholars and writers (mainly women) have, however, been arguing this for some decades now but they have not been heard. Will they be heard in 2018?

Many are also reflecting Mr Ferriter’s sentiment on elevating women to a ‘higher order’ by actively working to generate change and address the glaring underrepresentation of women in senior academic positions in Irish universities.

The percentage of female professors of history in Ireland is, for instance, notoriously low. A survey of the 136 (non-retired) academic staff listed on Irish history department websites reveals that only three out of a total of 23 professors (at the HEA-recognised A and B professor levels) are women.

Some 87% of all professors of history in Irish universities are men. Yet women comprise a third of all the academic staff listed in these departments. Clearly, this is a problem.

Women also remain vastly under- represented in the Dáil and currently suspended Northern Irish Assembly, including at cabinet level, despite the introduction of gender quotas in the

Republic to address a century-long problem of a very low percentage of women in politics.

Assessing the legacy of the vote for Irish women in 2018 should also provide an opportunity to assess the overall performance of the State in this period not least in relation to women’s rights and equal citizenship.

To what extent has the granting of the vote as an unequivocal political act of inclusive citizenship and democracy served, over time, to actually change or systematically improve women’s lives in Ireland?

Why has change been so slow in academia, politics and the media? And will anything concerted be done about this by those in positions of power and authority?

A key task in centennial Ireland in 2018 is therefore to assess and consider the performance of the State and society in the wider 100-year period of the vote for Irish women and the unequal position of women in Irish academia, politics and the media.

A welcome outcome of the decade of centenaries, apart from the generation of burgeoning and exciting new literature on Irish women’s history and the period of revolution more generally, should include the critical reflection it can precipitate about gender issues, equal citizenship, and the kind of society Ireland is and has become in 2018.

The charge that women were relegated to the margins of public life when the Irish State was established in 1922 remains highly relevant in 2018.

As women’s historians and other women’s studies scholars have widely demonstrated, one of the travesties of the post-independence period of nation building was the marginal role the Church and State afforded to women as full and equal citizens in a range of arenas, despite achieving the vote in 1918.

It has been widely demonstrated that (some) women were to varying degrees afforded an active public role in the revolutionary process but women were subsequently more systematically relegated primarily to the private sphere in the decades after Independence.

Article 41.2.3 of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland reflected this by stating that women by their ‘life’ (as opposed to by their ‘work’) “…in the home, give to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved”.

This year will also coincide with an abortion referendum; ongoing condemnation of the State’s treatment of and redress to women widely incarcerated in various Catholic institutions (including Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, including in Tuam and Bessborough); and a proposal to fundamentally revise Article 41.2.3 of the Constitution to reflect more accurately mothers’ present-day role in society, including in the workforce.

Much is also being made of the difficulties that will be posed in commemorating the War of Independence and an Irish Civil War premised on ‘brother against brother’ but ‘sister against sister’ and indeed ‘sister against brother’ also arises.

The memory of civil war and unresolved sectarian conflict runs deep in Ireland and the impact of this on women has been under-researched in a debate that has focused primarily on military men and less on civilian women.

The difficulties inherent in commemorating votes for women in 2018 must be confronted and not elided.

Those in positions of power in academia, the media, and in politics have a real opportunity to create a meaningful space for women’s voice and perspective during this commemoration.

As women’s history demonstrates, many suffrage campaigners in 1918 recognised the significance of achieving the vote but they quickly moved on to a range of other campaigns for women and urgent causes with unrelenting commitment.

The important task of commemorating and remembering the granting of the vote for women, in centennial Ireland, must therefore likewise consider suffragists’ continued desire for change beyond the vote and their unfinished cause, which is patently manifest in contemporary Ireland.

Linda Connolly is professor of sociology at Maynooth University and the author of From Revolution to Devolution: the Irish Women’s Movement. She is currently working on a research project on gender based violence in the Irish revolution.