Abstract
The thoughts of ‘An Buailtean’ and Eibhlin MacNeill capture the paradox that lies at the heart of this chapter: while the Gaelic League promoted a vision of Irish womanhood that valorized the housewife and mother, the organization gave women the opportunity to engage in public life to a far greater degree than either role would suggest. ‘An Buailtean’ underestimated the impact women had on the running of the Gaelic League at a local, everyday level. Founded in 1893 to revive and promote the Irish language, women were members of the Gaelic League from the outset, joining local language classes, participating in local feiseanna (festivals of Irish music, dancing, poetry and other culturally Irish activities)3, and raising funds to promote the League. Moreover, contrary to An Buailtean’s claims, women did take on leadership roles within the organization, both at national and local levels. Despite her pronouncement, quoted above, that women should largely work for the Gaelic League cause from within the home, Eibhlin MacNeill was herself an example of how women could take an active role in the public life of the League. From Belfast, MacNeill was a member of the Coiste Gnotha from 1905, the League’s national executive committee, and served as secretary of the League’s Ulster College.4 At a local level, women like Rosamond Jacob from Waterford, whose activism is discussed later in this chapter, took an everyday interest in the Gaelic League, joining language classes, helping to organize feiseanna, and sitting on the local branch’s committee.5
The organization methods of the League are very similar to those of other kindred societies and are almost equally prejudicial to the co-operation and assistance of women in our movement. The League organizer is a man; his meetings are attended largely if not exclusively by men; on the branch committees men are usually in a large majority, and the fewness of women in the League councils make them naturally slow in coming in, as all who wish to see them come … The women of Ireland and the Gaelic League have many common concerns — the education of the young, the advancement of industry, of temperance, of the health movement, and the making of free and happy homes. How better might we appeal to the hearts and minds of Irishwomen than by having the gospel preached by one of themselves to her sisters?1
At the outset let me state that I do not for a moment mean to imply that it is women’s province to go about speaking in public or lecturing to others about their duties, while neglecting their own. No! While there is room and even necessity for a few such women, still the woman who does most for her country’s welfare, and the woman whom the Gaelic League wishes to interest in its work is the ‘Woman of the Home’, the ‘bean n’ tighe’, the wife of the merchant, the famer, the artisan, and the labourer — it is in the hands of these women that the future of Ireland rests!2
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Notes
E. MacNeill, ‘The Place of Women in the Irish Revival’, Irish Peasant, 6 January 1906.
For a description of events commonly held at feiseanna see T. G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: the Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 167.
‘The Coiste Gnotha’, ACS, 26 August 1905, p. 8; ‘Notes’, ACS, 31Mar 1905, p. 8. The Gaelic League gave women ‘significant leadership roles’, especially through the Gaelic summer colleges, where women such as Agnes O’Farrelly and Nelly O’Brien were prominent. See T. G. McMahon, ‘“To Mould an Important Body of Shepherds”: the Gaelic Summer Colleges and the Teaching of Irish History’, in L. W. McBride (ed.), Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and Memory in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 135. See also F. A. Biletz, ‘Women and Irish-Ireland: the Domestic Nationalism of Mary Butler’, New Hibernia Review, 6:1 (2002), pp. 59–60.
McMahon, Grand Opportunity, p. 99. For a recent study of how women, as young girls, were inspired by the Irish Fireside Club, a column for children in the Weekly Freeman designed to encourage their involvement in the Gaelic League, see R. Nic Congáil, ‘“Fiction, Amusement, Instruction: the Irish Fireside Club and the Educational Ideology of the Gaelic League’, Éire-Ireland, 44:1 (2009), pp. 102–4.
K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain 1815–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 17–18.
W. P. Ryan, The Pope’s Green Island (London: J. Nisbet, 1912), p. 87.
S. Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Élite, 1879–1922 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999); F. Campbell, The Irish Establishment 1879–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 303.
For the rise of shopkeepers as significant leaders of the community in rural Ireland, see D. S. Lucey, Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: the Case of County Kerry, 1872–86 (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2011), pp. 161–2.
Report of the Gaelic League for the Year Ended 30th September, 1894 (Dublin: Dollard, 1895), p. 12.
Ibid., p. 19, pp. 114–18. Ó Doibhlin argues that Rose Young, one of the leading female Gaelic Leaguers in the Glens of Antrim, was almost certainly a Unionist until her death in 1947. See D. Ó Doibhlin, ‘Womenfolk of the Glens of Antrim and the Irish Language’, Seanchas Ardmhacha, 16:1 (1994), p. 114.
In the context of the suffrage campaigns of the early twentieth century, Jill Liddington writes about the enormous power of the digitized census records of the United Kingdom to rescue ‘forgotten Edwardians’. J. Liddington, Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote (Virago: London, 2006), p. 334.
E. M. S. O’Hanluain, ‘The Progress of the Gaelic League’, New Ireland Review, 34:1 (1910), p. 38.
McMahon, Grand Opportunity, p. 99. Upper-class women also supported the Gaelic League informally, through subscriptions and gifts, such as Lady Desart, who gave considerable help to the branch in Kilkenny. See L. O Bolguidhir, ‘The Early Years of the Gaelic League in Kilkenny’, Old Kilkenny Review, 4 (1992), p. 1022.
For the position of local shopkeepers in rural society, see L. O’Dowd, ‘Town and Country in Irish Ideology’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 13:2 (1987), p. 44.
NLI Ms 24,393, Fionán MacColuim Papers, Letter from Padraig O’Docharthaig, 6 April 1903. On the role of DATI dairy instructresses, see J. Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 96.
D. Urquhart, Women in Ulster Politics 1890–1940: A History Not Yet Told (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), p. 118; M. Hill, Women in Ireland: a Century of Change (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003), p. 54.
M. Luddy, Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: a Documentary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 299.
‘The Gaelic League’, Fáinne an Lae, 25 June 1898, p. 10; P. Rouse, ‘Borthwick, Mariella Norma’, in J. McGuire and J. Quinn (eds), Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a0791, accessed 21 June 2011.
C. Morris, ‘In the Enemy’s Camp: Alice Milligan and Fin de Siècle Belfast’, in N. Allen and A. Kelly (eds), The Cities of Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 63–4; C. Morris, ‘Milligan, Alice Leticia’, in McGuire and Quinn, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://dib.cambridge.org/viewReadPage.do?articleId=a5824, accessed 21 June 2011.
For women’s public speaking in the more politically radical context of the Edwardian suffrage campaign in Britain, see J. Lawrence, ‘Contesting the Male Polity: the Suffragettes and the Politics of Disruption in Edwardian Britain’, in A. Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 201–27.
‘In and Around Baile Atha Cliath’, ACS, 23 November 1907, p. 8. For the issue of Irish language as a compulsory subject for matriculation at the new National University of Ireland, see L. McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 50–86.
A. Bairner, Sport, Nationalism, and Globalization: European and North American Perspectives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 76–7.
N. O’Brien, ‘Gaelic League Colleges’, Irish Times, 19 June 1911, p. 9; McMahon, ‘“To Mould an Important Body of Shepherds”’, p. 127.
L. Lane, Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2010), pp. 29–48.
M. Ní Chinnéide, Máire De Buitléir: Bean Athbheochana (Dublin: Comhar, 1993), p. 1.
Biletz, ‘Women and Irish-Ireland’; K. Steele, Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), pp. 74–5.
G. Meaney, ‘Women’s Writing, 1700–1960’, in A. Bourke et al., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), p. 769.
M. E. L. Butler, Irishwomen and the Home Language (Dublin, n.d.); Half Yearly Magazine of the Gaelic League of London 1904 (n.p.), pp. 18–21; M.E.L. Butler, ‘A Word to the Women’, ACS, 30 May 1903, p. 5.
M. Butler, ‘Women’s World’, ‘The Language of St. Brigid’, Irish Weekly Independent, 21 October 1899, p. 5.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Women’s World’, ‘The Question of the Hour’, Irish Weekly Independent, 27 January 1900, p. 5.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘Irishwomen’s Education’, Irish Weekly Independent, 28 October 1899, p. 5.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘Education — National and Practical’, Irish Weekly Independent, 19 May 1900, p. 5.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘Practical Patriotism’, Irish Weekly Independent, 24 March 1900, p. 5.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent, 24 February 1900, p. 5.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘Power of Influence’, Irish Weekly Independent, 31 March 1900, p. 5.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘A Duty and a Privilege’, Irish Weekly Independent, 26 May 1900, p. 5.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘Prize Competition — Rural Life in Ireland’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 12 January 1901, p. 5.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, ‘Result of Prize Competition’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 9 February 1901, p. 5.
M. Killeen, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 23 February 1901, p. 5.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 18 May 1901, p. 5.
Ibid.
N. F. Degiton, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 6 July 1901, p. 5.
M. Corrigan, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 10 August 1901, p. 5.
E. Ryan, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 20 July 1901, p. 5.
M. Butler, ‘Competition for the Female Readers of “Woman’s World”’, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 23 March 1903, p. 16.
M. Butler, ‘Women’s World’, ‘Our Competition’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 9 May 1903, p. 18.
Ibid.
M. Butler, ‘Another View of Home Life and Domestic Influence’, ‘Woman’s World’, Irish Weekly Independent and Nation, 28 June 1902, p. 6.
The Irish Weekly Independent was owned by William Martin Murphy, a prominent Dublin businessman who was noted for his Home Rule politics and his crushing of the Dublin lock-out in 1913. See P. Maume, The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1999), p. 237.
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MacPherson, D.A.J. (2012). The Gaelic League. In: Women and the Irish Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284587_5
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