Abstract
The preceding chapters demonstrated that the partisan animosities and perceptions that defined pro- and anti-treaty discourses were heavily colored by divergent social outlooks and assumptions, but crucially, that these had more to do with contested measures and notions of status or respectability than with rigid socioeconomic conceptions of class. According to Weberian theory, social status is ‘conditioned as well as expressed through a specific lifestyle’, with lifestyle defined as ‘the totality of cultural practices such as dress, speech, outlook and bodily dispositions’.1 For the historian of so status-conscious a society as early twentieth-century Ireland, this suggests that attention must be paid to a range of quotidian phenomena rarely engaged with by political and military historians, from popular consumption patterns, to material cultural items like clothing, furniture, and housing, to caste and class markers like religion, education, occupation, and political affiliation. The present chapter will continue exploring the ‘politics of respectability’ in the civil war split by turning to the sartorial realm, clothing being arguably ‘the most universal medium whereby people all over the world make statements to claim status, in the widest meaning of the term’.2 In the context of the Irish Civil War, I would go further and argue that, along with its more obvious social status connotations, clothing also carried political meanings, and that the two layers of meaning were, in fact, deeply interwoven.
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Notes
Richard Swedberg (2005) The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts (Stanford, California), p. 269.
Bryan Turner (1988) Status (Minneapolis), p. 66.
Robert Ross (1999) Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870 (Cambridge), p. 85.
Mairead Reynold (1980) Some Irish Fashions and Fabrics c. 1775–1928 (Dublin), p. 3.
Richard Wrigley (2002) The Politics of Appearance: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford).
Thanks to Margaret Doody for the English Civil War example. Ambrose Bierce humorously suggested that hairstyles were what the two sides were actually fighting over. Bierce (1993 edn) The Devil’s Dictionary (New York), p. 110.
Katrina Navickas (2010) ‘“That sash will hang you”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 49, Issue 3 (July), 540–65.
Joshua I. Miller (2007) ‘Black Fashion as a Political Form’, paper delivered at the 65th Annual National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.
See Marta Ramón-García (2010) ‘Square-Toed Boots and Felt Hats: Irish Revolutionaries and the Invasion of Canada, 1848–1871’, Estudios Irlandeses, Issue 5, 81–91. Tom Garvin (2004) ‘Cogadh na nCarad: the Creation of the Irish Political Elite’, in Garvin, Manning, Sinnott (eds) Dissecting Irish Politics: Essays in Honour of Brian Farrell (Dublin), p. 6.
Ernie O’Malley (2013) On Another Man’s Wound (Cork), p. 29.
Senia Pašeta (1999) Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change, and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1922 (Cork), p. 135.
Terence Dooley (2001) The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: a Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860–1960 (Dublin), pp. 10–11, 127. But others have argued that 1000 acres was the minimum necessary for gentry status.
Kim O’Rourke (1990) ‘Descendancy? Meath’s Protestant Gentry’ in Fitzpatrick (ed.) ‘Revolution?’ Ireland1917–1923 (Dublin), pp. 99–100.
Dooley, Decline of the Big House, pp. 110–11. David Fitzpatrick (1998 edn) Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork), pp. 40–1.
William Bulfin (1907) Rambles in Erinn (Dublin), p. 65. O’Rourke, ‘Descendancy? Meath’s Protestant Gentry’.
On the disproportionate social and economic power still wielded by Protestant elites on the eve of the revolution, see F. Campbell (2009) The Irish Establishment 1879–1914 (Oxford), Chapters 1, 5, and Conclusion passim.
Tom Barry (1995 edn) Guerilla Days in Ireland: a Personal Account of the Anglo-Irish War (Boulder, CO), p. 6. Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life, p. 231.
Oliver Coogan (1983) Politics and War in Meath, 1913–23 (Dunshaughlin, Co. Meath), p. 3.
Sinead Joy (2005) The IRA in Kerry 1916–1921 (Cork), p. 13 and Bulfin, Rambles in Erinn, passim.
Andrew Forrest (1999) Worse Could Have Happened: a Boyhood in the Irish Free State 1922–1937 (Dublin), p. 115.
F. X. Martin (1966) ‘The Origins of the Irish Rising of 1916’ in D. Williams (ed.) The Irish Struggle1916–1926 (London), p. 8.
George Birmingham (1914) Irishmen All (Edinburgh), p. 178.
On Pareto and Irish society see Tom Garvin (2005 edn) Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858–1928 (Dublin), p. 40. ‘Ascribed’ versus ‘achieved’ status are the modern sociological terms for this distinction, Turner, Status, p. 4.
Inglis, West Briton, p. 15. On Moran see Patrick Maume (1999) The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (Dublin), p. 59, and Pašeta, Before the Revolution, pp. 39–41, 96–8, 120, 125.
Tony Farmar (1991) Ordinary Lives: Three Generations of Irish Middle Class Experience, 1907, 1932, 1963 (Dublin), pp. 23–4.
Peter Hart (1998) The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford), p. 156.
On distance from work and home as a measure of prestige see George Mosse (1985) Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York), p. 18.
On living above versus away from one’s business premises see C. S. Andrews (2001 edn) Dublin Made Me (Dublin), pp. 5–6. On ‘huckstering’ see Liam O’Flaherty (n.d.) A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland (London), p. 63.
Birmingham, Irishmen All, p. 169. David Fitzpatrick (2003) Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork), p. 31.
Peter Hart (1999) ‘The Social Structure of the Irish Republican Army, 1916–1923’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar.), 226–7.
Liam Kelly (2005) Kiltubrid, County Leitrim: Snapshots of a Rural Parish in the 1890s (Dublin), pp. 48, 52.
Seán Connolly (2001 edn) Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 1780–1845 (Dublin), pp. 103–4.
Frank O’Connor (1961) An Only Child (New York), pp. 32–3. On attitudes towards ‘shawlies’ see Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, pp. 11–12.
Col. Eamon Broy, BMH WS1, 280, p. 49. See also James Stephens (1999 edn) The Insurrection in Dublin: an Eyewitness Account of the Easter Rising, 1916 (Barnes and Noble Books), pp. 30–1.
Diarmaid Ferriter (2004) The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London), p. 151.
Mossie Harnett (J. H. Joy, ed.) (2002) Victory and Woe: the West Limerick Brigade in the War of Independence (Dublin), p. 19.
Macardle (1969 edn) The Irish Republic (London), pp. 211–12.
Seamus O’Connor (1987) Tomorrow Was Another Day: Irreverent Memories of an Irish Rebel Schoolmaster (Dun Laoire, Co. Dublin), p. 43.
On republican hostility towards poppy-wearers, see Fearghal McGarry (2002) Frank Ryan (Dublin), pp. 15–19.
On the Blueshirts’ uniform and clashes with republicans, see Maurice Manning (2006) The Blueshirts (Dublin), pp. 52–7, 114–16, 125–6.
Joost Augusteijn (1996) From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare: the Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence 1916–1921 (Dublin).
Dan Breen (1964 edn) My Fight For Irish Freedom (Tralee), p. 171.
Liam Deasy (1992 edn) Towards Ireland Free: the West Cork Brigade in the War of Independence 1917–1921 (Cork), p. 204. O’Connor, An Only Child, p. 188. O’Malley offers a detailed description of his own ensemble in On Another Man’s Wound, pp. 214–15.
See representative examples in James Durney (2004) The Volunteer: Uniforms, Weapons and History of the Irish Republican Army1913–1997 (Naas, Co. Kildare).
Tom Barry quoted in K. Griffith and T. O’Grady (1999 edn) Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution: an Oral History (Niwot, CO), p. 241.
Peadar O’Donnell observed, ‘city-minded Sinn Féin was darkly suspicious of the wild men on the land’, O’Donnell (1963) There Will Be Another Day (Dublin), p. 19.
Quoted in Richard English (1998) Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual (Oxford), p. 157.
See Morning Post, RIC reports, and other sources quoted in Joy, The IRA in Kerry, pp. 42–3. General Sir N. Macready (1924) Annals of an Active Life, Vol. II (London), pp. 460, 463. 653. Hart, The IRA and its Enemies, pp. 130, 134–9.
T. Ryle Dwyer (2001) Tans, Terrors and Troubles: Kerry’s Real Fighting Story, 1913–1923 (Cork), p. 268.
Ernie O’Malley (2012 edn) The Singing Flame (Cork), p. 186.
Kenneth Reddin (1936) Somewhere to the Sea (Boston and New York), pp. 90–1.
John Regan (1999) The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921–1936: Treatyite Politics and Settlement in Independent Ireland (Dublin), p. 113.
Charles Dalton (1929) With the Dublin Brigade (1917–21) (London), pp. 176–7.
Francis Costello (2003) The Irish Revolution and its Aftermath, 1916–1923: Years of Revolt (Dublin), p. 301.
Peter Hart (2006) Mick: the Real Michael Collins (New York), p. 199.
M. G. Valiulis (1992) Portrait of a Revolutionary: General Richard Mulcahy and the Founding of the Irish State (Dublin), p. 128.
Tom Garvin (1996) 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin), p. 124.
Dan Breen, BMH WS 1763, p. 49. See also Eoin Neeson (1989 edn) The Civil War 1922–23 (Swords, Co. Dublin), p. 162, and O’Connor, Tomorrow Was Another Day, p. 60.
On IRA fighters dressed as workmen, see FSA 22nd Infantry Battalion Intelligence Report for week ending 25 April 1923 RE: ‘“Irregular” activities in Castlerea district’, P 151/200, S. MacEoin Papers, UCDA. On women hiding weapons in clothes, see Younger (1969) Ireland’s Civil War (New York), p. 425.
Peter Carleton in Uinseann Mac Eoin (1980) Survivors (Dublin), pp. 305–6;
Michael Hopkinson (2004 edn) Green against Green: the Irish Civil War (Dublin), p. 137.
On ‘Green-and-Tans’ see C. Markievicz cartoon, ‘Reinforcements for the Free Staters’, in ‘Republican cartoons, CW period’, PD 3076 TX 17, NLI. On origins of the term ‘Black-and-Tans’: Patrick Twohig (1994) Green Tears for Hecuba: Ireland’s Fight for Freedom (Ballincollig, Co. Cork), p. 69. The ‘Black-and-Tans’ tend to be conflated with the Auxiliaries. Apart from differences in operational functions and pay, ‘Tans’ and ‘Auxies’ can often be distinguished by the latter’s distinctive Tam O’Shanters, Younger, Ireland’s Civil War, p. 101. ‘Auxies’ also tended to have better quality leather trench coats and full-length leather boots rather than mere cloth puttees.
J. A. Pinkman (1998) (Francis E. Maguire, ed.) In the Legion of the Vanguard (Boulder, CO), p. 148.
J. R. Hill (ed.) (2003) A New History of Ireland, VII, Ireland 1921–84 (Oxford), p. lxxii.
Eunan O’Halpin (1999) Defending Ireland: the Irish State and its Enemies since 1922 (Oxford), p. 78.
Stephen Collins (1996) The Cosgrave Legacy (Dublin), p. 44.
Andrews (1982) Man of No Property: an Autobiography (Volume Two) (Cork), p. 25 and Dublin Made Me, pp. 328–9.
Joseph Campbell (E. Ní Chuilleanáin, ed.) (2001) ‘As I Was Among the Captives’: Joseph Campbell’s Prison Diary, 1922–1923 (Cork), pp. 83, 95, 80.
T. de Vere White (1967) ‘Social Life in Ireland 1927–1937’, in Francis MacManus (ed.) The Years of the Great Test (Cork), p. 24.
Robert Ross (1990) ‘The Top-Hat in South African History: the Changing Significance of an Article of Material Culture’, Social Dynamics, Vol. 16, No. 1, 90–100.
‘Dublin Theatre Strike’, Voice of Labour, 30 June 1923. Seán Ó Faoláin (1963) Vive Moi! (Boston), p. 259.
D. R. O’Connor Lysaght (1970) The Republic of Ireland: an Hypothesis in Eight Chapters and Two Intermissions (Cork), pp. 82–3.
F. M. L. Thompson (1988) The Rise of Respectable Society: a Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900 (Cambridge), p. 109.
Tom Garvin (2005 edn) The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (Dublin), p. 174.
Liam Skinner (1946) Politicians by Accident (Dublin).
Robert Briscoe (with A. Hatch) (1958) For the Life of Me (Boston), p. 239.
Conor Cruise O’Brien quoted in Paul Bew (2007) Ireland: the Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford), p. 444.
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Foster, G.M. (2015). Social and Political Meanings of Clothing Pre- to Post-Revolution. In: The Irish Civil War and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137425706_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137425706_4
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