Women in Irish Society since 1800

Three distinct trajectories of change can be traced in the lives of women in Ireland over these two centuries. The first and most important area of change, as far as numbers were concerned, is the shifting relationship of women to the house as a site of unpaid or paid work. The second area encompasses the occupational and educational changes that began in the early nineteenth century. The third relates to women's involvement in movements for political change, including the feminist movement. All of these areas were interrelated, but for clarity's sake an attempt will be made here to deal with them separately.

Women, House, and Home

The sharp decline of the home-based textile industry after 1815 all over Europe left families bereft of an important source of income, however small. It was only in geographically contained industrial areas of Europe—the midlands and north of England, northeastern Ireland, the industrialized areas of France, the low countries, and parts of modern-day Italy and Germany—that factory work replaced home-based work for women. The devastating vulnerability of Irish women and men to famine in the late 1840s was an extreme version of the malnutrition and underemployment all over Europe in that decade. The Great Famine grimly removed the poorest and most vulnerable 10 percent of the population, including a good percentage of the women who had depended on textile earnings. The only way that famine changed the lives of women who survived it was by convincing them that home-based textile earnings were, in most of the country, gone for good.

On big and on small farms women did farm work as well as housework, and a holding of forty or fifty acres needed a family of at least six children to work it effectively. Because of rising levels of literacy and politicization, the postfamine decades brought expectations of a higher standard of living. For many people these could be fulfilled only by emigration. All of Europe supplied emigrants to North America and Australia; what was unusual about Ireland was the comparatively high proportion of young, single women emigrants, traveling alone or with their peers. More women than men emigrated from the midlands and the west of the country; elsewhere the numbers were about equal. Whether these women were independent, forward-looking individuals forging their own destinies, or lonely involuntary exiles who were of more use to their families when working abroad than when idle at home, their freedom of movement and ability to act outside of parental and paternal supervision should be noted. The same freedom-within-family contributed to the high rate of permanent celibacy (outside of the religious life) among women in Ireland until the 1960s. Rates of permanent celibacy were highest in the prosperous agricultural areas. Dowried women of the well-to-do agricultural class might not have been free to chose their own mates, but they could reject those chosen for them, even though this meant living the rest of their lives with their parents or siblings.

The developments in household technology that occurred in rural and small-town areas from the 1880s and 1890s—better-built fires with cranes for pots, mantelpieces, chimneys, flagged rather than earthen floors—were partly made possible by the easing of population pressure on small holdings and by remittances from abroad. In the 1890s also, the Congested Districts Board and some local authorities began to build solid, slated houses for laborers and small farmers. In independent Ireland the next significant housing development was the construction, in the 1930s, of approximately 12,000 local-authority houses a year in an attempt to clear the slums. Over half of all dwellings in the Republic in 1946, however, were without piped water and electricity, and only 12 percent of rural dwellings were thus equipped in 1961. Nor was it until the 1950s and 1960s that all the inhabitants of the notorious disease-ridden tenements of Dublin and lanes of Cork and Limerick were given proper housing—at this stage defined as two- or three-bedroom houses with gardens and indoor plumbing and electricity. Such new dwellings made women's work immeasurably easier, with no water to carry in and dispose of, beds that did not have to be cleared away every day, lines upon which to hang washing, and flush toilets. In the north of Ireland the standard of working-class housing was generally somewhat better in nineteenth-century urban areas, where the "two-up, two-down" terraced house with a tap and a privy in the yard was the norm, though in rural areas the situation resembled that in the rest of the country. The sectarian housing policy of the Northern Ireland state was challenged by members of the civil-rights movement and other groups from the early 1970s.

For middle-class people in towns and cities piped water, gas, and later, electricity, were introduced in the early years of the twentieth century. Middle-class women, moreover, had their burden of housework eased by the ready availability of girls and women to toil for long hours at low pay, which they did, until the 1940s. Domestic service was, in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe, the default occupation for women from laboring and small-farming backgrounds. Pay was low, but the conditions of work varied widely and it is impossible to generalize, other than to comment that while women fled this occupation in other European countries after the First World War, they abandoned it in Ireland from about 1940, when the wartime economy in Britain provided plenty of comparatively well-paid and well-regarded work. As late as the 1950s some middle-class people were still lamenting their departure and hoping that a new generation of women could be trained up in their place. This never happened; all women's expectations were rising in Ireland in these years, and the women who would formerly have been domestic servants were no exception.

The 1940s also saw the beginning of another wave of emigration, especially among women, this time to Britain and the plentiful, comparatively well-paid work and training available there after the war. The census occupational figures chart the first gradual, then accelerated, departure of women from "assisting relative" status in agriculture from 1926 onwards, and especially after World War II. If the postfamine female emigrants had emigrated to send money home, these women were emigrating for themselves, though their departure was heartily welcomed by young married women in Ireland who were increasingly reluctant to share living space with single sisters or sisters-in-law. To suggest that women were emigrating because they were "rejected" as marriage partners by Irish men ignores the evidence to the contrary. Every source from the 1950s confirms, with some alarm, the reluctance of Irish women to marry in Ireland. Women who were used to financial independence in white-collar or industrial or commercial work did not want to surrender it, as they were forced to do, on marriage.

Women's health in pregnancy and childbirth saw some improvement toward the end of the nineteenth century with the introduction of district nursing associations and public-health organizations such as the Women's National Health Association (1904) and the United Irishwomen (1911, later the Irish Countrywomen's Association). Maternal mortality fell whenever there was an appreciable rise in income and easing of financial pressure, together with trained midwives rather than doctors. The care given by the untrained handy-woman varied widely in quality, but it was often, up until the 1940s, the only care available to rural women in particular. Women in the cities had maternity hospitals whose services they could call on. The introduction of the National Health Service in Britain and Northern Ireland immediately after the war, and the implementation of a free-for-all maternity and infant-care system in the Republic in 1953, caused maternal and infant mortality to fall definitively all over the island and brought about a definitive improvement in women's health. This change also led to greater freedom from domesticity for single women, who were not called upon as often to rear motherless nieces, nephews, and siblings. Family size in both the Republic and Northern Ireland remained large by European standards until the 1970s, and the childbearing and infant-rearing work of a mother could span twenty years.

The subordination of women in Irish rural life is an oft-told tale. Yet the farm woman had until the 1960s a source of independent income unmatched in an urban setting: egg and butter money. Furthermore, because of the typical age difference between farmers and their brides, many a farm woman enjoyed a long and extremely powerful widowhood. The power of the widow (not only as farmer, but as shopkeeper, too) often oppressed younger women and men. The election to Dáil Éireann of widows, sisters, and daughters of dead male politicians shows both the strength of women's personalities at the local level and the considerable social authority of the older woman in Irish life. Women who married in the early 1950s increasingly rejected such authority, insisting upon living apart from the older generation if at all possible.

The social and economic changes from the 1960s to the 1990s narrowed the lifestyle gap between urban and rural women. The changes in agriculture that took place after Ireland's entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 also eased women's workload on the farm and made life on small farms easier. The proliferation of cars reduced rural isolation and facilitated off-farm employment.

In general, the greater availability of office and industrial work for women and the lifting of the marriage bar in the public service in 1973 slowed down emigration and contributed to a rise in the marriage rate. It was only when women in Ireland had a realistic prospect of paid work (within their own homes, in farms and businesses, or outside them) that they embraced domestic life heartily and in large numbers.

Education and Paid Work

The most important educational reform over these two centuries was the establishment of the National Board of Education in 1831. Making state money available to provide free primary education for boys and girls not only enabled parents to send daughters to school at no cost, but also provided employment opportunities as teachers for women of the nonpropertied classes. Girls' school attendance over the course of the nineteenth century gradually overtook that of boys, particularly in rural districts and urban areas of low female employment. By 1900 over half of all National teachers were women. Prior to the introduction of compulsory education in 1892, girls' attendance was highest in areas with low female employment, and lowest in the northeast, where the mill and the factory beckoned, and there was much home-based garment and textile work.

Nuns owed their rapid expansion in part to government support of the non-fee-paying schools they ran, 75 percent of which were affiliated to the National Board by 1850. Female religious vocations soared in public esteem in nineteenth-century Ireland and remained a very popular life choice for Catholic women in the Republic and Northern Ireland until the 1970s. It gave women training, authority, challenging and often innovative work, and a high social status, apart altogether from the immeasureable spiritual dimension. The vast majority of nuns worked with poor girls in schools of various kinds. This schooling was vocational and practical. There is little evidence for the oft-asserted claim that nuns "socialised" girls for "domesticity" either in fee-paying or in free schools. If they tried to do so, then they made a bad job of it, as many girls and women fled "domesticity" whenever other opportunities—the religious life included—presented themselves. (Nor were Irish women at any time during this period noted for their proficiency in the domestic arts, though it is difficult to credit the perceptions of observers with fixed ideas about the Irish, or about women, or about working-class people.) Nuns must receive part of the credit for the high female attendance at National schools, as they actively sought female pupils long before 1892.

Credit for advances in higher-level education, however, must go to Protestant women and the fee-paying schools that they set up in the 1860s in Dublin and Belfast. These colleges trained girls in the classics and mathematics, and their existence ultimately led to girls being admitted on equal terms with boys to the Intermediate school-leaving examination when it was established in 1878. It was after this that fee-paying convent schools began to prepare girls for the Intermediate examination, and in some cases, like the Protestant schools, to arrange for university extension lectures. Women began to take university degrees in Ireland in the 1880s. Until 1948 in Northern Ireland and 1966 in the Republic, however, secondary education for boys or for girls was limited to those lucky few whose parents could afford to pay for them, or who were clever and determined enough to win scholarships, or who lived near one of the few free secondary schools run by religious orders. Despite all of these obstacles, there was a steadily rising number of girls finishing secondary school from the 1940s. The university education of both sexes began to rise in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, when the first generation of university-educated working-class Catholics would form the civil-rights movement at the end of that decade. The 1970s saw university education take firm hold in the rest of Ireland. Since the 1970s female attendance at university and admission to the professions has soared.

Girls schools of all denominations, fee-paying and free, began to prepare girls also for the new "white-blouse" work opening up in the 1890s in post offices, offices in general, and the public service. Nursing also developed as a very respectable profession around this time, attracting women from a broad range of social backgrounds and subjecting them to rigorous training in work with a strong female identity. While academics and professional women might have been the leaders, it was teachers, nurses, and office and factory workers who made up the rank-and-file membership of the various political and cultural movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Women's trade unionization was slow, not only because of the problems that always beset it—hostility from male trade unionists and a vulnerable work-force—but also because in the only geographical area of Ireland where women worked in industry in sufficiently large numbers—the north and northeast—workers' loyalties were crosscut by sectarian tensions. Nevertheless, some advances were made in the 1890s among textile workers, and there were some women in the new trade unions of the early twentieth century, north and south.

The early years of the Free State saw an increase in the numbers of women in factory and office work and a greater visibility of women in the public sphere. Women's working rights were systematically attacked in the 1920s and 1930s. In the Free State married women were barred from public-service employment by the end of the 1920s and from National School teaching in 1932. Employment legislation in 1936 barred women from working in certain kinds of industries and from night work. The 1940s and 1950s yielded a female landscape laid bare by emigration and economic decline, but big changes were happening unnoticed. Adult women were fleeing what had hitherto been their two most common occupations, the land and domestic service, and more girls were remaining in school. The economic and social development of the 1960s made jobs for women available in commercial, industrial, and office work; women were also admitted to the Garda Síochána (the police force), and later, in the 1980s, to the Defence Forces.

Politics and Organization

Women were granted fully equal citizenship in the Irish Free State Constitution of 1922, years ahead of their counterparts in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Switzerland, and many other European countries. In France at this time, though women did not have the vote, they enjoyed very extensive rights in the workplace, including paid maternity leave. In Ireland the situation was the reverse—top-heavy with political equality, and with a small but very vocal and highly respected group of women in public life, but the women's organizations that existed were small and few, and they could do little or nothing to protect women workers.

Women's involvement in Irish politics began in the late 1870s and early 1880s when the land movement mobilized men and women throughout the country, and women played a key role in land agitation—resisting evictions and boycotting businesses and neighbors—up to 1903. The short-lived Ladies' Land League, founded in 1881 to take over the running of the movement while the male leaders were in prison, showed women for the first time in a leadership role in a nationalist movement. Longer-lasting women's nationalist movements were formed in the early twentieth century, though already the most lively and active of the cultural-revival organizations, the Gaelic League (founded in 1893), was admitting men and women as equal members. Cumann na mBan, the female auxiliary wing of the Irish Volunteers, was founded on a countrywide basis in 1914 and had branches throughout the country. The much smaller, Dublin-based Irish Citizen Army was already accepting men and women as equal combatants. The Proclamation of the Provisional Republican Government in the 1916 Rising addressed men and women as equal citizens and promised equal citizenship. In the north of Ireland more women than men signed the Solemn League and Covenant against Home Rule in 1912. Though the Solemn League and Covenant made no mention of gender equality, and though there was no female equivalent of Cumann na mBan in the Ulster Volunteers, the Ulster Women's Unionist Council, founded in 1911, had an average membership of about 60,000 and contained women of all classes. In 1898 women with property were given the local government franchise and allowed to sit on county councils, urban district councils, town and corporations. There had already been women Poor Law guardians since 1896, so by 1914 women—usually middle-class women, of all religions—were becoming familiar figures of authority on committees and in official capacities.

The Irish suffrage movement had begun in the 1870s as a small pressure group composed of women of mainly unionist sympathies. It was not until the early twentieth century that it grew in numbers, attracted nationalist women as well (who soon became the majority), and developed a militant wing. Surprisingly, the suffrage movement did not immediately founder on the rocks of unionist/nationalist divisions, but it was swallowed up by the more pressing political loyalties of the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1918 a new law granted the parliamentary vote to all men over twenty-one years old, and to women over thirty with certain property qualifications. The fact that the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons was Constance Markievicz, a Sinn Féin member, seems to indicate that nationalist revolutionaries were committed to gender equality. Many were not, however, as the actions of former revolutionaries anxious to dilute women's citizenship and to attack their working rights in the Free State show. Still, at the very least women were elected to and sat in both houses of the Oireachtas from 1922. This was in contrast to the Northern Ireland state, where, despite the strength of their organization and their considerable power at the local government level, unionist women were discouraged from standing for parliamentary elections in these years.

Yet women politicians in the Free State and Republic, even if they were respected as individuals, were ignored when they paid attention to women's issues. Overwhelmingly Catholic, they did not consider the banning of contraception in 1929 and 1936 to be a feminist issue, and they were unable to do anything about the removal of women from jury service in 1927, the attacks on working women mentioned above, and the association of women with domesticity in Eamon de Valera's constitution of 1937. A small group of former suffragists, which became known in the 1940s as the Irish Housewives' Association, kept a watching brief on citizenship issues, and they campaigned, as did all feminists in Europe in these years, for better maternal and child welfare and on consumer issues. The Joint Committee of Women's Societies and Social Workers agitated for, among other things, a children's court and women gardaí (police). Feminism might have been moribund in the 1950s and 1960s, but the Irish Country-women's Assocation (in the Republic and in Northern Ireland) saw a big increase in its membership over these decades, showing a new ability and willingness by women to get out of the house and to organize. It was partly pressure from this organization that led to the founding of the Council for the Status of Women in 1973, though the high-profile, Dublin-based Women's Liberation Movement of the early 1970s certainly helped. Over the succeeding decades, feminists gave high priority to the redefinition of women's legal and social relationship to the family, their access to economic resources, and their rights in the workplace and in education. Groups such as Irishwomen United (1975–1977), AIM (1972), the Women's Political Association, Irish Feminist Information, Cherish (a lobby group for single mothers), rape crisis centers, and others kept women's issues in the public view. Women won the right to retain public service work on marriage. They also secured separate welfare payments, several legal breakthroughs with regard to family law, children's allowances payable to mothers rather than to fathers, and access to contraception, divorce, and paid maternity leave.

SEE ALSO Equal Economic Rights for Women in Independent Ireland; Equal Rights in Northern Ireland; Farming Families; Social Change since 1922; Women and Work since the Mid-Nineteenth Century; Primary Documents: From the Report of the Commission on the Status of Women (1972); From the Decision of the Supreme Court in McGee v. the Attorney General and the Revenue Commissioners (1973); On the Family Planning Bill (20 February 1974)

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Caitriona Clear