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Women in the Irish Free State, 1922-39: The Interaction Between Economics and Ideology
Mary E. Daly
Journal of Women's History
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 6, Number 4 / Volume 7, Number 1, Winter/Spring 1995
pp. 99-116
10.1353/jowh.2010.0392
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The primary focus of scholars writing about modern Irish history has
been directed toward the pohtical sphere, most particularly toward
the origins of Irish nationalism and the creation of the Irish state. Despite
professing an awareness of the need to widen the range of historical
scholarship,1 women's history has shown some tendency to faU into a
similar trap. In part this reflects the fact that Irish scholars working on
women's history foUowed a path similar to other countries, and concen-
trated on the history of the suffrage movement.2 In Ireland, as in Britain,
this movement peaked in the second decade of the twentieth century,
coinciding with the major landmarks in the emergence of modern Ireland:
the Home Rule crisis of 1912-14, the 1916 Rising, and the Anglo-Irish War
of 1919-21. Women were by no means inactive in the campaign for Irish
independence, and the interaction between feminism and nationalism
and, more specifically, between the suffrage movement and the struggle
for independence has been the subject of considerable analysis.3 From the
apparently dizzy heights of this revolutionary period the women's move-
ment in Ireland appears to have undergone a major decline in the indepen-
dent Irish Free State. The small number of women deputies in the DaU
(Parhament) owed their election to kinship with dead nationalist heroes
rather than to independent pohtical credentials,4 and most descriptions of
women's hves in independent Ireland provide a dreary litany of legislative
and administrative restrictions on women's rights: legislation banning
divorce and access to contraception, restrictions on women's jury service
and on the employment of married women—a pattern which is seen as
culminating in the 1937 Constitution with its emphasis on the role of
women in the home.5

The sense of anticlimax concerning the woman question in the 1920s
and 1930s and the need for a major reorientation is not unique to Ireland
but was found in many other western countries, particularly those like
Ireland, which had successfuUy achieved women's suffrage in the imme-
diate aftermath of World War I.6 The apparent faUure of Irish feminism to
reestabhsh itself as a pohtical force after independence reflects the preoc-
cupation of a newly independent state with questions of national identity
such as its relations with Britain and the fact that most pohtical leaders
until the 1960s were drawn from men active in the movement for national
independence. Many of the women who had been prominent in the inde-pendence movement continued to support the republican cause, refusingto recognize the legitimacy of the new state and abstaining from any
participation in DaU Eireann (the Irish parliament). However given their
prioritizing of repubhcanism over aU other issues it is unclear that their
inclusion in the democratic process would have brought about a stronger
feminist presence in Irish pohtical life during these years.7

Yet there is a danger that concentrating on the pohtical narrative may
provide a somewhat distorted picture of the history of Irish women,
particularly given the tendency to distinguish between the apparently
upbeat experiences of the years prior to 1922 and the correspondingly
negative account of women's experience in post-independence Ireland.
The women who were active in the suffrage movement were a smaU, elite
minority, and the extent to which the suffrage campaign impinged on the
wider female population remains unclear. Although the women's republi-
can movement, Cumann na mBan, attracted a much wider membership, it
should not be assumed that aU participants were particularly conscious of
women's rights. Many were the sisters, wives, and lovers of active repub-
lican men; thefr involvement in the struggle for independence was heavüy
circumscribed by traditional gender roles with a strong focus on nursing,
first-aid, courier services, and washing the socks of male activists.8

There is, consequently, a danger that the freedom and status accorded
to Irish women in the early years of the twentieth century have been
exagerated and that in turn the repressive nature of the new Irish state may
also have been overstated. More importantly, the primacy given to pohti-
cal change and to the culture and ideology of the independent Irish state
tends to detract attention from the influence of economic factors on the
hves of Irish women. WhUe issues such as contraception, divorce, jury
service, restrictions on married women working in government employ-
ment, or the inclusion of a clause in the 1937 Constitution recognizing the
support provided to the State by the life of Irish women "vrithin the
home"9 have been seen by Irish feminists in recent times as circumscribing
the role of women, there is a danger that the history of Irish women in the
early years of the state may be unduly dominated by matters which
loomed larger in women's hves in the 1980s than they did in the twenties,
with consequential neglect of questions which were of major concern to
earher generations. Divorce, available prior to 1924 only by means of a
private bul introduced into the British Parliament,10 was an expensive
option accessible only to a wealthy minority—irrespective of rehgious
prohibitions—and does not appear to have been regarded as a feminist
issue at that time; opposition to the clauses relating to women in the 1937
Constitution was confined to a smaU group of feminists who were mostly
university graduates.11 The restrictions imposed on access to information