Gender and Sexuality in Ireland

By John Gibney

The history of sexuality in Ireland remains relatively understudied when compared with the more well-worn paths of political and military history, but that is not to say that it has never been considered. Now, in the fourth installment of the 'Irish perspectives' collaboration between Pen and Sword and History Ireland, a range of experts explore Irish history from the perspective of the broad concept of sexuality, in both theory and practice.

From the legalities that defined gender roles in the middle ages and early modern periods, to women’s role in political life and civil society, Gender and Sexuality in Ireland provides a comprehensive overview of the nation's understanding and relationship with sexuality and patriarchy. Population change, prostitution, incarceration, infanticide, abortion and homophobia are all considered alongside attempts to impose - and ignore - Catholic morality in independent Ireland.

Struggles for women’s rights and reproductive rights, the culture wars of the 1980s, and Irish people simply trying to have good sex lives, the essays gathered here cast light on aspects of Ireland's past that are often overlooked in more mainstream narratives of Irish history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526736802

Book preview

Introduction

John Gibney

In 1966, on the Irish broadcaster RTÉ’s iconic Late Late Show , a newly married Irish woman admitted on live TV to not wearing a nightdress on her honeymoon. This prompted a good deal of public fulmination, most famously the declaration by one parliamentarian, Oliver J. Flanagan, that sex had only come to Ireland since RTÉ, the state TV station, had been established. Often misquoted as ‘no sex in Ireland before the Late Late Show’ , the furore can be taken as symbolising a particular form of attitudes towards sexuality in independent Ireland.

Of course, if Flanagan had been right, there would hardly have been an Irish public to be offended. There can be no human history without sexuality, though there has been plenty of history written without it. Yet it can be difficult to use sexuality as a category of inquiry in history without clarifying how it is to be used. Does it mean sexual and/or gender identity, in a subjective sense? Or the way gender roles can be objectively defined by social norms, not to mention the law? Does it relate to the basic reality of human reproduction? Sexual pleasure? Or the policing of sexuality by authorities of various kinds? All of the above can be grouped under the loose term of ‘sexuality’, and all of them are explored to some degree in the chapters that follow.

The history of sexuality in Ireland remains understudied, and often overlaps with the history of gender. This can sometimes be taken as shorthand for ‘women’s history’; a category that serves as a necessary corrective to histories of Ireland that have silently excluded the lives and experience of women, as explored in Mary Cullen’s opening chapter. The bulk of the remaining essays deal with the period after the 1801 Act of Union, but Art Cosgrove and Brendan Scott explore the manner in which gender roles and sexuality were corralled within the legal requirements of marriage and divorce in the medieval and early modern periods, and which shaped the degree of political, economic and social influence that women could wield. In the eighteenth century women were excluded from formal political power, yet as Mary O’Dowd reveals, women remained politically committed and active in less formal, but no less meaningful, ways.

Contrasting studies of the roles played by women in nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland follow, in the form of their exclusion from civil society in the form of the Royal Irish Academy (explored by Clare O’Halloran), and Maria Luddy’s overview of prostitution in Irish society. The most basic function of sexuality - reproduction - is examined by Peter Gray and Liam Kennedy in their study of population change in County Clare after the Great Famine. Many of the themes they highlight (illegitimacy and ‘illicit sexuality’) are also touched on in Geraldine Curtin’s study of the policing and institutionalising of gender in Victorian reformatories.

These chapters deal with one form of sexuality. Two pieces by Angus Mitchell, from 1997 and 2016 respectively, address another: the ongoing controversy over the sexuality of the former colonial administrator and republican Roger Casement, who was executed in August 1916 for conspiring with the Germans prior to the Easter Rising of that year. The fact that diaries detailing a range of homosexual encounters were used to blacken Casement’s reputation and thus derail appeals for clemency prior to his execution remains one of the most contested issues pertaining to sexual identity in Irish history. The awkward possibility of accommodating a gay patriot was a step too far in the conservative society of post-independence Ireland, which helped to foster the assumption that the diaries must have been forged. Equally, this could be seen as nothing to be ashamed of, and Casement has assumed the status of gay icon. The question of their authenticity remains unresolved - Mitchell’s perspective is simply one side of the argument and has been contested vigorously by the veteran Northern Ireland LGBT activist Jeffrey Dudgeon and others - though the traditional conflation of Casement’s sexuality with their veracity is not automatically a given. Given the legal restrictions on homosexuality that pertained for so long in Ireland (under British rule and otherwise), the controversy over Casement offers a rare opportunity to highlight an otherwise hidden strand of Irish life.

Discussions of sexuality in independent Ireland often focus on the imposition of Catholic morality in the Irish Free State and its successor republic; and that is no myth. The Catholic Church in Ireland was preoccupied by sexual morality. As shown in Jim Smyth’s chapter on controversies over dancehalls and that of Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh on the alleged moral danger of womens athletics, the boundaries of public morality were policed vigorously in a society that slowly but surely restricted the participation of women in public life (a fact that was not lost on many Irish women). More tragic realities are revealed by Cliona Rattigan’s accounts of both infanticide and unofficial abortion in independent Ireland.

There then follow chapters by Diarmaid Ferriter and Paul Ryan that pose a challenge to the assumption that a stultifying Catholic morality was accepted unquestioningly. The correspondence with the agony aunt Angela Macnamara reveals a world in which Irish people were actually trying to have good sex, and presumably, some were succeeding.

The final chapters by Mary Kenny, John Cunningham and Mary Muldowney deal with the challenges faced in the 1970s by the movements for women’s rights, and reproductive rights (neither of which can be divorced from the other). The recent referenda that legalised same-sex marraige in 2015 and which removed the constitutional ban on abortion in 2018 could be seen as marking a liberalisisation in attitudes to sexuality and reproductive rights. It is fitting, in the wake of the 2018 referendum, that this anthology ends with Muldowney’s oral history of the bitterly divisive 1983 campaign that introduced the now defunct eighth amendment granting equal legal status to the lives of mother and unborn child.

There are, of course, gaps in this the overview provided here. In relation to gender roles, there is little on the role of women in philanthrophic organisations, or even in artistic and cultural life. There is nothing on the works of authors such as Edna O’Brien. Nor do the campaigns for women’s rights of the early twentieth century that became intertwined with the upheavals of the Irish revolution feature (though these have attracted attention in the course of the ongoing ‘Decade of Centenaries’). The chapters here also tend to deal with the twenty-six counties that gained independence in 1922; and the Catholic conservatism found south of the Irish border that had much in common with what existed in Northern Ireland. The ‘architecture of containment’ that survived in independent Ireland - ‘Mother and Baby’ homes, ‘Magdelene Laundries’, and ‘industrial schools’, administered by the Catholic Church (and occasionally its Protestant counterparts) with the connivance of the state - and the appalling sexual abuse revealed within this network in recent decades does not feature here. Nor, Casement notwithstanding, do LGBT identities and experiences. Yet this is not to dwell on shortcomings; rather, it is to highlight how much else there is to study under the broad rubric of ‘sexuality’ in Irish history (and recent initiatives such as UCD’s ‘Industrial Memories’ project, exploring the industrial school network, and the pioneering Irish Queer Archive, are welcome developments). The study of Irish sexuality remains relatively understudied, but what the following articles hopefully reveal are some of the realities that can be uncovered by exploring Irish history from the perspective of this most fundamental aspect of humanity.

Chapter One

‘History women and history men’: The politics of women’s history

Mary Cullen

The development of women’s history grew directly from the contemporary feminist movement. The roots of feminism lie in the behaviour-patterns societies have prescribed for women and men. While these have differed over time and place, feminism has always grown from women’s perception that the sex roles prescribed by their own society conflicted with their knowledge of themselves and with their development as autonomous persons.

The new wave of feminism which emerged in Western society around 1960 challenged the prevailing stereotype which insisted that every female, by virtue of her sex, was individually fulfilled and made her best contribution to society solely as a wife and mother, subordinating the development of other talents and leaving responsibility for the organisation of society to males. The American Betty Friedan called this model the ‘feminine mystique’, and women around the globe recognised it as corresponding to what they knew in their own cultures.

Feminist rejection of the feminine mystique was challenged by the assertion that history showed that women had always been satisfied with this role. Since history books seldom mentioned women at all, with the exception of a few monarchs and revolutionaries whose lives and careers hardly conformed to the mystique model, feminists turned to the historical evidence with the question: what did women do? The answers which have come so far, and they are only the beginning, raise wide-ranging challenges to establishment history.

As feminist enquiry focuses on different areas of knowledge, history included, the first stage is seeing and saying that women are invisible in the knowledge and theory of the particular discipline. Next comes the search for ‘great’ women, individuals who have ‘achieved’ within the criteria by which men are judged to have ‘achieved’. From this the focus moves to the contribution of a wider range of women to political, social and intellectual movements which underlie patterns of continuity and change in societies. The fourth stage sees women as a group, defined by their shared female sex, demanding the attention of historians. This development has a radical potential to which this essay will return. The ultimate stage should be the writing of a new integrated history incorporating the historical experience of both sexes.

Meg Connery of the Irish Women's Franchise League attempts to hand suffragist leaflets to Andrew Bonar Law (left) and Edward Carson (right).

Let us consider the implications of one early discovery by feminist historians: the women’s emancipation movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the causes that gave rise to them. While feminist movements were neither the central nor the most important phenomena in women’s history, their existence allows us to bypass one regularly repeated explanation for the invisibility of women in so many history books. Since women were not participants in public politics, historians, it was asserted, could hardly be blamed for not dealing with them. The women’s emancipation movement, a highly visible and international political movement, refutes this explanation.

Fanny Parnell: Irish poet, Irish nationalist, and the sister of Charles Stewart Parnell.

While laws, regulations and customs were not identical in all countries the position of women relative to men was fundamentally similar. In virtually every country in western society, women were excluded from political life, whether by holding public office, or as members of parliaments, or as voters. They were barred from higher education and the professions. Titles and property passed to sons in preference to daughters. The home was seen as ‘the woman’s sphere’, yet, to take a representative example, under English common law, in force in Ireland, when a woman married her legal identity merged into that of her husband. Her property, whether earned or inherited, passed under his control to dispose of as he pleased and the law gave him full authority over her and their children. Divorce was considerably more difficult for a wife to obtain than it was for a husband, and if a woman left her husband his duty to maintain her lapsed while his right to her property did not. In sex-related offences such as adultery, prostitution and illegitimate birth, the law treated women as the more guilty and punishable party.

Irish women at work in the fields in nineteenth-century Ireland. (Illustrated London News)

In campaigns starting around the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing into the 1920s and 1930s, in country after country, feminists revolutionised the status of women by removing most of the legally imposed civil and political disabilities based on sex. By any standards it was a sizeable achievement even if with hindsight we know that the underlying stereotypes of ‘natural’ or ‘correct’ feminine and masculine behaviour were harder to shift.

One aspect of this rediscovered history of the women’s emancipation movement is its relevance to women’s self-knowledge today; its restoration of part of their lost ‘group’ memory. It tells us that we have not been paranoid in perceiving oppression, and that the problem of sexism has older and deeper roots than many have realised. On the more positive side, the better sexism is understood, the better the chance of eliminating it. Further, the history of the women’s emancipation movement establishes beyond doubt that relations between the sexes, including relations of power, have not been unchanging throughout history and dispels the belief that women have always conformed happily to a ‘natural’ role of passivity and subordination. It places current feminism in context as part of a long historical process, rather than the historical aberration often suggested. Feminists today can start from the knowledge that women before them dissented from imposed patterns of behaviour and changed them. It frees them to build on what is already there instead of re-inventing the wheel in each new generation.

The family as a woman's workplace: ‘A kitchen interior’, by John Mulvany.

It also raises the question of why all this had to be rediscovered in the first place. Why had it ever been lost? Why has the historical reality that the structures of Irish society included a systematic limitation of women’s autonomy and freedom of action, a limitation not applied to men, gone unrecorded in histories of Irish society? It is difficult to see why an organisation of society which gave men a monopoly of access to political and economic power, and excluded women from virtually every avenue of approach to these, should be something that historians have not seen as a significant or important aspect of Irish society. It is equally difficult to see how feminist organisation to abolish sweeping civil and political disabilities could be regarded as more sectional, more trivial or less significant than, for example, nationalism or the labour movement.

It appears that the answers are not to be found in the content of the historical record but in the minds of historians. If we dismiss a conspiracy theory of deliberate suppression, the explanation can only be that most historians have not seen women as important or ‘significant’ in the history of their societies. They have written history within a paradigm that