“The Girls Were There and Did Their Share…”: Researching Representations of Women’s Militancy in Conflict and Post-Conflict Ireland

Next up in our BAIS postgraduate bursary winners series is Jess McIvor of the Universities of Bristol and Southampton. She explores Irish women’s militancy and used her bursary winners for a research trip to Dublin.

“I feel it would be a crime against history if the often brave and often hidden actions of the women’s section were not recorded for posterity…”

(Response to a questionnaire circulated among Cumann na mBan members by Eithne Coyle O’Donnell, March 1969. University College Dublin Archives, P61/4)

It has now been over 30 years since the publication of Margaret Ward’s pioneering study on Irish revolutionary women, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism—yet, despite this and many subsequent works exploring Irish women’s militancy, it remains still an “often hidden” aspect within the revolutionary narrative. Recently, Michael D. Higgins spoke on the need to restore the contributions and experiences of marginalised voices to their rightful place in history in this Decade of Centenaries. However, in addition to this restoration, I argue it is also necessary to understand how such voices were marginalised and their experiences elided in the first place. Thanks to the generous bursary offered by the British Association of Irish Studies, I was able to spend two weeks in Dublin researching these mechanisms of neglect of women’s militancy. I carried out research in three archives: the University College Dublin archives, Kilmainham Gaol and the Dublin City archives; focusing on the activism and organisation of militant women, and their photographic representations (or lack thereof) in the press and in private collections. Through this, I aimed to explore how photographic circulation and absence impact on women’s militancy in public narratives. These archival sources, along with research I’ve previously done in Amsterdam, Madrid, and Alcalá de Henares, will inform the first and second chapters of my PhD, which respectively examine the use of glamour and Amazonian archetypes in public representations of women’s militancy, and the application of tropes of domesticity to militant women in Ireland and Spain.

I started out the research trip in Kilmainham Gaol, a key location for many Irish women who were imprisoned in the Gaol or held there awaiting transfer to other institutions during the Civil War. Kilmainham holds a wealth of material on its women prisoners, ranging from diary entries and autograph books to pension papers and membership information, all of which demonstrated the centrality of women’s activist networks to militancy, and the differences in levels of circulation of images of women’s militancy within private and public visual economies. One particularly interesting source accessed was a collection of obituaries and funerary mass cards of Cumann na mBan woman, which emphasised the extent to which women’s militancy was obscured in post-conflict Ireland as part of efforts to re-establish normative gendered roles. After Kilmainham, I went to the Dublin City archives to research their collections of Civil War newspapers, focusing especially on their issues of An Phoblacht and the representation of women within them, which I will analyse in comparison to more mainstream papers such as the Irish Press and the Irish Independent in my thesis. Press representations are central to building public narratives, and the hyper-visibility of select women at the expense of wide scale representation obscures the place of women in the public narrative of conflict and is one facet of the mechanisms of neglect which marginalised their experiences.

My final stop was the UCD archives, consulting the collections of Eithne Coyle O’Donnell, Mary MacSwiney, and Sighle Humphries, two leading members of Cumann na mBan. Their personal papers offer the opportunity to examine the extent of women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle, and their efforts to ensure that their experiences would be remembered and passed on against a background of state sanctioned erasure. An unexpected find in these papers was highly detailed information on the Elizabeth O’Farrell Memorial committee, which sought to gain institutional recognition for the role played by Elizabeth O’Farrell in the 1916 Rising. The organisation succeeded in establishing a nursing bursary and prize in her name, as well as the creation of commemorative plaque and press coverage of the woman famed for her status as a “forgotten woman”. Finding these documents has heavily influenced my final thesis chapter, which will explore cycles of remembrance and forgetting of militant women, and the pervasive neglect which is often embedded into commemoration of these women.

This archival trip has been essential to developing and deepening my research, and I could not have done it without the support of BAIS and the bursary committee. I would also like to thank all of the staff and archivists who have assisted me during this, particularly Aoife Torpey of Kilmainham Gaol whose insights and suggestions have been invaluable to my research.

Jessica McIvor is a third year PhD student at the University of Bristol and the University of Southampton. Her interdisciplinary project focuses on a comparative social history of  Ireland and Spain, and explores photography as a vehicle for the construction of narratives of women’s militancy. It also examines processes of erasure and neglect surrounding women militants in post-conflict periods. 

*Image of Kilmainham Gaol courtesy of Trip Advisor.