Margaret Ward is a socialist feminist, living and working in Belfast. She has just written a book Unmanageable Revolutionaries about women's participation in Irish national struggles. Shelley Charlesworth asked her why she wrote the book.
MW: The main reason I wrote this book was to present women's contribution to nationalist history in a way that hadn't been done before. The Republican movement has always felt that if you could quote some of the great figures of the past like Countess Markiewicz then women had always been active and accepted. I wanted to give a chronological account of the much wider contribution that ordinary women have made to the nationalist movement, but also to look more critically at the kind of mythologising that has gone on in the Republican movement. The book tries to say that women have been active politically as a result of a lot of hard pressure on the part of women. But their role has been very circumscribed by the nationalist [illegible] organisations where they haven't really been accepted as equal participants.
SC: You also make the point that when women have been given positions of autonomy, or political responsibility, they have quite often been on the left or more radical wings of these organisations and have thought of more diverse and imaginative forms of political protest. It does come out consistently in the Ladies Land League and in Cumann na mBan (the Republican women's organisation) that there is this strong, critical stance from the women.
MW: I'm not necessarily saying that women as a sex would be inherently more egalitarian than men. Rather that women who become politically conscious then become conscious — even if they don't ever articulate it — of their own oppression as women, and of the need for a radical transformation of society before they can have the kind of equality they want as women. I think they were much more receptive to the fact that waged labourers and agricultural workers are oppressed, and they saw the necessity for drawing them into struggle. For instance, the Land League was basically run by Members of Parliament and men of substance and later on, in the early days of Cumann na mBan, the political movement seemed to be dominated by intellectuals and very confined to narrow groups. Women weren't necessarily of the same social groups and didn't have that kind of economic stake that men had in maintaining the status quo.
SC: But a lot of the women activists were actually related to male nationalists and so in a sense they would have shared a certain class background to the men.
MW: Yes. For example, in the Ladies Land League, Anna Parnell was the sister of Charles Stewart Parnell. But I think the important thing about Anna was although she came into politics because she was the sister of the leader of the movement, she didn't automatically go along with the political beliefs of her brother. The same could be said of a lot of women later on in the movement. One of the reasons I tried to show the family relations of the women was also to try and isolate what sort of women were able to be politically active, particularly when you think of the early part of the century. It seems to me that if you didn't have a supportive family background in the first place it was very difficult for you to be politically active. And so those women who were active had a very strong family tradition that often went back for generations. Interestingly, quite often they tended to break from the family tradition.
SC: I think one of the most encouraging things I read in the book was the articulate opposition to the 1937 Constitution (De Valera's brainchild which is still in force today) from some Republican women and the more bourgeois feminists, and professional women's bodies. In other histories of the period there doesn't seem to be very much reference to this.
MW: Well I don't think that anyone has realised that there was any opposition by women to the 1937 Constitution. For example, John Whyte in his book Church and State itemises the clauses relating to women but says that the only visible opposition to the constitution was by the Anglo-Irish intellectuals. He talks about their outraged response and simply leaves it at that. Historians have had a myopia about women. For example the Irish Times took the issue very seriously and was completely opposed to it. Historians have ignored page after page of mass meetings of women which were reported by a woman columnist on the paper.
I'm not sure how widespread this opposition of women was outside of Dublin. I would have thought its composition was very similar to the present anti-Amendment campaign on abortion in the South. But I'm not sure what would have happened in the countryside, particularly given Fianna Fail's [illegible] Irish political life. There must have been great antagonism to the Constitution, because it was passed by such a very small figure, and the abstention rate was a third of the electorate, a lot of whom were the principled Republicans who refused to vote on the question because of giving legitimacy to the state. Republican women who were well-known as figures like Kathleen Clarke, and Maud Gonne, wrote in to one of the mass meetings saying how much they condemned the clauses — partly on political grounds because the constitution didn't say that it would abolish special courts and also because they disagreed with its clauses on women. But Cumann na mBan as the leading Republican women's organisation didn't make any statement because they took the traditional abstentionist line. That was a great failure on their part.
SC: It does seem in this and other issues relating to employment, that you have a conflict between what men want — whether they couch it in nationalist terms or not — and where women's interests lie. The Conditions of Employment Bill introduced in the South in 1935 must be one of the clearest examples of the state using male material interests to further their own ends at the expense of women. Do you see it in those terms?
MW: If you take the Conditions of Employment Bill, it was completely supported by the Labour Party and the trade union movement. It gave women [illegible] for holidays and so on, and it seemed to [illegible]. On the other hand, without being conspiratorial about it, one of its most fundamental aspects was getting rid of women's waged labour at a time when the state could only provide more jobs for men by sacking of women. Male trade unionists and men generally saw very little conflict of interest — they were in favour of the Bill — and didn't argue for the deletion of the clauses relating to women. So women had to mobilise opposition with very little material support.
On the Constitution, men tended to oppose it on Republican grounds, and that was good enough for them. I don't think women were an issue, and although some men did support the women, they were an incredibly small minority. If Cuman na mBan, as a women's organisation, had seen it politically important to side with women over this issue, rather than turning their back on a very serious attack on women's rights, then the Republican movement would have had a very serious chasm between the interests of the women and the interests of the movement as a whole. I don't see how that could have been overcome if women were to remain in the movement, unless the movement fundamentally transformed itself. And that didn't happen.
SC: What is the Provisional's position on the anti-Amendment campaign?
MW: [illegible] campaign.
SC: So the result is a form of abstentionist politics, because they're not campaigning against the Amendment. It would be ironic if the amendment was passed by a small majority as a result of their not campaigning?
MW: This looks as though it will happen. Individuals within the Republican movement, like Rita O'Hare and the women's commission want Provisional Sinn Fein to join the anti-Amendment campaign. Many who oppose this do so not on abstentionist grounds but because they are afraid they will lose support from the more traditional rural supporters of the Republican movement. But of course that can easily be legitimised and dressed up on traditional abstentionist grounds.
SC: Absolutely. There have been a lot of parallels in this women's interests versus men's interests argument in the North over the last ten years: nurseries in particular. Do you think there is the beginnings of a change of policy within Provisional Sinn Fein at the moment, which takes these issues more seriously and sees a link between fighting for reforms and eventually achieving their national aims? Do you think there is now an opening for the women's politics, which campaign for certain concessions from the state to make women's lives easier, like socialised child care facilities and nurseries?
MW: As long as that kind of campaigning comes from the Republican movement, yes. Today's grass roots community politics are very much organised and controlled by Sinn Fein and circumscribed within that framework. Given the appalling poverty and deprivation that exists in housing and unemployment, to increase their support, Sinn Fein will have to take up these issues. But whether they would actually encourage movements like tenants associations or claimants unions, that couldn't be easily dominated by Sinn Fein, is quite another thing. I don't think that Sinn Fein would aim at the self-activity of the people because its tradition is for the Republican movement to be the guardians of the people's well being, to be the negotiators with the appropriate government bodies.
SC: And that's where they come into conflict with feminist organisations, who have stressed autonomy and control as prerequisites for any political activity.
MW: Yes. If for example a nursery is going to be set up, I'm quite sure it will be initiated by the women of Sinn Fein, which is fair enough if the women of Sinn Fein want to organise that, but I can't see more general support to a group of women who want to achieve something similar.
SC: I also think there is another parallel in the types of activity women were most involved in historically from the Land League onwards, in organising aid for people in prison and their families and the Relatives Action Committee formed to support the H Block Campaign. In fact it is not really surprising that the Relatives Action Committee never developed into a mass movement on the streets, although there were certain high hopes on the Left that it would broaden out into a more generalised political campaign. It was a very similar experience to the events you record in your book. Women would exhaust themselves in these prisoners' struggles, which were largely an adjunct of the main military campaign, and were never able to broaden out the campaign.
MW: It's hardly surprising particularly when you think that women's domestic role has been really transposed into a wider sphere in work on behalf of the prisoners. It is still very much the mothers, the wives, the daughters fighting on behalf of their male relatives, working themselves into the grave, and they don't have the time or the energy for other political activity because they still have all their domestic commitments too.
SC: I think what's interesting in your book is reading about women's organisations with a slightly more tangential or complex relationship to nationalist organisations. I'm thinking of the Irish Women's Franchise League which was virtually run by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. How important was she and to what extent was she influential, in both the suffrage and the nationalist movements?
MW: The IWFL was a very militant body set up in 1908 by Hanna and other women, like Margaret Cousins. It had its own newspaper, which was open to all the suffrage groups, with a wide distribution throughout Ireland. It was the only suffrage paper in Ireland and was very well-written, with a huge international coverage and input. The Sheehy Skeffingtons, Hanna and Francis, were quite unique in Ireland because they were feminists, nationalists, socialists and pacifists. Hanna's pacifism was mediated by her realisation of the brutality of the British state in Ireland, particularly after the murder of her husband by the British. I don't think, after 1916, that she would ever have said that armed rebellion was not justified.
As to her own significance, she was instrumental in raising the whole question of feminism at a time when it was extremely unrewarding to do so, prior to the First World War, when the major political debate was whether Ireland got Home Rule or not. It was people like Hanna who said it was being discussed in purely male terms when women didn't have the vote, and would not get it under a Home Rule Ireland, yet women wanted Home Rule as well. She continued, despite opposition from every political faction, to raise that issue. She went to jail several times, and was not the only woman to go to jail in Ireland for her suffrage beliefs. A whole new dimension was created in Irish politics, with the question of votes for women, and radical movements on the nationalist side had to start taking the question seriously.
Cumann na mBan was set up in 1914, but they didn't have any particular policy on women, because they started out as an organisation to assist the men of Ireland. Within a year they had to change their policy in response to the critical attacks from women like Hanna. They had to take Hanna seriously because she was not only a feminist but someone who understood what the national struggle was all about and was respected for those views. She wasn't a suffragette who was anti-nationalist, although there were people like that as well, rather she wanted an independent Ireland that was also socialist and imbued with feminist beliefs. Later on, Hanna was very important in the 1920s and 30s as a propagandist in the Republican movement. Read An Phoblacht in 1932 when she was editor while Frank Ryan was in jail, and see a basically nationalist-feminist paper.
As an individual feminist she was very important in forcing feminist concerns into the nationalist movement, but she always found her relations with the nationalist movement very problematic, because, particularly as a militaristic movement, it had very little space for women or women's concerns. She never felt she could join Cuman na mBan because she always maintained it was a subordinate organisation and as a feminist she couldn't join anything that didn't accept women on equal terms to men. So she was very much the conscience of the Republican movement.
SC: It is quite instructive to think that at that time there was a paper with those types of politics and there hasn't been anything similar since, despite the rise of the women's movement in the 1970s. There just hasn't been that much influence on the Republican [illegible], although they might argue with that. The [illegible] that have come from women of the Republican movement seem to have been much less sharp than the things you talk about in your book.
MW: Yes, Republican News doesn't carry the kind of analytical articles on women's oppression that an article written by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington would have done. It might detail events organised by women, but they are very much factual news items. All you might get is an occasional policy statement, but that doesn't give any idea of the dynamic of the women's movement. I hope that one of the effects of reading the book and the debates that went on will make people go back and look at what happened historically to women.
SC: There is to be a conference in Belfast soon which will look at the experiences of women over the last ten years. The topics it covers seem very wide ranging: housing, child care, abortion, violence, disarmament and the national question. These [illegible].
MW: Some Republican women have been going to the planning meetings and showing a lot of interest in [illegible] the opportunity it provides to discuss some of the issues that have divided feminists for such a long time. There is now a much greater degree of understanding both of the differences within the feminist movement and an understanding that if feminists don't start getting together even on a very limited basis to fight for women's interests then they are not going to be promoted, and there aren't going to be any significant gains made for women. One of the main things I felt in researching the contribution that women have made in nationalist history, has been that the very small feminist voice that has been on the margins of the dominant political culture has been instrumental in creating a small space for women and actually helping women involved in nationalist movements to raise the question of women. Feminists have been able to insert it into the political arena in some way because they have had that kind of freedom and autonomy to do so, and nationalist women have been able at least in a limited way to take on some of those ideas.