De Valera's Irelands (20 page)

It has got to the stage where only five words are needed for a shorthand history of women in twentieth century Ireland before the changes set in motion by the 1960s. The three words ‘de Valera's Ireland' are used to con­­vey an oppressive, stagnant, uncomfortable social environment for women. No elaboration is necessary, except perhaps to throw in the two words ‘comely maidens' (a reference to Eamon de Valera's St Patrick's Day speech of 1943) to imply prescription and hypocrisy in about equal measure. More detailed commentators will go on to refer to article 41.2 in the 1937 constitution; to the marriage bar against women public serv­ants and national school teachers; and the bans on divorce and contra­ception. Arensberg and Kimball will be mentioned, to depict a strictly segregated and inferior space for rural women; a thirty-year leap might be made to the corroborating anthropological testimony of John Messen­ger or Nancy Scheper-Hughes; the fiction of, perhaps, John B. Keane or William Trevor, for colour; and there it is, de Valera's Ireland. It is less a wonder that women were queuing up to leave the country, than that any of them stayed.
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It is possible to come away from reading some of the sociologists, historians and commentators on the period with the im­pression that Irish women were completely powerless and silenced in these years, and that change, if it took place at all, was for the worse.
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Legal scholar Yvonne Scannell and historian Mary Clancy, however, by placing discussions of women in de Valera's Ireland firmly in the con­text of the time, give us a more nuanced perspective,
3
and my own research mainly on women's household work and on the public definit­ions and lived experience of that work, has caused me to question what is now the very strong consensus that women in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s had very hard lives because of the dominant ‘ideology of domest­icity' (as it is sometimes called) and the oppressive patriarchy of every­day life.
4
Neither Scannell, Clancy nor myself deny the quite serious attacks on women's citizenship and women's work in Ireland in these years; and the strong anti-feminist tendency in government and among some of those who gave public lectures, published articles in journals and issued pastoral letters. However, there was a citizenship to be attacked, there were jobs from which it was considered necessary to exclude women, and there was a feminism to be against. Nor is there any suggestion, in this article, that Irish women's lives were easy, in the first sixteen-year unbroken period of de Valera's premiership. Many Irish people suffered desperate privation in these years, and women in charge of houses and women who were mothers in particular, often underwent considerable physical discomfort and ill-health, in the course of a daily round of a kind of hard work unimaginable today. It will be argued that in some key areas, however, women's lives changed slowly but surely for the better in these years, and that it is difficult, if not impossible, to genera­lise about ‘women' and ‘domesticity' when talking about this period.

Public perceptions and public life

In some writings by and about women in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s there is a strong sense of space and light. An article by feminist and re­publican Dorothy Macardle in one of the first issues of the
Irish Press
des­cribes the female occupational tables in the census as ‘a story of infinite romance and adventure'.
5
The same air of progress and excite­ment is found in the Irish-produced magazine
Woman's Life
, from 1936, where every issue, for the first few years, carried, as well as the staples of women's magazines (health, beauty, romantic fiction), an interview with a working woman: a packer in Brown and Polson's factory, a secretary working in a trade union, a commercial traveller, two ‘Tiller girls', a radiographer, a hotel receptionist, a street-seller, a nurse, a wife-and-mother who found it hard to believe that the modern girl is not interested in men.
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This maga­zine, which had a countrywide middle/lower-middle/upper-working- class circulation, judging by the address­es of competition entrants and other correspondence, also carried regul­ar news items about women in public life. The confidence with which Maura Laverty blends traditional and modern perspectives on women in her autobiographical writings, fiction and cookery writing is also typical of this optimism.
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Many Catholics who commented directly on modern women be­lieved that it was good and desirable for women to participate in public life so long as they were upholding Catholic principles and not neglect­ing their domestic duties. Alice Curtayne, in a lecture entitled ‘The Re­naissance of Woman' in 1933 (published a year later with an imprimatur by the Bishop of Ferns), attempted to give Catholicism the credit for women's equal citizenship, and although she questioned some of the achievements of feminism it was obvious that she welcomed women hav­ing a public role.
8

Not all Lenten pastorals were concerned with reinforcing patriar­chal authority. Dr Dignan of Clonfert, in his Lenten pastoral letter in 1934, urg­ed mothers and fathers to ensure that daughters got as good an educa­tion as sons, commenting that a good education was more import­ant than a dowry.
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The
Catholic Bulletin
in the 1930s approved of the French move­ment towards women's franchise, and of the improve­ments in French women's legal position within marriage that came about in the late 1930s.
10
The
Irish Monthly
published many articles in the 1930s and 1940s on the debate about women in public life.
11
Articles supp­orting equal pay for equal work, and women in the workplace, appear in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Catholic periodi­cals such as
Christus Rex
and the
Irish Messenger
.
12
The
Messenger
, it is true, spent much of the 1920s and 1930s lamenting women's desertion of the home (‘a place to keep clothes in and for sleeping') and carrying stories about girls who left farms and wither­ed away in towns and cities until they returned home or went to the bad, but by the early 1950s it was quoting papal encyclicals to the effect that women needed paid work and it confined itself to exhorting females to brighten up their homes, no differently from any women's magazine.
13

Christus Rex
, the
Catholic Bulletin
and the
Irish Monthly
were not wide­circulation publications it is true (the
Messenger
, on the other hand, was), but neither were many of the writings which are usually taken as exam­ples of the public attitudes of the period. How many women were aware of article 41.2 in the 1937 constitution?
14
It is simply not true to claim as one historian does, that ‘by 1937 women's political, economic and repro­ductive rights had been so seriously curtailed that women were explicit­ly barred from claiming for themselves a public identity'.
15

Leaving aside, for the moment, the ban on contraception, as far as public identity was concerned, women politicians were quite vocal in their support of women's issues, and women's organisations flourished in these two decades.
16
The Joint Committee of Women's Societies and Social Workers, an amalgam of women's organisations of all denomin­ations that were oriented towards social or philanthropic work, compris­ed 28,000 members in 1940. It was not afraid to call itself ‘feminist', nor was the Catholic Federation of Secondary School Unions (past-pupil), which had a few thousand members. Older, smaller organisations like the National Council of Women in Ireland kept a watchdog role and could count on the support of the larger organisations on issues to do with pro­tection of young girls, protection of the rights of women work­ers, and a public voice for women in the house. The Irish Country­women's Associ­ation had some 2,000 members in 1940 and kept grow­ing. While it did not call itself ‘feminist', it stated clearly that one of its aims was to pre­pare women for public life, and it was loudly lobbying for better work­ing conditions for women on farms as early as 1938.
17
The Irish House­wives Association, set up in Dublin in 1942 on a wave of awareness of the poor living conditions of urban women in particular, drew attention to poor housing, health, quality of foodstuffs (especially milk) and child­care provisions. It was a direct successor of the Irish Women's Suffrage and Local Government Association and self-consciously, proudly femin­ist.
18
Government commissions in these years invariably had two or three female members – women like Lucy Franks of the ICA, Maire MacGeehin, Brigid Stafford of the Department of Labour, Louie Bennett – who com­mented on issues relating to women, and were not slow to issue reser­vations and minority reports when they disagreed with the main report.
19
These women could of course be called ‘token women', but it is signifi­cant that even token women were seen to be necessary.

There were substantial infringements on women's rights in the years 1932–48; no attempt is being made to gloss over these injustices. But these injustices did not come about as a result of a prevailing ideolo­gy of domesticity, however much de Valera might have given the impre­ssion that they did. The marriage bar against women national teachers was introduced in a cynical attempt to make jobs available for young, single women and men.
20
The same is true of the marriage bar against women in the public service. Had these bars been introduced because of a co­herent and consistent commitment to domesticity, married women would surely have been statutorily barred from industry and non-public ser­vice employment also, which they were not. The ban on women doing certain kinds of industrial work in the mid-1930s was a pragmatic at­tempt to prevent new industries from hiring female labour (by definition cheap) in preference to paying breadwinner wages to men, rather than an explicit attempt to limit women to the home, though this might have been a by-product of such a policy.
21
Furthermore, women's organisations did not come out strongly against the marriage bar; perhaps in these hard times there was popular resentment, from women and men, at two-income households – Alice Kessler-Harris tells us that in the USA in the Depression years, wives of unemployed men and single unem­ployed women were often among the loudest clamouring for married women to give up their jobs.
22

Hostility to married women workers was a cause of tension among the rank and file and the leadership of the Irish Women Workers' Union in the early 1930s.
23
The Conditions of Employment Act 1935–6 aroused concerted opposition from organised women but also from represent­atives of social-work organisations, who argued that women needed this work to survive. There was always a philanthropic element in feminist activism, in Ireland no more so than anywhere else; concern for working-class women was voiced by middle-class women, who either did not want or did not dare to take up the cudgels against issues like the mar­riage bar which affected them in particular.
24
It is likely that Eamon de Valera intended article 41.2 in the constitution as retrospective justifi­cation of the marriage bar against women in the public service, and the Conditions of Employment Act; the women's organisations that objected to the constitution feared that the implications of article 41.2 in partic­ular would be wide-ranging and oppressive.

However, de Valera did not succeed in omitting ‘without distinction of sex' in article 16 and according to Clancy and Scannell, this was a sig­nificant achievement for the women objectors.
25
And, indeed, article 41.2 was never used to discriminate further against women in the work­place in this period (e.g., no statutory marriage bar was introduced against women in industry or non-public service employment); to curb their mobility (no restrictions were introduced on female emigration); or to curtail their citizenship (taking the vote from already enfranchised women was by no means unheard of in the Europe of the 1930s).
26
Article 41.2 was men­tioned in 1953 by the Department of Education as one just­ification for the continuation of the marriage bar, but the bar was beginning to be dis­mantled at this stage, and was eventually done away with by the end of that decade.
27
We have to see the fact that article 41.2 was not used against women in the ways suggested above, as a signif­icant if invisible victory for women's activism in Ireland.

It is inaccurate – to say the least – to depict de Valera's Ireland as a graveyard of women's rights. It was an intensive care unit, maybe, but dedicated attention ensured that the patient survived. The very fact that women's rights were constantly being debated, defined and defended indicates that they were very much alive.

Whose domestic sphere?

The women's organisations when they defended women's rights and women's work did not always get it right. One of the areas they, in com­mon with nearly all public figures in the period, got completely wrong was that of domestic service. In 1940 there was a cartoon in
Dublin Opinion
that showed the father of a family, his wife and three children grouped behind, offering a domestic servant a silver service to thank her for the completion of six months' service with them. Such jokes would become more common as time went on, as
Dublin Opinion
loved to mock the pre­tensions and preoccupations of the upper-middle-class to which its edi­tor belonged.
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