An Phoblacht - Issue 1 - 2022

The long journey of

Unmanageable Revolutionaries To mark the publishing of a new edition of ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism 1880-1980’, MARGARET WARD writes of the journey she and her work has taken since the book was first published in 1983.

In the mid-1970s, as a postgraduate student in Queen’s University of Belfast, when I proposed researching the history of Irish women’s political involvement, I was told by senior (male) academics that Irish women had not done anything in history – the evidence being that nothing had been written about them. If they had done anything, it would have been written about.

There were no female academics in the Politics department at that time. It was a long struggle before I gained permission to begin my research. I was a feminist activist as well as a student, living through a time of intense conflict, and it seemed crucial that women in contemporary Ireland had a clear understanding of the nature of women’s past involvement in movements for political self-determination.

The more I discovered, the more talks I gave to feminist and socialist groups, all eager to learn about our ‘herstory’. The eventual outcome was not an academic dissertation, but a book written for a popular audience.

When ‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism’ was published in 1983, it was widely reviewed and sometimes criticised for having been written “from the perspective of a socialist feminist with nationalist sympathies”.

Republican News found it “irritating at times, with its ultra-left reluctance to recognise the progressive dynamic in the nationalist movement”, but said it made a “convincing case for a strong autonomous women’s movement fighting alongside the national liberation organisations, to ensure women are not cheated of victory”.

Reviews from publications outside of the political arena were more on the lines of the Times Literary Supplement, which considered I had made “a real contribution to understanding revolutionary Ireland and…to our

Republican News found it ‘irritating at times, with its ultra-left reluctance to recognise the progressive dynamic in the nationalist movement’

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understanding of feminism as an aid to arriving at historical truth”.

One of the reviews I most appreciated was from C.S. Andrews, who had lived through those days as an active republican in the War of Independence and the Civil War and knew many of the women activists. He had published two highly-regarded autobiographical accounts of his experiences and his review in the Irish Press concluded “this is a book which must be read by anyone who is interested in the story of modern Ireland. It is well researched, well organised and well written”.

‘Unmanageable Revolutionaries’ was republished in 1989 and again in 1995, this time with a preface that included the campaigning work of Cumann na dTeachtaire, that coalition of republican and feminist women who, in the period of nationalist reorganisation following the Easter Rising, worked hard to ensure women were represented in political and public life and on the executive of Sinn Féin. Their minute book is contained in the Hanna Sheehy Skeffington papers in the National Library of Ireland. Although Hanna was in America for most of the lifetime of this group, it is thanks to her, our greatest feminist campaigner, that we have so many essential archives to inform us of our past. She kept everything in her home, determined that one day a feminist historian would write about those times.

It is interesting to consider how attitudes have changed over the years. In 1983, readers were urged “the book must be used with caution” and people queried why I would use a title that derived from de Valera’s unsympathetic attitudes towards women activists.

Now the phrase ’unmanageable revolutionaries’ has become common parlance to describe the radical nature of much of women’s participation in political movements and research on women’s role during the Irish revolutionary years has become mainstream within academia, thanks to the valiant efforts of many wom-

ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1  anphoblacht