Ireland and Masculinities in History: An Introduction
Rebecca Anne Barr, Sean Brady and Jane McGaughey
Questions of masculinities have come late to the Irish historical paradigm. In many Irish historical studies gender continues to be seen as a ‘women’s issue’: in other words, that questions regarding gender relate to the effects of patriarchy on women alone. This is no surprise, given that women continue to be underrepresented in the political, academic, and cultural life in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Such inequity is constitutionally enshrined in Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution, which delineates women’s role in the state as domestic support within heterosexual marriage, and exemplifed by Northern Ireland’s exemption from the UK’s 1967 Abortion Act. Such marginalisation was
R. A. Barr (*)
National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
e-mail: rebecca.barr@nuigalway.ie
S. Brady
Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: s.brady@bbk.ac.uk
J. McGaughey
School of Irish Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
e-mail: jane.mcgaughey@concordia.ca
© The Author(s) 2019
R. A. Barr et al. (eds.), Ireland and Masculinities in History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02638-7_1
brought to light during the 2015–2016 public controversy over the Abbey Theatre’s commemorative centenary programme, which included only one female playwright in its programme of ten plays.1 More viscerally, the McAleese Report on state involvement with the Magdalene Laundries and Catherine Corless’s investigation into the high mortality rates and unmarked mass burials in Tuam’s Mother and Baby Home, point to the devastating real effects of cultural, social and political marginalisation. But the status quo is increasingly contested. In the wake of 2018’s landslide referendum repealing the eighth amendment the campaign for abortion rights in Northern Ireland has intensifed dramatically and, in the Republic, debates continue as whether article 41.2 should be removed or amended before it is brought to a national referendum.
Women’s history in Ireland is clearly an urgent and necessary riposte to the erasure of women: a disciplinary focus which counters the sidelining and erasure of women’s experiences, political agency, and the material and cultural life of the domestic spheres in older historical methodologies. The act of ‘writing women into Irish history’ was seen as a ‘subversive activity’ which continues to be met with (in some quarters) resistance during this decade of commemorations.2 Moreover, despite the burgeoning of women’s history and gender history in Ireland since the 1970s, the effects of such scholarship have not been fully assimilated into Irish historiography as a whole. Yet notwithstanding the increasingly extensive research focused on recovering women’s history, there has nonetheless ‘been surprisingly little expectation that a focus on gender will change the way Irish history is written…[an attitude] partly explained by the lingering prejudice that gender history…has no serious implications for the study of established political or social themes’.3 This lack is, arguably, partly a result of the assumption that gender history is synonymous with women’s history and as such, ‘automatically …separate from other history’.4 This might be characterized as a Field Day approach in which women’s history and gender studies are sequestered as a separate supplement rather than being integrated into, and thus renovating, the corpus. Historians have long been calling for this omission to be addressed. In 2002, Linda Connolly argued that ‘a gendered history of Ireland…requires [an] illumination of masculinity’ and cautioned that ‘automatically transferring the history of women into a history of gender, while evading the construction of masculinity as a subject of scrutiny in historical writing’ would result in ‘only a partial understanding of gender’.5 An important publication which endeavoured to catalyse gender studies in Ireland is Gender and Power in Irish History (2009), edited by Maryann Gialanella Valiulis. This showcased a diverse selection of work on women’s history and gender, demonstrating the utility and
productiveness of gender paradigms for the understanding of Irish history, particularly in relation to gender’s ability to illuminate and interrogate power relations.6 Yet Valiulis’ 2009 collection included only one essay which specifically addressed masculinities and, even more revealingly, only one male historian contributed to the collection. Gender history was clearly perceived as ‘women’s work’. Eight years later still Catríona Kennedy laments that ‘Irish masculinities remains a chronically understudied area’ where the ‘relative dearth in the history of Irish masculinities’ makes it diffcult to establish ‘a longer historical perspective’. While ‘the study of masculinities has long been directly or indirectly central to the agenda of women’s history’, she acknowledges, an ‘explicitly gendered history of Irish men remains one of the most promising avenues for future research’.7
This brief overview suggests that the relative lack of attention by scholars to masculinities in Ireland’s history is a side-effect of the politically necessary focus on women’s histories and is refective of a persistent conservatism still reluctant to recognise the gendering of men. In Irish history, then, men ‘remain the unanalysed norm, women the exception which merits specifc mention’.8 The supposed primacy of the political (and the implicit distinction of ‘mainstream’ politics from gender politics) often renders gender a consideration of seemingly secondary importance when compared with questions of political legitimacy, nationalism and the nation-state, violence and colonialism.9 Such occlusion is further exacerbated by the terms of debate. As Connolly notes, ‘the prominent role history, historians and politics are generally afforded in the Irish public sphere’ is frequently ‘a largely masculinist phenomenon and performance’ conducted between men, excluding women, and the history writing that results is often ‘selective, partial and ideological in relation to women’s history and unequal power’.10 Essentialist presumption underwrites silence on masculinities.
While work on historical masculinities generally tends to be ‘unevenly distributed across geographical areas of focus’, the neglect of Irish masculinities—and of genders and sexualities in general—as sites of historical enquiry is notable, especially when compared with the development of these areas in the historiography of the United States and Britain for more than a generation.11 The fourishing of Irish diaspora studies in North America in recent decades has resulted in scholarly attention to gender and the Irish in North America and to the Irish female emigrant experience in Britain.12 But this has had little direct impact on approaches to Irish history itself. The relative lack of attention by historians to gender and masculinities in Ireland is even more remarkable
as Ireland, in both jurisdictions, has been dominated historically by competing religiously orientated masculinities. Though ‘confessional differences …might infuence understandings and practices of gender’ the tensions, conficts and legacy of ‘ethno-nationalist’ violence in this island are deeply infected by discourses of masculinisation, virility and emasculation.13 The depth and pervasiveness of religiously inspired and infected social conservatism has had direct impact of the formation of masculinities in Ireland, including the many men who did not conform to social and cultural expectations of their gender. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries, state, society and its institutions in the two Irelands have been characterised by male dominance and the ‘patriarchal dividend’. This has had direct consequences for the lives, bodies, and agency of women and sexual minorities.
Ireland and Masculinities in History aims to catalyse work on masculinities by showcasing a variety of research into Irish masculinities from a multiplicity of perspectives and periods. The collection moves towards a longer framework for historical studies of masculinities in Ireland, as delineated by Kennedy. Since the beginning of the twentyfrst century, literary and cultural critics have led the way in introducing critical approaches to masculinities in the Irish scholarly paradigm. Anne Mulhall’s groundbreaking work on heteronormativity and queer identity in modern and postmodern Ireland,14 Diane Negra’s collection, Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (2014), and collections such as Caroline Magennis and Raymond Mullen’s Irish Masculinities: Refections on Literature and Culture (2011)15 and Conn Holohan and Tony Tracy’s Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales (2014) all explore the continuing effects of Ireland’s patriarchal and conservative heritage on contemporary society. As Holohan and Tracy state, from a near-absence of these questions in Irish scholarship, in the last few years, the discipline has ‘caught up dramatically to rapidly constitute a burgeoning feld of new Irish masculinity studies’.16 Furthermore, as Debbie Ging argues in Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema (2013), since the 1980s Irish flmmakers have been at the forefront of ‘some of the most astutely observed and gender-progressive accounts of Irish men and masculinity’.17 A signifcant strand of popular Irish culture thus not merely makes ‘maleness… visible’ but also often ‘savagely critiques’ ‘patriarchal privilege’.18 Yet historians have been slower than cultural and literary critics to interrogate the role of masculinities. Among historians, the paucity of analysis on
Irish historical masculinities is not simply a matter of neglect, or ‘being behind’. Due to the focus on the national question, social history has been slow to develop in Ireland. Irish historiography is dominated by a deeply traditional empirical methodology, which tends towards political narrative, and has tended to be indifferent or indeed hostile to questioning historical men as gendered beings, or recognising that masculinities, and masculine hegemonies, might provide key critical interventions in the analysis of Ireland’s history.19 Questioning masculinities in Irish history has the potential to reframe and extend our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which gender and power intersect in Irish politics and society, and how competing ideologies of nation and denomination affected the gendering of men within Ireland, and beyond in diasporic communities.
Recent changes in Irish societies and cultures, north and south of the border, impress upon historians of Ireland the need to discern and analyse masculinities in Ireland within the framework of the longue durée. The publication of the multivolume Cambridge History of Ireland indicates the ways in which that long view can be opened up to issues of sex, gender and masculinity.20 The ways in which phenomena today inform questions of the past are as much a part of the historian’s approach to evidence as considerations of time-period context for that evidence. Male historical actors of course dominate historiography. But why they were dominant, or the ways in which masculine hegemonies were developed and maintained, is scarcely analysed in Irish historiography. The essays in this collection range in focus from the eighteenth century to contemporary history. In doing so, they augment existing historical studies of masculinities—such as Valente’s analysis of nationalist men and masculinities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland, Beatty’s study of the rhetorical re-masculinisation of Ireland following the revolutionary period, and McGaughey’s analysis of men and militarisation in Ulster in the frst quarter of the twentieth century.21 A gendered approach to Irish history assists in deconstructing essentialist ideals which frequently underpin claims to political legitimacy. Tracing a long-view history of Ireland’s patriarchy (whether Catholic, Anglican, or dissenting) is important for discerning continuities as well as disjunctures in gendering. Approaches to Irish history that take account of men as gendered beings, in relation to women, and to other men, offer to transform our understanding of social, political and cultural relations in important ways. Conceptualising masculinity as gender also offers the potential
for decoupling masculinity from maleness.22 As the chapters by Pamela McKane and D. A. J. MacPherson show, masculinity is constructed by women as well as men, claimed and distributed by groups who may not possess the male sexed body. Likewise, James Ward’s chapter shows how individuals can claim masculinity as part of gender performance irrespective of their sexed identity. Masculinity is not the sole provenance of men. It is often most legible when it deviates from dominant norms or leaves the male sexed body, as Jack Halberstam has shown. Studying masculinities in the context of Ireland’s troubled history, and studying Irish history in the context of gender trouble, we argue, will enable historians to interrogate the presumption of a naturalised relation between maleness and power and the political, religious and social ends this has been put to.
Though contemporary theorists have seized on the so-called ‘crises’ of modern masculinity, the early modern period in Ireland offers ample evidence of the malleable and shifting registers of masculinity, and their imbrication in the politics of colonialism, ascendancy power, and religion. Again, there has been important and groundbreaking work on this period in the feld of literary history and gender studies. Sarah McKibben’s monograph on ‘endangered masculinities’ in Irish poetry argues that ‘powerfully gendered and sexualised imagery was central to early modern colonial rhetoric of election, obligation, and destiny’ as Irish language poets represented English colonisation as an assault on elite masculine autonomy, honour and potency.23 The transformation of early modern models of masculinity is further complicated by the particular dynamics of Ireland’s society and politics. Yet few cultural, political or social histories of eighteenth-century Ireland explicitly interrogate masculinity as gendered performance. James Kelly’s That Damn’d Thing Called Honour: Duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (1995) exemplifes Irish historians’ tendency to ignore masculinity as a category requiring analysis. Kelly’s work, which examines the duel as a symbolic practice in its specifcally Irish context, provides a detailed and nuanced social history with attention to the complexities of rank, religion, law and space but notably fails to address the historical construction of gender which underpins the very notion of the ‘gentleman’, his codes of honour and behaviour.24 In Kelly’s work—an otherwise outstanding piece of scholarship— masculinity is in plain sight but unremarked, naturalised, and accepted as an unproblematic foundation upon which more supposedly important analyses can be based.
If historical studies of eighteenth-century Ireland have often taken masculinity as ‘an assumption rather than a subject for gender history in its own right’, recent eighteenth-century scholarship demonstrates the dividends available when masculinities are interrogated.25 Collections such as Catríona Kennedy and Matthew McCormack’s Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850 (2012) and Padhraig Higgins’s monograph, A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2012), both analyse the historical specifcities of masculinity as a gendered experience in martial participation and Irish political culture respectively.26 As Brendan Kane notes, ‘making masculinity a more effective tool of historical analysis can yield new insights on old questions’.27 If masculinity offers a means of illuminating social, cultural and political norms, it also provides a means of uncovering histories and sexualities occluded by orthodox Irish historiography: creating new questions. Thus, Declan Kavanagh’s recent Effeminate Years (2016) analyses the queer connotations of mid-century political satire, which deployed the Irishman as a fgure of labile gender and sodomitical or sterile capacities.28 As the essays in this collection show, eighteenth-century Irish masculinities were negotiated and contested in throughout this period of profound constitutional and cultural change.
James Ward’s chapter on early eighteenth-century dramas by James Farquhar and William Congreve examines the intersections of law, political history, and literature in the representation of Anglo-Irish masculinity. For Ward, Ireland’s bitter contestation of the 1688 settlement and the formative trauma of the Williamite wars, as well as the Anglo-Scottish Act of Union of 1707, have profound implications for Anglo-Irish masculinity. With Ireland reduced to a quasi-colonial and dependent status, Anglo-Irish playwrights use the language of contract to explore and protest their legal inequality. Comic dramas written for metropolitan London audiences dramatise the asymmetry of power and the rhetoric of mutuality, autonomy and willed submission found in the constitutional contracts between England and Ireland. Contractarian rhetoric is ‘shared across political and dramatic constructions of Irish masculinities’, crystallising in the negotiations of marriages; divorces; fnancial inheritance and terms of employment. Proto-liberal masculine subjectivity was constructed as autonomous but it was also predicated on the exclusion of femininity: yet there was nonetheless an ‘uneven distribution of agency’ both between and within genders. Power and rights are ‘acquired
political attributes’ which are ‘conventionally masculine’ but can be assumed by female characters, most obviously in the britches roles. These works thus show the non-essential and transferable nature of masculinity. Ward’s analysis of these witty dramas demonstrates that nationality, as much as gender, is a performance that can be claimed, counterfeited and disavowed in differing ways at specifc historical moments.
This sense of the inherent insecurity of Anglo-Irish masculinity is further extended by Clíona Ó Gallchoir’s reappraisal of two key Ascendancy fgures, Samuel Madden and Jonathan Swift. Ó Gallchoir argues that both authors attempted to craft a Protestant paternalism which was naturally responsible for the Catholic Irish population. By representing the Irish nation as indigent and vulnerable women and children, these authors endeavoured to create an authoritative and manly benevolence capable of caring and leading a people. Yet such rhetorical self-fashioning was undermined by a sense of failure. Ireland’s ongoing ‘economic underperformance threatens the Anglo-Irish self-image of effective leadership and governance’: rather than establish masculine dominance, then, eighteenth-century economic writing repeatedly falls into imagined scenarios of chaos and collapse, as ‘women and fatherless children evade and subvert patriarchal control’. If historiography once depicted Ascendancy Ireland as a monolithic and un-refective power, Ó Gallchoir shows that its members were beset by cultural and political apprehensions often expressed through gendered anxiety. Political emasculation and subordination qualifed eighteenth-century expressions of ‘manly’ power so that the ideology of improvement is more accurately seen as a discourse of masculine reproductive anxiety rather than propagandistic confdence. Ireland’s governing masculinity’s power and status as ‘fathers of the people’ were challenged both by agricultural sterility and by Catholic super-fecundity. Ó Gallchoir’s essay contextualises the ferocious satire of Swift’s A Modest Proposal within a reproductive crisis in which Catholics’ unruly and prolifc breeding implies a failure in Protestant governing masculinity.
Declan Kavanagh’s chapter ‘Bog Men: Celtic Landscapes in MidEighteenth-Century Satire’ shows how political authors deployed the bog as a primordial landscape closely associated with undifferentiated ‘feminine’ ooze in order to exclude Irish writers from Enlightenment objectivity and reason. Analysing Charles Churchill and John Wilkes’ attacks on political propagandist Arthur Murphy in The North Briton, Kavanagh notes how the bog operated as a ‘vexatious’ and liminal space
which defned a characteristically ‘Irish’ form of masculinity: a synonymity of people with an obdurate, uncivilised place which ‘served to delegitimise Celtic participation in English political and colonial discourses’. As in Ó Gallchoir’s essay, tropes of sterility and parasitism characterise the polemics against the Irish. Just as the early eighteenth-century Ascendancy economists worried about failure to make their governance productive, radicals such as Wilkes imagine the ‘fringes of Britain … as agriculturally sterile’ and the men who inhabit them as barren, non-normative and potentially queer. Undermining the generative virility required of productive, participatory citizenry, Wilkes and Churchill dismiss Murphy and his colleague the Scottish author Tobias Smollett from the right to govern and reap the rewards of colonial expansion in the Americas. Bringing together the emasculating rhetoric of the Irish Bull or blunder and the ways in which discourses of effeminacy served to alienate and disempower Irish masculinity, this essay ironically affrms the presence of Irish writers at the very heart of political power, bringing the whiff of the bog to the metropolis.
Kevin McKenna’s chapter examines the role of primogeniture and the ‘coming of age’ for the eldest son among the nineteenth-century landed elite in Ireland. Through an examination of the 1855 celebrations on the Clonbrock estate, McKenna shows that the symbolic and communal signifcance of these events changed dramatically in the late nineteenth century. Provincial newspaper reports of Gerald Dillon’s ‘coming of age’ reinforced the paternalistic social contract between landlord and tenants, focusing exclusively on the masculine components of ritual. The only allusions to women in the reportage were passing references to titled women present. All the main participants were male, both the landlord class and the tenants. This public event thus consolidated traditional conceptions of community, hierarchy and a very particular concept of masculine pecking orders. McKenna compares the celebrations in 1855 with that of Gerald’s son Robert in 1890. The effects of the Land League and Gladstone’s Land Acts had transformed the landlord–tenant relationship and unsurprisingly the tenor of celebrations had altered signifcantly, indicating a reassessment of the paternalist contract between landlord and tenants. The weakening of the traditional social contract by 1890 transformed the sense of masculine maturity and responsibility, devolving hierarchical authority from landlords to a more horizontal set of social relations.
Peter Buckingham’s chapter examines Irish migrant masculinity in the United States, through the life and career of Thomas Aloysius Hickey, a prominent leader in the nineteenth-century Socialist Party of Texas. Hickey’s masculinity was a bricolage of infuences: forged in Ireland, then in the working-class bachelor culture of New York City, and fnally in Texas as an activist and a married man. Hickey founded the Texas Land League, directly inspired by the Land League in Ireland. His League encouraged Texan working-class men to be ‘manly men’ and take ‘manly action’ in regard to their ambitions and landholding. Part of this ‘manly action’ was to marry and head a household; thereby differentiating the farmers from the troublesome bachelor identity of the cowboy. Texan cowboys, lionised as virile heroes throughout the twentieth century in American popular culture, are not the sole story of Texan masculinities. Indeed, Buckingham notes that their peripatetic and unruly bachelor existence challenged Hickey’s patriarchalism: sharpening his countervailing conservative vision of manliness. Hickey’s reticence to marry until he could afford to head a household and maintain his wife in housewifery promulgated an ostentatiously ‘traditional’ Irish masculinity for his Texan followers. Almost-forgotten historical actors such as Hickey, who led the rural proletariat, tenant farmers and sharecroppers, were infuential in embodying and disseminating ‘Irish’ modes of masculinity in American working-class groups.
Respectability is a central issue for the subjects of Mary Hatfeld’s chapter, ‘Games for Boys: Masculinity, Boyhood, and Play, 1930–1939’. Despite the dismissive tone often associated with the term ‘child’s play’, Hatfeld argues that Irish boys’ toys and games were very much caught up in capturing gendered constructions of an ‘ideal’ male childhood within the context of the Irish Free State of the 1930s. Using the collection of essays authored by children as part of the Schools National Folklore project at the end of that decade, Hatfeld explores recreation and leisure activities outside the structures of formal education, youth clubs, or sporting organisations.29 She questions how young Irish boys in the Free State used, changed, and transgressed dominant notions of masculinity within their daily lives. Informal games were everywhere— on the street, the playground and at home—and their format refected boys’ lived realities as much as, or even more than, fantastical expressions of young imaginations. The types of games and activities deemed most appropriate for Ireland’s next generation of men were those that countered supposedly immoral habits and, instead, reinforced the mental and
physical health of a masculine group seen as being particularly vulnerable on their journey to full manhood.
Aidan Beatty’s chapter ‘Fianna Fáil’s Agrarian Men and the Economics of National Salvation’, examines the triangular relationship between economic revival, national revival and masculine revival in the Irish Free State in the 1920s and 1930s. Against a backdrop of high levels of emigration and the failure of the economic and welfare policies of Cumann na nGaedheal, Fianna Fáil’s policies after 1927 capitalised on a widespread and growing disillusionment with what was seen as Cumann na nGaedheal’s arrogance, insensitivity and distance from the concerns of ‘plain people’. After 1927, Éamon DeValera criticised Irish workers for being merely wage slaves, and dependent on others for their living. The suggestion that Irish workingmen could work for themselves in rural Ireland proved popular, and the sturdy self-suffcient farmer was held up as the Irish masculine ideal. As Beatty argues, since the land reforms of the 1880s, acquiring land had become the only guaranteed access to respectable social status, and had strongly masculinist overtones. Cumann na nGaedheal had represented the interests of the larger grazier farmers, but Fianna Fáil positioned itself, especially after 1930, as the party and vehicle that would achieve the social and economic advancement of the ‘small man’.
The variety of agrarian masculinities is refected in Ed Madden’s chapter, ‘Bachelor Trouble, Troubled Bachelors: The Cultural Figure of the Bachelor in Ballybunion and Mullingar’. Studies on bachelors are better developed in the Irish historical context than elsewhere, given the prevalence of unmarried Irish men after the Famine but Madden’s analysis moves the question beyond the question of stem-family economics, and reveals the cultural complexities of the fgure of the ‘gay bachelor’ in Irish life. In spite of global developments in gay liberation in the 1970s, and the development of gay rights associations in Belfast and Dublin in the mid-1970s, in the rural west and south of Ireland, ‘Gay Bachelor’ competitions persisted, that were the antithesis of the meanings of ‘gay’ developing in Ireland’s main urban centres. Launched in 1970, Ballybunion’s Gay Bachelor Competition was conceived as a male counterpart to the Rose of Tralee. The Gay Bachelor competitions revealed tensions within Irish conceptions of masculinities. ‘Gay’ in this context denoted free single men as the epitome of masculine social and sexual autonomy. Connecting these festivals to the career of Joe Dolan, a fgure frequently cast as Ireland’s most eligible bachelor, Madden contextualises
the ways in which the fgure of the rural bachelor was represented and accommodated in Irish popular culture. Analysing ‘Troubled Bachelors’, a play staged in Mullingar in 1940, Madden shows how nationalist rhetoric was used to exhort men to marry, fusing Irish nationalism with heteronormative masculinity and reproductive marriage. Madden raises incisive questions about bachelorhood and masculinities. While the bachelor’s independence was valorised, the whole point of the ‘gay bachelor’ competitions was to yield the most eligible individual for nuptial responsibilities. In spite of the prevalence of bachelors in Irish society after the Famine, the tensions revealed in the form and content of these competitions indicate that bachelorhood was increasingly a problematic status. Madden’s essay asks at what point in twentieth-century Ireland did resistance to marriage become inability to marry? If the ‘gay bachelor’ became a confrmed bachelor, at what point did the confrmed bachelor become a euphemism for a homosexual man?
Questions of fatherhood and its infuence on masculine construction in historical and contemporary society are of interest for numerous scholars of gender. Dara E. Purvis’ chapter, ‘Irish Fatherhood in the Twentieth Century’ investigates Ireland’s legal treatment of fathers in order to assess how social perceptions changed from understanding parenthood as being synonymous with mothering. The end of the twentieth century marked a stark transition to the traditional and historical understandings of fatherhood in Irish legal history. only recently have courts begun to recognise men’s legitimate claims of being active in their children’s lives, in contrast to the law’s recognition of a biological mother’s right to be her child’s guardian as a natural product of her genetic link with the child. Ultimately, Purvis argues that Irish law has become the last bastion of increasingly outmoded gender stereotypes about men, fatherhood, and the role men want to have in their children’s upbringing. Recognition of ‘functional parenthood’ within Irish family law would not only supply a more equal parental role to wed and unwed parents of all genders, but also has important implications for the construction of the contemporary family since the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Ireland in 2015.
The question of how women and feminine ideals have interacted with and infuenced the construction of Irish masculinities forms the central premise for two chapters in this volume. Pamela McKane’s chapter, ‘“No Idle Sightseers”: The Ulster Women’s Unionist Council and the Masculine World of Politics During the Ulster Crisis’, explores how
dominant masculine gender norms in the north of Ireland affected the formation and growth of the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council (UWUC) prior to the outbreak of the Great War. When the UWUC was formed in 1911, Ulster was on the brink of a political and cultural identity crisis regarding Home Rule, which subsequently saw a marked escalation of militarization in the province. The UWUC often fgures as an auxiliary organisation during the Third Home Rule Crisis’ era of popular masculine performance; however, McKane argues that the inverse is far more accurate. Ulster unionist women’s roles as active campaigners, canvassers, speakers, and lobbyists made them central to the antiHome Rule movement. Their presence as respectable unionist women reinforced the gendered spheres of Ulster politics and enhanced the hyper-masculine imagery of men like Sir Edward Carson and James Craig to an even more dominant position within unionist iconography.
D. A. J. MacPherson also focuses on the actions of women in relation to Irish Protestant and unionist masculinities, this time through the paradigm of orangewomen’s activism in Scotland and Canada from 1890 to 1930. He contends that the emergence of women’s orange lodges at the end of the nineteenth century profoundly shaped and tested the nature of Irish Protestant masculinities on either side of the Atlantic. Male debate about allowing women to join the orange order hinged upon issues of religiosity and respectability, the latter of which often had been a diffcult status for orangemen to secure throughout the Irish Diaspora. Women’s supposed morality and unimpeachable virtue could be used to soften the rougher imagery associated with orangemen from the working classes. Incorporating feminine identities and ideals into the wider orange spectrum refected key shifts in broader gender discourse at the turn of the century in terms of domesticity’s place in a man’s world and the high status accorded to respectable orange masculinities, as opposed to their more violent and disruptive incarnations from the 1800s. MacPherson holds that orange masculinity became, paradoxically, defned by a more prominent role for women, with female members of the order promoting conservative politics without repudiating the wider working and middle-class masculinities at the centre of orange activities.
The legacy of orange masculinities and nationalist masculinities to the future of gender relations and masculinities, and even what scholars will question in the history and present in Northern Ireland, is analysed in Fidelma Ashe’s chapter, ‘Masculinities, Political Transition and Power: A Case Study of Northern Ireland’. Ashe argues that in spite of
huge advances in scholarly questions of gender elsewhere in the academy, especially since the 1990s, comparatively little interest has been shown in critical approaches to masculinities in Northern Ireland, historically or contemporaneously. Ashe’s incisive chapter argues that scholars have focused overwhelmingly upon identity through an ethno-nationalist framework of analysis, and ethnic identity remains the primary political identity in academic studies of the province. What this approach ignores is the role gender played in the Troubles, on both sides of the sectarian divide. While loyalist politics and masculinities historically promoted prominent roles for loyalist women, politically active women promoted an ultra-conservative and religiously orientated notion of masculine hegemony in the private and public spheres. During the Troubles, the confict reinforced religiously orientated traditional gender narratives, on both sides of the sectarian divide. In a context of a ‘surplus of masculinity’ in the political and militarised arenas, scholars frequently are blind to the gendered aspects of the province’s politics and society. Women, where they appear at all, tend to be cast in the role of ‘peace makers’. This has had serious implications for the post-confict resolution period since 1998. The overwhelmingly male representation in the confict, and of the confict, has meant that the men involved with the violence and politics of the Troubles, were framed as the key actors in the long process of confict resolutions. Neglect of gender and masculinities in this paradigm has meant that women’s social and political agency, and the conditions for LGBTQ rights and the rights of non-Irish, non-white ethnic minorities, have been subsumed in the prioritisation of ethno-nationalist confict as the framework to comprehend the province’s deeply troubled history and present.
The chapters in this collection seek to address some of the ways in which expressions, concerns, and contemplations of masculinities have been central to the history of Ireland. Despite the earlier indifference and often hostility to questions of masculinities, the increasing number of investigations of men as gendered beings in Irish history demonstrates the potential that this paradigm, with its interdisciplinary angles and contemporary resonance, offers for exploring Ireland’s past. Historicising Irish masculinities can renovate Irish historical methodology: recognising masculinity as a category shared and generated across and between the sexes; which is open to interlocutors from literary studies; and which understands masculinity as historically contingent, shifting, and multiform. We hope that this volume will go some way to help promote new and creative avenues for questioning how masculinities shape, and have
been shaped by, Ireland’s past, and the ways in which considering masculinities might shape and transform future scholarship.
noteS
1. E. o’Toole, ‘Waking the Feminists: Re-imagining the Space of the National Theatre in the Era of the Celtic Phoenix’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 28(2) (3 April 2017), 134–152.
2. M. MacCurtain, Ariadne’s Thread: Writing Women into Irish History (Galway: Arlen House, 2008), 47. See M. McAuliffe, ‘Irish Histories: Gender, Women and Sexualities’, in M. McAuliffe, K. o’Donnell, and L. Lane (eds.), Palgrave Advances in Irish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 191–221; M. Cullen, ‘Women’s History in Ireland’, in K. offen, R. R. Pierson, and J. Rendall (eds.), Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1991), 429–442: 430; L. Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 3–55; L. Connolly and T. o’Toole, Documenting Irish Feminisms: The Second Wave (Dublin: Woodfeld Press, 2005).
3. I. McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Isle of Slaves (Dublin: Gill, 2009), 141: our emphasis.
4. L. Connolly, ‘The Limits of “Irish Studies”: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism’, Irish Studies Review, 12(2), 139–161: 150.
5. Connolly, ibid.
6. M. Gialanella Valiuilis, Gender and Power in Irish History (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).
7. C. Kennedy, ‘Women and Gender in Modern Ireland’, in R. Bourke, and I. McBride (eds.), Princeton History of Modern Ireland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 361–383.
8. R. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), 3.
9. F. Ashe, ‘Gendering War and Peace: Militarized Masculinities in Northern Ireland’, Men and Masculinities, 15(3), 230–248.
10. L. Connolly, ‘Negotiating the Past: Refecting on Women’s “Troubled” and “Troubling; History in Centennial Ireland”, in o. Frawley (ed.), Women and the Decade of Commemorations (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, forthcoming 2019).
11. K. Gowens, B. Kane, and L. Nussdorfer, ‘Reading for Gender’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 22(4), 527–535: 527.
12. The latter has been most recently analysed by J. Redmond, Moving Histories Irish Women’s Emigration to Britain from Independence to Republic (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). See also
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
See brudder’s funny face, baby?
S
[Coming out, and speaking with boundless contempt.]
Dat’s de last time I tackle a job along wit’ a fambly man!
B
Bill, yuh promised us a Christmas tree!
P
An’ we knowed yuh’d get us one!
A
Yuh said yuh was gonna get one, didn’t yuh, Bill?
M
So we folleyed yuh all de way—
P
Yuh couldn’t lose us, Bill!
Not on yer life!
We wanted dat tree!
A
P
T’
[A grand climax.]
An’ here it is!
[There is a chorus of delighted screams as the children surround the tree.]
B
Bill, what a peach of a tree!
P
Some tree!
Lookit de presents!
Golly, lookit de presents!
See de boo-ful tree, baby?
A
T’
M
[She makes the baby clap its hands.]
D
[Puzzled, as the children, shrilling their delight, descend upon the gifts.]
Say, Santa Claus, I didn’t know you had a family.
S
[With infinite disgust.]
Kid, yuh said a mout’ful!
Are they all related to you?
[Not too modestly.]
D
B
Me eight brudders an’ sisters—count ’em. Bessie—an’ Pete—dey’re twins. An’ Maggie—dat’s her holdin’ de baby—an’ T’eodore—an’ Annie—an’ Grover—an’ Woodrow—an’ Calvin—dat’s de baby.
D
Do they all come from the North Pole?
B
[With injured American pride.]
W’at do yuh t’ink? We’re a lot of Polanders?
B
De Nort’ Pole? De Nort’ Pole’s warm next to w’ere dey come from. My paw ain’t woikin’, an’ de landlord toined off de heat w’en I didn’t pay de rent.
D
Rent? What’s rent?
S
[As B gazes appealingly at him.]
Yuh started dis. Yuh tell him.
B
Rent? Rent’s somethin’ yuh pay w’en yuh get money.
D
And when you don’t get it?
Yuh don’t.
B
S
[Becoming impatient.]
Say, what I wanna know is dis: is dis a kidnapin’ party, or is dis a kid party?
D
What’s a kidnaping party, Santa Claus?
B
I’ll show yuh.
[He calls to the children.]
Hey, fellers, we’re gonna beat it.
P
Naw!
We don’t wanna go, Bill.
B
A
We wanna play wit’ de presents!
T’
Lookit de sleds!
An’ de boxin’ gloves!
An’ de railroad trains!
An’ de trumpets!
See de pretty flowers, baby?
P
A
B
M
P
[Parceling out the musical instruments.]
Yuh take dis—and yuh take dis—an’ w’en I say “Ready,” yuh all blow to onct.
S
[Anxiously.]
Nuttin’ doin’!
Ready!
[The din is terrific.]
P
D
[Indicating the instruments with some anxiety, and pulling B ’ sleeve.]
Santa Claus, they haven’t been boiled!
S
W’at?
D
They haven’t been boiled, Mr. Slim!
S
[And you know he means the children—not the toys.]
Dey oughta be!
All ready? Go!
[The uproar is repeated.]
[To B .]
P
S
An’ I told yuh not to make a sound!
B
Say, kid, dere ain’t nobody else on dis floor, is dere?
D
No—nobody but us.
[Drawing a sigh of relief.]
B
Dat’s good. Now, fellers, we’re gonna go—
S
[Interrupting.]
An’ we’re gonna take him—
[He indicates D .]
along with us.
W’at’s de hurry, Bill?
We don’t wanna go!
Not now!
B
P
T’
B
Bill, dere’s no place fer us to go to.
B
W’at do yuh mean?
P
De landlord, he come along w’ile we was leavin’, an’ he says we needn’t come back—none of us—never.
B
[Rather pleased with her news.]
He says he’ll put de furniture on de sidewalk, an’ yuh can git it w’enever yuh like.
P
De sooner de better, he says.
B
Yea—an’ dat wasn’t all he says!
B
[Aghast.]
He trun yuh out de moment my back was toined?
Yuh bet he did!
B
B
He trun yuh out? He trun yuh out?
B
Dat’s w’at I’m tellin’ yuh.
An’ what did paw say?
B
B
Paw says ef yuh can’t support him in better style den dat, he’s gonna quit yuh cold.
B
W’at do yuh t’ink of dat, Slim? Ain’t it de limit? Ain’t dat de absoloot limit?
D
[Seizing B ’ hand.]
What’s the matter, Santa Claus?
B
[Angrily.]
Aw, nuttin’!
D
Why don’t you tell me, Santa Claus?
B
[Bitterly.]
Dere’s nuttin’ de matter—on’y de kids ain’t gonna have a roof over deir heads to-night!
D
Because you didn’t get money?
B
Dat’s w’y.
D
And because you didn’t pay the rent?
B
Yuh said it, kid.
D
But why do you want a roof over their heads? Can’t we take them along with us?
B
W’at’s dat?
D
They can come to the North Pole too, can’t they? Of course it will be a little crowded in the sleigh, but there’ll be room for all of us if we sit close. And we’ll have lots of fun!
S
[Meaningly.]
Do yuh hear dat, Bill?
[Eagerly.]
D
The reindeer are waiting outside!
S
Aroun’ de corner.
D
Dancer and Prancer, and Blixen and Vixen—
B
[Interrupting.]
De reindeer’s name is Lizzie—an’ her radiator’s froze.
S
[Crossing to him earnestly.]
But it’s gonna get us away from here, Bill! We get outa de city—we go somew’eres in de Bronx—an’ den we give Millman a ring on de telephone—
D
Don’t telephone daddy; he’s always busy
S
He won’t be busy dis time.
[He argues with B .]
D
You don’t know my daddy! My daddy is the busiest man in the world! When he comes to see me, he says, “Exactly ten”—and that means exactly ten. When I want to see him I have to ask his secretary—and sometimes he can’t see me at all.
B
Do yuh like dat?
D
I don’t like it—but I guess daddy has to work.
B
Your daddy woik? W’at fer?
D
I guess he wants his money—so that he can pay his rent.
[B snickers. D bridles indignantly.]
Don’t make fun of him! I won’t let anybody do that! I don’t think anybody works as hard as he works! Why, he starts in the morning
before I get up, and sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night, I tiptoe to the door of my room, and I can see the light burning in his study downstairs! Daddy works hard—and he looks so tired! He’s so tired sometimes that he won’t let me sit in his lap.
B
My daddy lets me sit in his lap all I like!
D
[Eagerly.]
Does everybody call him a fine man?
B
[A bit dubiously ]
Dey calls him all sorts of t’ings—but he don’t mind dat.
D
Do the policemen stop and speak to him?
B
Not ef he sees dem foist.
D
Do they send men to his house to take his picture?
B
[With pardonable pride.]
Dey don’t have ter: dey got his pitcher at headquarters.
B
[Who has been arguing with S in undertones during the preceding dialogue, now turns abruptly.]
Come on, fellers! We’re gonna go!
[Slim takes D ’ hand.]
A C
Naw, Bill!... We wanna play wit’ de presents!... We don’t wanna leave de presents!... We want de presents!
B
[Angrily.]
Come on, I say!
[Appealingly ]
M
Baby don’t wanna leave de presents!
D
Santa Claus, let them take the presents with them!
[As S releases him in astonishment, he runs to the children.]
Here: you take this, and here’s something for you; and you take one of the railroad trains—don’t forget the tracks—and you take the other one.
B
[Dumbfounded.]
Yuh’re givin’ away yer toys?
[Busy distributing gifts.]
They want them more than I do!
D
[He turns again to the children.]
Here: you can carry more than that!
[A ’ arms are full already, but he piles toys on the heap.]
Put these on top. Take them along.
[To P .]
Do they let you ride a bicycle?
Sure t’ing!
Then take this one.
[To B .]
P
D
Do they let you go coasting on a sled?
B
All I want—ef I gotta sled.
Here’s one for you.
D
[To T’ , holding up a pair of boxing gloves.]
Can you use them?
Kin a duck swim?
Take them.
[To B .]
T’
D
P
Hey, Bill, can I have de tennis racket?
B
[To D .]
How about it?
D
[And you see it hurts—and besides P ’ arms are full.]
He wants it more than I do.
M
[With a cry of delight.]
Gee, look w’at I found! Ice skates! See de ice skates, baby?
D
Ice skates!
[He pauses; takes them in his hand; caresses them. This time it hurts very much indeed.]
B
[Almost savagely.]
W’at are yuh gonna do, kid?
[Smiling at B .]
I’m going to give them to her.
D
[He places them in M ’ hands.]
Take good care of them—and look out for the baby—they’re sharp.
[He turns to B .]
And now, Santa Claus, what’s a kidnaping party?
B
Yuh wanna know dat?
Yes, Santa Claus!
Yuh really wanna know?
D
B
[D takes his hand and nods eagerly. B hesitates. Then he glares defiantly at S , and turns to D .]
Kid, yuh ain’t never gonna loin dat from me!
S
[With hostility.]
W’at did yuh say?
[Apologetically.]
D
I didn’t mean to forget your present, Mr. Slim.
[He runs to the tree and fetches the candy.]
Here you are! And Merry Christmas!
[He gives S the box.]
S
De candy! Dat’s my idee of one fine present!
D
And now, Santa Claus?
[Shaking his head.]
B
Kid, it’s gonna cost me a lotta coin—an’ gee, w’at wouldn’t I do wit’ just a coupla dollars?—but youse a little gen’leman—see?—an’ ef anybody lays a finger on yuh, I’ll moider him!
[He casts a defiant glance at S , and claps his arm upon D ’ shoulders in a rough accolade.]
Kid, youse a good sport—
[He bows grotesquely.]
—an’ I take me hat off to yuh! Yours truly, John W. Santa.
S
[Gasping.]
Youse gonna leave him here?
B
Yuh hoid me.
But we come here to—
S
B
[Interrupting.]
I changed my mind—see? A guy dat’s a he-man can do dat little t’ing —an’ John W. Santa’s a he-man!
[He indicates D .]
I’m gonna leave him here—an’ me an’ de kids is gonna beat it—an’ youse is comin’ along, too; don’t yuh forget dat!
S
Bill! Yuh said yuh was hard-boiled!
B
[Crossing to him menacingly.]
Ef yuh don’t believe it, now’s de time to try me!
[He pauses.] Well?
[There is a sudden loud knocking at the locked door at the right.]
H
[Outside.]
Let me in! Let me in or I’ll break down the door!
S
Beat it!
[There is a rush for the windows, but it stops short as the door at the left, which has been ajar for some moments, suddenly opens, and M stands on the threshold.]
B
[Rising nobly to the occasion.]
A-choo!
God bless you!
We’re pinched!
[Quietly.]
Just that.
D
S
M
S
[Jerking his thumb toward the window.]
Cops outside?
[Nodding.]
M
They saw you come in. They’ve been waiting for you to come out.
A
[Beginning to cry.]
I want my presents!
H
[Hammering at the door again.]
Let me in!
Let him in.
M
[B crosses to the door and unlocks it. H and V , both wabbly, but on their feet again, come into
the room.]
V
Master David! Master David! They haven’t hurt you, have they?
[She rushes to him.]
D
Santa Claus wouldn’t hurt anybody. He was going to give me a kidnaping party, that was all.
[He pats B ’ hand.]
[Horrified.]
Master David!
[Producing a whistle.]
V
H
Shall I whistle for the police, sir?
M
Wait, Halligan.
[He turns to the intruders.]
The house is surrounded. There is no way you can get out.
B
[Most unhappily.]
Yes, sir.
[He takes off his mask. For the first time we see his face: the face of a half-starved lad with big eyes.]
M
Bear that in mind.
[Most unaccountably, most leisurely, he turns his back on B , and draws up a chair.]
Davy, how would you like to sit in my lap?
D
I’d love it, Daddy!
So would I.
M
[D rushes to him. M settles him comfortably, quite oblivious of the others.]
There. There. David, where were you going with this man?
D
Not “this man,” Daddy: it’s Santa Claus.
M
I meant Santa Claus.
D
I was just going to the North Pole.
M
Were you going to leave me alone?
D
I would have come back to-morrow or the next day, Daddy—if you wanted me.
M
[Eloquently.]
If I wanted you!
[He pauses.]
Are you sure you would have come back, Davy?
D
Well, pretty sure.
[He hesitates.]
I wouldn’t want to bother you if you were busy.
M
[Wincing.]
I’m not so busy as you think, Davy.
D No?
M No.
[He pauses.]
Sometimes, when a man’s lonely—when he misses somebody who’s gone terribly, terribly much—he tries to make himself busy. Do you understand that, Davy?
D
I think I do. You mean—Mummy.
M
I mean—Mummy.
[His voice lightens.]
But now that my little boy is growing older, I don’t expect to be nearly so busy any more.
D
[Ecstatically.] Really, Daddy?
Honest and truly!
[Turning to Bill.]
M
D
Did you hear that, Santa Claus?
[B shuffles his feet and does not answer.]
M
[Sharply.]
Did you hear that, Santa Claus?
B
Yes, sir. I hoid him.
[Trying to speak lightly.]
M
And now, if you still want to go to the North Pole with Santa Claus— you may go.
[He pauses.]
Do you want to go?
D
[Hesitates; rises; looks at his father; looks at B and then, to his father’s unutterable horror, runs to B .]
You won’t mind, will you, Santa Claus?
[B is silent.]
M
[In a tone like that of a whiplash.] Answer him!
B
[Addressing D , and exceedingly gruff.]
W’at do yuh mean, kid?
D
You won’t mind if I stay here, will you? I don’t care so much about that old North Pole.
