Color profile: _DEFAULT.CCM - Generic CMYK Composite Default screen
Introduction Introduction
I
reland in the late nineteenth century was a conservative and male-dominated
country – in politics as well as in religion. Irish nationalist organisations, both those that favoured physical force as a method of achieving their aims and those that favoured the constitutional path of change through the Westminster parliament, were almost entirely male in composition. Ireland was ruled by Britain and women in Britain and Ireland were denied the vote and ignored by parliamentarians. There had been many outspoken women writers in the ranks of the nationalist United Irelanders in the 1840s, but in the 1860s the new generation of revolutionary nationalists (known as Fenians after the Fianna, warriors of ancient Ireland) formed themselves into the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a conspiratorial organisation with membership confined to men. Women were not eligible to take the oath of membership but some, mostly female relatives, formed a Ladies’ Committee which devoted its time to supporting imprisoned Fenians. The one exception and, indeed, challenge to the politically marginalised position of women during the nineteenth century occurred during the Land War, at a time when the dangers of famine, which had so devastated the country in 1845-49, once again threatened the Irish countryside. In 1879 the small farmers and peasantry mobilised against the high rents charged by Irish landlords, through the formation of the Land League – a political alliance of Fenians and the Irish Parliamentary Party. While largely male, the few women who controlled their own farms (mainly widows of farmers) were allowed to join. However, when the British government, in an attempt to quell the agitation, declared the Land League an illegal organisation and began to arrest its membership, the male leadership, most reluctantly, agreed to the formation of a new organisation that would be outside the terms of the British proscription. The Ladies’ Land League was headed by Anna Parnell, the sister of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Party. For a period of eighteen months the women’s organisation took over the leadership of the Land War and proved to be effective and determined opponents of landlordism and of British control over Ireland. It was this militancy that led to their demise. Under the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ the British government released the men, one of the conditions of release being that the women’s organisation would be disbanded. For their part, many of the women decided that they had no wish to serve in a subordinate role under a male organisation with whose policies they disagreed. Those political differences had serious consequences. An 11 11
E:...No Ordinary Women.vp Fri Jul 25 10:46:37 2003