Rival Maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the Reign of the Political Mother

Alert to the ways Maud Gonne used journalism and public presentation as a means of shaping her feminist activism, "Rival Maternities: Maud Gonne, Queen Victoria, and the Reign of the Political Mother" argues that Gonne both petitioned for Irish mothers' involvement in nationalist politics and sustained her own elite class position by challenging Victoria's embodiment of maternal sovereignty. Through her literary and dramatic personifications of Cathleen ni Houlihan and Mother Ireland, Gonne crafted a model of nationalist motherhood that, when placed alongside the Queen's representations of imperial maternity, worked to promote Ireland's divestiture of English governance.