Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival (review)

In the coda to Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival, Karen Steele notes that Constance Markievicz is the lone feminine presence among the Irish heroes memorialized in marble in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. For Steele, this symbolizes the manner in which many of key female figures of the Revival period have been excluded from the nation’s historical memory. This monograph goes far toward establishing the proper status of women within Irish nationalism during the Revival. Steele demonstrates that women were not mere supporters, but rather, vital entities within the movement. Steele’s assessment of the “advanced nationalist press” adds a much-needed and most welcome corrective to Ireland’s masculine, heroic national narrative.

By examining Ireland’s radical press in the years leading up to the Easter Rising, Steele discusses the nexus between high and low culture and its impact on the events of 1916. This intersection between feminism, anticolonial nationalism, and socialism served as a vital, invigorating force to the cause of Irish independence. The push for a free Ireland served as an entrepôt for many Irish feminist intellectuals into both the nationalist cause, and—as many believed at the time—entry as well into what was seen as an assured place within an independent Irish state. Yet the involvement of women in the nationalist cause was more than an external association, with such women as Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Delia Larkin, and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, as well as such organizations as Cumann na mBan and Inghinidhe na hÉireann playing key roles in defining and advancing the cause of Ireland’s independence. As Steele notes, the “advanced nationalist press provided a unique public forum for debates about Ireland’s future, and fertile ground for germinating ideas about what cultural and political organizations should develop.” This is exemplified by such journals as the Shan Van Vocht, which served as a rhetorical proving ground for noted Revivalists and nationalists, including James Connolly, Douglas Hyde, George Russell, and William Butler Yeats.

The body of Women, Press, and Politics During the Irish Revival comprises five chapters advancing chronologically from the 1890s up through the 1910s. The involvement of women in the nationalist cause evolved over time, and in a direction that was steadily less feminist. Women’s early inclusion and participation in the movement was eroded, eventually becoming a thoroughgoing marginalization in the years following the establishment of the Irish Free State. Steele argues that the women of Ireland were the custodians of Celtic values as well as purveyors of the feminist cause. Such sentiments are evident in the opening chapter, in which Steele uses the Shan Van Vocht and the nationalist-tinged romances of Alice Mulligan to demonstrate a growing intersection between Irish nationalism and feminist interests. From the ashes of the Shan Van Vocht, which ceased publication in 1899, emerged the United Irishman, a periodical that brought together the interests of Irish feminists, socialists, and nationalists. Along with the formation of the Inghinide na hÉireann as a feminine response to British colonialism, the involvement of women in this era counters assertions that the Irish feminist cause failed to live up to its potential. Additionally, the writings of Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith sought to educate what they thought would be a revolutionary generation with women as domestic nation-builders continuing their agenda in the home.

It was from this intellectual foundation that the more-recognized agents of Irish feminism emerged. With the elevation of Constance Markievicz and Cumann na mBan to prominence, a complex discourse of allegory and militancy developed that was indicative of revolutionary feminism, but also evidence of an audience savvy to the clues and nuances of the advanced nationalist press. In a general sense, Steele’s work is demonstrative of how cultural nationalism becomes imbued into cultural discourse by means of intellectual input—and in the case of Ireland during the Gaelic Revival, we see how women operated inclusively within the push for...