Irish Female Activists

ELT 48 : 2 2005 forty-four lines of commentary. Catullus and Horace are quoted in Latin; Homer, Pindar and Aristophanes in Greek. Originals are provided for most of Gogarty's parodies, and many poems are cross-referenced for comparison. This is a true scholarly edition, one that will serve both students and specialists of the Irish literary scene in Gogarty's lifetime. A. Norman Jeffares, himself a Dubliner, founder of IASIL (the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature) and ACLALS (the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), has written primarily on Yeats and also on Joyce, Moore, Swift, and Anglo -Irish literature generally. His latest book is yet another important contribution to the field, one that demanded a considerable expenditure of time in gathering (let alone researching and annotating) Gogarty's original documents, dispersed as they are in Ireland, England and the United States; the Acknowledgements list a total of twenty-five libraries and collections. Time well spent, given the impressive results. MICHEL W. PHABAND Hokkaido Bunkyo University, Japan Irish Female Activists Sinéad McCoole.iVb Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years 1900-1923. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 288 pp. 192 illustrations $29.95 AMONG the famous names associated with Irish resistance to English rule during the first decades of the twentieth century, a few have always been those of women: Maude Gonne, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Countess Markievicz. Many students of the period, however , would be hard pressed to go beyond these iconic figures and name a dozen more of the many women who played their parts in the drama of the 1916 Rising, and the War of Independence and Civil War that followed . Sinéad McCoole has provided a valuable resource for understanding how crucial, and how active, was the involvement of women in bringing about the emergence of modern Ireland. In first looking through her book, the reader must be struck by sheer numbers, by how many women there were who committed themselves to the nationalist cause without ever receiving the lasting fame of mention in a poem by Yeats. Some of the names are familiar because of their famous fathers (Louise Gavan Duffy, daughter of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy of the Young Ireland movement) or brothers (Mary MacSwiney, sister of Terence, Lord Mayor of Cork, who died on hunger strike). But this book is about 220 BOOK REVIEWS the exploits of the women themselves, as they bicycled through dangerous nights to carry messages, hid weapons and ammunition under their clothes, and, when arrested, went on hunger strike themselves. Given the rich literary atmosphere of the time, memoirs were published and letters do remain, but most of the names are not familiar, and McCoole has done an admirable job in recovering something of their lives, after decades in which many did not want to talk about what they had done. Interviews with nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren provide invaluable detail for the story of this book. No Ordinary Women is printed entirely on glossy paper, and readers, upon picking it up, may wonder what kind of book it is. There are photographs on nearly every page, many in color, but while resembling a coffee table book in its visual design and the feel of its pages, it might just as easily be seen as a reference work. The second half of the book is devoted to an alphabetical presentation of seventy-three brief biographies of women activists, followed by a list of women imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol after the 1916 Rising, and a second list of over 500 women imprisoned during the Civil War in Kilmainham, Mountjoy Jail, or the North Dublin Union. The first half of the book provides an historical overview, beginning with a chapter on "Women's Activism (1900-1916)," and continuing through the end of the Civil War in 1923. If the message conveyed by the physical book seems to contradict that of the text, both messages are nonetheless appropriate. McCoole has given us a great deal of primary material about who the women were and what they did during this crucial period, and scholars will follow paths out of this book for many years...