A Nation of Politicians: Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

7 Petticoat Government: Women and Patriotism

7 Petticoat Government Women and Patriotism The ideology of patriotism propagated by the Volunteers was profoundly gendered. Patriotism and masculinity were intimately connected. This can be seen in the heroic masculinity celebrated in Francis Wheatley’s well-known Volunteer paintings, particularly The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, which captures the demonstration on that date, but also in his Irish House of Commons, which depicts Henry Grattan making his famous speech supporting a motion for legislative independence on 19 April 1780. Wheatley’s paintings commemorate moments of manly patriotism, but they also suggest much about the role of women in Irish patriot politics. Women are present in nearly all of Wheatley’s Irish Volunteer paintings; in The Dublin Volunteers on College Green (see fig. 15), well-dressed women look down at the protest from windows above the scene; in the Irish House of Commons (see fig. 16), women, observing Grattan’s speech, crowd the best seats in the public gallery, a familiar site in the Irish Commons, unlike in its British counterpart . His other Volunteer paintings, such as Lord Aldborough reviewing the volunteers at Belan, County Kildare, likewise suggest women were certainly present at the key moments of Volunteer politics.1 But what does the presence of women in these paintings reveal about their place in the patriot movement? Were women mere spectators, marginal to important manly matters of parading and orating? Or were they more central to the politics of patriotism than previous accounts suggest? This chapter examines the role of women in patriot politics and demonstrates that women engaged with the patriot construction of the nation. I argue that the rise of the Volunteers provided increased 178
Figure 15 Francis Wheatley, The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4 November 1779 (detail) (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) Figure 16 Francis Wheatley (1747–1801), The Irish House of Commons, 1780, oil on canvas (© Leeds Museum and Galleries [Lotherton Hall], U.K. / The Bridgeman Art Library) opportunities for women to engage in politics and consider themselves good patriots. Wheatley’s paintings show that women were present at Volunteer ceremonials. In a recent account of women and politics in Georgian England, Kathleen Wilson rightly admonishes historians for conflating women’s presence with their influence in public life.2 This is a corrective to more-recent celebratory accounts of women’s role in the Georgian public sphere. At the same time, it is important not to confound women’s formal exclusion from the political nation with their unimportance to patriot politics or to dismiss their presence as merely decorative. Women made up a sizable proportion of the large crowds of spectators at local and regional Volunteer reviews, an action that offered public assent to the force. Along with other groups excluded from the political nation, women could also display intense interest in political affairs, such as electoral campaigns, parliamentary proceedings, and the politics of the Volunteers. Aristocratic women had traditionally played a role in electoral politics, canvassing electors on behalf of their family interest in a parliamentary seat. Previous chapters have shown that women participated in the campaign for free trade through their consumption choices and the display of political symbols. They were also active in the world of print culture. The rhetoric of patriotism repeatedly evoked a dynamic sense of interrelation between women and men in the project of renewing public virtue. Such language drew on broader cultural understandings of gender that stressed the complementary roles of men and women.3 As the discussion of invasion scares suggested, notions of the family and gender relations were central to the culture and ideology of volunteering. Although limits remained on the degree of political participation or “gender disorder” that would be tolerated by male patriots, women were nonetheless central to the culture of volunteering and the politics of patriotism. Recent research on the 1790s and the rebellion of 1798 in particular has begun to uncover the role of Irish women in the politics of loyalism and republicanism.4 This period has received increased attention, but with the exception of Mary O’Dowd’s general history of women in early modern Ireland, women’s political presence before the French Revolution has been all but ignored.5 This is somewhat surprising given that historians of eighteenth-century Britain have emphasized how the challenges of war and empire provided women with a wide range of opportunities to “act like political subjects within the...