Gendering the "Union of Hearts": Irish Politics between the Public and Private Spheres

Gendering the "Union of Hearts": Irish Politics between the Public and Private Spheres MITZI MYERS Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight? Who blushes at the name? It is much less significant that men's History is made of wars than that men's wars are made of stories. No one can write about Ireland without getting into trouble.1 The three epigraphs above are most obviously related to the gendering of 1798, the bloody events that precipitated the passage of the Irish Act of Union in 1800, but they apply just as readily to the Union itself.2 The larger issues, as my title indicates, involve gender and politics. They raise the much vexed and contentious subjects of how the so-called public and private spheres interconnect (or, as some still argue, fail to) and of how women do politics, if indeed they do. In an Irish context, some might still argue that they do not. Gender concerns are arriving late to Irish studies but as the title of a recent collection—Women and Irish History—announces, they are arriving nonetheless. At the same time, that handy and noncommital and of my title yokes two discrete subjects ambiguously. Who can help recalling Virginia Woolf's musings on her similarly tricky title, "Women and Fiction"? In translating her terms to an alternative dyad, we might ask 49 50 / MYERS whether "Irish history" should mean what women were really like (as opposed to the feminine stereotypes of the past, perhaps); or should the phrase refer to the history that Irish women actually wrote (and, indeed, one essay in this new collection does concern women historians in Ireland); or should it call into question women and the history that is written about them? Or should it finally encompass all three concerns: an accurate portrayal of Irish women, their right to pen their own historiography, and also to correct the historiographical record? In putting the question to the phrase "women and fiction" Woolf recognized the interconnections of concerns like these, and also the difficulty of arriving at a conclusion about them in a brief essay.3 In situating notions past and present of a gendered Irish Union within this context of public and private spheres, of "women and fiction," of "women and Irish history," I want also to argue for a broadening of our understandings of what the Union meant, to factor genre as well as gender into the rethinking of the civil imaginary that bicentennial conferences necessitate. Wars, rebellions, and risings are not just records of military battles won or lost. Acts of Union are not just political documents enacted through men's public speech making or private bribe taking. One might parenthetically remark that David Wilkinson's recent work on massive and organized Secret Service expenditures seeks to undercut G. C. Bolton's classic on the passing of the Act of Union as a study in parliamentary politics—more or less corrupt Irish business as usual—in much the same way that the ongoing flumes of essays, monographs, and anthologies underlining United Irish organizing and propaganda seek to revise older orthodoxies on undisciplined and incoherent radical politics.4 The explanatory paradigm of a spontaneous peasant jacquerie fueled by sectarian hatreds rather than radical ideologies taken for granted in mid-twentieth-century scholarship has been under sustained siege for some time, with new work appearing almost weekly. Bicentenary reconsiderations of Ireland in 1798, like those of Revolutionary France that began almost a decade ago, bid fair to rethink not just one historical period or event, but the whole question of how history is constituted and represented. But we have scarcely begun to consider what women were doing behind the lines or behind the scenes, as in Lady Londonderry's intercession for the government scapegoat William Orr or Lady Moira's warnings to Catholic leaders like Denys Scully who, she thought (quite rightly, as it turned out), seemed too sanguine about the emancipatory potential of Union with English partnership.5 We still don't quite know how to deal with what conduct book writers notoriously called "female influence" and modern scholars are beginning to read as informal Gendering the "Union of Hearts": Irish...