Women and Irish-Ireland: The Domestic Nationalism of Mary Butler

The shift of the national struggle after the fall of Parnell from the arena of constitutional reform to that of cultural revival opened up new opportunities for women to participate in Irish public life. By diminishing the importance of achieving mere political independence and making cultural de-Anglicization the primary focus of their efforts, the Irish-Ireland movement tacitly acknowledged that Irish women, even if limited to their traditional roles as homemakers and teachers, had a crucial contribution to make in building the Irish nation. All of the priorities of the Irish-Ireland ideology—including the revival of the Irish language, the education of Irish children in the national history and literature, and the use of Irish-made products to strengthen the national economy—largely pertained to the domestic sphere, where women were recognized as predominant. In comparison with nationalist organizations pursuing political programs, whether constitutional or republican, those organizations promoting a cultural agenda proved far more receptive to enlisting the support of women.

At the end of the nineteenth century, women in Ireland were beginning to take a larger part in public life. Reforms enacted during the 1890s, in particular, allowed them to participate in local government. After 1896, women could serve as poor law guardians and, after 1898, they could vote in local elections. They were, however, still denied the franchise in parliamentary elections and, as long as this remained the case, the opportunities for women to enter national politics remained limited. ¹ During this period, all nationalist political organizations and most literary societies continued to enroll only men. By contrast, the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 to promote the revival of the Irish language, accepted women for membership on an equal basis. In the league, moreover, women were not restricted to subordinate roles, but played an active part in leadership. At the annual national convention in 1906, for instance, women were elected to seven of the forty-five positions on the Gaelic League Executive. Although its goals were not explicitly feminist, the league's openness to the participation of women—despite the socially conservative context of turn-of-the-century Ireland—contributed significantly to enlarging the public role of women. The opportunities thus afforded can be demonstrated by considering the career of Mary Butler, one of those seven women elected to the League Executive and a frequent contributor to the leading periodicals of "Irish-Ireland." ²

Along with many other women who devoted their energies to the Gaelic League, Mary E. L. Butler, who was born in 1872 and died in 1920, has, unfortunately, been almost completely forgotten. Unlike such nationalist women as Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz, whose lives have been most frequently examined by modern biographers, Butler did not seek an assertive public role for women, and, unlike Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, she was not an avowed feminist. ³ In her general attitudes, however, she was probably more representative of her contemporaries than were the more outspoken women of her day. Butler was not necessarily opposed on principle to the public participation of women in political and commercial life, but she perceived that, in the socially conservative environment of Ireland, any movement hoping to succeed had to operate within its limits or else risk the total rejection of its program. As a practicing Roman Catholic, she generally subscribed to the church's attitudes toward gender, accepting that there were "separate spheres" of activity for men and women, with women confined largely to the domestic realm. ⁴ However, in her many articles in Irish-Ireland newspapers, Butler argued that respectable Irish women could still make a significant contribution to building an independent Irish nation through activities undertaken within their own homes. Besides bringing up their children to speak the national language, Irish women could also teach them pride in the national history, immerse them in Irish culture, and purchase household articles of Irish manufacture. For Butler, the overriding...