Female Emigration and the Cooperative Movement in the Writings of George Russell

In the opening act of Padraic Colum's 1904 play The Land, Ellen Douras cries out in frustration to Matt Cosgar, a man who is unable to oppose the future his overbearing father has mapped out for him on the family farm: "O Matt, what's the land after all? Do you ever think of America? The streets, the shops, the throngs."¹ Six years later, in January, 1910, the Irish Homestead, the organ of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society under the editorship of George Russell (Æ), began a discussion on the causes of emigration from rural Ireland. That discussion spanned the following six months, and the topic of emigration was revisited on numerous occasions in later issues of the paper. Russell referred to Colum's play, saying it "centred round this problem of the unrest of Irish women" and the distaste for country life among the rising generation of Irishwomen. Russell contended that, when, discontented with their lives and prospects in rural Ireland, such women left a parish they often "drew young men after them."² Russell believed that, if Ireland were to embrace agricultural cooperation, and thereby enhance the quality of country life, the rural exodus could be stemmed.

Russell saw in the values and aims of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society a means of tackling the problem of rural depopulation. Russell offered several reasons to account, in particular, for female migration from rural Ireland. For Russell, the fundamental problem was the fact that Irishwomen were obliged to engage in heavy manual work on the farm. By ensuring a wholly domestic role for rural women, Ireland would become a country no woman would willingly emigrate from. Russell's concern to fix women within the domestic parameters of home life represented more than just a concern to improve their quality of life, for in his cooperative writings the state of the nation was a function of the state of the home. The object of cooperative propaganda, Russell argued, was to improve the quality of rural living—to "build up cleaner, more worthy, more effective homes, peopled by healthier, more efficient, more cheerful men and women."³ To facilitate the regeneration of Irish national life, the renewal of rural life was imperative. If Ireland hoped to foster a healthy population, the answer, Russell wrote in The National Being, was for people to live "more in the country and less in the cities," because by the third generation, a city-dwelling population was "mean in stature, vulgar or depraved in character."⁴ To achieve national regeneration, women's role within the rural home as mother to the future Irish race was crucial. Emigration, so Russell asserted in eugenicist terms, accounted for "all those who would have made the best wives and mothers," leaving at home "the timid, the stupid, and the dull to help in the deterioration of the race and to breed sons as sluggish as themselves."⁵ To arrest the trend of Irish emigration was, therefore, more than merely a desire on Russell's part to repopulate and revitalize rural Ireland. Such an aspiration was bound up with his wider program for national regeneration. Crucially, the gender hierarchy that Russell considered integral to domestic life mirrored his conservative concern to set the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in a leadership role within the cooperatively organized Irish countryside.⁶ Russell's vision for the future of Ireland was one in which "a vast network of living progressive organizations will cover rural Ireland, democratic in constitution and governed by the aristocracy of intellect and character."⁷ This concern for status, authority, and hierarchy at different levels of Irish life—in both the domestic and public spheres—indicates the conservative character of Russell's cooperative philosophy.

Russell's discourse of rural femininity resembles the sentiments expressed by the founders of the United Irishwomen in 1910. If both the United Irishwomen and Russell—representing...