feminism

feminism, a term first coined by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier in the 1830s, but not in common use in English until the 1890s, can be defined as advocacy of women's political and social equality. It can trace its beginnings in Ireland to William Thompson's Appeal (1825), which argued for women's emancipation on the grounds of reason. Although Thompson and his collaborator Anna Wheeler were Irish, the Appeal was addressed to ‘Women of England’, and published there; its Irishness was accidental.

As time went on Irish feminism became more rooted in Ireland and came to include all political traditions. The Irish women's campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts (see prostitution), while it applied to conditions in Ireland, involved only 49 Protestant middle‐class women. The campaign for educational equality, although also confined to middle‐class women, was bigger, and towards the end of the century included Catholics as well as Protestants. The first women's suffrage association, the North of Ireland Women's Suffrage Society, was set up in 1873, followed by the Dublin Women's Suffrage Association, later the Irish Women' s Suffrage and Local Government Association, in 1876. However, the suffrage movement did not really flourish until the early 20th century, when a range of suffrage organizations appeared, some of which, like the IWSLGA, attracted both nationalists and unionists. The Irish Women's Franchise League, founded in 1908, was the most high‐profile of these organizations. Nationalist in its sympathies, it strongly resisted absorption by the British‐based Women's Social and Political Union on which it modelled itself. There were some working‐class women in the suffrage movement but most of the participants were female white‐collar workers or professionals, or the womenfolk of professionals.

It is all the more striking, then, that James Connolly, champion of the Irish working class, was the most influential feminist in early 20th‐century Ireland. Not only did Connolly's Irish Citizen Army accept women on a strictly equal footing with men; the commitment to sexual equality in the proclamation that accompanied the rising of 1916 (it addressed itself to Irishmen and Irishwomen, and pledged a commitment to universal adult suffrage) was also largely his doing. Besides Connolly, at least four of the proclamation's seven signatories (Clarke, MacDonagh, Pearse, Plunkett) were sympathetic to feminism. It was this, and the involvement of women in 1916, in Cumann na mBan and in prominent positions in the First and Second Dáil, rather than unanimous support for women's self‐determination among nationalists, which ensured that women in the Irish Free State gained full equality of citizenship in 1922, six years before British women.

From 1922, feminists opposed women's exemption from jury service, attacks on women's working rights in 1935, and their consignment to a domestic role in Eamon de Valera's constitution of 1937. Representatives of the 28,000‐member Joint Committee of Women's Societies and Social Workers, the Catholic Federation of Women's Secondary School Unions, and the National Council of Women in Ireland stoutly affirmed their feminism to the Commission on Vocational Organization in 1940, demanding that ‘home‐makers’ be given an authoritative voice in the proposed vocational assembly. The strong emphasis on ‘equality in difference’, and the identification of feminism with women's household work, continued into the 1940s. The Irish Housewives' Association (founded in 1942) defined women's issues as everything from consumer issues to children's welfare and women's political representation, and in 1947 incorporated into itself the remnants of the IWSLGA. A small, Dublin‐based organization with a high proportion of Protestants, it was regularly attacked by the Catholic sociology journal Christus Rex in the late 1940s for its support of school meals and co‐operative housekeeping ventures. It supported Dr Noel Browne's mother and child bill in 1950–1.

It is misleading to speak of a ‘revival’ of feminism in the late 1960s. While the high‐profile, Dublin‐based Irish Women's Liberation Movement (1970–1) attracted the most publicity, the ongoing pressure put on government by the Irish Housewives and the Irish Countrywomen, among others, to appoint a commission to review women's status probably had more impact. The Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 led to the Council for the Status of Women as a monitoring body in 1973. The feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, while they built upon the earlier feminist concentration on women's household work, prioritized a redefinition of women's legal and social relationship to the family, economic resources, education, employment, and public life. Key reforms followed, while groups like Irishwomen United (1975–7), AIM (1972), the Women's Political Association, Irish Feminist Information, Cherish, Rape Crisis Centres, and many others testified to the renewed popular interest in women's rights.

Bibliography

Owens, and R. Cullen , Smashing Times (1984)
Smyth, Ailbhe (ed.), Irish Women's Studies Reader (1993)
Tweedy, Hilda , A Link in the Chain (1992)

Caitriona Clear