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Violence against women in the Irish Civil War, 1922–3: gender-based harm in global perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2020

Gemma Clark
Gemma Clark*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
*Department of History, University of Exeter, [email protected]
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Abstract

Since the 1990s, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, violence against women in wartime has become a matter of international concern. This article, on gender-based violence (G.B.V.) during the Irish Civil War, draws on research from scholars and activists around the globe, and newly accessible archival sources, to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. Records of the Irish Free State's Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence during 1922–3 – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). Women's interactions with the Civil War were thus distinctive from men's because of the prevalence in Ireland of forms of aggression and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy nor ideology of either warring side to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland, where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females. Revolutionary Ireland was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men); however, for pro- and anti-Treaty forces, maintaining propriety militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 165 , May 2020 , pp. 75 - 90
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Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2020

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12 This despite some agitation on issues of rural poverty and land rights: Gemma Clark, Everyday violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge, 2014).

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26 Clark, Everyday violence, p. 3.

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31 Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee Applications (C.P.I.C.), 1922–55 (N.A.I., Department of Justice and Equality (JUS), 2017/46 series).

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33 Thomas McDonagh application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/279); Stephen Kilmartin application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1065); Bridget Barry application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1108); Charles Fitzpatrick application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/2034).

34 Mary Hyde application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1474).

35 Mary Gallagher application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/2007).

36 James Fletcher application (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/30).

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43 Mai Callanan application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/897).

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45 Matthew Hamill application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1156).

46 Bridget Barry application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1108).

47 Kalyvas, Logic of violence; Achilles Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’ in Public Culture, xv, no. 1 (winter 2003), pp 11–40.

48 Article 41.2.1, 2 of the Irish constitution (1937) recognises the value (to the state and society) of the woman's ‘life within the home’. On the influence of the Catholic church on the drafting of the constitution, its positioning of women as naturally domestic and the consequent impact on their social/economic lives, see Ronit Lentin, ‘“Irishness”, the 1937 constitution, and citizenship: a gender and ethnicity view’ in Irish Journal of Sociology, viii (1998), pp 5–24; Thomas Murray, ‘Socio-economic rights and the making of the 1937 Irish constitution’ in Irish Political Studies, xxxi, no. 4 (2016), pp 502–24; Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Women, citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1948’ in Women's History Review, vi, no. 4 (1997), pp 563–85.

49 Clark, Everyday violence, pp 73–85.

50 Irish Times, 24 Mar. 1923.

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52 E. J. Wood, ‘Variation in sexual violence during war’ in Politics and Society, xxxiv, no. 3 (Sept. 2006), p. 309.

53 Clark, Everyday violence, p. 192.

54 Ibid., pp 188–90.

55 Daniel Breen statement, 1959 (M.A.I., B.M.H., W.S. 1763).

56 Gemma Clark, ‘Fire as revolution and repression: revolutionary Ireland in perspective’ in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds), The Oxford handbook on colonial insurgencies and counterinsurgencies (Oxford, forthcoming).

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60 Michael Laffan, The resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin party 1916–1923 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 277.

61 Thanks to Oliver Morgan for sharing unpublished research that helped me think about republican military cultures in new ways.

62 Coleman, ‘Military service pensions and the recognition and reintegration of guerrilla fighters after the Irish Revolution’, p. 557. On the value of the M.S.P. Collection for studying female militancy specifically: Coleman, ‘Compensating Irish female revolutionaries, 1916–1923’, pp 915–34.

63 Tom Inglis, ‘Origins and legacies of Irish prudery: sexuality and social control in modern Ireland’ in Éire-Ireland, xl, nos 3 & 4 (fall/winter 2005), pp 9–37.

64 Anthony Keating, ‘Sexual crime in the Irish Free State 1922–33: its nature, extent and reporting’ in Irish Studies Review, xx, no. 2 (2012), p. 135.

65 Connolly, ‘Violence experienced by women in the Irish Revolution’, p. 24.

66 John Henegan application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/2051).

67 Kathleen Keyes McDonnell application (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1950).

68 Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopaedia of hair: a cultural history (Westport, CT, 2006), pp 271–2. On the categorisation of hair cutting as gender-based, but not sexual, violence: Coleman, ‘Violence against women in the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921’, p. 141.

69 Louise Ryan, ‘“Drunken Tans”: representations of sex and violence in the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21)’ in Feminist Review, no. 66 (autumn 2000), pp 73–94.

70 On the public humiliation of Jewish males by forced beard shaving: Michael Wildt, Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the dynamics of racial exclusion: violence against Jews in provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York, 2011).

71 Legacies of slavery have shaped an especially strong relationship between hair and self-expression for women of colour; see, for example, Rose Weitz, Rapunzel's daughters: what women's hair tells us about women's lives (New York, 2004).

72 Sherrow, Encyclopaedia of hair, p. 3.

73 Ibid., p. 13.

74 Irish Times, 12 Aug. 1922.

75 Catherine Gourley, Flappers and the new American woman: perceptions of women from 1918 through the 1920s (Minneapolis, 2008).

76 Andreea Prundeanu, ‘Cutting Delilah's hair: sentimental collaborators and the politics of female sexuality in WWI/II France’ (D.Phil. thesis, Michigan State University, 2017).

77 Connolly, ‘Violence experienced by women in the Irish Revolution’, p. 11.

78 Clark, ‘Fire as revolution and repression’, forthcoming.

79 Hughes, Defying the I.R.A., chapter 4.

80 Irish Times, 28 Apr. 1923.

81 Anne White application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1984).

82 Clark, Everyday violence, pp 164–5.

83 Maria Thomas, ‘“The civilisation that is being forged amid the thunder of the canons”: anti-clerical violence and social reconfiguration: July–December 1936’ in Peter Anderson and Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco (eds), Mass killings and violence in Spain, 1936–1952 (New York, 2015), pp 112–33.

84 Anti-Treaty newsletter titled, ‘War Issue / Stop Press / Nationality / To preserve the Republic’ with an article about the Free State Army using a convent as a military base, 8 July 1922 (N.L.I., Erskine Childers papers, MS 48,060/1). George Corr found this source; thanks to him for sharing unpublished research on anti-Treaty presentations of ‘the enemy’.

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89 On the revolutionary circulation of/responses to threatening notices: Clark, Everyday violence; Hughes, Defying the I.R.A.

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96 ‘Violence against women a “mark of shame” on our societies, says U.N. chief on World Day’ in U.N. News (25 Nov. 2018) (https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/11/1026511) (31 May 2019).

97 See academic and public fallout over Peter Hart's ‘tentative yet provocative application of the term “ethnic cleansing” to the Irish Revolution’, David Fitzpatrick, ‘Protestant depopulation and the Irish Revolution’ in I.H.S., xxxviii, no. 152 (Nov. 2013), p. 643; Gemma Clark, ‘The Irish Revolution: moral campaign or bitter sectarian conflict?’ in Irish Times (online), 18 Sept. 2017.

98 On Irish feminist responses to the 1937 constitution and campaigns for gender equality: Luddy, Maria, ‘A “sinister and retrogressive” proposal: Irish women's opposition to the 1937 draft constitution’ in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth ser., xv (2005), pp 175–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pašeta, Senia, ‘Women and civil society: feminist responses to the Irish constitution of 1937’ in Harris, Jose (ed.), Civil society in British history: ideas, identities, institutions (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2010)Google Scholar; Cullen Owens, A social history of women in Ireland, chapter 10. As well as this issue's editors and readers, I thank for bringing my article to fruition: Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Marie Coleman and Stacey Hynd, for inspiring my interest in the topic and its contemporary resonances; conveners and attendees of seminars/workshops (at the University of Edinburgh; Trinity College Dublin; I.E.S. Irish Studies, London; Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) where I developed my ideas; my students, past and present, whose enthusiasm for the Irish Revolution sustains and stimulates my research.