Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism, 1850–1950

Cara Delay

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526136428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This is the first book-length study to investigate the place of lay Catholic women in modern Irish history. It analyses the intersections of gender, class and religion by exploring the roles that middle-class, working-class and rural poor women played in the evolution of Irish Catholicism and thus the creation of modern Irish identities. The book demonstrates that in an age of Church growth and renewal, stretching from the aftermath of the Great Famine through the Free State years, lay women were essential to all aspects of Catholic devotional life, including both home-based religion and public rituals. It also reveals that women, by rejecting, negotiating and reworking Church dictates, complicated Church and clerical authority. Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism re-evaluates the relationship between the institutional Church, the clergy and women, positioning lay Catholic women as central actors in the making of modern Ireland.

1

Women and Catholic culture

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland boasted a vast body of prescriptive literature that instructed women how to lead proper Catholic lives.¹ A key example, Bernard O’Reilly’s 1883 advice book The Mirror of True Womanhood, conflated women’s religious and domestic duties:

There is nothing on earth which the Creator and Lord of all things holds more dear than [the] home, in which … a mother’s unfailing and all-embracing tenderness will be, like the light and warmth of the sun in the heavens, the source of life, and joy, and strength, and all goodness to her dear ones, as well as to all who come within the reach of her influence.²

As this passage suggests, the gendered norms of the post-famine era highlighted women’s ‘natural’ roles as wives and mothers. Authors urged Irish Catholic women to focus their life’s efforts on the domestic sphere. There, women would create a peaceful and civilised religious space where they would influence their husbands, educate their children, and secure the future of the Irish Catholic nation.³ Education helped to create and enforce these norms. By the late nineteenth century, Catholicism was the focus of girls’ educational lives. Religious education began early, in the home, but as girls progressed through the state educational system, it reinforced the messages of idealised Catholic womanhood, with the goal of preparing girls for future motherhood. By the first few decades of the twentieth century, religion had become even more enmeshed in education; by then, most Irish girls had access to at least a secondary-level education as well as a quickly expanding body of religious print literature – books and ­periodicals – to read. And by this time, Catholicism had become solidified as the central focus of girls’ lives and education. As part of their religious education, Irish girls absorbed the vast prescriptive literature of the era.

The conduct literature of Catholic commentators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, did not represent a simple or uniform patriarchy. The messages involved were complex, reflecting anxieties about lay women’s real-world roles. Whereas Church leaders, public political figures, and much of Ireland’s print culture celebrated the ideology of separate spheres and thus advocated a limited public role for women, other commentators recognised that Catholic women were making their mark as philanthropists, nuns, and writers and thus were stretching the public/private divide. Many Irish women, both religious and lay, certainly were limited by the construction of Catholic womanhood, yet some helped to create, and enforce, the ideal.⁴ And others overstepped the boundaries of the ideal, revealing through their words and actions their agency and activism.⁵ Complicating the notion of a monolithic gender ideal that male Church leaders imposed, this chapter exposes the multifaceted messages of Catholic womanhood in Ireland from 1850 to 1950. By examining girls’ educational experiences and women’s involvement in the consumption and creation of Catholicism’s popular and print culture, it demonstrates how girls and women were both subjects and agents of the development of modern Catholic identities.

Women in Ireland, 1850–1950

Although traditional scholarship has overstated the case, the Great Famine certainly impacted Irish women’s lives. Historians since the 1970s have linked what they describe as women’s declining status to the cataclysmic years of the famine of the 1840s and subsequent changes. Séamus Enright contends that Catholic women were ‘significant agents of change’ before 1850 but became ‘progressively disempowered and marginalised’ thereafter, while in Joseph Lee’s view, the famine ‘drastically weakened the position of women in Irish society’.⁶ Most scholars identify famine-era changes in the rural economy and the family as the catalysts for women’s declining status.⁷ The ­economic transformations necessitated by the Great Hunger, they argue, led individual families to adapt their inheritance practices. By the late nineteenth century, it was only possible for one of the sons in any family to inherit that family's farm, and a daughter’s marriage portion became dependent on the incoming dowry of a sister-in-law. A growing life expectancy among older Irish people, meanwhile, meant that parents lived longer and children waited longer to receive their land or their dowry. Consequently, large numbers of Irish women married late (past childbearing age), remained single, or emigrated. The effects of these transformations lasted for decades. Before the famine, only 10 per cent of Irish women remained unmarried by the age of forty-five. By 1926, this figure had risen to 25 per cent.⁸ K.H. Connell, Robert E. Kennedy, and Rita Rhodes have alleged that the status of Irish women fell along with the marriage rates in the subsequent decades, particularly in rural areas, as parents increasingly viewed girls, who would need to be dowered, as unwelcome financial burdens.⁹

Female emigration also provides some clues to women’s status in the post-famine era: single Irish women emigrants outnumbered male Irish emigrants for some years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This unique phenomenon, which defies the usual European pattern, resulted in a shortage of women in some rural areas of Ireland.¹⁰ According to some historians, these high emigration levels attest that women’s status in post-famine Ireland was particularly unstable.¹¹ While unmarried women emigrated or waited to marry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, married women were pushed out of rural economic production.¹² In 1861, 846,000 women in Ireland worked for wages. By 1901, this number was only 550,000, with 8 per cent of these female workers concentrated in just ten occupations. Of women doing housework, 56 per cent were unwaged in 1861. That figure rose to 81 per cent by 1901.¹³

Other historians, however, have revised the overly dismal picture of Irish women’s lives in the post-famine era and early twentieth century. Joanna Bourke, for example, has shown that some Irish women may have welcomed changes in their economic status in the decades following the famine. Their heightened positions within the household meant that well-off rural women became largely, if not entirely, responsible for the finances of the family.¹⁴ Although many Irish women continued to face economic difficulties in both family and community life, others found increased opportunities in the late ­nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For some, urban work possibilities and emigration afforded them alternatives to marriage and motherhood. Indeed, single women’s high rates of emigration in late nineteenth-century Ireland may not reflect their worsening economic status but rather their rising expectations. These women may have wanted more out of life than Ireland could offer, thus actively seeking the opportunities of emigration rather than viewing emigration as exile.¹⁵ Some women emigrants who returned to Ireland after living abroad, as Jeremiah Murphy remembered of the early twentieth century, demonstrated their different expectations:

The girls, especially, were prime targets of the young farmers contemplating matrimony and they provided almost unfair competition for other girls who never left home. They were smart looking, well dressed and their manners and speech were a ­distinct asset. However, when asked if they were going to marry a farmer some retorted, ‘I guess I’m too wise for that’.¹⁶

Single female emigrants, as Meaney, O’Dowd, and Whelan point out, sought ‘independence’ as well as ‘better living and working conditions’; in the process, they caused angst among Catholic Church authorities, who realised that these women were rejecting the idealised version of Irish womanhood for something different and distinctly modern.¹⁷

Whether married wives and mothers, adult daughters, or domestic servants, and whatever their economic circumstances, in most parts of the island, women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries navigated life within an atmosphere of heightened Catholic patriarchy. By hastening population decline,¹⁸ the Great Famine paved the way for both the growth of a powerful Catholic middle class (featuring thousands of nuns and priests) and the revitalisation of the institutional Catholic Church. Historians in the past few decades have analysed how Ireland – whose Catholics were known throughout Europe in the pre-famine era as disorderly and religiously lax – evolved into a nation whose people would, until the late twentieth century, attend mass at levels over 90 per cent.¹⁹ Many, most notably historian Emmet Larkin, have documented that the key transformational decades were those following the famine of the 1840s.²⁰

The Irish hierarchy’s attempts to instil orthodoxy during the age of the ‘devotional revolution’ were part of a larger nineteenth-century Irish civilising process that the Church spearheaded.²¹ Although in the works before the middle of the century, this mission intensified in 1850 when the Irish bishops, headed by Dublin’s Archbishop Paul Cullen, convened at Thurles, County Tipperary for their first national synod in seven centuries; there, the Irish bishops set to work on unifying practices in the Irish dioceses.²² Most of the episcopate agreed to concentrate on improving parishioners’ attention to basic Catholic duties: frequenting mass and confession; attending baptisms, marriages, wakes, and funerals in the chapel, not in private homes; and adopting new powerful devotions, such as the parish mission. In a later (1854) circular to parish priests, Archbishop Michael Slattery of Cashel elaborated on the aims of the Synod of Thurles. ‘The object of these Regu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Women and Catholic culture
• 2 Catholic girlhoods
• 3 The Irish Catholic mother
• 4 The holy household
• 5 Gender and space
• 6 Women, priests, and power
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index