Irish Women's Prison Writing

Mother Ireland’s Rebels, 1960s–2010s

Red Washburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032103532
  9781032103525
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000546002
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores 50 years of Irish women's prison writing, 1960s–2010s, connecting the work of women leaders and writers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This volume analyzes political communiqués, petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs, highlighting the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O'Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey (formerly Marian Price), Áine and Eibhlín Nic Giolla Easpaig (Ann and Eileen Gillespie), Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D'Arcy. This text builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. Centering Irish women's prison writings, in order to challenge canonization in history and literature, this volume argues that women's lives and words offer a different view of gender and nation as well as offer a fuller and more inclusive archive of Irish history and literature. Additionally, this book will point to the ways in which their politics of everyday life and their cultural work is a form of anti-colonial civil rights feminism, for it speaks truth to power in a world in which compliance and silence are valued. Overall, this text focuses on rethinking and recasting women's voices and words in order to document and promote the ongoing Irish freedom struggle from an abolitionist feminist perspective.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Knowledge, Power, and Intersections of Theory/History/Auto/biography/Methodology
• 2 Civil Rights March Script: Rhetoric, Politics, and Tactics in Bernadette McAliskey’s Memoir The Price of My Soul
• 3 In the Footsteps of the Officers-in-Command: Comradeship, No Wash, Hunger Strikes, and Fecal Art in the Prison Prose of Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, and Síle Darragh
• 4 “Our Only Weapon Was Our Pen”: Strip-Searching and Resistance in the Politics and Prison Epistolary of Ella O’Dwyer and Martina Anderson
• 5 Sisters in Shackles: Sisterhood, Exile, and Force-Feeding in the Writings of the Price and Gillespie Sisters
• 6 Writing on the Walls: Power and Struggle in the Prison Poetry of Roseleen Walsh
• 7 Bloody Writing: Menstruation and Herstory in Margaretta D’Arcy’s Tell Them Everything
• 8 Conclusion: Toward an Interdisciplinary Prison Archive and an Intersectional Abolitionist Feminism
• Index