CATRIONA KENNEDY
Oxford University Press
£99
ISBN 9780198899532
Reviewed by
Sylvie Kleinman
Sylvie Kleinman is Visiting Research Fellow, Department of History, Trinity College, Dubin.
This book opens with two women viewing themselves (in private letters) as quite capable of navigating the age’s intense ideological conflicts, even if held back from meaningful action. Martha McTier, wife and sister of two founding members of the United Irishmen, reminded her brother William Drennan that women were supposed to be ‘only echoes’ of their publicly active menfolk. In an altogether different political sphere, Lady Londonderry (Frances Stewart), sister of Viceroy Camden and stepmother of Lord Castlereagh, wrote to the radical Jane Greg that, within families, men expected no [ideological] opposition from their women. There was no advantage in her discovering truths, as she could not acknowledge them. Yet, trawling through their correspondence, Catriona Kennedy tracks how they considered themselves autonomous political subjects. Both McTier and Stewart were privileged yet constrained by the norms of the times, and Kennedy explores the ideas and practices which led to that self-awareness. Her book has a ‘global’ outlook in revisiting radical and revolutionary women while also considering less-literate Catholic women, though sources are lacking to track their political awareness.
The Decade of Centenaries rooted women of all political hues and degrees of public activism into the history of fundamental Irish change. In parallel to revolution, it foregrounded in the context of the Great War the female impulse to play a meaningful role in society. This has re-energised how historians of many themes and periods project their interpretations of the past, but the late eighteenth century was a key moment in the gendering of modern democratic politics. New debates vocalised the rights of women as never before, and this book approaches from various angles how women of varied backgrounds experienced and navigated the intense ideological conflicts of the 1790s. This is the first full-length study of Irish women’s engagement with (or countering) the transformative politics of the 1780s and ’90s. Many were not always visible in the public sphere and did not leave sources for us to grasp their self-awareness, ideally in their own words. Their experience has often been relayed, if not shaped, in narratives with ideological agendas.
We discover how privileged women perceived themselves, their potential actions or hampered agency, within the male-dominated political cultures of Ireland’s three principal communities. Women caught up in the dynastic ties and political allegiances of the Protestant élite or immersed in the dynamic oppositional culture of Belfast Presbyterianism are explored with great objectivity. But far less familiar ground is covered in two innovative chapters. One looks at the ‘doubly hidden’ middling or gentry Catholic women, who, unlike their Protestant counterparts, left so few letters, diaries or literature behind. We thus know frustratingly little about their personal views on life and womanhood, but some were active in publishing (Catherine Finn) or as agents for the Fitzwilliam estate (Elizabeth Fagan and Barbara Verschoyle). The latter we know was preoccupied with the plight of the Catholic poor and promoting the faith, and like others of her peer group demonstrated an increasingly assertive Catholic presence within the sphere of charitable provision. Female agency in the expansion at this time of Catholic philanthropy and the conventual movement, with its beneficial outcomes for female education, is discussed. But if documented elsewhere, here we get a better sense of how this was often framed in counter-enlightenment and counter-revolutionary mind-sets. Beyond patriarchal models, many could deploy purposeful femininity against infidelity and revolution in a public space opening up to privileged Catholics. Looking at the ‘women of no property’, they could sometimes mark their presence in a subaltern sphere of illegal associations, agrarian ‘Whiteboyism’ and Gaelic poetry and ritual. If urban underground radical culture in the 1790s was inhospitable to women, Kennedy considers, inter alia, how female-led mourning practices and the lamenting tradition could act as weapons of resistance. Women as monstrous rebel followers surface in loyalist and informer accounts and early 1798 histories and memory, but reconstructing genuine experiences or motivations is challenging. Local communal ties probably drew women into action if radical society at large still marginalised them politically, but social contrasts and tense sectarian polarities were also at play in documented instances of female rebelliousness.
Kennedy by no means avoids the gendered roles in which women were portrayed by the fiercely partisan culture of historiography and commemoration c. 1798–1848. Matilda Tone, Pamela Fitzgerald and Sarah Curran would achieve particular status as widows and sweethearts grieving the memory of their heroic leader partners, but also in the former’s case as a custodian of memory in exile. However, their status as remembered and projected can distort what had not actually been as committed a ‘republican’ stance as is often projected. If gender roles were strictly delineated in the 1790s, many women nevertheless left incisive self-assessments of their own political ideas and described broader power struggles at play which they could not influence.
This book is the outcome of assiduous exploration of, and reflection on, sources stretching well beyond the more foregrounded radicalism and republicanism of the United Irish movement.