By Elizabeth Malcolm
The boycott in late 1880 of Captain Charles Boycott, the English-born agent for the earl of Erne’s Lough Mask estate in south-east Mayo, is still remembered today mainly because it introduced a useful new word into the English language. Historians writing about the 1879–82 Land War, such as Samuel Clark, J.S. Donnelly Jr, Paul Bew and Donald Jordan, all describe how the earl refused his tenants’ request for a substantial rent abatement during a period of economic hardship and how Boycott then set about serving notices to quit on tenants who fell into arrears. The tenants rejected his writs and the local community banded together to launch a boycott against him and his family, which eventually forced their return to England. Most accounts of the incident describe a struggle between tenants, priests, Land League leaders and Home Rule politicians on one side and, on the other, the landlord and his agent, backed by other landowners, Dublin Castle, the police and the army. This was, in other words, essentially an all-male affair.
Except that it wasn’t. Women were actively engaged at all stages of the incident, sometimes playing decisive roles. It is important to ask, then, why was women’s involvement ignored by most commentators at the time and why does it continue to be ignored by historians today?
‘YOU’LL NOT SERVE MY HOUSE …’
In September 1880, on Boycott’s orders, David Sears was serving writs for rent arrears on about a dozen Lough Mask tenants. He was protected by a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) escort and had already delivered three writs when he met resistance at the home of a Mrs Fitzmaurice. Addressing him disparagingly as ‘Davy’, she informed him: ‘You’ll not serve my house as long as I have life in my body, you mean scoundrel you … [even] if you have all the peelers in the country with you’. A group of women and children who had gathered at a signal from Fitzmaurice then proceeded to shower Sears and the police with stones, mud and manure, the RIC receiving ‘some hard knocks’ as they ‘vainly’ tried to protect the process-server from the ‘violence of the infuriated women’.
The Connaught Telegraph reported that the people had been unprepared for writs to be served that day, not having been alerted beforehand as they usually were. The ringing of church bells and the sounding of horns were widely employed in rural Ireland during the 1880s to summon crowds, as they had been 50 years earlier during the Tithe War, but a Scottish-born journalist named James Redpath, who reported for various American newspapers, noted that women had a system of their own for conveying messages, involving the display of coloured flags. A red flag, often made from a petticoat, warned that a process-server was on his way and called on female neighbours to gather. This was the signal used by Fitzmaurice. Once again there are parallels with the Tithe War, because such signalling by women is also mentioned during the 1830s. Those men who were not away working as seasonal labourers in Britain would congregate as well, but it was the women and girls who took the lead. According to Redpath, they ‘won’t allow the men to resist the process-server because they are sent to jail [for] so long for doing so, and, besides, these women think they can take care of the process-server themselves’.
BOYCOTTING CAPTAIN BOYCOTT
The following day Boycott secured RIC reinforcements from Ballinrobe, but Sears refused to serve any further writs. Redpath claimed that Sears’s wife had been warned during the night by a female friend that the women were now planning to leave their doors open and, as her husband entered, to throw boiling water from their kettles into his face. When Sears and the RIC did not appear the next morning as expected, a group of people went to Boycott’s home, Lough Mask House, where the men persuaded his herdsmen and drivers to leave their jobs, while the women convinced Boycott’s indoor female servants to do the same.
This marked the beginning of the famous boycott. Soon shopkeepers were refusing to sell to the Boycott family, buyers were declining to bid for their stock or crops at auction, and women were not accepting their laundry or their letters at the Ballinrobe post office. Michael Davitt in The fall of feudalism in Ireland (1904) ascribed the Lough Mask boycott to the actions of the Land League, whereas Joyce Marlow, in her popular Captain Boycott and the Irish (1973), remarked that a group of male tenants, not the Land League, had instigated the boycott. Neither was in fact correct. It was women rather than men who initially prevented the landlord’s writs from being served and who then joined with the men in imposing the boycott.
Women continued to play a prominent role as the boycott stretched into winter. Historians have long recognised that successful boycotts required widespread and determined community cooperation, particularly by women. According to Joe Lee writing in 1973, ‘Female support proved indispensable for the success of boycotting’, which was ‘heavily dependent on the housewife avoiding prescribed shops’. Furthermore, the ‘institutionalisation’ of boycotting demanded ‘remarkable’ commitment, which ‘fostered a widespread sense of personal involvement in the struggle’ amongst women as well as men.
THE ULSTER ‘ANGISHORE’
Mayo women were involved in the boycott in other significant ways that have largely been overlooked by historians. In October 1880, supporters of Captain Boycott began recruiting labourers in counties Cavan and Monaghan to help him gather in his harvest. Newspapers identified these labourers as Orangemen, and some suggested that they would be carrying revolvers. Alarmed that the arrival of armed Orangemen might lead to major disturbances, Dublin Castle despatched substantial military and RIC contingents to protect Boycott’s new workforce.
When the 50 labourers reached Claremorris by train in early November, they were met on the platform by an escort numbering over 200 soldiers and RIC. Outside the station also to greet them was a large and vocal crowd containing many women, girls and young boys. The Belfast News-Letter’s correspondent, who had accompanied the labourers, reported that a ‘wail of mingled vengeance and indignation’ arose from the crowd the like of which he had ‘never heard before’. Nationalist papers provided more detail on this ‘wail’ and women’s leading role in it. Some of the words shouted were in Irish or Hiberno-English. Among the women’s cries, the term ‘angishore’ (Irish ainciseoir) featured prominently. This means a miserable wretch, yet the word can also suggest a degree of pity. It would appear that the Mayo women were mocking rather than simply abusing the men from Ulster. And, indeed, the Connaught Telegraph mentioned that the crowd laughed at what the paper called the ‘woe-begone’ labourers. Hostility, it said, was mixed with contempt and sarcasm.
Boycott’s Orangemen and most of their escort had to walk the fifteen miles from Claremorris via Ballinrobe to Lough Mask House because, owing to the boycott, it was impossible to secure enough cars to transport them. On the way, with heavy rain falling, the convoy was again jeered at by groups of women and girls, some of whom ran alongside the marching men and addressed them directly. According to the Freeman’s Journal, they ‘galled the soldiers and Orangemen with their banter’, groaning at Boycott’s name, cheering the Land League and singing Land League songs. Again, mockery was to the fore, with the women calling the Ulstermen the ‘hungry army’, enquiring whether they were tired of walking in the rain, and warning that Boycott would likely make them pay for the miserable dinner of boiled turnips that awaited them.
‘The absence of men was most marked’, the Freeman’s correspondent continued. The few men who did appear on the roadside either stood silently watching or quietly cursed Boycott. When one woman shouted at some men that they seemed to prefer to have women do ‘the work’ for them, a man responded: ‘Don’t be making a fool of yourself, woman … we’d be out if we were wanted’. This man clearly resented the suggestion that he and his friends were leaving the work of resistance solely to women, yet the Mayo men were obviously content to remain on the sidelines and have Boycott’s Orange labourers mocked by women, correctly calculating that the experience must have been humiliating for them. Even the Belfast News-Letter admitted that the people of Mayo essentially treated the Ulstermen as a ‘good joke’.
Two weeks later, having completed their harvest work largely without incident, the labourers walked back to Claremorris station, again in heavy rain and again closely guarded by a large force of soldiers and policemen. This time, however, there were no jeering crowds of women lining the roads or surrounding the railway station. According to the Belfast News-Letter, ‘The absence of the peasantry was remarkable. Not a creature was to be seen either in the fields or about the road.’ The day before the planned departure, Fr John O’Malley, a leader of the Land League in south Mayo, had posted placards in and around Ballinrobe containing an address to the ‘Men of Mayo’. Ignoring the part played by the women of Mayo, he commended the Lough Mask tenants for ‘manfully upholding … the cause’ and instructed the ‘Men of Mayo’ to ‘permit the Orangemen and the English army to take themselves away out of your outraged county unmolested and unnoticed’.
Michael Davitt claimed that Fr O’Malley went further by walking in front of the column to ensure that no attempt was made to impede its progress. The only person O’Malley encountered en route was described by Davitt as ‘a poor old woman leaning against a wall, intent on gazing with all the curiosity of her sex at the military’. The priest rebuked the woman in a loud voice, intended to be heard by the soldiers: ‘How dare you come out here to intimidate her Majesty’s troops … Be off now, and if you dare to molest these two thousand heroes after their glorious campaign, I’ll make an example of you.’ According to Davitt, the ‘siege’ of Lough Mask House promptly resumed after Boycott’s relief force had retreated into the ‘records of history and of ridicule’.
No Irish newspaper appears to have reported this incident involving O’Malley and the elderly woman, with the Connaught Telegraph merely remarking with satisfaction that Boycott’s ‘white slaves’ had returned to Ulster. Davitt’s information about Land War affrays is not always accurate but, given the way in which the labourers and their escort had been taunted by women on their way to Lough Mask House, further mockery involving a woman on the way back would have been consistent at least.
WOMEN, PASSIVE RESISTANCE AND COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE
The Boycott incident is far from unique. When examined closely, many nineteenth-century confrontations portrayed at the time and later as clashes between men reveal that women as well as children were prominently involved. This was true not only of anti-eviction protests but also of food riots, sectarian fights, election contests and anti-tithe affrays. Furthermore, some of these events had national implications, helping to shape British policy towards Ireland. These include the killings of policemen at Carrickshock in 1831, the anti-tithe affray at Rathcormac in 1834, the Orange rampage at Dolly’s Brae in 1849 and the anti-eviction clash at Carraroe in 1880.
Public protest in Ireland, whether directed against landlords and their agents, clergymen, Orange parades, the RIC or the British army, was communal. As in the Boycott incident, women frequently resorted to verbal abuse and mockery, calling into question the masculinity of their opponents, but they also took part in violent clashes. They were noted in particular for their skill as stone-throwers. Eyewitness accounts describe women carrying rocks in their aprons, wrapping them in stockings or shawls and swinging these improvised weapons around their heads before releasing them. Contemporaries, however, preferred to play down or ignore women’s role in collective violence. Male allies did not want to admit that they had relied on female fighters, whereas male opponents could not bring themselves to confess that they had been bested by women.
As Heather Laird argued in a 2013 article, as long as historians focus on the national level and study male-dominated political organisations and campaigns, women’s activism will remain invisible. It is at the level of the farm, the street, the shop, the market square and also the home where women activists are to be found. Many employed the ‘weapons of the weak’, like passive resistance in the form of boycotts and gendered ridicule, but others resorted to collective violence and fought alongside their menfolk.
Elizabeth Malcolm is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and author (with Diane Hall) of the forthcoming Gender, violence and memory in Ireland, 1100–1900.
Further reading
H. Laird, ‘Decentring the Irish Land War: women, politics and the private sphere’, in F. Campbell & T. Varley (eds), Land questions in modern Ireland (Manchester, 2013), 175–93.
J. Lee, The modernisation of Irish society, 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973).
J. Redpath, Talks about Ireland (New York, 1881).
J. TeBrake, ‘Irish peasant women in revolt: the Land League years’, Irish Historical Studies 28 (109) (1992), 63–80.