Patriotic women and the emotional politics of empire: Ireland and Australia, 1916-1920
This article was originally published on RTE’s Century Ireland. Read the original article.
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, nationalist aspirations reshaped relations between many of the different entities making up the British empire. This recasting of relations spurred a variety of emotional responses. For example, since it morphed from a set of colonies into a modern nation-state (1901), Australia’s claims to global leadership in social and political matters, like the woman vote (1902), raised indignation on the part of some in the British metropole. Such claims to leadership challenged Britain’s proud reputation for supremacy in all empire matters. Closer to ‘home’, Irish demands for national autonomy were even more vexing because they threatened to fundamentally alter political relations within Britain’s ‘internal empire’, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Detail of an anti-conscription poster from 1916 aimed at the women of Australia Photo: State Library of Victoria
Irish demands and British responses to those demands created highly volatile political environments – marked by fear, distrust, indignation and anger – on both sides of the Irish Sea.
Nationalism was not the only issue to generate emotional responses.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the empire was embroiled in heated discussions about a related concept: citizenship. The woman voter – real or imagined – was at the forefront of these international discussions, although the tone and content of the debate varied across region. In Australia, women had been granted the right to vote in a national parliament as early as 1902. Antipodean discussions, therefore, often centred on the anxiety-ridden question of how to be a ‘good’ woman voter who exercised loyalty to both the new nation and the old empire. British and Irish women were only granted limited franchise in 1918 and then equal voting rights with men in 1928. In the early decades of the twentieth century, they were caught up in passionate, sometimes violent suffrage/anti-suffrage exchanges. Irish women’s situation was even more complicated. The Irish suffrage movement was split along the lines of national allegiances. Those loyal to the country’s union with Great Britain demanded a say in the affairs of a British parliament. Nationalist women ultimately wanted to vote in an Irish parliament however they disagreed about whether to seek representation in a British parliament or hold out until an Irish parliament was established.
Thanks to national and international suffrage alliances, early twentieth century women were emerging as well-connected political actors. Suffragist and anti-suffragist women around the empire established periodicals to monitor and influence domestic and international developments on the highly contested issue of citizenship. The onset of World War One raised the emotional level of ongoing suffrage/anti-suffrage debates. For example, as suffrage groups variously decided to abandon or continue their campaigns in the face of the devastating global conflict, they elicited a variety of responses from outpourings of sympathy to vehement condemnation. The nation’s and the empire’s interests – indeed their very survival – was thought to be at stake. Therefore, many patriotic citizens considered energy invested in any cause other than the war effort to be dangerously treacherous. Suffrage was included in this category but so too were other causes including, Irish nationalism. Indeed, as the war progressed and Irish nationalist aspirations intensified, patriotic women around the empire (suffragist and anti-suffragist) took it upon themselves to intervene in the discussion. It was not simply a case of nationalist aspirations affecting only the Irish in Ireland, many Irish diasporic communities sanctioned and pledged support for the cause ‘back home’ thereby increasing tensions between them and empire loyalists in their new homes (for instance in Britain and in Australia).
It was during these often-heated exchanges taking place around the empire that the racialised trope of the childlike but martial Celt reappeared. Prevalent in the nineteenth century, especially during times of heightened nationalist agitation and increased migration, it had fallen into abeyance. However, at this critical stage in the development of empire, it was redeployed by some patriotic women in the attempt to shame the Irish into abandoning their disruptive and divisive ways. Significantly for patriotic Irish women, the emotional sting was taken out of this shaming politics, as the racialised stereotype was recast as positive by nationalist women keen to justify their position as revolutionary Irish women.
Patriotic Australian women and the pampered childlike Celt
Many politically conservative Australian women had not wanted the mantle of global suffrage forerunners (only New Zealand had granted women the national vote before Australia). As Australian women performed the pioneering role of woman voter, they were acutely conscious that the eyes of the world were on them. As ‘good’ loyal women, they were anxious to exercise their newfound political power to protect both the integrity of an emerging Australian identity and Australia’s reputation as a loyal unit within the family of nations comprising the British empire. To this end, they fervently supported the pro-conscription campaign in the lead up to the 1916 referendum (a successful referendum outcome was needed to conscript Australian men for overseas service, not for service within the country).
It came as a blow, then, when the British Anti-Suffrage Review, organ of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (NLOWS), used the example of the failure of the 1916 conscription referendum to attack the political and emotional integrity of Australian women voters by blaming them for that defeat:
Their action has dumbfounded some most ardent supporters of Woman Suffrage, because there is irrefragable evidence that they permitted their emotions to guide their pencils in the booths, and reason and patriotism appealed to them in vain. In the supreme trial of citizenship most women ‘shirked their duty’ (January 1917).
Australian women – like those of the loyal conservative Australian Women’s National League (AWNL) – indignantly rebuked this accusation by blaming:
SOCIALISM, PACIFISM, SINN FEINISM (January 1918).
In its paper, Woman, the AWNL argued that undesirable disloyal elements had infiltrated an otherwise loyal British-Australian community. Irish Australians, led by the infamous anti-conscriptionist and Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix were singled out for special attention. Mannix and Irish Australians, exemplified by those who supported Sinn Féin, were accused of forming a ‘false’ class which ‘while making no secret of its desire to disintegrate the Empire, lays claim to a pseudo Australian sentiment’ (December 1920). Sinn Féiners were indicted with ‘loving Australia little, but hating England more’, which they had demonstrated when they opposed conscription not only in the 1916 referendum but also in its successor, the failed 1917 referendum (December 1917). They were deemed guilty of trying to harness support for their false cause by disseminating ‘historical half-truths and entire myths’ about Irish-British relations (December 1919).
Archbishop Daniel Mannix bronze statue at the right side of the main entrance of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Like loyal Australian women, patriotic British women likewise drew on the trope of the childlike Irish. There was a significant difference, however. Whereas Australian women accused Irish-born compatriots of shying away from the theatre of war, British women looked on anxiously as the supposedly irrational, naïve but also martial Celt looked set to bring down the United Kingdom, and by inference the British empire, through his collaboration with Britain’s foe, Germany.
Women like Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst of the militant suffrage body, Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), campaigned aggressively, sometimes violently for the vote until 1914 when they abandoned their militant tactics, if not their propagandising, to prioritise the British war effort. Earlier, in 1911, they had welcomed their Irish sisters into the militant branch of the larger suffrage campaign. In doing so, they highlighted Irish women’s natural affinity for militant tactics. In the paper Votes for Women, Christabel Pankhurst affirmed that the ‘women of Ireland come of a fighting race’ (October 1911). A couple of years later, Votes for Women reasserted its commitment to this view of the Irish by quoting the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL) on exactly this point: that ‘militant societies are native to our [Irish] soil, and that Irish men and women respond most naturally to militant appeal’ (May 1913).
Christabel Pankhurst, c. 1910 (Image: LSE Library)
thing, but Irish men and women embracing their martial prowess to fight for independence was not only misguided, but at this critical time in the history of the empire, it was also naively dangerous, even lethal.
In 1917, in her new periodical aptly titled Britannia, Pankhurst quoted – giving air to and then quickly denying – the purported views of German-born scholar of Celtic languages, Professor Kuno Meyer:
I regard the Irish as an ill-balanced, emotional race, unfitted for self-government. I look upon them precisely as we Germans look upon the Poles – as a people only fit for poetry, rhetoric, and sedition (August 1917).
This fitness for poetry was a good thing – the ‘romanticism’ of the Celtic peripheries, she claimed, provided the perfect complement for the serious rationality of the Anglo-Saxon core, rendering the UK a sound balance of temperaments. But Celtic romanticism, interpreted as naivety, needed to be kept in check. The Irish could not, for example, be relied on to repel the ambitions of the more strategic Germans with whom nationalists were consorting. ‘Ireland is an Ireland which will fall victim to Germany within a day’, Pankhurst asserted, for it cannot defend itself. ‘What we say as ordinary British people is that we do not want and we will not have Germany established in Ireland’ (August 1917). Given the ongoing international crisis, the British could no longer afford to give free rein to the Irish people’s potentially calamitous mix of martial, childlike emotionalism.
Patriotic Irish women and reversing the shame of British colonisation
Patriotic women in Ireland acknowledged the global circulation of racialised tropes of the Irish. However, instead of rejecting them outright, they drew on aspects of them which promoted their conceptualisation of a strong, noble and ancient Celt ‘race’; a ‘race’ which was certainly worthy of national autonomy. Some patriotic Irish women, like nationalist, socialist and feminist politician and soldier, Constance Markievicz, wholeheartedly embraced the concept of the martial Irish.
‘I have never heard in the early history of any country so many stories of great fighting women as I read in the history of Ireland’, Markievicz declared in the Irish Citizen, organ of the IWFL. Here she was referring to the stories of Maeve, of Macha, of Granuaile, of Fleas, and many others (November 1915). Fighting was in the Irish woman’s blood. ‘Ancient Ireland bred warrior women, and women played a heroic part in those days’, she asserted (October 1915). Here she was supported by prominent feminist nationalist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. In another women’s paper, Bean na hÉireann, Sheehy Skeffington had declared that in ancient times, Irish men and women were equal in arms, as in other professions (November 1909). In terms of the looming Irish Revolution, Markievicz instructed Irish women to arm themselves with ‘noble and free ideas’. ‘And if in your day the call should come for your body to arm’, she added, ‘do not shirk that either’ (July 1909).
Markievicz in uniform examining a Colt New Service Model 1909 revolver, posed c.1915 (Image: National Library of Ireland)
Markievicz’s argument was that in ancient Ireland, men and women had been comrades-in-arms. British colonisation, through the imposition of sex difference and sex segregation, had corroded a shared heritage of gender equality to the point that, ‘To-day’, she said, ‘we are in danger of being civilised by men out of existence’ (October 1915). Her strategy was to embrace the backward or ‘uncivilised’ aspects of the racial stereotype of the Irish. Once British-imposed notions of civilisation had been rolled back, Irish men could once again look on their sisters as fellow warriors; as joint inheritors of a proud martial Irish ‘race’. This way, they could work together to reverse the shame that imperial Britain had imposed on Ireland during the colonising process.
Opponents of Irish autonomy held up racialised stereotypes to attempt to shame the Irish into dropping their nationalist ambitions. Women like Markievicz denied their potentially shaming qualities. Instead, they argued that some aspects of the racialised stereotype of the Irish could be used to help shift the stigma of colonisation and promote the cause of independence.
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Across the British empire, patriotic women engaged in emotionally charged debates about developing understandings of citizenship and the shifting relations of empire. They strategically deployed emotional strategies, like shaming, in the attempt to influence political discussions of global significance. Their attempts at shaming, for example through the use of racialised stereotypes of the Irish, are not simply revealing of their emotional strategies of choice, they are also revealing of the nature of their own anxieties. They are indicative of the heightened anxieties felt by patriotic British women who were worried about the fate of their empire, internal and external, as well as patriotic Australian women who felt that their connection with the ‘mother country’ was under threat. Conversely, patriotic Irish women turned these derogatory tropes around. They employed aspects of these racialised stereotypes in their attempt to reverse the shame of colonisation and to reinvest a sense of pride in Irishness.
Archbishop Daniel Mannix bronze statue at the right side of the main entrance of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Mannix was further subjected to Woman’s shaming tactics. In the face of Australian-born men’s brave wartime sacrifices, the periodical painted him as a cowardly and parasitical migrant. Accepting the protection of the British flag and Crown, he was content to live ‘well-fed and softly housed while saner and braver men (including our own Australian sons) have lived, fought, suffered, and died in far distant trenches that the world, including Australia, should be free from oppression’ (December 1919). ‘[A]ll the world knows that Ireland is to-day the most prosperous corner of the Empire, and her people the most pampered children of that Empire’s great world-wide family’ (December 1919). The fact that Ireland repelled any efforts to introduce conscription in 1918, without putting it to the vote, and under threat of revolt – a revolt that culminated in the Irish Revolution – only served to confirm Woman’s suspicions about the ungrateful and childlike nature of the Irish.