Do you think of Ireland as a matriarchal place?

I have a question for you.

About how many of us think of and describe Ireland as being quite the matriarchal place — whether you agree with that and what you think that really means.

But first, some rambling thoughts.

“The Photographic Collection, M004.25.00053” by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

A few weeks ago, I was reading a paper by historian Ciara Breathnach on“The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891-1923”, about how investigations into the family income of the West by the Congested Districts Board found that:

“Aside from the annual sale of animals or migrant earnings, most households derived a cash income from female-dominated, cottage-based industry. Butter churning and poultry rearing were traditionally female enterprises and by 1890, spinning, weaving, sewing, and embroidery employed women exclusively. Women undertook all such household work as cooking, baking, cleaning, and whitewashing. The female head of household also took charge of the household money, and rationed the food on a daily basis. When the men migrated to Great Britain for the harvest season, women also reaped the crops…..

….. One inspector, Major Gahan, noted that the women of the Glenties district were the "sole support of the families, the men do little or nothing beyond setting the crop and taking in the harvest." The average family income in this district was £38-19-6 pence. Half of this, almost £19, is readily identifiable as female earnings from the sale of eggs and knitted goods. In the Victorian era, female inclination to engage in paid labour was considered a sensitive barometer of poverty, and this is applicable to the congested districts. In the fishing community of Arranmore, when families reached a certain income threshold, women did not undertake extra work, as these families did not have to rely on female enterprises as much as they did on the mainland.

Inspector Gahan observed of Arranmore that: "The people have more energy, and, although the great profits they reap from the herring fishing has a rather deadening effect on them, from an industrial point of view, still on the whole they seemed to me more industrious than the people of other districts on the mainland”.

Throughout the congested districts, women worked hard to ensure a certain cash income level was reached and the poultry industry was the most common way of filling the income deficit. The inspectors also noted that the people saw no need to surpass a certain income, so money was rarely saved” (Breathnach, 2004; p.82).

As a social scientist, my main interest is in how societal systems shape people. The above account immediately grabbed my attention for how it revealed two very different worlds, with two very different social systems, coming into collision. Gahan, with his Victorian ideals of progress, industry (industriousness), capitalism and productivity coming up against a much older subsistence way of living —of earning just enough to fulfil your need— and interpreting it as ‘a lack of energy’ (the politically correct way of saying lazy). But most of all, two very, very different ideas about gender roles and the place of women.

The Victorian period was, ultimately, when the strict gender roles of ‘man as breadwinner’ and ‘woman as home-maker’ were invented. Well not so much invented as held-up as the highest societal ideal. As something ‘the better sorts’ should be displaying to the ‘worse off sorts’ so that they too could aspire to similar levels of respectability and progress (this is the era of the rising Middle Classes and strict gender roles were the rungs of the ladder they climbed up on). Consequently, a man like Gahan, with all his Victorian ideals of ‘female and male propriety’ interpreted women having to go out and earn money in the public sphere (the domain of men) as an indication of absolute abject poverty — how wretched and poor these people must have been when the woman has to go out and earn hard cash!

As well as that may be, and as alien as the concept of women being bread-winners and central earners of the household were to Gahan, I am more intrigued by how that clearly was not alien to the people he went to investigate. Rather, the inspectors of the Congested District Board were encountering a social system which, while very gendered (the jobs that women earned money from, like butter-making, poultry production and weaving were considered female-specific activities), had not yet developed the strict public/private divide (with women assigned to the domestic sphere and men the public) we would see emerge in the coming 20th century.

I read Breathnach’s paper and promptly saved it to a folder of notes I have called “Women subverting the social system” — it’s a collection of all the different ways I have found women of Ireland repeatedly failing to adhere to some socially prescribed ideal of womanhood. Usually, it’s them defying the public/private divide — ignoring, challenging or going against the ‘proper social order’ of women as domestic and subservient to men as the guardians of the public world.

Probably my favourite paper in this folder is one called Gender, Violence, and Rebellion in Tudor and Early Stuart Ireland by William Palmer, which examines how Tudor English colonisors “blamed Irish women, in part, for why Ireland was so difficult to govern” because the wives of Gaelic Lords were engaging in very ‘unwomanly’ activities like raising armies, inciting rebellion and worst of all, had so much say that their husbands often had to seek their counsel before making any decisions.

Another is historian Cara Delay’s "Uncharitable Tongues": Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland which, again, charts a culture clash. It’s about the influence of (poor) women at the community level where “they used their voices to denounce and abuse their neighbours and kin” and negotiate power. Using their voices in such a way, Delay argues, was just a continuation of a much older heritage where women’s voices — in gossip, curses, and storytelling— were held in a position of importance (and fear) and had sway over their families and communities. Yet, in the early 20th century, as the strict ideals of womanhood and gender roles (which Gahan prescribed to in his inspections of the people of Congested Districts) were beginning to be enforced, these women were increasingly viewed as problematic and ‘unwomanly’ and were often brought to court charged with “abusive or threatening language”.

There is a thread that ties all of these papers (and their women) together — and that’s the window they reveal into the influential position that women in Ireland held, and how, really until the 20th century (when gender roles got really strict and clearly defined), things were much more blurred in Irish society. Both of the sexes were doing what they needed to do to survive, and underlying that is a sense that Irish society, at one time, wasn’t too bothered with the idea of strictly defining women according to the ‘domestic’ and ‘the private’. I organise these women (in my folder) as ‘subversive’ because they are subverting (what to me are) traditional ideals of womanhood by entering into the public (male) domain. But I think for them, and likely the society they came from, that was perfectly normal.

All of this inevitably leads me back to the notion of Ireland as a ‘matriarchal’ society. Due to a lack of discernment and fairly large bag of bias (because I think women of Ireland are f*cking immensely powerful!) I have often looked at all of these threads of female influence and power in the public realm (my ‘subversive’ women) as evidence of what so many people I speak to believe — that Ireland is a very matriarchal place.

I’ve gone down all sorts of research rabbit-hole-dead-ends trying to get to the root, the cultural core, of where Irelands’ matriarchal-ness/female power/dominance (domineering-ness) comes from. I’ve looked at the rich Goddess culture in Irish myth, how writers and artists like Cristina Biaggi view it as the remnants of a matrifocal culture centred around a ‘primordial Creator Goddess’, and (like in this post) I’ve gone down the route of exploring it on the basis of matricentric family units were lineage was traced through the mother line, rather than the father line.

None (for me) ever really had legs.

But that still leaves me with the problem (or research curiosity) that many people I chat with (about Ireland), including women I have interviewed, see it as a place where “really, it’s the women in charge”.

What does that mean though? Or rather, what does that really look like?

I think (although I can only speak for myself) that what we are getting at when we describe Ireland as a matriarchal place is the direct influence (and often dominance) of women (very specifically as mothers) at the local and family level in Ireland. I can’t tell you how many times someone has, on learning of my research interests, said some version of what Sonia expressed in her interview when she said:

“My mum was definitely the main influencer, there was no doubt about that”!

Mothers in Ireland are repeatedly described as ‘the bosses’, the ones who are ‘really in charge’.

One way to look at that is it’s a remnant of a much older culture / societal system where women (like the ones mentioned in the papers above) played a very active and influential role — often one considered the remit of ‘The Man’ — in society. The other is to see a ‘matriarchal Ireland’ as, in fact, a direct outcome of the strictly gendered public/private divide.

If you think about it, in order for the public realm to be ‘Male’ it relies on keeping women out of it (which it has done very effectively for much of the 20th century in Ireland — thanks DeValera and Co.!), ergo, in order for the private realm to be ‘Female’, men have to be kept out of it too.

I think we may have co-opted that quite strongly in Ireland.

Prof. Pat O’Connor writes how:

“Writers and dramatists have consistently depicted Irish women as strong, coping and courageous. Irish men, on the other hand, have been presented as weak, sometimes over-dependent on maternal approval, and often as rather pathetic figures. This very weakness has often been used to justify women's support of what is privately seen as the illusion of male authority. Women, it is suggested, see themselves as the strong ones, and 'play along' in the interests of family and social harmony”.

In Ireland (now lets be honest with ourselves here) we dismiss men as being fairly useless — “God love him, sure he tried”.

But where are we dismissing them from?

More often than not it is the private realm, the world of the familial and the local — the female sphere. Ireland is this strange dichotomy of being very patriarchal (you could even say condescendingly paternal) at the institutional and governmental level (the Public Domain) and very matriarchal at the local and familial (the Private Domain). This is a direct outcome of a 20th century social system which created a strict gendered order and divide between the public and private. ‘The Men’ were put in charge of the Public and ‘The Mammies’ ran the Private.

When you take all that force and fire that I believe women of Ireland so inherently possess, and you shove it all into one container it, inevitably, is going to take up space. ‘Matriarchal’ Ireland, I feel, is as much about women being the strong, domineering ones as it is about many a woman saying ‘Well if this (private realm) is to be my domain, and I have little choice in the matter, then I’m going to absolutely rule it’. All of us who grew up in it knew it! And because the Private, ‘Mammy-ruled’ domain is the world we encounter in our everyday lives (the public-institutional is far away, and hidden) Ireland has, to so many, felt like a matriarchal place.

And that, I think, has as much to do with the inherent power of women as it has to do with the dismissal of men from the private domain to counter the dismissal of women from the public.

It’s all a bit of a mess, isn’t it? People, ordered and divided on the basis of gender, circling around each other, engaging in all sorts of acts of dismissal, bringing each other ‘down a peg or two’, to keep the other from encroaching on their ‘territory’ / domain.

The roots of Ireland, then, as a ‘matriarchal place’ continue to allude me. I just keep adding other theses to my already long list of them.

But enough with my ramblings. What do you think?

I’d be really keen to hear if, you too, subscribe to that view of Ireland as being quite matriarchal. And if so, what that means to you?