Part Three: The power of the expansive inner landscape of women of Ireland

Third of a five-part series presenting key themes of the Women of Ireland Project Interviews

Expansive views in the Wicklow Mountains

The Expansive Inner vs. the Outer Restrictive landscape: The Third Key Theme

I have had this long-standing fascination —obsession nearly— with how paradoxical the story of women of Ireland (perhaps women everywhere?) is. By paradoxical I mean that for everything women of Ireland are, they are also its opposite. A history littered with contradictions; disparities between the socially prescribed ideal for women and what women of Ireland actually do.

For much of the history of our wee island, women of Ireland have existed within a very restrictive landscape. Nearly every societal mechanism you can think of, from strict cultural norms to legislation that confined them to specific spheres of society, has been brought to bear to contain and restrict them. Reflecting on Ireland in the early 20th century, historians Una Crowley and Rob Kitchin describe how policy-makers deployed a ‘disciplinary regime’ that sought to regulate, shape and control the daily lives of Irish citizens, and while this affected all, women were its main focus:

“The disciplinary regime that was constructed was highly gendered, focusing almost exclusively on the regulation and self-regulation of women. They worked to form a dense spatialised grid of discipline, reform and self-regulation, seeking to produce ‘decent’ women inhabiting virtuous spaces by limiting access to work and public spaces, confining women to an unsullied (marital) home, with the ever-present threat of new sites of reformation, and convincing citizens that such material and discursive practices were in their own and the nation’s best interests (and thus to self-discipline their own sexual behaviour)”

Una Crowley and Rob Kitchin (2008): Producing 'decent girls': Governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922-1937)

This is the societal landscape that the women who went before us lived in. It was, in no uncertain terms, restrictive. It had been carefully and deliberately constructed that way.

Yet, that isn’t how I think of the lives of the women who went before me. I see all that they did rather than all that they couldn’t do. What they still did despite (in spite of) it all. They were do-ers, organisers, makers, creators, and shapers, and all of that can only come from having an expansive, rather than restrictive, inner world.

Those paradoxes (the disparities between the reality and the ideal for women in Ireland) I have long seen but struggled to grasp, I see now as generations of women who had an expansive inner landscape — full of innate power and energy— but had found themselves stood in the middle of a highly restrictive outer world.

Perhaps the clearest glimmer of this inner expansive versus outer restrictive landscape came from one of the participants of this project:

“I had a quite restricted childhood…. [and yet] always felt that the world was nearly my oyster”.

While the world beyond her Self may have been restricting and limiting, her world within was expansive and powerful, full of the possibility of what she could do and create. And it is the power of that inner world that has meant so many women, throughout Ireland’s history, have managed to subvert (and quite often simply ignore) the restrictions put in their way.

Looking back at the periods of the most restrictive (societal) times in Ireland’s history, there are snapshots and glimmers of women’s expansive inner landscape dotted across it.

I see it in the work of Cara Delay on working class women in the early 1800s, in how they continued to use their voices to exert influence in their local communities, at a time when women were increasingly being pushed into the private sphere:

“Women, who were deeply immersed in larger neighbourly and kin conflicts, blurred the prescribed lines between public and private, frustrating efforts of religious and secular authorities to contain women within the domestic sphere…. Women used their words in their daily lives to construct both their communities and themselves. Ultimately, poor women retained their speaking power in an Ireland that increasingly celebrated female passivity and silence”

Cara Delay (2013): "Uncharitable Tongues": Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

It’s in the writing we have on the lives of the many female saints medieval Ireland produced, which reveals:

“A society in which women were strong, capable, complex, highly valued individuals, a society in which female education could flourish….The number of Irish female saints and scholars will probably never be known, but a few of their stories are still told in their own Lives and those of their male teachers and students, stories which tell us that from the most renowned school of all Ireland to the most isolated cell in the wilds, women as well as men helped to earn Ireland the epithet, the Land of Saints and Scholars”

Maeve Callan (2003): St Darerca and Her Sister Scholars: Women and Education in Medieval Ireland

It’s in how women as mothers, even when deeply oppressed by the Catholic Church, continued to exert influence and use their position to negotiate, influence and contest its authority.

“Letters that literate women wrote to members of the Church hierarchy in the late 19th century illustrate how Irish women utilised motherhood in order to claim influence and privilege. Calling on their roles as mothers to assert power within the home and over their children, women also demanded that priests and bishops respond to their needs and wants. Irish Catholic mothers thus sometimes exploited the domestic ideal to their own purpose”

Cara Delay - Chapter 3: Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850-1950

Regardless of how restrictive the outer landscape has been, women of Ireland have always found ways to expand. To subvert. To go round. They found the tiniest cracks in the shell and pushed them wide to reveal the oyster.

That is the legacy of the women who went before us, and as Sonia beautifully explained when telling her story, they have left us a clear baton to pick up and carry on enlivening Irish life with that powerfully expansive inner world:

The baton is kind of a unique one…. and I'm really always aware of the exceptionalism…. that I can drop in to in terms of describing Irish women. But there's some lovely work starting to come out around how women continued, despite everything really; the church, the state, and now more lately, our…. commitment to this economics of neoliberalism and capitalism. [But] how women find spaces in that.

And….Pat O'Connor…. a feminist historian… has said [how] women never came down from the platform, you know, they created another platform. And….when you kind of look at how they manipulated or negotiated that space — because they were kept very much from a public space and told to remain in the private sphere…. [but they set up] associations like the Irish Housewives Association…. and they were real rebels. They really were!

And….there's some lovely work around descriptions of the priest coming into the house, and the women of the house really challenging him, you know, and calling into question, who is he to say about this or say about that, you know. And that was done in the private sphere.

But yet, it influences me now, sitting here knowing that, you know, it's okay for me not to be Catholic and not to have a faith in Ireland now, because they kind of created that space to challenge it. So the baton is to continue to find those little cracks or those little opportunities to continue influencing, you know, how we transform, how we become equal, how we negotiate what life looks like now in the 21st century. And I'm really intrigued as to what shape it takes?”

P.S. if you enjoyed or found my previous piece on Tight Culture interesting, I am giving an online talk titled “The ‘Ghost’ of Tight Culture Past: Exploring the impact of cultural tightness in the life histories of women of Ireland” on the 26th July at 3pm as part of the DRAOI (Discourse Research Association of Ireland) Summer Seminar Series.

Details can be found here

It is free for all to join (online via Microsoft Teams) and I’ll circulate the joining link closer to the time to anyone who may wish to attend (send me an email/leave a comment if you would like me to send this to you)

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