Part Two: "These lines that are invisible": segregation of space and the public/private divide in Ireland

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

“Segregation and Separation”: The Second Key Theme

Of all the themes emerging from the Women of Ireland project interviews, this one is probably the most difficult to write about. Because I’m trying to find and give words to something that exists beyond words — a felt-sense, or a hunch I get as women I’ve interviewed hint at a web of invisible lines that exist in the experiences they have had and the world they inhabit. Invisible lines which, in the literal meaning of the word, seem to segregate; set one thing apart from the other.

Literally for want of a better word(s) “segregation and separation” is the label I’ve given to the sense I get when women have told me stories like that of a teacher/nun who treated you based on what your father’s occupation was:

“If your father was a doctor or a Gard, or a vet, anything like that, you are going to be treated really well. And, if you lived in a council house, forget it”

Or a participant who, as a single woman, had to get a male relative to act as a guarantor when she applied for a mortgage from the bank in the late 80s/early 90s — the same bank she was a manager in:

I was one of the first female managers in technology in [the bank] and very young. And…. when I became a manager, I decided I'm going to buy a house. I was single, I was going to buy a house…. And I applied to [the bank] for a loan. I was a manager in [the same bank]. And because I was a single lady, I wasn't entitled to a loan. I was entitled to it if I could get a guarantor. So, I asked could my mother be a guarantor. And because she was a single, widowed woman, she was not allowed to be a guarantor…. I had to ask [another male relative], who was an assistant manager, junior to me…. to go as the guarantor for me for a loan. Isn't that just bonkers?

Or a female CEO who recounted her struggle to access certain spaces, because she was a woman:

“[It could be hard to be] able to access power, like…. sometimes you just needed a direct line to some, you know, government official and I could never get that as a woman, never, I always had to go through a different chain of men”.

Regardless of the specifics of the story, what I see as common across them is the segregation of space:

A delineating or organising of space according to some hidden comparative measure which determines which side of its invisible line you’re supposed to be on.

And when you try to cross over them, mostly blissfully unaware, you wonder what it is you are bumping up against.

This, broadly speaking, segregation of space is something I see as a strong connection between the world many of the women I’ve interviewed experience and the world women all through the ages of Ireland’s past have experienced. For the segregating of space (all sorts of spaces!) on the basis of gender is a notable feature of Ireland’s history, from recent times right into the very distant past. And is most commonly known or expressed as the public-private divide.

The public-private divide is nothing more than a conceptual, or ideological separation between the public sphere — that of the economy, public institutions, and politics— as male, and the private sphere — that of the domestic, the home and the family— as female. And you can’t really tell the story of the women of Ireland without it, for it is the ideology that lies behind so many of the systems designed to ‘contain’ women in one sphere and privilege the male in the other.

Article 41.2. of the constitution (the part the Referendum in November is about) is, to my mind, perhaps the most visible and tangible expression of this otherwise quite hidden segregation of space as public/private—male/female in Ireland:

“In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved…..The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home”.

When it was entered into the constitution in 1937, under De Valera’s government, it clearly connected women’s citizenship to their role in the private sphere, defining their place in society according to their role as wives and mothers¹.

However, as historian Margaret Ward explains, this element of DeV’s constitution was merely a culmination of the Irish Free State’s “determination to ensure that women were removed from the public arena”².

Why?

Well, we are (in my opinion) going to need that concept of Cultural Tightness once more as, yet again, it was all to do with Threat.

For the Irish Free State was born in a pool of threat and fear. Not just from the War of Independence, but from the Civil War that broke out between those who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty (Pro-Treaty) and those who didn’t (Anti-Treaty).

The women of Cumann na mBan (the group most women involved in the various revolutionary activities of those years were part of) were overwhelmingly Anti-Treaty. And this wasn’t to go well for them. When the Civil War came to an end, a scapegoat —someone to blame— was needed for the death, destruction and devastation. And that scapegoat was the staunch, unrelentingly Anti-Treaty women.

Historian Maryann Gialanella Valiulis explains:

“Women became associated with a virulent anti-Treaty stance, and the narrative grew on both pro- and anti- Treaty sides that women polluted the public sphere and needed to be returned to the home”³

The government of the new Irish Free State, in the wake of the chaos, hurt and bitterness the Civil War caused, was desperate to return some form of order and build a stable state. Facing the very real threat that the country would literally implode, they tightened (turned to strict social norms) and who were the focus of their tightening? ‘Unruly’ women who had brought chaos when they had uprooted the proper order of things by their involvement in the ‘public’ sphere.

Returning women to, and containing women within, the private sphere —their proper place— was seen as essential for the very stability and future of the nation.

That’s why we have Article 41.2, and why the first few decades of the Republic are marked by clear legislative efforts to reinforce and reaffirm the gendered segregation of the public-private:

“The Irish Free State turned to legislation to imbed inequality into the fabric of the state and ensure that the ideology of domesticity was part of the dominant discourse of the day. It was the Free State that compromised women’s citizenship. It was the Free State that denied women the right to serve on juries, to work impeded in the civil service and in factories, to divorce, to use birth control, to overall be free and unencumbered citizens of the new state with the right to a place in the public sphere”.⁴

And it’s why a nun thought it was fairly normal to determine your status in her classroom based on your father’s occupation, or why a bank didn’t accept a loan application from a single woman, or why a female CEO still has to keep going through ‘the men’ to get access to those in the public sphere.

But the ultra-conservative men in charge of the bourgeoning Irish State, although they made the public-private divide very palpable, did not beg, steal or borrow it from anywhere. They didn’t even have to invent it. It had long been a part of Irish life.

The historians J.J. Lee and Margaret Ward connect the strengthening of the public-private divide to another devastating part of Irish history — An Górta Mór (The Great Hunger/The Great Famine).

For J.J. Lee, a consequence of the economic changes The Famine caused was a weakening of the position of women in Irish society⁵. Prior to The Famine, the gendered lines between public and private were more fluid. Amongst the poorer classes, a woman’s income, through skills such as weaving and knitting, and the production of butter, were essential to the household. Between them, a husband and wife could survive. Agricultural tasks on small farms were also performed by both men and women, and the simple primary diet of potatoes meant most women were not tethered to domestic duties.

The Famine changed this social fabric utterly. Domestic industry (which women contributed to with their weaving) was obliterated and butter-making increasingly was outsourced to creameries. Farms shifted from tillage to livestock which changed the labour-intensity — women were no longer needed to till fields. Women essentially lost their economic independence, and this made them vulnerable to, and more reliant on, male economic dominance. The world of the economy —the public sphere— was firming up as male.

Source: National Library of Ireland

This lack of economic independence had a significant impact on women’s marriage prospects. While women previously could come to a marriage with their own contribution, now she relied on her father’s dowry. Few families could afford to dowry more than one daughter, so parents became reluctant to allow their daughters to mix with boys. Sex segregation — keeping boys and girls apart and preventing any temptation— became the order of the day. Hence, the educational system that was also emerging at this time tended to keep boys and girls separated in single-sex schools, or boys and girls classes.

The Famine also had another impact — a growing social anxiety relating to respectability and being seen as respectable. This period (the 1840s onwards) is marked by the adoption of the “prudish values of Victorian middle-class morality”⁶ which cast the woman as the ‘Angel of the home’ and was heavily informed by the public-private divide which cast men as the rational, logical actors driving the public world, and women as the passive, submissive and emotional guardian of the home. This heavily informed the emerging formal educational system which:

“Indoctrin[ated] [women] into adopting as self-images the prevailing male image of women….. until the more gullible came to believe that the role was a law of universal nature and not simply a product of a peculiar and transient set of local circumstances” (J.J. Lee)⁷

Margaret Ward perhaps provides the best summation of how ‘The Famine’ impacted the lives of women:

“The Famine…. made those who survived determined to ensure that this would never happen again. This meant land consolidation, putting an end to sub-division and dependence on one crop. It meant passing down inheritance to one son, providing a dowry for one daughter to marry. It meant postponed marriage and enforced celibacy as restricted opportunities for marriage and changes in inheritance patterns were underpinned by a new puritanism….. The Irish church reformed, the authority of Rome imposed and the impact of this was profound. The demise of the old village clusters, due to land consolidation, led to women being isolated on family farms, and as labour-intensive tillage gave way to cattle-rearing their economic worth was discounted. Public space was rigidly separated on gender lines, the importance of women’s domestic role leading to increased pressure for women to remain within the home”⁸

Just as the Irish Free State used the re-tightening of strict gender divides to respond to the threat and devastation of the Civil War, the fear and threat The Famine left in the bodies and souls of those who had survived and stayed made them reach for, and wholly embrace, these strict gendered social norms for a sense of order, safety and, most essentially, respectability.

There is a pattern, then, in Ireland’s past of times of opening up (usually around rebellion and revolutionary periods) where gender lines and the segregation of space becomes blurred and more fluid, and the tightening of it back up again in response to threat and trauma. And it is the bodies, minds and souls of women that bear the brunt of that tightening, as nearly every element of society, from legislation, education, the economy, and even as Cara Delay has shown, folklore, is brought into action to draw a line around them and corral them into the private sphere.

Not that that ever kept a good woman down! Women have always enlivened and powered the public sphere in Ireland, regardless of how barbed the line keeping them from crossing into it was.

There is so much more I can say here, and so much further I could go back in history, tracing these invisible lines, these segregations and separations, from one century to another, and the various ways they manifested at different points in time — but that’s for the book!

Yet, as I continue with my analysis of the 36 Women of Ireland project interviews, I continue to see the threads of these segregations and separations in their stories. They remain, as they have done for centuries, a part of the fabric of the ‘woman of Ireland’ story.

But what do you think? Am I on to something here? Or should this remain as just a hunch?

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P.S. I recognise I’ve given a very ‘Republic-of-Ireland-centric’ perspective in this history here. Women of Northern Ireland, I have not forgotten you, I’m just still working on learning how this shows up in the NI context. This investigation of the public-private is very well developed and documented for women south of the border but, sadly, seems to be more overlooked in studies of women North of the border. But I’ll get there.

1. Beaumont, C. (1997). Women, citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish free state, 1922-1948. Women’s History Review, 6(4), 563–585. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029700200154

2. Ward, M. (1996). Irish women and nationalism. Irish Studies Review, 5(17), 8–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670889608455553

3. Valiulis, M. G. (2019). The making of inequality in the Irish Free State, 1922–37: Women, power and gender ideology (None edition). Four Courts Press.

4. ibid.

5. J. J. Lee (1978), 'Women and the Church Since the Famine', in M. MacCurtain and D. O'Corrain (eds.), Women in Irish Society. The Historical Dimension (Dublin)

6. ibid.

7. ibid.

8. Ward, M. (1996). Irish women and nationalism. Irish Studies Review, 5(17), 8–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670889608455553