Women and power, capitalism, and Ireland's 'witch-hunt'?

This is quite a long piece (one for a cup of tea and the sofa) and if you are receiving it via email it is highly likely your email provider will clip or truncate it, so best to read via the Substack App or online if possible).

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Lately, as I’ve been working on a chapter of the book where I attempt to impart a sense of the essence of women of Ireland — of the archetype— of how women are spoken of, written about and thought of in the Irish context, I find myself relying on the word ‘power’.

“Women’s innate power”, I write.

Yet, I don’t even really know what I mean. I can’t define that. It’s just the phrase that comes. The best I can do to capture all the strength, vitality, capability, resourcefulness, self-reliance and self-assuredness that is mentioned whenever ‘Mná na hÉireann’ are evoked.

“Women are so strong, they’ve so much life and force and capability, and it’s really astonishing….there is this inherent power that I sense from most Irish women”.

Women of Ireland Project Participant

‘Innate power’ is a feeling, and these the best words I have yet been able to attach to it. I rely on it evoking something in the reader (because I can’t define it). All I know is that it’s not the dictionary version of power. It’s not the power of wield and control, it’s the power of generation and creation. It’s an energy, not an authority.

People talk about women’s lack of power, because of their long-standing lack of access to and representation in the realm where all the social power lies; the public sphere. That’s the real power, that’s the ‘hard power’. The bit that women have —their traditional influence in the sphere of the private, of family and community— is only ‘soft power’, and it’s no good (they say).

Ireland is a relationship-based society. One that functions not according to rules and regulations but to personal connections. Our colonised past has left us suspicious and mistrusting of the institutional, formal powers in society. Instead, informal networks, personal loyalties and social ties take precedence in Ireland. They’re what govern everyday life (think Gard’s wiping driving penalty points for family and friends). Cute-hoorism produces back-slapping and applause, not prison sentences or fines.

As Niamh Hourigan explained in her book “Rule Breakers”, “Being there trumps being fair” in Ireland. Reciprocity, returning favours, doing ‘right by’ those in your social network (family and community), and breaking rules if it means protecting or helping another (i.e. being there) carries much greater weight in Ireland than sticking to the letter of the law (i.e. being fair).

Maybe, then, it’s that bit of Irishness in me which leads me to question the dismissal of ‘soft power’ — the power contained in the private sphere— as second-best. In Ireland, I would argue, this realm of so called soft power is where the real power lies. Or at least, it’s the power (in the energetic rather than authoritative sense) that underlies and drives everyday life.

And it’s the realm most strongly associated with women.

I’m reading Silvia Federici’s tour de force of a book “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation” for the second time as part of a reading group led by the wonderful

Hannah-May Batley

of

r o o t & r o c k

. It’s an impossible book to capture in a few short sentences but it sets out, across a vast epoch of European history, how the Witch Trials were crucial to the establishment of capitalism that emerged in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries.

It’s a book about the gradual, intentional subjugation of the female body, the degradation and devaluing of women’s contributions, and all the ways that emerging capitalist nation’s sought to impose and implant patriarchal ideologies at the heart of society. It’s a book about why women were made second-class.

Federici explains how this degradation of women was necessary for a capitalist economy to develop. Because for capitalism to grow, the communal, cooperative social structures that stood in its way first had to be destroyed. This meant destroying women (making them secondary to men, units of free labour production etc.) because women were at the heart of such local economies. Women were integral to the functioning of community in a subsistence, land-based, non-accumulative, collective pre-capitalist society and that was a threat to capitalism, waged labour and the free market.

It’s the kind of book that changes everything. Changes how you see the world, how you see yourself in the world, and reading it is deeply challenging (but if you have not read it I urge you to!)

Wood-carving of witches, c.1500

It’s an especially interesting book to read as a woman of Ireland. Because Ireland didn’t have The Witch Trials in the way much of Europe did. There were only four recorded Witch Trials in Ireland (compare that to the estimated 3,847 people accused of witchcraft in, mostly lowland, Scotland), and these were nearly all in Protestant communities versed in the ‘demonology theology’ being taught across Europe to (literally) ‘demonise’ (mostly) women.

One theory put forth for Gaelic Ireland’s lack of witch trials has been its colonisation; it’s mistrust of the formal legal system of the ‘coloniser’. Another is that Ireland, with it’s long-held belief in the Otherworld of faeries and supernatural beings, did not fear ‘witches’ in the same way. Irish ‘witches’ were old women who transformed into hares and stole milk, or prevented butter from being churned; they were mischievous not threatening. And anyway, people in Ireland had piseog’s to safe-guard against them; they could deal with witches in the community, not bring them to the attention of the ‘not to be trusted’ coloniser’s legal system (again, echoes of Ireland’s reliance on a relationship-based system, rather than a rules-based one, to govern everyday life).

Ireland was also late to capitalism, much later than the rest of Europe. Until well into the 1960s, with the establishment of the IDA (The Industrial Development Authority) and it’s policy of ‘industrialisation by invitation’, Ireland was an agrarian economy centred on the ‘small family farm’. The reality of this was a tough, largely subsistence based living on the land that relied on reciprocal, communal structures to survive. Neighbours and extended kin-groups cooperated in tasks, working together as a meitheal and remnants of that continue to exist in rural, farming Ireland (my Dad and brother still help our neighbours cover their silage pit every year, just as they had always helped cover ours). In Ireland, 426,000 hectares of land still remain in commonage; land jointly owned by several people, usually in the community, who collectively graze cattle or sheep on their shared parcel of land but cannot claim exclusive rights to any part of it.(Such commonages were largely destroyed as part of the development of capitalism in Britain under the ‘Enclosure Acts’)

Ireland then, until well into the 20th century, possessed many of the characteristics of the pre-capitalist society Federici explains was destroyed in the name of capitalist development. And its memory can still be accessed (in the stories of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents).

Yet, there is no denying that Ireland is a patriarchal, and now, highly capitalist society. It’s been patriarchal for as long as written records show; from medieval Brehon Law times to the present, women have never had formal power in the way a patriarchal-capitalist society thinks of power (i.e. ‘hard’ power). But they’ve had plenty of influence. They’ve always been at the heart of things, directing and guiding, powering and driving; the centre of family and community life, the centre of ‘relationship-based’ Ireland.

And the patriarchal-capitalist system in Ireland has viewed that as a threat in just the same way as every other European nation.

“The rise of capitalism was coeval with a war against women”

Silvia Federici (pg.5: Caliban and The Witch)

Based on Federici’s analysis, the development of capitalism requires the destruction of communal systems (because there is strength to resist in numbers), the removal and disconnection of people from the land and a collective, subsistence way of life (so they rely on earning a wage, not growing food, to survive) and the control of women’s bodies (so they can be exploited as unpaid reproducers of the labour force and free domestic labour).

The Witch Trials were a key part of that process because women were central actors in the pre-capitalist, community-based system and heavily resisted initial attempts to dismantle it.

Naming the Witch Trials as a tool of capitalist development redefines it. Extends it to encompass acts designed to subjugate, degrade and marginalise members of society who present a threat to the development of the new social order (i.e. capitalism)

Capitalism came late to much of Ireland (most date it to the late 1950s for the Republic, although, in parts of Northern Ireland, especially around industrialised Belfast the date is likely much earlier), and it’s emergence was (I would argue) preceded by, for all intents and purposes, a ‘war against women’.

Except, Ireland didn’t drown or burn women in its attempts to destroy them and their influence, it’s ‘Witch Hunt’ was much more subtle.

In the 19th century, just as women across the rest of Europe had been lobotomised into docile, mild-mannered, domestic ‘Angels of the Home’ by several centuries of “state terrorism”¹, things really got going in Ireland.

Historian Cara Delay’s² examination of petty court sessions in the late 19th and 20th century reveals how poor women were increasingly brought before court accused of “threatening and abusive language”. Usually, they had cursed or publicly denounced a neighbour. Press reports framed these women as ‘deviants’; as the threatening antithesis of the ideal passive, silent, domestic woman.

Yet, to local communities, such behaviour was not deviant but part of life. Women in Ireland had long used their voices in public spaces “to deliberate effect”. Words held power in those times. Words delivered with intention were believed to produce physical outcomes, and women’s words were known to be particularly potent in that regard.

Women had long used that power — the power of their words — to influence each other and their wider communities through gossip and curses. But, now, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the power of women’s words to influence local life and social networks were increasingly viewed as threatening, inducing anxiety amongst the male-elite. What ensued was an increased policing of women’s voices and the proscribing of women’s influence in the public sphere.

“Although poor women were in fact using their words to regulate each other’s behaviour, newspapers and courts paid particular attention to underscoring the violent potential of deviant women…. Abusive language court cases tell us much about women’s roles in community life and nation building. Women, who were deeply immersed in larger neighbourly and kin conflicts, blurred the prescribed lines between public and private, frustrating the efforts of religious and secular authorities to contain women within the domestic sphere. They attempted to retain a place in the public realm of the modern era as they rejected the paradigm of silent wifehood…. 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: “Uncharitable Tongues”: Women and abusive lanugage in Early 20th century Ireland

What Delay’s work shows is an older culture (a pre-capitalist, collective culture), where women were an active and influential part of community life, beginning to clash with a new social order which insisted on female passivity and domesticity and actively sought to curtail women’s power in the public sphere. Except women in Ireland, just like their counterparts across Europe a few centuries prior, were not going down easily. Much harsher means would be needed to ‘bring them into line’.

In the 20th century, following a momentary opening up of women’s roles during the revolutionary years, post-partition, post-independence Ireland returned to the task of disciplining and controlling women with renewed vigour. In the upper echelons of society — of church and state— the male elite saw the influence of women in the public domain as a threat to the future stability and functioning of the nation. For them, if society was to thrive, women had to be contained, they had to be neutralised.

And so it was, in the early decades of the 26-county Irish Free State, women were passed through an intense “disciplinary grid”³ of ecclesiastical doctrine, discriminatory legislation and social conditioning designed solely to produce passive, ‘decent’ women confined to the domestic sphere as wives and mothers. Women who subsumed themselves into this role were praised as ‘mothers of the nation’. And those who did not, those who transgressed this ideal by becoming mothers out of wedlock, felt the full force of that ‘disciplinary grid’. They were the ‘witches’ threatening the moral purity of the Irish nation and they would be judged without trial.

“In Ireland — whenever a child is born out of wedlock, so shocked is the public sense by the very unusual occurrence, that it brands with an irreparable stigma, and, to a large extent, excommunicates the woman guilty of the crime”

Fr. James F. Cassidy, writing in 1922 (The Women of the Gael)

The women of 20th-century Northern Ireland were not being pushed through the same ‘disciplinary grid’ — the Catholic Church-Irish government ‘Ideal Woman’ cookie-cutter — as women in Southern Ireland. But they were also not insulated from or unfamiliar with a similar level of social scrutiny and expectation. They too were subject to and judged against strict codes of morality, sexuality and traditional ideals of womanhood.

Historians Lindsay Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart⁴ point to how, where women were concerned, there was more similarity than difference North and South of the border. Both states were Christian conservative and faith heavily informed the development of state policy in both jurisdictions. They shared similar anxieties about moral decline and sexual promiscuity and similarly turned to the regulation of reproduction and the judging of women against high moral standards to address them. Critically, both states fostered a culture which pitted morality against the agency and bodily autonomy of women. Morality, in both, took priority. Transgressors and ‘deviants’ in Northern Ireland received the same treatment as those in Southern Ireland:

“People who deviated from the stringent moral codes pertaining in both states had limited options and often found themselves ostracised, incarcerated and exiled”.⁵

The exact number of unwed mothers incarcerated in Ireland’s state-funded and religious run “architectures of containment”⁶ (Mother and Baby Homes, County Homes) is not known, but some, for the 76 year period between 1922 and 1998 put it at 81,000. Analyses of the European Witch Trials note that “the precise number of Europeans tried and executed for witchcraft is unknown. The consensus among historians is that 100,000–110,000 Europeans were tried for witchcraft between c. 1400 and c. 1750, about half of them executed”⁷ (note: not all of these are women).

Unmarried mothers were not legally tried, physically tortured and executed, of course. (Although, the way many were treated in these institutions skirts too close to the definition of such words). This is where my comparison enters the realm of ‘a bit of a stretch’.

Nevertheless, the sentiment behind both the witch trials (if we are to take Federici's assessment of them) and Ireland’s “disciplinary grid” are the same: subdue women with fear and threat, confine them to the private realm, diminish their influence at the community level and in the public sphere, and in doing so, reduce their position in society to that of the free reproduction of the labour force.

In the 20th century 26-county Irish Free State, the latter was wrapped up with fears of a reducing population. In a meeting of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland in March 1937, Prof. John Busteed argued that:

“Quite a distinct issue is whether Ireland is capable of maintaining her own powers of reproductivity. In my opinion there is undue complacency as to the probability of the Irish population to be able to maintain its numbers by reproduction”.

Falling marriage rates were one of a variety of reasons put forward as to why Ireland’s population was at risk of decline. “The Irish Free State has a lower marriage rate than any other country for which statistics are available”, Prof. Busteed opined, before going on to conclude that:

“Greater female economic freedom has no doubt reduced to some extent the urge to get married; and in so far as female labour supplants male labour, the male is rendered unable to marry”.

In other words, women needed to be safely ensconced in an unsullied marital home (not out working taking jobs from men) reproducing morally superior Catholic-Gaelic children if the burgeoning Irish nation was to survive. While Prof. Busteed did not say it, that is certainly what Church and State believed, and they colluded in every possible way to ensure it.

“Woman's primary function in society —the one for which nature has admirably suited her— is that of wife and mother. The woman's duties in this regard, especially that of bringing up the children, are of such far-reaching importance for the nation and the race that the need of safeguarding them must outweigh almost every other consideration”

Fr. Edward Cahill: Notes on Christian Sociology: The Social Status of Women (1925)

‘Safe-guarding’ it involved a ‘witch-hunt’ of women deemed the most ‘deviant sexual transgressors’; unmarried mothers. One that was terrifying and brutal enough to put ‘the fear of God’ into every other woman, lest they let ‘their own morality’ slip too. I have heard the fear in many of the women I’ve interviewed when they recalled the Ireland of their upbringing:

“Once I got to being a teenager, I had quite a restricted childhood because I was the oldest and I was a girl. And the whole dominant narrative was you weren't going to get pregnant. So it's really interesting how everything was held in that in that space. As you got older, you realise that”. (Woman of Ireland Project participant on her teenagehood in the 1980s)

While the State introduced a plethora of discriminatory legislation that barred women from the public realm and left them with only two viable options, emigration or marriage, the Church went straight to the source of everyday power in relationship-based Irish society — community, family and interpersonal relationships. They knew the power of influence lay in how people related to one another and in how they judged one another. And they taught them how. They ‘read’ it — the judgement— from the pulpit every week. Local priests spied on suspected women and were tasked with rooting them out. It was an ‘Inquisition’ encouraged by the chief ‘Inquisitor’, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid:

“A broad white silk shawl covered his frail bent shoulders, falling down on each side to cover his hands, in which he clasped the glinting gold processional monstrance. His dark eyes, glittering in a masklike face, were transfixed on the shimmering white sacred Host. He had a long, straight thin nose and a saturnine appearance, with an awesome fixity of expression, and the strong mouth of an obsessional…. Drowsily fantasising on the imposing and fearful procession in a mixture of dream and nightmare, I was nudged into wakefulness by Laithwaite. ‘What an impressive figure, Noël: would he not make a notable addition to the distinguished company of Spanish Inquisitors?’”

(Description of Archbishop Dr. John-Charles McQuaid by Dr. Noël Browne, including those of Sir Gilbert Laithwaite, British diplomat, born and raised in Ireland and the then British Ambassador to Ireland, from ‘Against the Tide’, Dr. Noël Browne’s auto-biography)

It’s not being dunked or burned as a witch that flutters unexplained fears up the spines of women of Ireland, it’s being pilloried by your community, shamed and silenced, cast-out and ostracised. Encoded in the DNA of women of Ireland is a fear of ‘what will people think’, ‘what will people say’ and it’s kept many a woman silent, and afraid to use her voice.

Ireland did not experience the witch-hunt craze that swept through many parts of Europe (particularly modern-day Germany, Switzerland and Scotland). Of this we can be thankful. But that does not mean that people of Ireland did not undergo a disciplining which similarly sought to degrade women’s position in society. One which utilised fear and threat, praise and social conditioning, to remove women from the public sphere, reduce their influence in wider society and neutralise them in the domestic realm. What clout they continued to have could now be dismissed as ‘soft power’.

Yet, women’s innate power —which is usually most palpable when they collectively come together— was never quenched. Women got clever, they cloaked it. As the “disciplinary grid” tightened around them, women’s organisations in the 20th century adapted. They outwardly prescribed to the prevailing ideals of womanhood, taking names like “Irish Housewives Association” or the “Irish Countrywomens Association” and then used those platforms to continue to assert their influence in the public realm, remaining active agents in it.

That Archbishop McQuaid had the Irish Housewives Association monitored as a potential communist organisation (he was also intensely suspicious of its multi-denominational standing which saw Protestant and Catholic women mixing!) is telling. He was hardly acting as someone who believed women’s collective power to be ‘soft’.

I have long struggled to make sense of the “disciplinary grid” years in Ireland’s history. Why so intense? Why were women viewed as so threatening? The various explanations I have read —it’s because of Ireland’s religiosity, or its economic struggles, or of women being made a scape-goat for the tensions that existed in post-independence, post-partition Ireland— have felt like corners of the puzzle but never the centre, unifying piece. Understanding it all as a ‘witch-hunt’ to break the collective power and influence of women — to still and reduce their voices— touches something so much deeper and through it I find some answers to my ‘Why’ questions. Answers which make me even more convinced in the innate power of women and the immense force that becomes when women come together.

No wonder those with all the ‘hard power’ have always found it so threatening.

1. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia. pg. 118

2. Delay, C. (2013). ‘Uncharitable Tongues’: Women and Abusive Language in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland. Feminist Studies, 39(3), 628.

3. Crowley, U., & Kitchin, R. (2008). Producing ‘decent girls’: Governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922–1937). Gender, Place & Culture, 15(4), 355–372. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690802155553

4. Earner-Byrne, L., & Urquhart, D. (2019). The Irish Abortion Journey, 1920–2018. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03855-7

5. Ibid.

6. Smith, J. M. (2022). Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment. University of Notre Dame Press.

7. Leeson, P. T., & Russ, J. W. (2018). Witch Trials. The Economic Journal, 128(613), 2066–2105. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12498