"The sibling bond, between brothers and sisters, is so strong that husband and wife commonly have seperate residences"
Musings on a matricentric Ireland and the connections between women's power, male-absence and the masculine.
In Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore), in the north-west of Ireland, there is a story from the late 19th / early 20th century of a Connemara man who ‘married-in’ to the area and got a bit of a shock when he discovered it was far from the ‘man-of-the-house’ he was going to be.
In Gaoth Dobhair at that time, it was customary for a married couple to live with, or near the wife’s family. Wives did not ‘marry-in’ to their husbands’ family, husbands (just like this man from 200 or so miles away in Connemara) ‘married-in’ to their wives’. Not only that, in the eyes of the community, a husband’s relationship with his wife was less important than her relationship with her family; her blood-kin.
When E. Estyn Evans, a Welsh geographer and archaeologist (who wrote a beautiful book called The Personality of Ireland) visited Gaoth Dobhair in 1937 he described how:
“The sibling bond, between brothers and sisters, is so strong that husband and wife commonly have seperate residences”
This custom, of married women continuing to live in their natal home, separate to their husbands, was alive and well in the 1960’s on Tory Island, off the north coast of Donegal, when Professor Robin Fox headed there to begin his landmark ethnographic work (The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe).
Fox also discovered a custom of kinship that would seem unusual for the majority of us who grew up taking our family name from our fathers’ side. While such a custom was present on Tory, it was not so blanket. Instead, depending on preferences or traditions of the family, islanders were identified either through their father’s side, their mother’s side or a combination of both.
“In one example, people that were descended from a widow named Nellie Doohan were identified as either ‘Liam-Nellies’ or ‘Eoghan-Nellies’, depending on which of her sons they were descended from. The ‘Eoghan-Nellies’ could be further subdivided into ‘John-Eoghan-Nellies’ and so on” (Gray et al., The Idea of the Modern Family).
A woman living with her brother rather than her husband, and children tracing their lineage through their mother’s line, seems peculiar to us. It is something that stands out — a contrast to the dominant kinship customs the marjority of us know— and is why that Connemara-man got such a shock when he realised what ‘marrying-in’ really meant.
Yet, in societies were descent is matrilineal — were society is centred around women, around mothers— such things don’t seem strange, they are usual.
I have a long-held view, based soley on my lived experience, that women of Ireland hold and exercise palpable power at the local and interpersonal level. It is this —the innate energy and force they have— that powers everyday life in Ireland. The type of power I am talking about here is energy not dominance. Its the proactive directing of energy towards something; to create, to make, to do, to action. Women of Ireland are ‘do-ers’, they are the energetic pivot on which Irish life turns. That women exert and have influence and power at this local level is palpable, even when wider society likes to pretend it isn’t there, or diminishes it as ‘soft power’. But there is a depth to it that cannot fully be ignored.
The centrality of women to everyday life in Ireland and the influential, even commanding, role many have within the family and local community, has to be rooted in something, surely?
But what?
Stories like those of the Connemara-man in 19th century Gaoth Dobhair, or the precedence brother-sister relationships there took over those of a husband-wife relationship, and the descent customs of the Tory Islanders, have fed in to my theory that Ireland once had a matricentric, or mother-centred culture.
In a matricentric culture, the mother takes a central position in the family, while the father is peripheral. This centering of the family unit around the mother places them at a position of importance, and while this does not mean women have higher status in such societies, it does mean they, as mothers, command a certain respect.
Considering the remoteness of Gaoth Dobhair and Tory Island, can we read their customs of matrilineality, and the greater importance given to the relationship between sister and brother over wife and husband (a characteristic of matricentric cultures), as the vestiges and remnants of a much older mother-centred culture in Ireland? Could this be why, in the 21st century, we still anxiously revere ‘Mammy figures’, essentialising their domineering characteristics into 90 second ‘Every Irish Mammy Ever’ Tik Tok satires?
For many researchers, the answer is yes.
Archaeomythologist Miriam Robbins Dexter believes that the power and autonomy of the goddesses and heroines of Irish myth could only come about — or have been formed into story— in a society with “underlying matrilineal traditions”. While Irish feminist theologian Mary Condren, in her book The Serpent and the Goddess, straightforwardly argues that pre-Christian Ireland was mother-centred:
“It would be impossible here to provide all the evidence of matrilineal descent in the Irish sources, but the following are representative examples. The Venerable Bede in the eighth century, when writing about the Picts of Scotland, maintained that they traced their descent through the female line and that was because, when they left Ireland, the Irish gave them wives on condition that the lineage continue to be traced through the female line. Throughout Irish mythology, relationships to the mother are emphasised. The Tuatha Dé Danaan were ‘children of the Goddess Dana.’ Even famous heroes were called after their mothers: Buanann was ‘mother of heroes’, while the Goddess Anu was known as ‘mother of the gods’. In some cases men were even called, not alone after their mothers, but after their wives” (pg. 27).
Nuggets like this from Ireland’s ancient past light me up. There is something beguiling about looking at the power of mother-figures and the accompanying influence of women at local level in Ireland as a continuance, if a bit of a battered and bruised one, of a very very old matricentric culture.
And yet, my thoughts on this remain conflicted and tenuous. Beyond what I have presented here, I have not yet found anything firm enough to figuratevely hang my hat on (yet!) and claim Ireland was once matricentric. Moreover, in reading such stories in search of any evidence for the roots of female status in an older time I’m likely falling into the same trap as the early scientists who developed a theory of prehistoric matriarchies centred on the worship of great mother goddesses (as explained in this video).
I am coming to accept that I may never really know the answer to the roots of the power I witness amongst the “ordinary” women of Ireland. Certainly, chalking it down to the remnants of a matricentric or mother-centred culture is too simple. There are numerous threads that make up what underlies that sense I have of female power at the community and interpersonal level in Ireland.
One day, while getting myself into knots over such thoughts, I asked a question directly to the past:
“What was it like for women back then?”
The following image was what answered:
I saw a woman in a small dark space, a cabin I supposed, looking at a man sat dejectedly in a darkened corner. There in presence of body if not presence of mind. She looked at him as if in hope of something, acknowledgement, or help maybe? But he stared on. She turned back to what she was doing and continued on with her tasks with the self-assured efficiency of someone used to doing them alone.
I read the man as someone in the depths of depression, or someone who had experienced a traumatic event(s). She had no choice but to keep going and keep everything going.
When that image came to me, I recognised it as the roots of the force, power and presence of women in Ireland, everybit as much as some ancient custom.
When writing about Irish women in Legend, Literature and Life, scholar Lorna Reynolds made the following perceptive observation about the collective experience of women of Ireland through the ages:
“One thing I think one can truthfully, if not usefully, say about Irish women and life, is that, given our sad and troubled history, unless Irish women had been extraordinarily resourceful, adaptable and pertinacious, there would be no Irish life to mention. When one considers the wars and invasions, the battles and sieges, the laying waste and destruction, the taxing and the tithing, the harrassments and the confiscations, the poverty and the starvation, the restraints and the deprivations, the prohibitions and the exactions, the times of Riot, Rebellion and Martial Law, the Penal Laws, and the Great Famine — and a great deal more besides— the marvel is that children ever got born, let alone reared and educated”.
Women have long been the space-holders in Irish life. Generations of women have had to be how playwright Peter Sheridan described his mother:
“Ma soldiered on. She couldn’t buckle. If Ma collapsed we all went under”
Quite simply, If they had not kept things together, life would have fallen apart. As one generation of ‘space-holder’ gave way to the next, a pattern of behaviour was created; women of Ireland, mothers particularly, became the fabric of society and the skilled craftspeople spinning the thread to keep it all together. Is it any wonder they are described as strong, capable, forces-to-be-reckoned with?
And yet, to look at everything I have written so far about the power of women in Ireland — the type of energy and action they demonstrate— is, itself, a description of an imbalanced energetic state. It is, energetically speaking, wholly masculine. It is the power of doing, actioning, producing, protecting, responsibility and decisiveness. This is the power that generation upon generation of the women of Ireland have provided to keep their families and communities going, and it is a pattern of behaviour that many of us are now stuck in.
In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger examines how people behave during times of collective trauma, finding that both masculine and feminine (in the energetic sense) qualities are needed at different points in the response to catastrophic events (although he articulates them as male and female roles):
“These two kind of leaders more or less correspond to the male and female roles that emerge spontaneously in open society during catastrophes such as earthquakes or the Blitz. They reflect an ancient duality that is masked by the safety of modern life but becomes immediately apparent when disaster strikes. If women are not present to provide the empathetic leadership that every group needs, certain men will do it. If men aren’t present to take immediate action in an emergency, women will step in. To some degree the sexes are interchangeable —meaning they can easily be substituted for one another— gender roles [i.e. masculine and feminine energies] aren’t. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it”, pg. 65.
For the last 700+ years (or maybe even longer?), male-absence has been a feature of Irish life, whether due to trauma (from war, rebellion, colonisation), war itself, incarceration or transportation (e.g. to Australia and other British colonies). This is what I think of when I read of how “if men aren’t present to take immediate action in an emergency, women will step in”.
My sense is that there have been an awful lot of women in Irish history who, like the woman I saw in that dark cabin, have “stepped in” or were just providing the action anyway. And they continue to do so in their uniquely proactive and indomitable ways; if anything, it is now an entrenched norm of behaviour for many women of Ireland.
Beyond intergenerational trauma, economic necessity has also played a part. I liken Ireland to how Greek film director Aglaia Mitropoulou describes the culture of economically deprived Greek Islands as a “covert matriarchy”. Just like those islands, the difficult economic conditions of many parts of Ireland generated traditions of sesonal male migration that lasted centuries. Year on year, men left and women stayed, creating, or pehaps just following on with, patterns many of us know well; of women at the centre of family, society and life, directing the action.
Women of Ireland, then, are used to going it alone in many ways. Of being the space-holders, the proactive ones, the doers, the shapers, the makers and creators. Over-time. this has created a pattern of behaviours (some good, some not so good) that have been handed down; grandmother-mother-daughter, grandmother-mother-daughter, grandmother-mother-daughter, over and over.
Is this force merely a trauma response or is it rooted in an older culture? Maybe both, maybe neither, but the latter is certainly possible.
In the myths, folklore and legends of Ireland:
“the action is almost always propelled by the agency of women….. the main action[s] are dominated by women who are feisty, outspoken, intelligent” (Frances Devlin-Glass, pg. 109).
As Irish folklorist Gearoid Ó Crualaoich notes, Irish ancestral culture is characterised by “proactive, female creativity and power”.
Clearly then, there is something about us women of Ireland, in legend and life, that allows us to lean easily into those masculine energies of doing and actioning.
It’s a power that has proved necessary in responding to disaster upon catastrophe upon trauma. Yet, perhaps the greater task, and the type of leadership needed for this current time are the feminine powers we have left untended and underexercised. And its precisely such qualities that seem harder to find amongst the “bold resolute women” of whom there are so many that “one cannot avoid lighting on them” in any reading of Ireland, either past or present.
That Irish history is, quite literally, dripping in so many stories of women typified as ‘fiery’, ‘fierce’, ‘bold’, and ‘bad-ass’ probably says as much, if not more, about the qualities that are valued within our society than the characters of the women themselves. In the overtly masculine (energetically speaking) system we live in, stories of historical women who made it in a ‘man’s world’ stand out because we are seeking homestasis, we are seeking a feminine energy to counteract and balance out the strongly masculine. But we fail to notice that while it may help address the many ways in which women have been written from history, it’s the same old qualities that are being extolled.
If history has made women invisible, then the erasure of the feminine has been almost absolute. That is the bigger, more hidden, potentially deadly, story of our past.
Omg, love this! As somebody who has recently become fascinated with the feminine and masculine energy, the dance of what that means, and as an Irish woman who can see that masculine energy as a very strong feature of Irish Women, I resonate with so much of the above and enjoy the pondering!