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Violence, ridicule and silence: the campaign for female suffrage in 1918

Suffragists Kathleen Emerson & Meg Connery in Green Street Dock 1912

Making public spaces unsafe for women, and denying authority to the female voice has, as we are told by Professor (or SAINT!) Mary Beard, a long and dis-honourable history. The campaign for female suffrage in 1918 was part of this story.

The on-going Decade of Commemorations activities encompass the centenary, this year, of the granting of partial female suffrage in 1918. The Library, contributing to the work of the Houses of the Oireachtas Votail 100 programme, and in collaboration with sister institutions island-wide, has curated an online exhibition Violence, ridicule and silence: Irishwomen’s road to the vote. However, while we are all familiar with the broad outlines of the story of the campaign – window breaking, hunger strikes, Cat & Mouse Act – this exhibition focuses on slightly more uncomfortable facts, which have not always been part of the narrative. Hence the rather angry title. Because dismissing historic thuggery and evil-doing as being ‘alright for the times’ has a whiff of the Harvey Weinsteins about it and these days, there is no appetite for explaining things away.

Women’s history is negatively impacted by the loss of their records. © Meath Co Co

Thus the age old refusal to permit the female voice to be heard, in government, is no longer to be understood as How Things Were, it is to be understood in the terms in which Professor Mary Beard puts it in her important book Women and Power: a manifesto. Speech is about power, and silencing the female was once an essential part of ensuring that power stayed in male hands. Regardless of what excuse the anti-suffragists gave for their stance, it was always about fear around power.

The opponents of female suffrage were profoundly threatened by the possibility of its success. This is clear from the weapons with which they attacked it. Apart from the prevarication and lies of the constitutional politicians, women were everywhere mocked and shouted down when they spoke out and when that failed they were physically assaulted. One of the exhibits, from Queens University, is a student magazine account of how a visiting suffragist was prevented from speaking by the male students who howled her down for an hour, and set off a stink bomb to disperse the audience. This event also addresses the use of ridicule as a tool to shame women into silence. Suffragists were sometimes described as monstrous freaks, non-women, or would-be men for wanting to step outside their domestic spheres. At this Queen’s event a half-man half-woman effigy was introduced to mock the female audience.

Silence affects women’s history in other ways, not alone in that female voices were not permitted to be heard but their records don’t always make it to the archives and so their stories get lost. An example is suffragist, Lilliian Metge (1880-1954) who remains a somewhat enigmatic figure, despite being, arguably, Ireland’s most militant suffragette. Metge bombed Lisburn Cathederal in 1914.

Access to education politicised many women. Early TCD graduates 1906.

The reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, outside the General Post Office by Padraig Pearse, marked the beginning of the Easter Rebellion 1916. Its guarantee of ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens’ represented a strong pro-gender equality statement that reflected the ethos of the Volunteers and the involvement of many women in the armed struggle for Irish independence. These ideals were reneged on by the first Free State government, one of whose ministers, Kevin O’Higgins stated ‘the normal and natural function of women was to have children’ and this was more important than any civic duty or privilege’. He also dismissed the 1922 constitution’s guarantee of equality by saying that ‘a few words in a constitution do not wipe out the difference between the sexes, either physical or mental, temperamental, or emotional’.

The exhibition goes beyond the apparent success of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 to the great disappointment of what happened next. Reneging on the promises of the 1916 Proclamation, the restrictions placed on the lives and rights of women by the Government in the 1920s and 30s read like a preface to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, up to and including the misogynistic 1937 Constitution: the1926 Civil Service Act legalised a gender barrier in competitions for posts; the Juries Service Act 1927 effectively barred them from jury service; from 1932 female civil servants and teachers had to leave work on marriage; in 1934 there was a complete ban on the importation of contraceptives; in 1936 the Conditions of Employment Act empowered the minister to restrict the employment of women in industry; and the 1937 Constitution signified the home as the rightful place of women.

The collaborators (to whom a thousand thanks for enthusiasm, patience and suggestion as well as wonderful images) are: Queen’s University  Belfast, University College Dublin, PRONI, the Representative Church Body Library, the Hugh Lane Gallery,  the National Archives, The National Museum, and the National Library. Thanks also go to the private owner of one image, to the Estates of Edith Somerville and Dorothy Macardle, and to Dr Micheline Sheehy Skeffington.

Dr Jane Maxwell

https://www.tcd.ie/library/exhibitions/suffrage/