Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T17:18:38.619Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Violence against women in the Irish Civil War, 1922–3: gender-based harm in global perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2020

Gemma Clark
Gemma Clark*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
*Department of History, University of Exeter, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Since the 1990s, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, violence against women in wartime has become a matter of international concern. This article, on gender-based violence (G.B.V.) during the Irish Civil War, draws on research from scholars and activists around the globe, and newly accessible archival sources, to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. Records of the Irish Free State's Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence during 1922–3 – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). Women's interactions with the Civil War were thus distinctive from men's because of the prevalence in Ireland of forms of aggression and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy nor ideology of either warring side to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland, where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females. Revolutionary Ireland was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men); however, for pro- and anti-Treaty forces, maintaining propriety militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 165 , May 2020 , pp. 75 - 90
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Gaggioli, Gloria, ‘Sexual violence in armed conflict’ in International Review of the Red Cross, xcvi, no. 894 (Dec. 2014), pp 504–05Google Scholar.

2 Bourke, Joanna, Rape: a history from 1860 to the present (London, 2007)Google Scholar, location 197 (Kindle edition).

3 Morris, Madeline, ‘In war and peace: rape, war, and military culture’ in Barstow, Anne (ed.), War's dirty secret: rape, prostitution, and other crimes against women (Cleveland, OH, 2000), pp 167–203Google Scholar.

4 United Nations (U.N.) Department of Public Information, ‘Background note: sexual violence: a tool of war’ (Mar. 2014) in Outreach Programme on the Rwanda Genocide and the United Nations (https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/backgrounders.shtml) (11 Jan. 2020).

5 Gaggioli, ‘Sexual violence in armed conflict’, p. 505. For example, the 1998 Rome Statute underpinning the International Criminal Court (which came into force in 2002) expanded the definition of crimes against humanity to include other systematic sexual acts outside rape (enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, etc.).

6 Coan, C. B., ‘Rethinking the spoils of war: prosecuting rape as a war crime in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’ in North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation, xxiv, no. 1 (fall 2000), pp 183–237Google Scholar.

7 Gottschall, Jonathan, ‘Explaining wartime rape’ in Journal of Sex Research, xli, no. 2 (May 2004), pp 131–2Google Scholar.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., p. 130.

10 Gaggioli, ‘Sexual violence in armed conflict’, p. 504.

11 U.N. action against sexual violence in conflict, ‘Stop rape now’ (http://www.stoprapenow.org/) (29 Aug. 2019).

12 This despite some agitation on issues of rural poverty and land rights: Gemma Clark, Everyday violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge, 2014).

13 Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘The rape of Mary M.: a microhistory of sexual violence and moral redemption in 1920s Ireland’ in Journal of the History of Sexuality, xxiv, no. 1 (Jan. 2015), pp 75–98.

14 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The logic of violence in civil war (Cambridge, 2006), p. 19.

15 Sinéad McCoole, No ordinary women: Irish female activists in the revolutionary years (Dublin, 2015); Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie, Remembering women's activism (London, 2018), chapter 2.

16 Gabrielle Machnik-Kékesi, ‘Gendering bodies: violence as performance in Ireland's War of Independence (1919–1921)’ (M.A. thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2017), p. 13.

17 Senia Pašeta, Irish nationalist women, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 2013); Jason K. Knirck, Women of the Dáil: gender, republicanism and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (Dublin, 2006); Marie Coleman, ‘Violence against women in the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921’ in Diarmaid Ferriter and Susannah Riordan (eds), Years of turbulence: the Irish Revolution and its aftermath (Dublin, 2015), pp 137–56; eadem, ‘Compensating Irish female revolutionaries, 1916–1923’ in Women's History Review, xxvii, no. 6 (2017), pp 915–34; eadem, ‘Military service pensions and the recognition and reintegration of guerrilla fighters after the Irish Revolution’ in Historical Research, xci, no. 253 (Aug. 2018), pp 554–72.

18 Lindsey Earner-Byrne and Diane Urquhart, ‘Gender roles in Ireland since 1740’ in Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (eds), The Cambridge social history of modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2017), pp 312–26; Rosemary Cullen Owens, A social history of women in Ireland, 1870–1970: an exploration of the changing role and status of women in Irish society (Dublin, 2005).

19 Linda Connolly, ‘Sexual violence a dark secret of War of Independence and Civil War’ in Irish Times (online), 10 Jan. 2019; eadem, ‘Sexual violence and the Irish Revolution: an inconvenient truth?’ in History Ireland, xxvii, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 2019), pp 34–7; RTÉ Radio 1, The history show, Irish War of Independence: women of the revolution, broadcast 13 Oct. 2019.

20 Connolly, ‘Sexual violence a dark secret’.

21 Connolly, ‘Towards a further understanding of the violence experienced by women in the Irish Revolution’, Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, Working Paper Series, no. 7 (Maynooth, 2019), p. 5.

22 Connolly, ‘Wartime sexual violence against women in Ireland “ignored”’ in Irish Times (online), 9 July 2018.

23 Una Crowley and Rob Kitchin, ‘Producing “decent girls”: governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922–1937)’ in Gender, place and culture, xv, no. 4 (Aug. 2008), pp 355–72.

24 For an overview of the conflict: Clark, Everyday violence, pp 2–5.

25 Eunan O'Halpin, ‘Counting terror: Bloody Sunday and the dead of the Irish Revolution’ in David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Terror in Ireland, 1916–1923 (Dublin, 2012), p. 214. I greatly anticipate the overall findings of the project, to be published by Yale University Press.

26 Clark, Everyday violence, p. 3.

27 David Durnin and Ian Miller (eds), Medicine, health and Irish experiences of conflict, 1914–45 (Manchester, 2016), p. 2.

28 Ian Miller, ‘Pain, trauma, and memory in the Irish War of Independence: remembering and contextualising Irish suffering’ in Fionnuala Dillane, Naomi McAreavey and Emilie Pine (eds), The body in pain in Irish literature and culture (Cham, 2016), pp 117–34; Justin Dolan Stover, ‘Violence, trauma and memory in Ireland: the psychological impact of war and revolution on a liminal society, 1916–1923’ in Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese (eds), Psychological trauma and the legacies of the First World War (Cham, 2017) pp 117–40.

29 Gavin M. Foster, The Irish Civil War and society: politics, class, and conflict (London, 2015), pp 172–202; Diarmaid Ferriter, A nation and not a rabble: the Irish Revolution, 1913–23 (London, 2015), chapters 28–30; Clark, Everyday violence; Brian Hughes, Defying the I.R.A.?: Intimidation, coercion, and communities during the Irish Revolution (Liverpool, 2016); Peter Hart, The I.R.A. at war, 1916–23 (Oxford, 2003).

30 Clark, Everyday violence; Hughes, Defying the I.R.A.?; Hart, The I.R.A. at war.

31 Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee Applications (C.P.I.C.), 1922–55 (N.A.I., Department of Justice and Equality (JUS), 2017/46 series).

32 Clark, Everyday violence, p. 22.

33 Thomas McDonagh application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/279); Stephen Kilmartin application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1065); Bridget Barry application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1108); Charles Fitzpatrick application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/2034).

34 Mary Hyde application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1474).

35 Mary Gallagher application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/2007).

36 James Fletcher application (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/30).

37 Annie Meehan application (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/48).

38 O'Halpin, ‘Counting terror’, p. 226.

39 Mary Barry application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1118).

40 Gemma Clark, ‘Motives for murder’ in Revolution Papers, xlv (8 Nov. 2016); Gerard Murphy, The year of disappearances: political killings in Cork, 1921–1922 (Dublin, 2011); John Borgonovo, Spies, informers and the ‘anti-Sinn Féin Society’: the intelligence war in Cork city, 1919–1921 (Dublin, 2006); Hughes, Defying the I.R.A., chapter 4.

41 Mai Callanan application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/897).

42 Clark, Everyday violence, pp 156–7.

43 Mai Callanan application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/897).

44 Justin Dolan Stover, ‘Families, vulnerability and sexual violence during the Irish Revolution’ in Jennifer Evans and Ciara Meehan (eds), Perceptions of pregnancy from the seventeenth to the twentieth century (Basingstoke, 2017), p. 59.

45 Matthew Hamill application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1156).

46 Bridget Barry application, 1923 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1108).

47 Kalyvas, Logic of violence; Achilles Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’ in Public Culture, xv, no. 1 (winter 2003), pp 11–40.

48 Article 41.2.1, 2 of the Irish constitution (1937) recognises the value (to the state and society) of the woman's ‘life within the home’. On the influence of the Catholic church on the drafting of the constitution, its positioning of women as naturally domestic and the consequent impact on their social/economic lives, see Ronit Lentin, ‘“Irishness”, the 1937 constitution, and citizenship: a gender and ethnicity view’ in Irish Journal of Sociology, viii (1998), pp 5–24; Thomas Murray, ‘Socio-economic rights and the making of the 1937 Irish constitution’ in Irish Political Studies, xxxi, no. 4 (2016), pp 502–24; Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Women, citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1948’ in Women's History Review, vi, no. 4 (1997), pp 563–85.

49 Clark, Everyday violence, pp 73–85.

50 Irish Times, 24 Mar. 1923.

51 Clark, Everyday violence, p. 191.

52 E. J. Wood, ‘Variation in sexual violence during war’ in Politics and Society, xxxiv, no. 3 (Sept. 2006), p. 309.

53 Clark, Everyday violence, p. 192.

54 Ibid., pp 188–90.

55 Daniel Breen statement, 1959 (M.A.I., B.M.H., W.S. 1763).

56 Gemma Clark, ‘Fire as revolution and repression: revolutionary Ireland in perspective’ in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds), The Oxford handbook on colonial insurgencies and counterinsurgencies (Oxford, forthcoming).

57 Scott Gates, ‘Recruitment and allegiance: the microfoundations of rebellion’ in Journal of Conflict Resolution, xlvi, no. 1 (Feb. 2002), pp 111–30.

58 James Connolly, The experience of occupation in the Nord: living with the enemy in First World War France (Manchester, 2018); Edward Madigan, ‘“An Irish Louvain”: memories of 1914 and the moral climate in Britain during the Irish War of Independence’ in I.H.S., xliv, no. 165 (May 2020), pp 94–108.

59 Anne Dolan, ‘Killing in “the good old Irish fashion”? Irish revolutionary violence in context’ in I.H.S., xliv, no. 165 (May 2020), pp 12–26.

60 Michael Laffan, The resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin party 1916–1923 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 277.

61 Thanks to Oliver Morgan for sharing unpublished research that helped me think about republican military cultures in new ways.

62 Coleman, ‘Military service pensions and the recognition and reintegration of guerrilla fighters after the Irish Revolution’, p. 557. On the value of the M.S.P. Collection for studying female militancy specifically: Coleman, ‘Compensating Irish female revolutionaries, 1916–1923’, pp 915–34.

63 Tom Inglis, ‘Origins and legacies of Irish prudery: sexuality and social control in modern Ireland’ in Éire-Ireland, xl, nos 3 & 4 (fall/winter 2005), pp 9–37.

64 Anthony Keating, ‘Sexual crime in the Irish Free State 1922–33: its nature, extent and reporting’ in Irish Studies Review, xx, no. 2 (2012), p. 135.

65 Connolly, ‘Violence experienced by women in the Irish Revolution’, p. 24.

66 John Henegan application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/2051).

67 Kathleen Keyes McDonnell application (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1950).

68 Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopaedia of hair: a cultural history (Westport, CT, 2006), pp 271–2. On the categorisation of hair cutting as gender-based, but not sexual, violence: Coleman, ‘Violence against women in the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921’, p. 141.

69 Louise Ryan, ‘“Drunken Tans”: representations of sex and violence in the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21)’ in Feminist Review, no. 66 (autumn 2000), pp 73–94.

70 On the public humiliation of Jewish males by forced beard shaving: Michael Wildt, Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the dynamics of racial exclusion: violence against Jews in provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York, 2011).

71 Legacies of slavery have shaped an especially strong relationship between hair and self-expression for women of colour; see, for example, Rose Weitz, Rapunzel's daughters: what women's hair tells us about women's lives (New York, 2004).

72 Sherrow, Encyclopaedia of hair, p. 3.

73 Ibid., p. 13.

74 Irish Times, 12 Aug. 1922.

75 Catherine Gourley, Flappers and the new American woman: perceptions of women from 1918 through the 1920s (Minneapolis, 2008).

76 Andreea Prundeanu, ‘Cutting Delilah's hair: sentimental collaborators and the politics of female sexuality in WWI/II France’ (D.Phil. thesis, Michigan State University, 2017).

77 Connolly, ‘Violence experienced by women in the Irish Revolution’, p. 11.

78 Clark, ‘Fire as revolution and repression’, forthcoming.

79 Hughes, Defying the I.R.A., chapter 4.

80 Irish Times, 28 Apr. 1923.

81 Anne White application, 1924 (N.A.I., JUS/2017/46/1984).

82 Clark, Everyday violence, pp 164–5.

83 Maria Thomas, ‘“The civilisation that is being forged amid the thunder of the canons”: anti-clerical violence and social reconfiguration: July–December 1936’ in Peter Anderson and Miguel Ángel Del Arco Blanco (eds), Mass killings and violence in Spain, 1936–1952 (New York, 2015), pp 112–33.

84 Anti-Treaty newsletter titled, ‘War Issue / Stop Press / Nationality / To preserve the Republic’ with an article about the Free State Army using a convent as a military base, 8 July 1922 (N.L.I., Erskine Childers papers, MS 48,060/1). George Corr found this source; thanks to him for sharing unpublished research on anti-Treaty presentations of ‘the enemy’.

85 Branche, Raphaëlle and Virgili, Fabrice (eds), Rape in wartime (Basingstoke, 2012), pp 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 4.

86 Block, Sharon, Rape and sexual power in early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006)Google Scholar.

87 Heineman, Elizabeth D. (ed.), Sexual violence in conflict zones: from the ancient world to the era of human rights (Philadelphia, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Lynch, Robert, ‘Explaining the Altnaveigh massacre’ in Éire-Ireland, xlv, nos 3 & 4 (fall/winter 2010), pp 184–210Google Scholar. The sexual assault at Sopwell House (above) saw the ‘separation of the two Protestant staff from the Catholic maid, who escaped the abuses of the armed raiders’: Clark, Everyday violence, p. 188.

89 On the revolutionary circulation of/responses to threatening notices: Clark, Everyday violence; Hughes, Defying the I.R.A.

90 Irish Times, 28 Apr. 1923.

91 Huemmer, Jennifer, McLaughlin, Bryan and Blumell, L. E., ‘Leaving the past (self) behind: non-reporting rape survivors' narratives of self and action’ in Sociology, liii, no. 3 (June 2019), pp 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Earner-Byrne, ‘Rape of Mary M.’, p. 98.

93 Aiken, Siobhra, ‘“Sinn Féin permits buried in the heels of their shoes”: Cumann na mBan emigrants and transatlantic revolutionary exchange’ in in I.H.S., xliv, no. 165 (May 2020), pp 109–33Google Scholar.

94 Maria Luddy, ‘Marriage, sexuality and the law in Ireland’ in Biagini & Daly (eds), Cambridge social history of modern Ireland, pp 344–62; O'Donnell, Ian, ‘Sex crime in Ireland: extents and trends’ in Judicial Studies Institute Journal, iii, no. 1 (2003), pp 89–106Google Scholar.

95 U.N.O.D.C., Global study on homicide: gender-related killing of women and girls (Vienna, 2018).

96 ‘Violence against women a “mark of shame” on our societies, says U.N. chief on World Day’ in U.N. News (25 Nov. 2018) (https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/11/1026511) (31 May 2019).

97 See academic and public fallout over Peter Hart's ‘tentative yet provocative application of the term “ethnic cleansing” to the Irish Revolution’, David Fitzpatrick, ‘Protestant depopulation and the Irish Revolution’ in I.H.S., xxxviii, no. 152 (Nov. 2013), p. 643; Gemma Clark, ‘The Irish Revolution: moral campaign or bitter sectarian conflict?’ in Irish Times (online), 18 Sept. 2017.

98 On Irish feminist responses to the 1937 constitution and campaigns for gender equality: Luddy, Maria, ‘A “sinister and retrogressive” proposal: Irish women's opposition to the 1937 draft constitution’ in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth ser., xv (2005), pp 175–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pašeta, Senia, ‘Women and civil society: feminist responses to the Irish constitution of 1937’ in Harris, Jose (ed.), Civil society in British history: ideas, identities, institutions (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2010)Google Scholar; Cullen Owens, A social history of women in Ireland, chapter 10. As well as this issue's editors and readers, I thank for bringing my article to fruition: Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Marie Coleman and Stacey Hynd, for inspiring my interest in the topic and its contemporary resonances; conveners and attendees of seminars/workshops (at the University of Edinburgh; Trinity College Dublin; I.E.S. Irish Studies, London; Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) where I developed my ideas; my students, past and present, whose enthusiasm for the Irish Revolution sustains and stimulates my research.