Renegades: Irish Republican Women 1900-1922 [Paperback]

Ann Matthews book Renegades is a great contribution to the roles women held in the foundation of the Republic of Ireland. It offered a great compilation of primary research about their contributions to the emergence of a free Ireland. While many of us have heard of Maude Gonne and Countess de Markiewicz, it was interesting to see their contributions in context with the overall historical movement. They apparently courted fame, and it is their names that are most closely associated with that period. However, what I found interesting (along with Maude Goone and Countess de Markiewicz' personal hype) were the contributions made by lesser known names and the the demographics of female support. It strikes me, however, the roles that a hand-full of women held with constant volunteering, committee work and other contributions were staggering. They obviously dedicated their lives to the cause of freedom. The same names keep turning up again and again.

If there is a criticism about this book, it is that toward the end of the book I felt overwhelmed with statistics without the benefit of a lot of context. I confess that I still don't really understand the implications of the last chapter and the result of voting for or against the Treaty. A stronger conclusion for the book would have been welcomed to sum up the book's premise.

We tend to hear only of Maud Gonne and the Countess Constance de Markievicz. These two genteel ladies managed to reinvent themselves, in their thirties and at forty respectively, into Joan of Arc characters, on a mission to liberate the Irish from the British. Ann Matthews regards both figures as far more self-absorbed than earlier historians have judged them. Gonne and de Markievicz disguised their own English backgrounds. They directed themselves as leading ladies in a martial performance, with the Irish as supporting cast and spectators, and the British as the villains. Their fiery rhetoric roused crowds, as they rallied the people of their adopted homeland to a brutal, desperate conflict. To widen the stage long dominated by their strident egotism, Matthews focuses upon the role of women who waited in the wings, second-billed, as thousands of extras, as spear-carriers.

Her narrative moves quickly, as she covers the rise of the Gaelic League, the Inghinidhe na h'Éireann ("Daughters of Ireland," INE), and community activism that hastened participation of women in the Easter Rising of 1916. Matthews, as with Fearghal McGarry's "The Rising" (also reviewed by me), draws upon witness testimonies recently released by the Bureau of Military History. These accounts, as well as memoirs and correspondence, show Dr. Matthews' concentration upon primary sources for her dissertation, revised into this study.

Women, beginning to free themselves from propriety, attended Irish-language lessons of the Gaelic League. As these often popularized a cultural nationalism as a vehicle for militant republicanism, along with an increasingly pervasive tilt toward triumphalist Catholicism, many women became politicized.

In Dublin in 1916, civilian women often showed courage under fire. Their sons, husbands, and fathers fought with rifles, but the women fought with equal courage against great odds. After the failed Rising, a few women were arrested and a handful were interned. Some of these were the leaders of the faction most opposed to a second end to hostilities a few years later.

While her book ends before the 1922-23 Irish Civil War that followed the Treaty's acceptance by a slim majority of the Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament. Matthews documents how some women elected to the Dáil took strident and hostile stances towards any compromise. They vowed to fight against the pro-Treaty Free State, to bring about nothing less than total independence for the entire island.

Charts, maps, and photographs enhance this volume; it will serve as a necessary reference for scholars of Irish republicanism, women's studies, and political history. Matthews incorporates her sources smoothly. Her narrative avoids theoretical cant and anachronistic judgment.

Focused on primary sources where the women may not have articulated such contexts or concerns about why they fought, and how they did so within the constraints and prejudices of their society, Dr. Matthews' content often tends towards presentation rather than interpretation. Its strength as a direct explanation of what women did back then may be a slight weakness. For, we hear little of why and how these women devoted themselves so diligently to the struggle. How they managed to do so, while raising children, making a living, and conducting their duties within a traditional, devout, and hierarchical society remains a mystery in many of these pages.

Matthews emphasizes what historical records reveal. She relies on what was written down or dictated; this concentration highlights public admissions rather than private hopes and fears. Yet, these emerge in one chapter that constitutes what will likely be the most noteworthy section of this study. During the 1919-21 conflict, when British auxiliary "Black and Tan" troops demobilized from the Great War were recruited to attack the Irish Republican Army, attacks were perpetrated against women, in physical and emotional abuse as well as assault and rape. Shortly after, an investigation funded by Republicans was seen, correctly as Matthews avers, as biased as it failed to relate any Republican violence against women.

The British Labour Party conducted its own inquiry. These reports reveal crimes on both sides. As with propaganda of Maud Gonne and Countess de Markievicz as Fenian patriots untainted by British pedigree, so with the Republican forces as entirely noble, chaste heirs to the fighting Fenian tradition. This guerrilla war tarnished both rebel and imperialist. Often, as in the Civil War to come, Irishmen and Irishwomen in this small nation fought against their neighbors. The narrative halts after the Treaty is passed in 1922, but as Dr. Matthews concludes, this led to decades of Irish internecine conflict that in our new century have yet to fully end.