Rattigan, Cliona What Else Could I Do?: Single Mothers and Infanticide, Ireland 1900-1950 (Irish Academic Press, 2011)
This powerful book explores the history of single mothers and infanticide in Ireland over a fifty-year period. Based primarily on underused archival material, Rattigan provides a detailed analysis of the diverse experiences of unmarried mothers who faced criminal charges because they were suspected of having committed infanticide. Although statistics relating to female perpetrators of serious forms of crime are interrogated, the history of single women who killed their illegitimate infants cannot be understood through official numbers alone. The author undertakes a detailed case-bycase analysis of the records of over three hundred infanticide cases tried in Ireland, both North and South, during the first half of the twentieth century.
Ó hÓgartaigh, Margaret Quiet Revolutionaries: Irish Women in Education, Medicine and Sport, 1861-1964 (The History Press, 2011)
Lane, Leeann Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular (UCD Press 2010)
Born in Waterford in 1888 Rosamond Jacob, of Quaker background, was in many cases a crowd member rather than a leader in the campaigns in which she participated - the turn of the century language revival, the suffrage campaign, the campaigns of the revolutionary period. She adopted an anti-Treaty stance in the 1920s, moving towards a fringe involvement in the activities of socialist republicanism in the early 1930s while continuing to vote Fianna Fail. Her commitment to feminist concerns was life long but at no point did she take or was capable of a leadership role. However, it was Jacob's failure to carve out a strong place in history as an activist which makes her interesting as a subject for biography. Her 'ordinariness' offers an alternative lens on the biographical project. By failing to marry, by her inability to find meaningful paid work, by her countless refusals from publishers, by the limited sales of what work was published, Jacob offers a key into lives more ordinary within the urban middle classes of her time, and suggests a new perspective on female lives. Jacob's life, galvanised at all times by political and feminist debate, offers a means of exploring how the central issues which shaped Irish politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century were experienced and digested by those outside the leadership cadre.
McIntosh, Gillian & Urquhart, Diane Irish Women at War: The Twentieth Century (Dublin 2010)
This book is the first to assess the impact of conflict on women in 20th-Century Ireland, and how women responded to and influenced these conflicts themselves. Their roles ranged from combatants, pioneers and workers, victims and survivors, prisoners, poets, playwrights, and artists. Irish women have played their part in many spheres during two World Wars and three national conflicts in the 20th Century. Drawing on original research from a range of international scholars, and covering the span of the century, the book considers women and war through a myriad of themes - militarism, morality, political activism, and motherhood - and through the lens of a variety of sources, from memoirs to political propaganda, artistic output to activism on the streets. Whatever their socio-economic or political background, a common thread of engagement links Irish women in wartime as they challenged and changed societies subsumed by hostilities.
Leeney, Cathy Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939; Gender and Violence on Stage (New York, 2010)
Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is the first book to examine the plays of five fascinating and creative women, placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day. How these playwrights dramatize violence and its impacts in political, social, and personal life is a central concern of this book. Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Manning, and Teresa Deevy re-model theatrical form, re-structuring action and narrative, and exploring closure as a way of disrupting audience expectation. Their plays create stage spaces and images that expose relationships of power and authority, and invite the audience to see the performance not as illusion, but as framed by the conventions and limits of theatrical representation
Marie-Louise Coolahan Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford, 2010)
This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years 1574 and 1676. This was a tumultuous period of political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power struggles of early modern Ireland. This study brings to light the ways in which women contributed; they strove to be heard and to make sense of their situations, forging space for their voices in complex ways and engaging with native and new language-traditions. The book investigates the genres in which women wrote: poetry, nuns' writing, petition-letters, depositions, biography and autobiography. It argues for a complex understanding of authorial agency that centres of the act of creating or composing a text, which does not necessarily equate with the physical act of writing. The Irish, English, and European contexts for women's production of texts are identified and assessed. The literary traditions and languages of the different communities living on the island are juxtaposed in order to show how identities were shaped and defined in relation to each other.
Harford, Judith & Rush, Claire Have women made a difference?: women in Irish universities, 1850-2010 (New York, 2010)
Emanating from a conference celebrating one hundred years of women in university education in Ireland ('Women in Higher Education: Have Women Made a Difference?', 2007), this collection brings together papers from leading scholars in the fields of education, history, literature, nursing, social policy and women's studies. Tracing the evolution of women's role in university education from the nineteenth century to the present day, the book captures the complexity of women's position within the academy and poses the critical question: 'Have women made a difference?'
