A press of their own: Irishwomen and modern print culture 1896--1920

My project joins in the critical drive to tease out the implications of feminism's relationship to Irish nationalism and to flesh out the potential for both as joint liberation ideologies twinned since the Enlightenment. I examine three monthly journals produced by women during the anticolonial movement in an attempt to join the question of sex with the question of the nation. My research concludes that women were not static objects of male nationalists, but were active contributors; producing counter-nationalisms that frequently contested dominant ideas about nation, gender, and civic life. The first chapter examines the historic relationship between nationalism and feminism. The second chapter, "The Sentiment of Sovereignty in the Shan Van Vocht 1896-1899," argues that Shan fused affect and intellect to formulate cultural nationalism grounded in prototypical feminist politics. The third chapter, "'Guns and Chiffon:' The Style of Feminist Republicanism in Bean na h'Eireann 1908-1911," recognizes the pattern between women's individual style alongside their commitment to revolutionary politics. Writers in Bean counseled women to reject colonial fashion as well as a nationalist costume in favor of modern style, creating a radical chic. The fourth chapter, "The Sober Citizen: Feminist Temperance in the Irish Citizen 1916-1920," examines women's contribution to the temperance movement by emphasizing that men's traditional drinking practices inside the rounds custom was as great a threat to the life of the nation as was British colonialism. Women argued that the national house deserved priority over the public house. The conclusion, "Women Writing into and out of Irish Nationalism 1896-1920," considers the work of feminist activists in the anticolonial movement such as Alice Milligan, Helena Molony, Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Louie Bennett alongside Irish women at the end of the twentieth century, such as Eavan Boland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Marina Carr who further questioned the male-dominant nationalist tradition.