A 'Manly Study'? Irish women historians as public intellectuals, 1868--1949

My doctoral thesis, entitled A 'Manly Study?' Irish Women Historians as Public Intellectuals, 1868--1949, explores the lives, scholarship, and political and social activism of more than twenty female historians, and addresses debates about modern Irish historiography and women's history. A social history of historiography, my thesis examines what the history of the Irish historical profession looks like when women are placed at the center of the narrative. The Irish women historians are also contextualized within new scholarship on women historians.;The careers of these women complicate aspects of the paradigm of Western women historians outlined by Bonnie Smith in The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998). Smith argues that between 1800 and 1940, female historians tended to write popular women's, social, and cultural history, while men wrote "high" political history that legitimized the state, thereby gaining greater access to political power. Smith connects the rise of the modern historical profession, and the gendering of the profession as male, with the consolidation and expansion of Western nation-states (such as the United States, Britain and France) in the 19 th and 20th centuries. I demonstrate that Irish female historians could gain access to political power through both political activism and the writing of political and politicized history. For example, Alice Stopford Green and Helena Concannon became senators, Dorothy Macardle and Rosamond Jacob helped establish Fianna Fail, and Mary Hayden was one of Ireland's leading feminists. By embracing the roles of public intellectuals, they differentiated themselves from women historians in other Western countries during the period under consideration.;In conclusion, I argue that while the official contours of the discipline of Irish history were largely shaped by university-based male historians, these men did not write history in a vacuum. They had to grapple with "history from below," sometimes written by women. Popular women historians played an important if indirect role in shaping modern Irish historiography, because they raised a discordant voice with which male professional historians were compelled to engage.