Mná na hÉireann PART 2

Survival & Celebration

In 19th Century Irish Art&

Poetry & Song

An 11th Century view of place and condition of a woman in IRELAND.

By anonymous Irish poet.

Mé Éba ben Ádaim uill

I am Eve, great Adam's wife….>

EVE'S LAMENTMé Éba ben Ádaim uill; (Anonymous. Irish poet - 11th century)

I am Eve, great Adam's wife, 'Tis I that outraged Jesus of

old; 'Tis I that stole Heaven from

my children; by rights 'tis I that should

have gone upon the Tree.  I had a kingly house at my

command; Grievous the evil choice that

disgraced me;Grievous the chastisement of

crime that has withered me! Alas! my hand is not clean.

Lucas Cranach (Northern Renaissance Painter) 1472-

1553

'Tis I that plucked the apple;

it overcame the control of my greed;

for that, women will not cease from folly

as long as they live in the light of day.

 

There would be no ice in any place; There would be no glistening windy winter; There would be no hell, there would be no sorrow, There would be no fear, were it not for me. [Anonymous. Irish poet -11th century]

Downfall of Adam & Eve -Michelangelo-Sistine Chapel-1509

Women lose rights under Elizabeth I

The conquests and plantations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transformed the political, social and economic structure of Irish society. From the time of conquest by Elizabeth I until the great famine of the 1840s, there are three statements to be made about the role of women in Irish society:

1. Women were totally without formal political rights.

2. Their property and inheritance rights both within and c. 1600 outside of marriage were now governed by English common law—not the Gaelic Irish law. Property was in hands of the husband and the men. Women lost inheritance rights enjoyed under Gaelic law and practice.

3. The role of women was a subject and subsidiary role to the male, and it was performed largely within a domestic context: primary role was as wives and mothers.

Molly Macree 1860

The common image of idealized woman is represented in this poem by Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (Co Kerry d. 1762).

 “She will be weak, depressed and lifeless

until her deliverer returns.”

Irish woman is passive, dulcet, golden-haired S p é i r b h e a n (a heavenly woman or a comely maiden; pronounced ‘spare van’.

Thomas Alfred Jones, National Gallery of Ireland

‘Women and the Law in Ireland’ Mary Robinson [President 1990-1997]

in Women’s Studies International Forum 1988

“At beginning of 19th century, when Britain and Ireland were joined - Act of Union [1800]:

Women had virtually no rights at all

Chattels of their fathers and subsequently of their husbands

Could not vote-not sign contracts - if married, could not own property

No rights over their childrenNo control over their own

bodiesHusbands could rape and beat

them without any interference from the law.” - M. Robinson

In 1985 Ireland ratified UN convention For Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [an international Bill of Rights for Women] Ireland had to implement a series of European Community directives ensuring equality in work force & in social welfare. 170 nations ratified treaty; United States signed it Sept. 1980 but has not ratified the treaty nor has Afghanistan and Sao Tome & Principe (Africa). 

‘Ach, if only they'd stayed so nice und backwards.’

- Women in County Galway, - 1955 Der Spiegel

FESTIVALS AND FAIRS

Bidh Crínna – BE WISE Irish Proverbs – Sage advice for husbands in the Middle

Ages

1. Neither praise nor dispraise your wife before strangers.

2. Reprove your wife as you would your son or your friend.

3. Do not give your wife authority over you, for if you let her stamp on your foot to-night she will stamp on your head tomorrow.

4. Be wary of the food which a jealous woman offers you.

IRISH couple – Middle Ages

By Nathaniel Grogan 1800

Cork butchers celebrated coming of Easter with Mock funeral of a herring – last day of Lent-symbolized abstinence. On reaching River Lee, remnants of the herring were flung into river. Then a quarter lamb is tied to a lath—in a street parade with musicians, revelers & mischief makers.

Whipping the Herring out of Town – scene of Cork, 1800

Snap-Apple Night 1833 (Halloween in Blarney) Daniel Maclise

Snap-Apple Night, painted by Irish artist Daniel Maclise in 1833.

It was inspired by a Halloween party Maclise attended in Blarney, Ireland, in 1832.

There Peggy was dancing with DanWhile Maureen the lead was melting,To prove how their fortunes ranWith the Cards could Nancy dealt in;There was Kate, and her sweet-heart Will,In nuts their true-love burning,And poor Norah, though smiling stillShe'd missed the snap-apple turning.

Snap-Apple Night 1833 (Halloween in Blarney) Daniel Maclise

WORKING LIFE

IRISH Women at WorkEarly Irish Culture

Noblewomen, while denied full legal capacity, had limited rights of contract, inheritance, and alienation of land. If divorced, women retained their own property. Lower class women had few or no rights of equality.

In later centuries (17th century) women in middle and upper classes were more involved in public and philanthropic works: founded hospitals, schools, institutions for poor, ‘ladies’ associations for ministering relief and raising charity funds.

The life-cycle of women outside the upper classes consisted of living in mud cabins; basic domestic chores remained the principal occupation of women along with weaving [cottage industries] and assisting husbands’ work.

Employment of household servants in the Big Houses of the Irish countryside increased in the 17th century.

Aran Islands – At Work

IRISH WOMEN AT WORK 14th Century

Account Roll of the Priory of the Holy Trinity, Dublin

Records show women:

Earning wages as a housemaid and a washerwoman

Baking bread and brewing beer on a commercial scale

Working with the reapers at harvest-time binding sheaves

Helping on a building site carrying water to mix mud

Drawing straw for thatchers.

Weaving, An Spideal, Galway, 31 May 1913

Not unlike women in Medieval Ireland

Connemara woman spinning

Another lady stands at the cottage door knitting and in the foreground are some hens and a wash tub.

Photo in the Library of Congress.

Irish Cabin Interior 1840sFrederick Goodall

Cabin almost completely lacks furniture or furnishings--but despite the stoney poverty, artist incorporates romance with young woman, who is knitting as her young music suitor looks on. Woman chaperone by hearth.

The artist explains how he persuaded people “to sit constantly (for his paintings)– – and they seemed pleased to do so. This I managed with help of a shilling and the persuasive tongue of the worthy old woman who was our cook at our lodging.”

“Taken on the spot in the County of Downe, Representing Spinning, Reeling with the Clock reel, and Boiling the Yarn’. One of a set of twelve engravings by Irish artist

William Hincks - 1782

“A rare artifact: these engravings acknowledged the work of women.”--Fintan O’Toole, IRISH TIMES

The work was hard, but the relative prosperity of the cottage depicted in the engraving hints at the enormous impact the linen trade had on Irish standards of living in the eighteenth century.

Irish people had been growing flax and making linen since the Bronze Age. With Ireland largely colonized by British in the early-eighteenth century, the authorities promoted the development of linen as the primary Irish industry.

FLAX TO FABRIC: Woman’s labor critical to survival in Ireland.

The grasping landlord never minded waiting a month or two for the rent from his Irish tenants:

“Until the cow is sold at the fair, or the piece that's in the loom”

--Satire by Riocard Bairéad, a famous poet from Belmullet, Co Mayo, d. 1819

Increasingly as the eighteenth century wore on the manufacture of cloth or

embroidery was for sale, and its returns were necessary to meet inflated rent

demands of the landlords. The entire family was involved in the process. Women spun

the flax into yarn

18th-century cottage scene in Ulster’s domestic linen

industry before industrialisation.- Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum,

Northern Ireland

A Spinning Lesson, 1874George Washington Brownlow

Young girl being taught by her mother to do the laborious job of spinning wool with primitive type of big wheel, typical of the west.

Artist was concerned with child labour—he highlights extreme poverty and starvation during recurrent periods of crop failure after the Famine. “In all farmhouses the dresser was covered…with

noggins, and with pails, all wood hooped, and kept as white as snow – while tubs and casks … were in abundance.” -- An 1877 Writer.

Interior, with Woman Spinning – study from nature, south of Ireland, near Inchigeela, Co Cork 1876. James

Brenan

The artist informs viewer: such work is so poorly paid that the woman is in lonely isolation with nothing to show for it in the way of possessions.

‘It was skillful work because only one hand does all the joining and teasing—and exhausting because it required so much striding to and from (a ‘walking wheel’), up to 30 miles in a week’s spinning.’

Committee of Inspection (weaving, County Cork) 1877 – James Brenan

Buyers from a city department store inspect a piece of homespun cloth.

Gloomy expressions on face of women tell story: hand-woven cloth produced on cottage loom could not compete with cheap English factory cottons being imported into Ireland in great quantities.