The Role of Irish Women in the Easter Rising
The Cumann na mBan and the Fight for Irish Independence
In the early 1900s, Irish nationalists and suffragettes had different goals. The suffragettes wanted the vote, which women did not have in either Ireland or England. They felt the nationalists only gave lip service to women’s rights. Nationalists felt that women were self-serving in seeking the vote before Irish independence had been achieved. Suffragettes and nationalists were only united by the Easter Rising, the 1916 revolt that attempted to free Ireland from British rule while Britain was occupied fighting World War I.
Suffragettes and Nationalists
The unification of nationalists and suffragettes occurred with the 1913 formation of the Irish Volunteers and the 1914 founding of their auxiliary organization for women, the Cumann na mBan. In The Two Irelands, David Fitzpatrick shows how nationalists enlisted the aid of feminism by involving women in political and military organizations and promising suffrage. The Cumann na mBan was formed six months after the Volunteers to assist the men by serving as nurses, messengers, or other ancillary duties that would keep them out of combat.
At first, radical suffragettes distrusted the republican organization. The Irish Citizen, a radical suffragette newspaper, called the Cumann na mBan "slave women" for supporting the revolutionaries without a guarantee of suffrage. But most early members were wives, girlfriends or sisters of male nationalists whose interest in the success of the Rising was due to their family ties to it. They had less interest in agitating for the vote than did the editors of the Irish Citizen. Eventually, some of the more radical women joined the Cumann na mBan, largely blunting suffragette criticism. The best known of the radical suffragettes to join was Countess Constance Markievicz, an Irish agitator who married a Polish Count, accounting for her exotic name.
The Rising
Patrick Pearse, leader of the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner to the Irish Republican Army), seemed to offer women the opportunity they wanted. When he read his Proclamation announcing the formation of the Irish Republic, he clearly gave full equality to all Irish women. There were two problems. First, Pearse’s Irish Republic didn’t last a week. British troops armed with heavy artillery crushed his Easter Rising bloodily. Second, as Margaret Ward shows in Unmanageable Revolutionaries, not all of Pearse’s commanders followed his edict.
Ward finds that individual IRB officers either did not understand the substance of Pearse’s Proclamation or chose not to follow it. Eamon De Valera, later President of Ireland, was the most extreme, flatly refusing to have any of the Cumann na mBan working with his troops in any capacity. Women under James Connolly's command had the opposite experience. Connolly, an egalitarian socialist, had been arming females for several years and he readily armed the women of the Cumann na mBan who were assigned to him. Some of the more daring women, including Countess Markievicz, engaged in combat with British troops.
After the failure of the Rising, Markievicz was one of seventy women taken prisoner, although she was the only one tried. She was found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad. Her sentence was commuted, but from her cell she could hear the executions of Pearse and many of his lieutenants. The British released her after thirteen months, and Markievicz resumed her fight for Irish independence and women's suffrage.
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