Nations and Nationalism 6 (4), 2000, 541-61.

0ASEN 2000

Janus and gender: women and the

nation’s backward look
TRICIA CUSACK
School of Professional and Continuing Education, The University of
Birmingham, Selly Oak campus, Birmingham B29 6LL

ABSTRACT. This article considers how nations are imagined and characterised in
relation to the national roles allocated to women, with particular reference to the early
Irish state. It examines two related dichotomies, that between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’
nationalisms, and the concept of the nation itself as ‘Janus-faced’, simultaneously
looking ahead to the future and back to the past. It has been suggested that women
bore the burden of the nation’s ‘backward look’ towards a putative traditional rural
past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nation’s present and
future. This thesis is examined with reference to Ireland and the representation of
women in visual imagery and travel writing.

‘All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationa-

lism’s ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have
historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalisation of gender
dgference’ (McClintock 1993: 61). This article considers how nations are
imagined and characterised in relation to the national roles allocated to
women, with particular reference to the early Irish state, following indepen-
dence in 1922. The article examines two related dichotomies, that between
‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms, and the concept of the nation itself as
‘Janus-faced’, simultaneously looking ahead to the future and back to the
past. It considers how women’s national role as a mother-figure effectively
cuts across the first dichotomy, and how it is figured in the second. It has
been suggested that women have borne the burden of the nation’s ‘backward
look’ towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community,
while men appropriated the nation’s present and future. This thesis is
examined with reference to Ireland and the representation of women in visual
imagery and travel writing. The first two sections discuss ethnic and civic
nationalisms in relation to the nation’s ‘Janus-face’. The following two
consider how women’s national role was depicted, and defined, in Ireland.

Civic and ethnic nationalisms and gender

The origins and character of nations and nation-states have been debated by
Ernest Gellner, Anthony Smith and others. Gellner suggested that modern
542 Tricia Cusack

urban-industrial development was a precondition of state-formation, while

Smith has emphasised the need for a sense of shared ethnicity and past
history in the formation of nations (Gellner 1983; Smith 1991). Nations and
nationalisms have been commonly characterised as either ‘ethnic’ or ‘civic’
that is, based upon shared cultural traditions and a common inheritance
from the past, and backward-looking, on the one hand, or on the other,
associated with a given territory, depending upon universalist political rights
accorded within that territory, and forward-looking. Indeed, the nation has
been described as ‘Janus-faced’ (Nairn 1997: 67, 71-2)’ forging a modern
aspect for itself, yet simultaneously looking back to a putative historical
identity to justify the collectivity. A claimed ‘ethnic past’ also enables the
nation to define itself against ‘others’. Although ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’
nationalisms are understood to be ideal types, one or the other type is
expected to predominate in particular cases (Brown 1999: 282). Alternative
terms strategically employed include civic and ‘cultural’ nationalism,
proposed by David Brown, for example, in order to de-emphasise the
‘biological’ connotations that have been attached to the term ‘ethnic’ (1 999:
282). ‘Ethno-cultural’. is similarly employed in place of ‘ethnic’ by Hugh
Kearney (1997: 1-22). The terms ‘political’ and ‘cultural’ nationalisms are
preferred by John Hutchinson, the former, like ‘civic’ nationalism, based on
equal participation in the polity, and the latter referring to cultural
distinctiveness measured by religion, gender or other factors (Hutchinson
and Smith 1994: 122).
A further distinction drawn between civic and ethnic nationalism is that
whereas membership of the civic nation is achieved through political
processes of assimilation, ethnic nations are conceived as having a ‘prior
existence’ and membership is unconditional and exclusive:
Ethnic nations are perceived as social groups that exist prior to and independently
from particular states, while the definition of civic nations emphasises the crucial role
of political institutions in forming a nation . . . in the language of ethnic nationalists,
nations assume the imagery of quasi-organic communities, offering individuals a
sense of unconditional belonging akin to that characteristic of pre-industrial local
communities. (Nieguth 1999: 157-8)

However, civic nationalism must always be embedded in a particular

culture, so that ‘What distinguishes “civic” nations from “ethnic” nations is
not the absence of any cultural component to national identity, but rather
the fact that anyone can integrate into the common culture, regardless of
race or colour’ (Kymlicka (1995) in Nieguth 1999: 161).
Not surprisingly, like many dichotomies, this one acquired normative
power, with Eastern, or colonial nationalisms defined as ethnic, regressive
and illiberal and ‘civilised’ Western nations being categorised as civic,
universalist and liberal.* Recent criticism has undermined such associations
between civic and liberal, and cultural (or ethnic) and illiberal states,
suggesting instead that illiberalism has more to do with whether the state
Janus and gender 543

and its people feel threatened or insecure (Brown 1999: 290, 300). Moreover,
ethno-cultural nationalisms are pervasive and widespread, even at the heart
of Western nations that consider themselves to be established liberal
democracies, like Britain - or England - and France (Kearney 1997; Sluga
1998). Brown has also questioned the ‘purity’ of the ethnickivic dichotomy
by pointing out, for instance, that both civic and cultural nationalism look
to a past and to a future. Thus civic nationalism may emphasise the nation’s
institutional past (1999: 283) while the ethnic nation may look ahead to its
destiny.
There have been recent attempts to bypass the ethnic/civic divide
altogether. Thus Tim Nieguth has found the terms too amorphous and
proposed extracting and substituting four ‘irreducible’ ‘organising principles’
of states: territory, race, culture and ancestry (1999: 161; 169). The ‘cultural’
nation is differentiated from the ‘ancestral’ one in that: ‘The primary
concern of the cultural nation is to preserve its cultural integrity - a feature
that sets it apart from . .. ancestral nationalism’ (Nieguth 1999: 165-6).
If such critiques do useful work towards unpacking the nationalist
project, especially in so far as the cultural neutrality of nations styled ‘civic’
is questioned, they tend to remain ‘gender-blind’, or else simply enumerate
gender as one cultural aspect among others, failing to recognise the
centrality of gender to definitions of the nation. In this sense, both civic and
ethnic nationalisms are misrepresentational. As Glenda Sluga observes:
‘Gender transgresses and problematises the historical and geographical
divides that mainstream theorists of nationalism have used to distinguish
between political and cultural nationalism’ (1998: 88).
Thus ‘ethnic’ or ‘ethno-cultural’ nationalism has invariably invoked a
traditional and ‘natural’ domestic role for women. Women in particular
tend to be perceived in ethnic nationalist ideology as having an existence
‘prior to’ the particular state, as the mothers of the tribe. Subsequently,
women are defined through their familial role as retaining the traces of the
putatively historical, quasi-organic community within the modern state. The
burden of national ‘parenthood’ is carried by women, although the head of
the ‘family’ is generally male.
‘Civic’ nationalism has also been conceived and practised in gendered,
not universalist, terms in so far as political activity has been represented as
a masculine prerogative, and the modern model of the civic nation, since the
late eighteenth century, has taken men as the norm for the making of
citizens. Sluga has shown how the ‘political’ (or civic) nation has a history
of excluding women from citizen rights, for example, in post-revolutionary
and nineteenth-century France. Meanwhile, the family and women’s
nurturing role have been pronounced fundamental to the state (Sluga 1998:
93, 96). Sluga argues that men have based their authority on heading the
family, which in turn has been portrayed as a microcosm of the social order:
women’s ‘disorderliness’ has been represented as a threat to the nation,
including their participation in the public sphere (1998: 89-94, 98). The
544 Tricia Cusack

same pattern of gender characterisations, with women being relegated to the

private sphere, occurred in England, and as we shall see in Ireland too, in
the nineteenth and through into the twentieth century.
Michael Billig has introduced the concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to
account for the myriad of inconspicuous signs and systems that sustain
nationalism under ordinary peace-time conditions. These include the ‘deixis’
of small words like ‘we’ or ‘us’ in newspapers that implicitly refer to
members of the same nation, and: ‘We, the readers, readily accept the deixis
of homeland, and the apartheid of news into “home’’ and “foreign”’ (Billig
1995: 126). Some of these signs might fall under the ‘civic’ rubric, while
others can be classified as ‘ethnic’ (for instance, ‘we’ as voters; ‘we’ as
English).
Billig notes particular contexts - such as the sports sections of news-
papers - where the reader is incribed as masculine (1995: 119). However, he
explains that women generally have to be included in the deixis, since:
‘women are to prepare themselves to sacrifice their sons and husbands ...
wars could not be fought without . . . women as patriotic mothers and carers
. . . answering the call to love the masculine warriors’ (1995: 126). For Billig,
then, both male and female readers are addressed as members of the
homeland: ‘The daily deixis of the homeland crosses the divides of gender’
(1995: 126).
The very terms in which Billig understands women’s national role - those
of support and sacrifice at one remove - place women in a derivative role in
relation to the state’s undertakings. The question can therefore be raised
whether the ‘banal nationalism’ so often flagged to the nation through such
terms as ‘we’ does function so universally for women as it does for men.
Women are not necessarily part of the ‘fictive audience’ for general news
reports. It is interesting that one of the few sites where women readers
exclusively are inscribed, women’s magazines, employ an intimate style of
address (Winship 1987) that takes on the air of the confession rather than
the public statement.
Cynthia Enloe has pointed out that nationalisms have ‘typically sprung
from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized
hope’ (Enloe (1984) in McClintock 1993: 62). While men claim to engage in
the rational ordering and modernisation of the present and future state,
they themselves have effectively operated from an ethno-cultural base of
shared understandings about the nation and women’s relation to it. That is,
masculine hegemony in the modern state has frequently been maintained by
social networks based on male bonding. While women are thus given a
special symbolic status in relation to the nation, they are distanced from
active membership of the polity: consequently they are constructed as
‘other’ to men in the nation: ‘they are often excluded from the collective
“we” of the body politic, and retain an object rather than a subject position
... In this sense the construction of womanhood has a property of
“otherness”’ (Yuval-Davis 1997: 47). It might even follow from this that
Janus and gender 545

ethno-cultural nationalisms are generated by masculine interests, whilst civic

nationalism more often provides the routes by which women try to reclaim
a basis of national e q ~ a l i t y . ~

Women and the nation’s ‘backward look’

Etienne Balibar has emphasised the nation-state’s inclination to construct

itself as a familial or ‘racial’ ~ommunity,~ based on national kinship, and
encouraging ‘endogamy’ among its citizens, but he also pointed to the
state’s multiple interventions in and penetration of social and family life.
The nation inserts itself into every aspect of social and family life, covering
this intrusion with the ideology of caring and protection. Family and
kinship relations are codified and appropriated by the state, while the state,
representing itself as a large family, effects a ‘naturalisation of belonging’
(Balibar 1991: 96) among its members. The national form according to
Balibar is thus characterised by:
a nationalization of the family, which has as its counterpart the identification of the
national community with a symbolic kinship . . . and with a tendency not so much to
project itself into a sense of having common antecedents as a feeling of having
common descendants. (1991: 101-2)
Ethnic nationalism uses the metaphor of the family in this sense, namely the
family relation of parenthood and descendants. However, civic nationalism
also uses the metaphor of family and kinship, albeit in a somewhat different
sense: this is envisaged in terms of marriage and future relations. Thus:
both forms of nationalism employ, in their mythology and symbolism, the language
of the family. The family of civic nationalism is primarily the marriage family,
whereby entry into the family and its territorialhstitutional home from diverse
sources indicates commitment to a common loyalty and destiny; whereas the family
of cultural nationalism is primarily that of parenthood, with the commitment . ..
deriving from the belief in common ancestry. (Brown 1999: 283)
Therefore ‘The very language of nationalism singles women out as the
symbolic repository of group identity’ (Kandiyoti 1991: 434). The nation’s
identity is generally sought in particular historical claims and traditions that
focus on women’s role in relation to home and family. Women’s and men’s
relations to the modern nation thus have different trajectories: while women
are taken to represent the nation’s traditional face, men appropriate the
future. It is no accident that the metaphoric owner of the look, the Roman
god Janus, is masculine and that he controls the view in both directions. As
Anne McClintock puts it:
the temporal anomaly within nationalism . . . nostalgia for the past, and the . . .
sloughing off of the past - is typically resolved by figuring the contradiction as a
‘natural’ division of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic
546 Tricia Cusack

‘body’ of national tradition . . . Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of

national modernity . . . (1 993: 66)

Women, then, become historicist figures against the historical progression of

men. They are deflected from the transformation of their roles promised by
national citizenship by having to bear the burden of cultural tradition
(Kandiyoti 1991: 429, 433-5, 440-1). Carrying such a burden implies that
women had to be exemplars of virtue: ‘The “burden of representation” on
women of the collectivity’s identity and future destiny has also brought
about the construction of women as the bearers of the collectivity’s honour’
(Yuval-Davis 1997: 45).
Men in power ensured that unencumbered they could do the ‘public
business of the state’ (Valiulis 1995: 129). Women, on the other hand, were
encumbered by and indeed conflated with the institution of the family. Thus
‘[a] maternal image is a powerful one in the rhetoric of nationalism; it
allows a particular group to identify itself in terms of an organic unit: the
family’ (O’Brien 1996-7: 18). The backward look encompassed women as
mothers of the nation. In modern societies, the family is typically reified as
a special institution outside the mundane sphere of economics and politics,
and indeed, outside historical processes of change. Women are then
identified with the ‘apolitical’ institution of the family rather than with the
national polity. Indeed, women are sometimes located not so much in the
context of tradition and ‘history’ as in nature, as a natural origin for the
tribe. Women’s imagined begetting and nurturing of the race is founded in
their unconscious natural fecundity and animal-like being.
The role of women, then, is strongly identified with the nation’s
‘backward look’ to its putative origins and traditions, although sons, in
taking on this knowledge, use it to push the nation forward. Furthermore, if
women were the passive guardians of national traditions and morals, the
modern state located its masculine forebears in the past as fathers and
leaders of the nation and the fount of the nation’s native skills and genius,
its arts and its crafts: the patriot’s patrimony. Therefore, even on their own
imputed territory in the distant past, women were constructed as subject to
men and as non-participants in politics or the arts.

Women or citizens? The early Irish state

Margaret Ward points out that: ‘Some of the first acts of the [Irish] Free
State government were to pass legislation curtailing women’s rights as
citizens’ (1996-7: 14). Thus the first independent government, under
Cosgrave, debarred women from becoming top civil servants and moved to
exclude women from jury service (Valiulis 1995: 118, 120ff.). De Valera’s
government subsequently enacted restrictions on women working in
industry in order to ‘protect the interests of the male workers who . . . might
Janus and gender 547

have been swamped by lower paid women in the new industries’ (Gallagher
(1937) in Coogan 1993: 495). Irish government legislation in the. 1920s and
1930s was based on differential gender roles with women cast as mothers
and wives and placed in a ‘derivative’ relation to the state (Beaumont 1997:
174; Valiulis 1997: 161-2). Indeed, the Constitution of 1937 took married
women as the norm, although the norm for the majority of Irish women
was that they were single and still relatively independent. The infamous
Article 41, section 2 of the 1937 Constitution summed up the state’s view of
women’s, or woman’s contribution to the nation:
2.1 In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home [my emphasis],
woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be
achieved.
2.2 The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged
by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
[my emphasis] (Article 41 of the Constitution in Coogan 1993: 495)
Ward compares de Valera’s insistence on women’s home duties to Nazi
decrees (1995: 240). Ireland indeed was not alone in employment discrimina-
tion against women in the 1930s’ as public sector employment was restricted
for married women in Britain and the United States, as well as in Germany
(Daly 1997: 103; Valiulis 1997: 162-6; Klug 1989: 23).5
A number of factors contributed to employment discrimination in
Ireland. Following the Famine of the 1840s’ changes in agricultural
organisation and farming had reduced women’s field labour and increased
their economic dependency (Nash 1997: 115). Ward suggests that subse-
quently ‘Public space was rigidly separated on gender lines’ with women
being restricted to a domestic role (1996-7: 8- 10). The post-Famine
changes to the rural economy had encouraged a focus on prudent marriage
and sexual restraint, which generated fresh national images of chaste,
repentant and passive women. These were reinforced by a fashionable cult
of the Virgin Mary spreading across Europe in the nineteenth century.
Indeed, ‘Irishmen of the second half of the nineteenth century constantly
fused the Virgin and Hibernia. England was seen as a threat to pure,
Catholic Ireland . . .’ (Loftus 1990: 58). Loftus suggests that:
the need to maintain the political integrity of the new Irish state, and the moral
purity of Irish Catholicism in the face o f . . . cosmopolitan liberalism, encouraged the
persistence of the semi-religious, semi-political image of virginal Ireland current since
the nineteenth century. (1990: 66)
Carol Coulter has suggested that although prior to independence women
in Ireland had had relatively more opportunity for political activity than
women in other colonial countries, subsequently their activity was restricted
by a patriarchal state, following the colonial model (1993: 3). Albert Memmi
indeed noted the tendency of post-colonial nations to imitate the ways of the
coloniser (1990: 186-7, 197). Such imitation frequently took the form of men
assuming the coloniser’s role in regard to women, which returned to them a
548 Tricia Cusack

sense of power and control. Thus after years of colonial ‘emasculation’, there
was a shoring up of an Irish masculine identity and an emphasis on women’s
supportive domestic and nurturing role. (If this is particularly marked in
post-colonial nations, it seems to be typical of nationalisms.) In so far as
mothers were supposed to inculcate ‘traditional Irish culture’ in their sons,
this included the perpetuation of their own passivity.
Two icons dominated the imagining of the nation’s womanhood into the
twentieth century, the country personified as female and motherly, Mother
Ireland - more present in Ireland than the parallel figure of Britannia in
England - and the Virgin Mary, representing the paragon of feminine
virtue, and at the same time an idealised mother-figure. Marina Warner
points out that ‘The Virgin Mary has been formed and animated by
different people for different reasons, and is a truly popular creation . . .
[and] ... perceptions of the Madonna have shifted from emphasising her
ideal virginity to holding up her exemplary motherhood for emulation . . .’
(Warner 1990: xxii, 342-3). Mother Ireland has been a similarly protean
figure. Ireland has been variously represented by male nationalists as a
young woman in need of protection from violation and subsequently as a
mother, fertile and nurturing, the motherland.6 Thus Robert Lynd, a
member of Sinn Flin wrote: ‘The Nationalists who matter to Ireland are
those who serve Ireland, not because they have to, but because they see her
beauty and her desolation and feel towards her as children feel towards
their mother’ (Lynd (1912) in Cosgrove 1995: 98).
Warner observes that the Christian church deemed women equal before
God, yet subject to men ‘in the order of creation and society’ (1990: xxiv).
The Virgin Mary provided an ideal model for the feminine ideals
propagated by the state. Thus there was an increasing emphasis on sexual
regulation and women’s maternal role, reinforced by Catholicism, and a
male, celibate clergy prescribed the ‘traditional model of the moral Irish
woman’ (Dooley 1985: 53). According to Nash: ‘The cult of the Virgin Mary
. . . strengthened the construction of asexual, maternal and domestic
femininity upon which hypermasculinity and socio-economic and sexual
regulation depended’ (1997: 115). The initial period of the new Irish state
indeed was marked by Catholic triumphalism7 and de Valera’s political
rhetoric subsequently drew on Catholic as well as national values. Mean-
while, consistent with Balibar’s thesis, the state and the church controlled
crucial aspects of family conduct, like divorce and contraception. As Joan
Wallach Scott points out, laws placing restrictions on women’s public lives,
and their conduct made sense only as ‘part of an analysis of the construction
and consolidation of [masculine] power’ (Wallach Scott (1988) in Valiulis
1995: 136).
According to de Valera, the woman’s historical role was to bring up her
sons as good nationalists.’ De Valera’s speech in 1932 on the occasion of
the death of Margaret Pearse, mother of two of the rebels of the uprising in
1916 illustrates the mother’s ideal role and conduct:
Janus and gender 549

But for the fame of her sons the noble woman . . . would, perhaps, never have been
heard o f . . . Her modesty would have kept her out of the public eye. Yet it was from
her [Patrick and William] learnt that ardent love for Ireland and for Gaelic culture
and tradition that became [their] passion. It was from her that they inherited the
strength of soul that made them resolute . . . in the career they foresaw would end in
death ... This loving and tender woman resisted the promptings of her mother’s
heart; she did not . . , hold her sons back. She bade them go . . . she bore bravely the
sorrow of their death. (Irish Press (1932) in Valiulis 1995: 117)

As Valiulis observes, the speech invokes parallels with the Virgin Mary and
her acceptance of her son’s sacrifice: Catholic piety and patriotism are
fused. De Valera also approved Pearse’s intention to adhere to what are
subsequently identified as her sons’, not her own, beliefs. ‘De Valera’s ideal
woman was ... passive. She has no work of her own’ (Valiulis 1995:
117- 18).9
The long drawn-out process of national independence had eclipsed issues
of gender for male and female republicans alike (Ward 1995: 248, 262) but
in the nationalising process itself, gender had been spoken for anyway.
Nash suggests that a reverence for and marginalisation of women:
reinforced social and domestic sexual colonisation at the very moment it was
politically overthrown [and] the eventual ratification of women’s political, social and
economic subordination in the 1937 Constitution . . . defined their role as maternal
and femininity as essentially passive, private and domestic . . . (1997: 114-16)

Mary Daly suggests that few married women in Ireland worked in the
public arena in the 1930s,.so that the 1937 Constitution could be seen as
‘acknowledging the importance of women’s lives and work within the home,
giving status to many members of Irish society who were otherwise ignored’
(1995: 1 11- 12). However, women were perceived as becoming more
prominent in the workforce, and this development was viewed by Catholic
bishops as a moral threat to both family and state (Valiulis 1995: 122,
127-8, 136).
There was no mass opposition from women to the 1937 Constitution,
which was voted in by referendum (Beaumont 1997: 184). Yet women were
active in various groupings opposing the attempts of the state to restrict
their role to a domestic and non-public one: some of these were feminist
(Valiulis 1995: 124, 130), others non-feminist, but all wished to advance
women’s welfare (Beaumont 1997: 174-6, 181, 187-8). It is interesting that
women’s organisations tended to be inclusive in their membership. For
instance, the Irish Housewives Association encompassed all women working
at home, whatever their class or religious affiliation. Their association
together as women was for purposes of mutual support, education and
justice, a beneficent sisterhood, and they made use of a civic nationalist
model to define their position and rights as women. Men’s organisations
were often more exclusive, on ethno-cultural lines, and power-directed: Irish
nationalism itself was a ‘rigidly masculine tradition’ (Ward 1995: 248).
550 Tricia Cusack

The association of women with household duties, however, was pervasive

amongst women, even self-styled feminists, as well as men in the period of
the 1920s- 1950s. Popular books and magazines assumed that household
work was women’s responsibility (Clear 1997: 190). Feminists in Ireland did
not concern themselves about the fact that most married women did not
work in the public arena, but they did argue that single women’s careers
would suffer because they would be viewed as likely to resign if they
married (Beaumont 1997: 180). The Irish Housewives’ Association sup-
ported women’s political activism, but believed that women should have an
important domestic role, as well as equal political and civil rights, that is, a
dual engagement in private and public spheres that has been labelled
‘maternalist politics’ (Clear 1997: 200- 1). l o Thus Louie Bennett, a feminist,
trade unionist and opponent of de Valera’s constitutional edicts none the
less wrote in 1946 that:
Woman herself is still seeking her real place in the world, and . . . it is difficult to
foresee what part she will play in the revolutionized and mechanized world we are
entering upon. One line of hope lies in a new approach to the home and the domestic
sphere, and if the new generation accept homekeeping us a vocation [my emphasis]
and a social service I believe that they will blaze a trail towards a finer civilization
than we have yet known. (Clear 1997: 200)

It seems that Irish women could only go so far towards embracing a ‘civic’
nationalism that would enable them to claim full citizenship. Their familial
role, and its national importance, were deeply inscribed. The very organisa-
tions set up to support women’s interests may well have helped to
consolidate their subjective experience of difference.

Ireland, the peasant woman and the cottage

One of the famous modern projects of the Free State, the hydro-electric
scheme on the Shannon, completed in 1929, might be located in the
vanguard of the state’s future-oriented and masculine projects. Mark
Maguire has argued that the scheme demonstrated the state’s modernising
priorities, which effectively overrode those of the rural Gaelic nation:
‘Ardnacrusha emanated from somewhere in the space between nation and
state, and wove modernity into the archaic fabric of nationalist Ireland’
(Maguire 1998: 110). The fishermen whose old lifestyle was disrupted by the
scheme demonstrated against it to public acclaim. However, finally they
were subjected to a modernist assessment of their losses by the state and
categorised by historians and others in ways that ensured the priority of the
modernising project: ‘The outcome of the battle altered certain aspects of
[the] sense of nationality while reifying others’ (Maguire 1998: 1 17-19).
However, such an interpretation of the Shannon project underestimates
the role of ethnic/ethno-culturaI nationalism and its ideological under-
Janus and gender 551

pinning of the state. If the fishermen were to be displaced from contem-

porary life in the interests of modernisation, the traditional rural idyll could
be imaginatively retained, located in the nation’s past. De Valera’s famous
national broadcast of 1943 indeed envisaged Ireland as an ancient rural
idyll, a land of ‘frugal comfort ... bright with cosy homesteads . . . joyous
with ... the romping of sturdy children [and] the laughter of comely
maidens’ (Keogh 1994: 133-4); even the language was archaic.” Women,
whether political activists or peasants, are silent in Maguire’s story, but they
remained the focus of the ‘backward look’.
The traditional cottage represented the archetype of the authentic Irish
homestead and: ‘It was in this environment [the simple cottage] that the
Gael would be born and flourish ... The role of women as begetters and
preservers of the race was central to this vision’ (Bhreathnach-Lynch 1997:
29). Representations of the nation as a ‘homeland’ become so naturalised
that their part in constructing nationalist discourse tends to be overlooked.
The place of being of the national family, the motherland or homeland, is
significant in affective, as well as material, terms. Furthermore, given the
powerful metaphor of home, it is not surprising that the traditional Irish
cottage - like the English cottage - should so easily have become a symbol
for the nation. In Ireland - as in England - ‘The underlying theme of
“home” was also the quest for an organic community; small, self-sufficient
and sharply differentiated from the outside world’ (Davidoff, L‘Esperance
and Newby 1976: 152; 156). The Irish cottage landscape might be ‘read’ as a
sign of the national family, in Balibar’s sense, a familiar and distinctive
landscape wherein the member of the associated ‘racial community’’2 feels
‘at home’.
The organic c~mmunity,’~ with its thatched cottages and shawled
women, as revealed in the rural west, thus became the primary object of the
backward look, depicted in paintings such as Paul Henry’s A Connemara
Landrcape, n.d. (Figure 1) and popular postcards by John Hinde (Figure 2).
The cottage then could be seen as a sign for traditional, family-centred Irish
womanhood (Nash 1993: 47) and with the image of the shawled peasant
woman it became a marker of national identity. Representations of cottages
and women in peasant dress reinforced the ideological association between
women and ethno-cultural nationalism, and obscured the tribal bases of
patriarchal power.
The male peasant was important in nationalist ideology, celebrated by
nationalists as a powerful and creative historical agent. Thus in Is an Irish
Culture Possible? (1936) James Devane asserted that:
If there is one country . . . where one man [sic] symbolises nearly all national life and
nearly the whole content of the national struggle, that country is Ireland, and that
man is the Irish peasant . . . all art and all culture in a primitive society such as ours
arose from the people; from the great yeomen, from folk music and folklore, from
communities and craftsmen in contact with the peasant and the soil. (Kennedy 1994:
150)
552 Tricia Cusack

Figure 1. Paul Henry, A Connemara Landscape, n.d., oil. Courtesy of the National
Gallery of Ireland.

However, male peasants rarely feature in the cottage landscape, except as a

minor accent (as in John Luke’s The Road to the West, 1944). It is possible
that male labourers were perceived as threatening and as unsuitable subjects
for art. For example, in nineteenth-century France, reactions to Millet’s
figure of an exhausted field-worker, Man with a Hoe, taken by the public for
an escaped convict, indicate the popular recoil from realist paintings of male
labourers. In Ireland, the worker was also a potential subversive, alongside
5 54 Tricia Cusack

men in all sorts of civilian disguises who might carry a gun. Therefore
emphasis was thrown instead on the motherly figure near the cottage.
However, women, together with the cottages that stood in for them, had
special significance in such landscapes. Women in particular embodied the
nation’s ‘backward look’ and this look focused on a putative ‘organic
community’ which functioned naturally and harmoniously, based on
traditional hierarchies and established gender divisions. The figure of the
shawled woman represented a simple, homely lifestyle and was most often
an older woman, with associations of traditional culture and customary
wisdom. The cottage and the shawled woman together, ironically, were
potent signs of the new Ireland.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the shawl was still common, especially in rural
areas. The plaid shawl returned to a Gaelic identity shared with the Scottish
Gaels. It also referred to the Irish Jacobite or Stuart sympathies of the
eighteenth century, later rewritten as a strategic manifestation of anti-
Englishness. Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass have discussed the Irish
mantle (a kind of cloak) as representing a refusal to conform to English
norms of dress and order; furthermore, ‘Irishwomen wearing the mantle
[were] widely invoked as figures of disorder . . . Spenser typifies the view that
the Irishwoman hides her illegitimate pregnancies under her woollen
cloak .. .’ (1992: 166). For the English colonisers, and later travel writers,
the image of the shawled woman could similarly signal an ‘otherness’ like
that of the ‘orientalist’ woman. Indeed, the shawl recalled the eastern
costume of the Virgin, as depicted in numerous paintings and altarpieces.
Mother Ireland was personified as a shawled woman, and nationalists
celebrated traditional costume, anticipating its return across Ireland.
Thus male nationalists like Robert Lynd, and Michael Collins, prominent
in the Free State government, eulogised the colourful pageantry of the
peasant women of Achill, dressed in their homespun petticoats. Collins
envisaged the women of Ireland once again absorbed in homecrafts like
spinning and weaving (Bhreathnach-Lynch 1997: 29). In The Path to
Freedom (1922) Collins asserted:
To-day it is only in those places [the west] that any native beauty and grace in Irish
life survive [one sees] processions of young women . . . dressed in their shawls and in
their brilliantly-colouredskirts made of material spun, woven and dyed by themselves
. . . as it has been .. . for a thousand years . . . It is only in such places that one gets a
glimpse of what Ireland may become again. (Bhreathnach-Lynch 1997: 29)

As Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch comments, ‘Collins’s myopic vision failed

to recognise that the vast majority of Irish women would not have known
how to dye, spin or weave, let alone wish to do so’ (1997: 29). Collins
admired peasant women for their pageantry; their dress is not docile but
flamboyant. While Irish dress had a history of colonial suppression (Jones
and Stallybrass 1992: 157) Collins firmly places the women in the domain of
the distant past, and as representing the continuity of domestic craft
Janus and gender 555

Figure 3. Maurice MacGonigal, Mother and Child, 1942, oil. Reproduced by kind
permission of Ciaran MacGonigal and Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.

traditions. The revolutionary symbolism of peasant dress was neutralised in

its new folkloric setting.
Paintings of peasant women and cottages in the 1930s by Maurice
MacGonigal were consciously nationalist (Crofts 1997: 135). MacGonigal
was ‘one of the most important artists of the Irish Free State’ (1997: 139)
556 Tricia Cusack

and his pictures, like Henry’s, illustrated the first Free State Handbook. He
employed an academic figurative style associated with the National College
of Art, Dublin, where he and Sean Keating dominated the organisation and
teaching. MacGonigal’s panel paintings in the early years of the Free State
for Runnymeade House, Dublin represented life on the Aran islands in the
authentic west. Aran Folk with Donkeys gathering Turf c. 1926-7 is
dominated by stoical shawled women, looking past the viewer’s gaze and
therefore separated and aloof from it; only the donkey, at the centre of the
scene, meets the viewer’s eye. The realist style heroicises the ‘Aran folk’ as
the authentic working people of Ireland, depicting the women as serious,
industrious and long-suffering. MacGonigal’s Waiting for the Boats: Fish-
ermen’s Wives c. 1938-42 focuses upon three loyal wives in peasant dress
waiting, and praying, for their husbands’ return.
MacGonigal’s Mother and Child (1942: Figure 3) shows a seated woman
in the foreground of an Irish cottage landscape. Large-scale and dominating
the viewer, she wears the Irish dress of shawls and a crimson skirt and has
a baby on her knee. There are inescapable parallels with the figure of
Mother Ireland and, especially because of artistic precedents, with the
Virgin Mary and Child. The woman thus represents a national figure of
maternal piety.
As in other Western nations, the burden of moral purity fell on women.
Nationalist ideology required that ‘Irishness’ should be seen as morally
superior to Englishness or Britishness. This was especially important given
the long years of colonial denigration of the Irish as morally irresponsible,
childlike or even bestial. As masculine status in Victorian England had been
measured by wifely virtue (that is, a man’s status as head of the household
depended on his wife’s moral standing) so the status of the Irish Free State
was to be measured by the domestic virtues of its women (Valiulis 1995:
128).14 Ruskin’s ‘Angel in the Home’ continued to be a model for the Free
State government.
In practice, women were treated as childlike and irresponsible, so needing
the guidance and control of men.ls ‘The ideal Irish citizen was responsible,
in control . . . and, of course, male’ (Valiulis 1995: 124). Thus a colonial
primitivist view of the Irish as an underdeveloped race was displaced onto
Irish peasant women, who were depicted as innocent creatures of nature.
H. V. Morton’s popular travel narrative of Ireland describes the remoteness
of savage Western tribes, counter-balancing this with a depiction of young
peasant women as having an immediate and animal-like presence. He
focuses on the women, watching them as they laboured out in the fields or
on the seashoreI6 and he likens them to savages and a variety of beasts,
such as goats, deer and antelopes. For instance, observing a young woman
in Connemara, Morton marvelled:

Here, within 24 hours of London, was a primitive woman . . . the traditions of her
tribe . . . go back to remote ages . . . [he] longed to be able to paint her or to cut her
Janus and gender 557

in marble as she stood, strong and poised above the sea, her feet gripping the
slippery rock, her toes curved and muscular, like the toes of a savage. (1934: 186-7)
Morton depicts women leaping over the rocks in displays of wild and
unthinking agility: ‘a big, dark girl sprang over a stone wall and walked
over the sharp rocks in her bare feet with a basket of earth on her back.
This she poured on the cleared rock . . . and . . . leapt over the wall again
like a deer’ (1934: 175). The girl then steps away ‘like a goat’ over the rocks.
Morton displays the modern artist’s fascination with women as the animal
and the exotic-primitive which are here conflated. He had to admit that
‘such girls do enter the modem world’ as emigrants to America; one might
add, as if from a time-machine.
Morton’s encounters subtly sexualise Irish women, with metaphorical
innuendoes, and many references to their bare legs and scarlet (not ‘red’)
dress:
The white road twists like a snake between the grey walls, and over it walk strong,
barelegged girls, wearing scarlet skirts and Titian-blue aprons. They swing from the
hips as they walk with the grace of those who have never known shoe leather . . .
(1934 172)
There is a hint of Eve, as well as Eden, here and, again, a wilful
misrepresentation of the girls whom he knows migrate abroad to work and
whom he has observed wearing fashionable stockings, as well as shoe
leather.17 For instance, he noted the strange but typical spectacle that: ‘From
a primitive thatched house came a smart young girl in a fashionable felt hat,
blue tailor-made costume, and flesh-coloured silk stockings’(1934: 168).
Titian’s colour is complemented by the muted Dutch domestic interior.
Thus, in the Claddagh (a western village): ‘Beyond every little open door
you see, sharp as an interior by Peter de Hooch, a woman bent above some
task, sometimes with the fine colour of scarlet on her . . .’ (1934: 170).
Morton’s depiction of women as pre-social creatures of nature, or as exotic
spectacle, is supplemented by their depiction in their other given role as the
natural mother. The ‘backward look’ invoked such an organic community
of cottages and shawled peasant women, close to nature, which could still
be ‘experienced’ in the primitive west. It defined an ethno-cultural
nationalism that pervaded conceptions of women’s role in the modern state.

Conclusion

This article has highlighted the pivotal role of gender in nationalist ideology
and the contribution of visual and literary representations to such ideology
in the case of the early Irish state. In Ireland, as elsewhere, women were
endowed with symbolic importance, while being deemed unsuitable for full
national citizenship. As in most other nations, women were conflated with
the family and the domestic sphere, and regarded as the keepers of the
558 Tricia Cusack

nation’s morals. At the same time, the family, or the tribe, became a
metaphor for the whole nation, epitomised in the figures of Mother Ireland
and the Virgin Mary as mother. Women’s public role as citizens in Ireland
was overshadowed by an ideological view of them as natural mothers, set
apart from modern society, preserving the heart of some kind of persisting
‘organic community’. Their role as national citizens was compromised by
their ideal role as bearers of tradition. Thus women’s participation in Irish
public life was delimited in the name of traditional values (ethnic
nationalism) while men claimed to advance the civic state. If women were
associated with tradition in the nation, appeals to tradition were used to
control them (Steans 1998: 66). While Irish women appealed to a civic
nationalist model of the nation to extend their civil rights, they were defined
according to a gendered ethno-culturalism that tied them ideologically to
the private arena. Yet civic nationalism itself was also gendered, so that
men took themselves as the model for citizenship. Feminist critics were well
aware of their displacement into a kind of historicist limbo: the ‘poor,
dinnerless husband’ was a thin excuse for ‘push[ing] women back into the
dark ages’ (correspondent to the Irish Times (1927) in Valiulis 1995: 125).18
Yet women themselves were imbued to a greater or lesser extent with the
dominant ideological conceptions of appropriate gender roles. An exclusive
focus on women’s domestic obligations was contested by many women who
demanded a political power which they justified not only in terms of claims
for equal rights but on the basis of their familial importance to the nation.
Popular images of thatched cottages and shawled peasant women, as well as
travel literature like Morton’s, continued to help construct and perpetuate a
gendered national mythology. Following the establishment of the Irish Free
State, Janus’s backward look transfixed women over many decades.

Notes

1 Nairn, drawing on Gellner, seems to claim this metaphor, which he employed in ‘The
Modem Janus’ an unpublished manuscript of 1977 (1997: 67.71 -2).
2 For instance, see Brown (1999: 284-7). Ireland might be cited as an example of a post-
colonial country perceived as fostering a bad ethnic nationalism.
3 Thus even within so-called civic nationalist countries, like France, ethno-culturalism gains a
strong presence, alongside the usual allegorising of the nation as a buxom female.
4 ‘The racial community has a tendency to represent itself as one big family or as the common
envelope of family relations’ (Balibar 1991: 100). Balibar uses the term ‘racial’ a bit loosely here
as a synonym for kinship.
5 Thus both in Ireland and the United States, jury service for women was opposed, while
their domestic role was highlighted (Valiulis 1997: 162-6) while the “‘endowment of
motherhood” that is, financial recognition by the state that child-bearing was for the national
good’, was advocated by both left- and right-wing speakers in early twentieth-century England,
including the Fabian leader Sidney Webb (Klug 1989: 23).
6 While male nationalists represented Ireland as female, they represented themselves as having
a ‘fierce virility’ (Nash 1997: 108-27).
Janus and gender 559

7 For instance, the Eucharistic Congress in 1932 that took place at an open-air altar.
(Kennedy 1994 151). Kennedy illustrates public genuflection at the Congress on ‘Men’s Day’,
but does not comment on the dominant masculine character of such triumphalism.
8 Althusser saw the role of the family as a transmitter of the state’s ideology (1972: 252).
9 Coulter states that ‘DeValera was personally hostile to women’s equality’ (1993: 25).
10 Clear takes her term ‘maternalist politics’ from Koven and Michel, (1993).
I I However, Keogh says he was told by M. Moynihan that de Valera changed ‘comely’ to
‘happy’ just before broadcasting (1994 413,n.90).
12 As noted above, Balibar’s use of the term ‘racial’ here seems to be as a synonym for kin.
13 In a classic paper on the anthropology of the ‘folk society’ Robert Redfield summarised the
features of ‘primitive’ and peasant communities, highlighting their organic character. However,
he also observed that ‘the obvious exception to the homogeneity of the folk society lies in the
differences between what men do and know and what women do and know’ (1947: 297).
14 Women’s (or woman’s?) burden of honour was demonstrated for instance by the pre-
independence nationalist riots at the Dublin performance of J. M. Synge’s The Pluyboy of the
Western World, which turned on the issue of Irish female virtue.
15 In the Irish parliamentary debates of the 1920s, the government depicted women as childlike
and unable to take responsibility, like the British colonial view of the Irish (Valiulis 1995: 124).
16 Young women as well as men migrated from the western island of Achill for work in
mainland Britain in the 1930s; however, Morton notes that when the men were away ‘Achill
becomes an isle of women. They run the home and they work the fields’ (1934: 220).
17 Morton’s characterisation of Irish women also omits to accord them the high degree of
articulacy which he notes elsewhere as characteristic of Irish peasants: thus he cites Padraic
Colum’s claim that while English country people had a vocabulary of 300-500 words, Irish
speakers in Ireland deployed between 2,500 and 6,000 (1934 168-9, 182-3).
18 The Irish Independent (1927) had described ‘real’ women as reluctant to leave ‘their
cherished household duties . . . the preparation of their husbands’ dinners . . . to decide matters
entirely foreign to their experience and often beyond their comprehension’ (Valiulis 1997: 165).

References
Althusser, L. 1972. ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in B. R. Cosin (ed.), Educution,
Structure and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin and Open University.
Balibar, Etienne. 1991. ‘The nation form: history and ideology’, in Etienne Balibar and
Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), Ruce, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso.
Beaumont, Caitriona. 1997. ‘Women and the politics of equality: the Irish Women’s Movement
1930-1943’. in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary ODowd (eds.), Women and Irish
History. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sighle. 1997. ‘Landscape, space, and gender: their role in the construction
of female identity in newly independent Ireland’, Cunudiun Womun Studies: Les Cuhiers de la
Femme, 17, 3 (Summer/Fall): 26-30.
Billig, Michael. 1995. Bunul Nutionulism. London: Sage.
Brown, David. 1999. ‘Are there good and bad nationalisms? Nutions und Nutionulism 5, 2:
281-302.
Clear, Caitriona. 1997. ‘No feminine mystique: popular advice to women of the house in
Ireland 1922-1954: in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary ODowd (eds.), Women and
Irish History. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Coogan, Tim Pat. 1993. Eumon de Vuleru: The Mun Who Wus Irelmrl. New York:
HarperCollins.
Cosgrove, Mary. 1995. ‘Paul Henry and Achill Island’, in Ullrich Kockel, Landscape, Herituge
und Identity: Cusr Studies in Irish Efhnogruphy. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Coulter, Carol. 1993. The Hidden Trudition: Feminism, Women und Nationalism in Ire/und.
Cork: Cork University Press.
 Tricia Cusack

Crofts, Sinead. 1997. ‘Maurice MacGonigal PRHA (1900-79) and his western paintings’, Irish
Arts Review, 13: 135-42.
Daly, Mary E. 1995. ‘Women in the Irish Free State 1922-39: the interaction between
economics and ideology’, Journal of Women’sHistory 6 , 4 and 7, 1: WinterlSpring.
Daly, Mary E. 1997. “‘Oh, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, Your Way’s a Thorny Way!”: the condition
of women in 20c Ireland’, in A. Bradley and M. G. Valiulis (eds.), Gender and Sexuality in
Modern Ireland. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Davidoff, Leonore, Jean L’Esperance and Howard Newby. 1976. ‘Landscape with figures:
home and community in English society’, in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds.), The
Rights and Wrongs of Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Dooley, Dolores. 1985. ‘Expanding an island ethic’, in Joseph Lee (ed.), Ireland: Towurds u
Sense of Place. The UCC-RTE Lectures. Cork: Cork University Press.
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith (eds.) 1994. Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass. 1992. ‘Dismantling Irena: the sexualising of Ireland
in early modern England’, in Andrew Parker et al. (eds.), Nationalisms and Sexualities.
London and New York: Routledge.
Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1991. ‘Identity and its discontents: women and the nation’, Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 20, 3: 429-43.
Kearney, Hugh. 1997. ‘Contested ideas of nationhood 1800-1995’, The Irish Review, 20
(WinterlSpring): 1-22.
Kennedy, Brian P. 1994. ‘The Irish Free State 1922-49: a visual perspective’, in Raymond
Gillespie and Brian P. Kennedy (eds.), Ireland: Art into History. Dublin: Town House.
Keogh, Dermot. 1994. Twentieth-Century Ireland: Nation and State. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
Klug, Francesca. 1989. “‘Oh to be in England”: the British case study’, in Nira Yuval-Davis
and Floya Anthias (eds.), Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan.
Loftus, Belinda. 1990. Mirrors: William III and Mother Ireland. Dundrum: Picture Press.
Maguire, Mark. 1998. ‘The space of the nation: history, culture and a conflict in modern
Ireland’, Irish Studies Review 6, 2: 109-20.
McClintock, Anne. 1993. ‘Family feuds: gender, nationalism and the family’, Feminist Review
44 (Summer): 61 -80.
Memmi, Albert. 1990 (19571. The Colonizer and the Colonized London: Earthscan.
Morton, H. V. 1934. In Search of Ireland. London: Methuen.
Nairn, Tom. 1997. Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited. London: Verso.
Nash, Catherine. 1993. ‘Remapping and renaming: new cartographies of identity, gender and
landscape in Ireland’. Feminist Review 44 (Summer): 39-57.
Nash, Catherine. 1997. ‘Embodied Irishness: gender, sexuality and Irish identities’, in Brian
Graham (ed.), In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography. London and New York’:
Routledge.
Nieguth, Tim. 1999. ‘Beyond dichotomy: concepts of the nation and the distribution of
membership’, Nations and Nationalism 5 , 2: 155-73.
O’Brien, Eugene. 1996-7. ‘The epistemology of nationalism’, Irish Studies Review 17 (Winter):
15-20.
Redfield, Robert. 1947. ‘The folk society’, The American Journal of Sociology 52, 4: 293-308.
Sluga, Glenda. 1998. ‘Identity, gender, and the history of European nations and nationalisms’,
Nations and Nationalism 4, 1: 87- 1 I 1.
Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin.
Steans, Jill. 1998. Gender and International Relations. Cambridge: Polity.
Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella. 1995. ‘Power, gender and identity in the Irish Free State’, Journal
of Women’s Hisrory 6, 417, I (WinterlSpring): 117-36.
Valiulis, Maryann Gialanella. 1997. ‘Engendering citizenship: women’s relationship to the state
in Ireland and the United States in the post-suffrage period’, in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis
and Mary ODowd (eds.), Women and Irish History. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Janus and gender 561

Ward, Margaret. 1995. Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism. London:
Pluto.
Ward, Margaret. 1996-7. ‘Irish women and nationalism’, Irish Sfudies Review 17 (Winter):
8-14.
Warner, Marina. 1990 [1976]. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary.
London: Picador.
Winship, J. 1987. Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.