Uncle John was rumoured to be the one who reported my grandma to the authorities. It was autumn of the 1922 Civil War, and the Irish Free State believed anti-treaty “trigger-happy harpies” were a danger to the fledgling state. My grandmother Maggie, only 14, was rounded up with other girls for passing messages to local IRA flying column members and for her membership of Cumann na mBan. Interned first in Carlow Laundry, then sent to Kilmainham Gaol, which had been refashioned as a detention prison for suspect women, Maggie was released back to the farm in Carlow that spring, but her world had changed utterly. In a small notebook, her mother recorded: “Maggie O’Toole left Tomduff 13 day October 1924 for London”, then finally, “stopt their till 3 Nov an sailed to New York in 1926 wrote by her mother Mary An Toole”.
When I landed in Dublin in May 1995 from New York – with 10 items of clothing in a vintage US army backpack, a well-worn suitcase full of history books, interview transcripts and a borrowed laptop computer – it was to a deeply conservative, homogeneous society. Divorce and abortion were illegal, while homosexuality had only been decriminalised two years previously. Mother and baby homes were still open and the tsunami of paedophile priest revelations was two months away. In these pre-Celtic Tiger days, more people were leaving Ireland than arriving on its shores.
I’d come to Ireland to research the women and girls – including my grandma – who had been held in Kilmainham Gaol between 1922 and 1923. Of the 12,000 anti-treaty prisoners at that time, an estimated 300 were women held in Dublin. Maggie was one of the youngest. She had only just turned 14 when she was arrested.
It turned out grandma was a jailbird. But how could that be? She lived with us in Garden City, an elegant, well-appointed town in Long Island founded by an Irish man, Alexander Turney Stewart. Her greatest transgression was letting me stay up past bedtime to watch Dallas. Through the years, she had often told me of riding her white pony, Billy, side saddle, over Mount Leinster through wind, rain and sleet to her friend Bridie Mullins’s house to deliver a dispatch. I thought it was just another one of her fantastical stories from the old country like the dangers of a fairy ring, banshees foretelling the death of a loved one or how a blood drop from a Cahill relative could cure you of chicken pox.
RM Block
In Kilmainham Gaol in 1995, I opened a beautifully hand-scripted registry from 1922 to find “Prisoner Index No 13286, O’Toole, Maggie, Tomduff, Borris, Carlow”. In another dusty, but meticulously kept record book, I found note of a letter received from my great-grandmother, the widowed Mary Anne Murphy O’Toole, on March 26th, 1923. Although the contents were not listed, it was probably part of a letter-writing campaign by her, and other members of the community, to have her eldest child, Maggie, released.
As my research continued over several months, Kilmainham Gaol’s archivist uncovered more documentary evidence that floored me. The young rebel had written her name in pencil on one of the prison cell’s walls and signed other girls’ autograph books, both common practices at the time. Maggie had left her mark.
Grandma loved prison, according to interview transcripts of conversations with Maggie and a Boston historian in the early 1990s. It gave her a break from farm work and her three siblings, a chance to read, watch plays and learn etiquette from the fancy Dublin ladies.
But why did she join Cumann na mBan so young? Why didn’t she or my Irish parents talk about the Easter Rising and War of Independence (1919-1921)? I decided to extend my stay indefinitely and travelled to historical, church and family archives to collect more information on women and girls’ lives at that time.
In Enniscorthy during one of the hottest summers on record, I watched a Corpus Christi eucharistic procession led by priests and little brides of Christ, was persuaded by cousins to judge the best-dressed lady at the Strawberry Fair and ate the most divine wild mushrooms on toast on Curracloe Strand. In Maynooth I milked neighbours’ cows and climbed fences dividing the fields. In Wicklow I tramped up mountains. I went foraging in the Black Stairs and walked the river Barrow canal path in Carlow. The sky was vast and the colours bright, a welcome respite from the grey skyscrapers and lonely Manhattan commutes of my early twenties. Investigating this story would forever change the trajectory of my life. Ireland was slowly starting to feel like home.
At Cathal Brugha barracks military archives in Dublin, I was the first person to ever sign out many of the Civil War record boxes. In search of more social context to understand Maggie’s story, I wrote to The Irish Times formally requesting use of the newspaper archives. One day then editor Conor Brady, a keen historian himself, inquiring about my research, asked me if I would write about it for the paper. I did and it was published in October 1996.
By now, I’d also devoured as many books on modern Irish history as I could. But it wasn’t easy to find the stories of ordinary women and girls. Why?
Women played a vital role in the revolutionary struggle for Irish freedom from the British empire. During the Easter Rising of 1916, 90 women participated in the city-wide armed rebellion with 60 from Cumann na mBan and others from the Irish Citizen Army. Some carried pistols as both organisations had committed women to combat.
Maggie was six when the women’s paramilitary organisation Cumann na mBan was founded in 1914, to support the broader nationalist movement. In small towns, big cities and remote rural areas, women signed up to hide and feed men on the run, raise funds, perform first aid and practise drilling, signalling and rifle shooting. All while caring for their families, homes, farms, animals, gardens, and keeping everything secret.
Near Borris, Maggie’s mother, Mary Ann O’Toole, ran the local Cumann na mBan garrison under the nose of her brother-in-law John, who helped with the farm after her husband died in 1916. Family legend has it that she hid bullets in her braids and ammunition in a false-bottomed rocking chair. There were many tales of hiding men in the hay shed and moving them out just before the British arrived.
Nationalist women such as Mary Ann were fighting for more than the land between 1919 and 1921, however: they were also fighting for freedom from restrictive gender roles. One of the most extraordinary things I learned was that Ireland declared women’s equality – in writing – long before Europe, the US or Britain. The Easter proclamation claimed the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally”. This extraordinary commitment to equal status for women was revolutionary, as was the additional promise of equal voting rights, and so many women throughout the island signed up to the nationalist cause.
After the War of Independence, women played a prominent role in the new nation. In 1921 six women were elected to the Dáil, while 43 women were returned to local councils. That same year, at Cumann na mBan’s convention they recommitted themselves to their main goal: “To follow the policy of the Republican Proclamation by seeing that women take up their proper position in the life of the nation.” The promise was copper-fastened, or so the women thought, in the 1922 Irish Free State Constitution, which granted all citizens, irrespective of sex, the right to vote from age 21.
Soon after, as the country descended into Civil War, the pro-treaty Free State government forcibly pushed women back into the private realm of the home. The once-admired rebel women were now largely blamed for the violence of the Civil War. Maggie, her mother and the other Cumann na mBan members were feeling the heat. The Catholic hierarchy urged women to desist from revolutionary activities in a pastoral letter in October 1922. These were usually read out at Mass to publicly admonish and shame those involved. Sunday Mass was the biggest social gathering in Borris, and the women must have been angry and humiliated at being called out in this way.
[ Sister against sister: How the Treaty split Cumann na mBanOpens in new window ]
When the restrictions on Cumann na mBan were lifted in 1932, Maggie returned from New York to rural Carlow married to local flying column member Arthur Rice with the first of their seven children. But Ireland had become an even colder place under Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil who did not share the Proclamation’s vision for women and children. De Valera dreamed of an isolationist, agricultural land where women were coerced into traditional roles, with an adherence to chastity, humility and service to God. A combination of moral aspiration and religious constraint – to be better than the British and revered by Rome – produced an idealised role of womanhood. Maggie wouldn’t leave again until 1959, having moved all her children out of Ireland through education and emigration to England and the US.
As she told the historian: “We did auction and when I left the road gate the morning we were moving out I thought my heart would break and, oh Lord, I cried and cried all the ways to the train. And when I look at that now I say God knew so well that it was hard at that time like everything was. God directed me. But it was hard, and I loved every grain, every blade of grass that grew on that farm.”
Strangely, learning of my grandmother’s rebellious past and her push for her children to escape Ireland’s suffocating constraints is what rooted me back here. Maggie’s story made my trip to Ireland an emigration instead of a visit. I’ve been here now for 30 years and have spent much of it exploring the nation’s broken promises.
Women in Ireland remain grossly underrepresented in all walks of Irish public life. We’re paid and promoted less than men, spend nine years more in ill health, and bear the brunt of the long-term professional impact of childcare costs and inflexible work policies. Levels of violence against us are at epidemic proportions and many single mothers live in poverty following relationship breakdown. What does it mean to be a woman in a nation that treats you as less than – despite all your foremothers’ sacrifices during its birth?
I’m not the rebel my grandmother was. To succeed as a republic we need to stay focused on the promise of the Proclamation and meet Cumann na mBan’s goal: for women to take up their proper position in the life of the nation.
Margaret E Ward is a leadership consultant and Irish Times contributor
