Irish Women 20th Century

• Girls and boys education

  • Girls were treated differently, often kept home from school to mind siblings
  • Everyone had to pay fees for secondary school, most schools were single sex
  • Girls got an inferior education, many schools did not teach science or higher maths
• Until the 1960s very few women attended university
• Irish women could study and get degrees at the Royal University by the 1880s, but were not allowed to attend Trinity College Dublin until 1904
• Most parents' belief about daughters

  They would marry and their husbands would look after them, so they did not need a career
• Life was very hard in the 1900s, with very few homes having electricity and nearly all work being manual
• Types of work for women

  • Farms
  • Small shops
  • Factories
  • Sewing
  • Taking in washing
• Accepted view of women's role in society

  Different from men's, not as intelligent, more suited to minding children and housework, their main role was to be a good mother and homemaker
• Very few middle- or upper-class women worked outside the home, most husbands would see it as a bad reflection if their wife went out to work
• Women's behaviour in society

  • Strictly controlled, improper for women to smoke in public or go to public houses until WW1
  • Middle-class girls required chaperones when meeting young men
  • Women didn't kiss boyfriends until engaged
• In 1900 women did not have the right to vote or become members of parliament
• The Home Rule Party did not permit female members
• Suffragette movement


  Fought for women's rights to vote and sit in Westminster
• Irish Women's Franchise League (IWFL)


  Led the campaign for women's suffrage in Ireland
• Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a founder of the IWFL, came from a political family and had been to university
• Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and other women were angry that they were not allowed to vote, even though men who could neither read nor write were
• They heckled politicians and threw bricks through windows of places where politicians were meeting
• All women over the age of 21 were given the right to vote
• Sinn Féin was the first Irish political party to admit women as full members
• In 1912, Jenny Wyse-Power became Sinn Féin's vice-president and the party put forward two women candidates in the 1918 general election
• One of these was Countess Markievicz, who was elected to the first Dáil and appointed Minister for Labour when Sinn Féin set up an Irish government in 1919
• In the 1916 Rising and later War of Independence, women acted as messengers, spies and nurses for the rebels
• Women wrote regularly for nationalist newspapers and fundraised for nationalist causes
• Women provided safe houses and shelter for those hiding from the Black and Tans
• Some women also fought as soldiers, as members of Cumann Na mBan, a female version of the Irish Volunteers set up in 1914
• The Irish Citizen Army (ICA) was a trade union army of men and women who defended workers' protest meetings
• Countess Markievicz and other IAC female members fought side by side with the rebels in the 1916 Rising
• The Ulster Women Unionist Council was formed in 1911 and had over 100,000 members by 1913, vowing to "stand by our husbands, our brothers and our sons… in defending our liberties against the tyranny of Home Rule"
• In 1912, 234,046 Ulster women signed an agreement stating they would fight to the death against anyone who tried to weaken the link between Ireland and the rest of Britain
• Delia Larkin and Rosie Hackett set up a women's trade union called the Irish Women Workers' Union (IWW) that fought for better working conditions, education and living conditions for female workers
• In 1913, Larkin wrote "tenements are one of the greatest causes, which helped to make drunken slaves of the women who lived there"
• All men and women over the age of 21 years got the right to vote in the Irish Free State in 1922
• Laws that negatively impacted women


  • 1927 Juries Act - Prevented women from sitting on juries
  • 1929 Censorship of Publications Act - Banned the publication of any information on contraception
  • 1932 Marriage Bar - Forced women teachers to give up their jobs when they got married
  • 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act - Made the sale of contraceptives illegal, Marriage Bar extended to Civil Service
  • 1936 Conditions of Employment Act - Limited the number of women working in industry
• Reasons for women's lives improving from the 1960s

  • Coming of electricity to every home
  • Improvement in the Irish economy
  • The Irish Women's Liberation Movement (IWLM)
• By 1964 electricity transformed life for everyone, freeing up women to go out to work or do other things
• In the 1960s there was a boom in the Irish economy, new multinational companies set up, and Ireland joined the EEC, creating more jobs for women
• Free secondary education was introduced in 1967, women became better educated and began to demand equal treatment
• The Employment Equality Act of 1977 meant that men and women doing the same job would get equal pay, and job ads for just men or just women were not allowed
• Attitudes towards women working changed more slowly, it was not until the 1980s that it really became acceptable for married women to go out to work
• The IWLM demanded more sexual freedom for women and availability of contraceptives, and in 1971 Irish women travelled to Belfast to buy contraceptives where it was legal
• Although a law passed in 1979 allowed contraceptives to be prescribed by doctors, it was not until 1985 that they could be openly sold