Afterlife: Single Cork women left destitute after the revolutionary period

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An exhibition at Cork City Library highlights how a patriarchal social structure prioritised marriage and motherhood ...

Pity the impoverished single women who took part in the campaigns of Ireland’s revolutionary period but were often left afterwards with no means to support themselves.

An exhibition at Cork City Library (until November 30th) entitled Cork Afterlives: Single Women and the New Irish State, by Cork-reared Leeann Lane of Dublin City University, highlights how a patriarchal social structure prioritised marriage and motherhood.

The exhibition examines the impact of male-breadwinner wage policies, unequal pay and a lack of social insurance or secure employment for unmarried women. They were forced to rely on family or charity.

Cork did not rise in Easter 1916. However, during the War of Independence and the Civil War, women in Cork City and county were involved in republican activism. Such activism was dangerous and often resulted in the loss of employment and/or imprisonment.

In the Irish Free State in 1926, the number of unmarried women was 50 per cent greater than in England and three times greater than in the US. Many of these women experienced poverty, poor health, economic dependency and loneliness.

The exhibition is based on applications for pensions under the 1934 Military Service Act. The letters sent by the women to the Military Service Pension Board (MSPB) lay bare their straitened circumstances.

Lane writes that “access of Irish women to paid employment and full rights as citizens was increasingly restricted in the 1920s and 1930s through legislation heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching ... The assumption that women, once they reached adulthood, would marry, was embedded in the culture and legislation.”

Mary and Annie MacSwiney, sisters of the republican lord mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, were educated to third level. This allowed them to escape some of the obstacles faced by single women.

Following her arrest after the 1916 rebellion, Mary lost her teaching job in St Angela’s College in Cork and set up, with her sister, St Ita’s School, the first lay…

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