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

0ASEN 2000

Janus and gender: women and the nations backward look

TRICIA CUSACK
School o f 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 nations backward look towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nations 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 nationalisms 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 independence 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 womens 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 nations backward look towards a putative traditional rural past and an organic community, while men appropriated the nations 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 nations Janus-face. The following two consider how womens 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

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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

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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 nations 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 womens 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: womens disorderliness has been represented as a threat to the nation, including their participation in the public sphere (1998: 89-94, 98). The

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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 newspapers - 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 womens national role - those of support and sacrifice at one remove - place women in a derivative role in relation to the states 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, womens 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 womens 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

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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 nations backward look Etienne Balibar has emphasised the nation-states 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 states 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 nations identity is generally sought in particular historical claims and traditions that focus on womens role in relation to home and family. Womens and mens relations to the modern nation thus have different trajectories: while women are taken to represent the nations 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

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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 collectivitys identity and future destiny has also brought about the construction of women as the bearers of the collectivitys 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 (OBrien 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. Womens 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 nations 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 nations native skills and genius, its arts and its crafts: the patriots 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 womens 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 Valeras government subsequently enacted restrictions on women working in industry in order to protect the interests of the male workers who . . . might

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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 states view of womens, or womans 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 Valeras insistence on womens home duties to Nazi decrees (1995: 240). Ireland indeed was not alone in employment discrimination 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 womens field labour and increased their economic dependency (Nash 1997: 115). Ward suggests that subsequently 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 colonisers role in regard to women, which returned to them a

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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 womens 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 nations 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 womens 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 Valeras political rhetoric subsequently drew on Catholic as well as national values. Meanwhile, consistent with Balibars 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 womens 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 womans historical role was to bring up her sons as good nationalists. De Valeras 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 mothers ideal role and conduct:

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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 mothers 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 sons sacrifice: Catholic piety and patriotism are fused. De Valera also approved Pearses intention to adhere to what are subsequently identified as her sons, not her own, beliefs. De Valeras 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens welfare (Beaumont 1997: 174-6, 181, 187-8). It is interesting that womens 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. Mens organisations were often more exclusive, on ethno-cultural lines, and power-directed: Irish nationalism itself was a rigidly masculine tradition (Ward 1995: 248).

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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 womens 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 womens careers would suffer because they would be viewed as likely to resign if they married (Beaumont 1997: 180). The Irish Housewives Association supported womens 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 Valeras 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 organisations set up to support womens 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 states future-oriented and masculine projects. Mark Maguire has argued that the scheme demonstrated the states 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-

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pinning of the state. If the fishermen were to be displaced from contemporary life in the interests of modernisation, the traditional rural idyll could be imaginatively retained, located in the nations past. De Valeras 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 Maguires 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, LEsperance and Newby 1976: 152; 156). The Irish cottage landscape might be read as a sign of the national family, in Balibars sense, a familiar and distinctive landscape wherein the member of the associated racial community2 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 Henrys 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)

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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 9 4 4 ) . It is possible minor accent (as in John Lukes The Road to the West, 1 that male labourers were perceived as threatening and as unsuitable subjects for art. For example, in nineteenth-century France, reactions to Millets 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

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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 nations 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 antiEnglishness. 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, Collinss 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

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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)

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and his pictures, like Henrys, 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. MacGonigals 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 viewers gaze and therefore separated and aloof from it; only the donkey, at the centre of the scene, meets the viewers eye. The realist style heroicises the Aran folk as the authentic working people of Ireland, depicting the women as serious, industrious and long-suffering. MacGonigals Waiting for the Boats: Fishermens Wives c. 1938-42 focuses upon three loyal wives in peasant dress waiting, and praying, for their husbands return. MacGonigals 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 mans status as head of the household depended on his wifes 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 Ruskins 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. Mortons 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

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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 artists 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. Mortons 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). Titians 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). Mortons 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 womens 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

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nations 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. Womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Mortons, continued to help construct and perpetuate a gendered national mythology. Following the establishment of the Irish Free State, Januss 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 postcolonial 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).

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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 Mens 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 states ideology (1972: 252). 9 Coulter states that De Valera was personally hostile to womens 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, Balibars 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 Womens (or womans?) burden of honour was demonstrated for instance by the preindependence nationalist riots at the Dublin performance of J. M. Synges 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 Mortons 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 Colums 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).

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