Constructions of civil war masculinities in the writings of Dorothy Macardle

ABSTRACT

Through the lens of her jail journal and published works such as Tragedies of Kerry (1924) and The Irish Republic (1937), this article examines the manner in which Dorothy Macardle encoded her attitude to the Treaty split and civil war in constructions of masculinities. Male behaviour towards women was a signifier of the integrity or otherwise of political stance on the issue of the 1921 Treaty. Soldiers and officials of the Irish Free State were guilty of moral failure in their willingness to sanction violence against republican women in the civil war sites of incarceration and by acting in a similarly repressive manner as the British had previously acted against the Irish. In her writing, Macardle constructed a chronicle of the female prison experience during the civil war that marked the Free State official and solider as “other” in his boorishness to the courtly, dignified republican male.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• women’s history
• Irish Civil War
• Dorothy Macardle
• Irish revolutionary period

Dorothy Macardle is perhaps the most influential chronicler of the Civil War, certainly on the republican side, for the first 45 or 50 years after the establishment of the Irish Free State. Through the lens of her jail journal her journalism and published works such as Tragedies of Kerry (1924) and The Irish Republic (1937), this article examines the manner in which Macardle encoded her attitude to the Treaty split and Civil War in constructions of masculinities. In Macardle’s literary corpus republican males displayed certain traits of an idealised masculinity; such masculine traits or virtues signified the righteousness of their political position on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. For Macardle male behaviour towards women was a signifier of the integrity or otherwise of their political stance. The behaviour of republican men was bound up with the ideal and values of the republic; their heroic masculinity was fused with the wider republican cause and its purity. By contrast, the conduct and comportment of the pro-Treaty soldier and male Irish Free State official signified the sordidness of their compromise; acceptance of a partitioned Irish Free State in thrall still to the British crown and British directives. Such men were boorish, displaying cowardly behaviour, and crucially behaviour that deviated from the concept of male chivalry towards women.

While radical feminism of the second wave period and beyond would denigrate the soldier as the quintessence of masculine brutality, Macardle created a set of oppositional masculinities in her writing on the Civil War. Masculinity, in her work, was not a homogenous collective identity with one single public face; types of masculinity were equated with political stance. The Irish Free State soldier was brutal; the violence of the republican male was mitigated by the righteousness of fighting for the ideal of the Republic; republican violence was a violence stripped of brutality and mindlessness. A certain type of preferred or essentialist masculinity was then linked in her writings to the concept of the republic in waiting. In her Civil War jail journal she wrote of the manner in which acceptance of the Treaty and the establishment of the provisional government had allowed the values of the Republic, encapsulated in the republican male, to give way to altogether less edifying society. Republican males in Macardle’s writing had certain essentialist qualities which were based on virtues of valour and chivalry. Historians and literary scholars have discussed what Aidan Beatty has described as the “masculinist project of Irish nationalism”.¹ Lisa Weihman discusses the manner in which “nationalist movements in Ireland felt compelled to assert a dominant, masculine fighting force against England in order to combat the longstanding colonial feminization of Ireland”.² For Macardle, the Irish Free State soldier and official had become emasculated by failure to maintain those male virtues; that enfeeblement was displayed in gratuitous violence, desecration of the domestic sphere and brutality towards women.

Dorothy Macardle was an unlikely republican. Born in 1889 to an English mother and an upper middle-class father who supported a constitutional solution to the Irish national question, Macardle’s early life was one of opportunities. Her father, Thomas Callan Macardle, was the owner of Macardle Moore brewery established by his father in 1862. The Macardles must be placed in the context of the rising Irish Catholic middle classes in formation from the post-famine Ireland.³ Macardle’s early life was affluent and reflective of the family’s status within the upper echelons of that class in the period. She completed second level at Alexandra College.⁴ Graduating from UCD with a first-class honours BA in English Language and Literature in 1912, Macardle went on to do a Teaching Diploma in Alexandra College. From 1914 she worked as a teacher in Stratford-Upon-Avon, returning to Ireland in 1917 to a teaching job at Alexandra. Macardle then was out of Ireland when the 1916 rebellion broke out and, indeed, up to this point, her political focus was the British Empire. Macardle’s early political influences were twofold reflecting the different viewpoints of her parents. Thomas Macardle supported the restoration of an Irish parliament with limited powers under a Home Rule solution to the national question. Minnie Macardle’s English background ensured that her children celebrated the British Army and Empire, although to do so was not necessarily at variance with the political beliefs of their father: a Home Rule government would still see Ireland remain part of the British Empire.

Macardle began a period of republican self-fashioning after her return from Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1917. Her Irish “awakening” followed the trajectory of so many of her generation in republican politics as she moved from cultural nationalism to assume an advanced nationalist political perspective in the period after 1916. She joined Cumann na mBan and Sinn Féin sometime in late 1918/early 1919. In the autumn of 1920 Macardle moved to live in Maud Gonne’s house at 73 St Stephen’s Green and from this period her full self-identification as a radical in the republican movement commenced. She described herself as a republican “convert” stating that like “most converts to a cause, I was zealous to the point of fanaticism”.⁵

Adopting an anti-treaty stance, Macardle began work with Erskine Childers, on the publication of An Phoblacht. When the Civil War began on 28 June 1922 Childers had to leave Dublin. Carrying on his propaganda work underground, he was accompanied for a time by Macardle as a staff member. Returning to Gonne’s house in Dublin after this work she, on the instigation of Molly Childers, produced one of a number of republican publicity sheets of the period, entitled Irish Freedom leading to her arrest on 9 November 1922.⁶ Macardle’s relationship with Alexandra College grew increasingly fractious in the period of the War of Independence and ultimately was unsustainable due to her continued republican activities which saw her absent from her duties without leave for various periods from 1919; her arrest brought matters to a head and her employment was terminated on 8 December 1922. Macardle herself recalled in 1952 that it “was in 1922 that I was suddenly translated from the position of lecturer in Alexandra College to that of a military prisoner in Mountjoy Jail”.⁷

Throughout her jail experience, Mccardle was conscious of her lack of long-reaching republican antecedents; she had not participated in 1916 and she had no familial connections to republicanism. She saw jail as means of establishing her bona-fide credentials within republicanism. Her jail journal allows the historian a sense of her interiority in this life-altering period as she struggled to forge her republican credentials and came to grips with the loss of her expected future life. Throughout the journal, the reader is privy to her struggles with the possibility of having to engage in supportive hunger strike: the boredom and at times, pettiness and sordidness, of the prison day as women shared close quarters and inadequate cooking and sanitary facilities; her elegy for her previous life as a teacher in Alexandra College; her abject distress at the execution of her mentor, Erskine Childers on 24 November 1922. Core to her republican self-fashioning during her imprisonment was an analysis of the ideal of the republic and the manner in which she encoded a commitment to anti-treaty politics through a dialectical construction of masculinities.

A certain type of “great man”

In Macardle’s writing, the virtues of manhood belonged to the republican side in the Civil War. Recalling the 1916 rebellion, she wrote in her jail journal:

Was that a military victory for the Republic? No! Was it a victory for the Republic? Yes, Yes, because the sacrifices of those noble leaders woke Ireland & the world to a great truth – that Ireland had the right to be free.⁸

In a similar manner, Mary MacSwiney declared that with 1916 Ireland had “reasserted her manhood”, a masculine endeavour augmented by the death of her brother, Terence, on hunger strike in October 1920.⁹ During the Civil War the republican men “who control the movement”, Macardle wrote, had certain innate characteristics, qualities revered by those who support them: “purity of motive, sincerity & power of sacrifice […] moral, mental & physical courage”.¹⁰ Anti-treaty men, by contrast, were emasculated by their compromise and collusion, shorn of the heroic traits inherent in those who led the 1916 rebellion, participated in the War of Independence; innate characteristics now manifest in the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. Manifesting a masculinity couched in the language of the heroic, the republican male, by contrast, exemplified in his person the purity of the revolutionary campaign not yet concluded.

For Macardle, the republic, allegiance to which was pledged by the Second Dáil, was a spiritual and natural entity. It was a “beautiful, dream built city […] shining with a purity & grandeur surpassing the purity & grandeur of ancient Athens or Rome”.¹¹ The betrayal of the men who had accepted the Treaty permeated through Irish society rendering its people cruel and malevolent in spirit and deed:

This has been the despairing shame of the sorrow of these days – that it seemed as if the people of Ireland had lost that living spiritual sense which revolts against cruelty and responds to suffering & is inspired by courage & courageous moods. […] And in the leaders who have inducted the change in the people it is as if all the spiritual force had turned to malice and hideousness, & would never give way to justice or mercy again.¹²

It was necessary, Macardle argued in her jail journal, to “thrust out” the Provisional government if Ireland was not to sink into “slavish degradation”. The men who took the “shameful oath” were, she wrote, “vile & guilty men” and “bestial & so grossly insane”; “to kill them could hardly be a sin”.¹³ On 4 December 1922, Macardle contemplated the signing into law of the Irish Free State that was to occur two days later focusing on the noble men who would ensure the ultimate triumph of the republic notwithstanding such an ignominious and regressive political development:

the Republic of Ireland, because its existence is a thing of the laws of nature - the law of freedom, will not be dead. And we have splendid men – de Valera, Liam Mellows Rory O’Connor.¹⁴

The Irish Republic was written as a work of propaganda in defence of the politics and decisions de Valera made, particularly during the Treaty debates and the ensuing Civil War. Eunan O’Halpin argues that Macardle’s history is a one-sided account of the period it purports to investigate, heavily suggesting that she subordinated her political integrity and reputation to that of de Valera’s.¹⁵ That Macardle’s politics aligned in many areas with those of de Valera does not, however, render them invalid or derivative. Macardle’s political thought at all stages of her life was based on personal conviction and sustained intellectual questioning. Moreover, she was fully able to indicate her political disapproval of certain of de Valera policies.¹⁶ In The Irish Republic Macardle accorded de Valera the position of a Shakespearean tragic hero. At other times, he took on the mantle of the Irish mythological god, Lugh who successfully led the Tuatha Dé Danaan against the Fomorians, establishing himself as the rightful ruler. During the 1917 by election in East Clare de Valera asked voters if they wanted a “hero” to represent them.¹⁷ During the Civil War he towered in stateliness, courage and principle over those whom she depicted as Free State hirelings of the British. The short story, “By God’s Mercy” in Earth-Bound set during the War of Independence represents de Valera as a man who inspired his followers to the point where “you couldn’t do a mean or dirty thing. Whatever misfortunes we get, while he’s living we’ll get no disgrace”.¹⁸ While in prison, Macardle wrote that male honour and integrity were more important than ever during the Civil War:

Character is more important in Ireland’s fight than in any other, because we have to fight enemies so corrupt; & it is more important at this moment than at any other in Ireland’s fight. Who but de Valera could keep men who have been vilely & cruelly betrayed from growing cruel & vile? His men who were the comrades of Rory & Liam & Erskine Childers they once served devotedly the very traitors who have killed over fifty of their prisoners in their goals & murdered God knows how many by the roadside & in their homes ¹⁹

Macardle recalled her dismay at the signing of the Treaty and her relief when “de Valera’s great repudiation came”. It was, she wrote, “as if the pall that had been stifling Ireland had been rent by the spear of Lugh”.²⁰

Macardle contended that those on the anti-Treaty side would not resort to the cowardly tactics of those who comprised the Provisional government and its officials. She inferred that supporters of the Treaty in the Dáil had inveigled the Irish people to support it either by threatening renewed warfare or by using “slow flattery” and material inducements.²¹ Macardle claimed that commissions were offered to men to join the Irish Free State army; “prosperity has made traitors & cowards of thousands now”.²² During the early months of Macardle’s imprisonment in late 1922 the Irish Free State carried out a series of executions commencing on 17 November with those of five men who had been caught carrying weapons. In the six months that followed, a total of 77 republicans were executed.²³ The Minister for Defence and Chief of Staff of the army, Richard Mulcahy, declared in the Dáil that official execution would prevent unofficial ones by members of the army.²⁴ Republicans, Macardle declared, would not retaliate in a similar manner; to kill helpless prisoners was “a weapon too vile for us to use:”; such a tactic was not an “act of war”.²⁵ In Tragedies of Kerry she wrote:

the I.R.A. controlled no building where captives could be detained. To kill or ill-use a prisoner in any way was impossible: there was no alternative but to disarm the men and set them free to hunt their captives again. Throughout the campaign this was done.²⁶

Macardle’s account of the Civil War in Kerry is filled with instances of the ill-treatment of IRA prisoners, of men savagely beaten and abused further when in a weakened state. Seamus Taylor, a “gentle, home-loving boy” from Glencar in Kerry was “resting in his mother’s house” when he was taken by Irish Free State soldiers who “rushed in”. Taken to Killorglin Barracks, he “was covered with blood-stained bandages, hardly able to stand”. Taylor was subject to a further beating rendering him almost unconscious. He was killed on the roadside near Ballyseedy wood and taken to Tralee::When his people went to Tralee they were given a broken, shot-riddled body in a rough wooden case. They could not recognize their son”.²⁷ The soldiers in Mountjoy jail were described by Macardle as coarse; their masculinity as fighting men reduced to gratuitous displays of brutal violence aimed at the vulnerable. On 15 November Macardle wrote:

We heard shots outside this morning & coarse laughter. Davy climbed up to the window & came down with a white face. The soldiers had shot a cat &it was in agonies on the grass. That night was “hideous with the soldiers shouting & shooting in the yard”; a convict prisoner was injured as he looked out the window of his cell. ²⁸

Macardle repeatedly represented the soldiers and officials on the pro-Treaty side as prone to a violent irrationality, for which, in the words of Beatty, “read ‘hysterical and feminised’?”²⁹ In Tragedies of Kerry Free State soldiers are at described at various points “mad with rage”; as falling on republicans “in fury”.³⁰ Despite the nineteenth-century construction of woman as the domesticated angel in the house, as Gilbert and Gubar discuss, the female was also considered to have the “capacity for explosive rage”.³¹ As Beatty states, “ ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are coterminous and each implicated in the other”.³² Republican men operated, Macardle argued, on the understanding that there were limits to the use of violence. Their masculine integrity was a signifier of the integrity and veracity of the republican ideal. Conversely, anti-Treaty men such as Mulcahy in sanctioning, what Macardle deemed transgressive violence, were transmogrified on an individual level, a reflection of the morally debased society that was the Irish Free State:

How is it that Mulcahy & his comrades, once true Irishmen, have become so malignant, so callous & dead to honour that they can murder old comrades who never fought but in self-defence & who have been for months prisoners at their hands. It is because there is a law for true Irishmen which if they break they shut out light & life forever from their souls.³³

Ireland’s freedom, she wrote in Tragedies of Kerry “is a thing of spiritual life or death that there is no evading; purified by spendthrift sacrifice it makes heroes; denied and stifled it makes treacherous men”.³⁴ The book was of course a propagandist polemic that would be regularly reprinted making it difficult, as Anne Dolan states, to view the Free State soldier as engaging in anything more than grotesque mob violence.³⁵ The reality was, as Eunan O’Halpin discusses, that republicans adopted the moral high-ground yet their interpretation of the “recognised rules of warfare” was “highly eclectic”.³⁶

The perfidy of pro-Treaty side caused Macardle to view the Civil War as “destructive of noble patriotism”.³⁷ If the Republic “was defeated”, she wrote, “there will be no light or holiness or beauty in Ireland for a long while”.³⁸ Indeed, she exhorted republican men not become inured to the violence that was spreading during the conflict. Michael Hopkinson writes that during the early months of the Civil War “relations between the Republican political and military leadership were extremely poor”. De Valera described how the “old contempt for civil or semi-civil work apparently persists”; Rory O’Connor wrote of the “compromising mind of the diplomats”.³⁹ Bill Kissane argues that the IRA during the Civil War was divided between those like de Valera “who was willing to discuss terms” and those like Liam Lynch “that felt any compromise was a betrayal of national ideals”.⁴⁰ Macardle aligned herself on the side of de Valera:

The feeling I have now about our movement is that it is all […] heroisms & charity – a beautiful splendid cause. But […] there is a lack of wisdom & […] the wise & patient leaders see all their policy ruined, all their constructive work undone by a rebellious thoughtless military clan. […] Erskine Childers & de Valera […] angry despair against our militarists & a fear that they will wreck all.⁴¹

With the execution Childers on 24 November 1922 Macardle feared that “the thoughtful, constructive aspect of the movement; might ‘disappear’.”⁴² Republican violence was not an end in itself for her and she was willing to embrace the concept of a morally righteous compromise: “A treaty with England – even a pact with the Free State government would be false. Surrender would not. A pact would leave us bound in honour to their vileness: surrender would leave us morally free”.

If a surrender was initiated the “deceit and terror” orchestrated by Free State men could be jettisoned in favour of the “heroic faith & allegiance” of the republicans.⁴³

In Macardle’s jail journal Erskine Childers is described as having given and “won the love that belongs only to heroes & saints”. Republican men, therefore, exhibited a masculinity signified by traits associated with the realm of the heroic and the epic. Soldiers and officials of the Irish Free State, according to her interpretation of the Civil War split, by contrast with the republican male, were guilty of moral failure, in their willingness to sanction violence against republican women but also by acting in a similarly repressive manner as the British had previously acted against the Irish. The ordinary soldiery of the Irish Free State army took “refuge” in “debauchery”, Macardle wrote, as the “only stimulus to such work as they had to do”. The “degradation that followed” was the work of “drink-sodden irresponsible men”.⁴⁴ Their republican victims in Tragedies of Kerry are all “upright” with an innate honourability. Jeremiah Donoghue who was killed with three other members of the IRA on the Countess’s Bridge in Killarney on 7 March 1923 was a young man with a “wild honesty” who believed that the enemy “should be defied outright, in the open – you should stand in his path and challenge him”.⁴⁵

In The Irish Republic Macardle described Childers as a man of “the rarest qualities”, all traits of heroic masculinity as she constructed it. He was: “a fighter without bitterness, an idealist without rancour, his keen feelings governed by reason and intellect; magnanimous, gentle and of absolute integrity”.⁴⁶ Macardle’s grief on hearing of Childers’s execution was palpable:

They have killed him – put him out of Ireland, out of life – that dear, loving, grateful, brilliant, heroic man. They have done a hideous, unutterable, never-to-be forgiven thing. Erskine Childers was good – good […] & splendid to the heights & depths of his spirit. He gave & won the love that belongs only to heroes & saints. Every moment of my memory of him is splendid with the worth of his work, & his fearlessness, happy with his quick, impetuous praise. He was selfless in his devotion to Ireland as a women might be in love.⁴⁷

Recollecting the attack by Irish Free State soldiers on the republican troops in the Four Courts which began on 28 June 1922 Macardle recollected that she “struggled out of the stupefaction of dismay clinging to the thought of the one man who would make known the truth”. She depicted Childers, when she called to his house in Rathgar, as looking “with that smile that was always the lifting of a cloud”.⁴⁸ Macardle contrasted Childers with the “corrupt and evil men” who decreed his death. And this contrast runs through the jail journal and her histories of the revolutionary period. Those who serve as officials within the Irish Free State prisons are, by contrast with the loftiness of Childers, spineless. The prison doctor in Mountjoy is described as one who is:

Afraid to be human – afraid to be concerned, & kind as a doctor talking to his patient would naturally be, he forces himself to keep an air of indifference […] He is afraid of his Government, afraid for his position […] what a vile, craven, slavery of the soul! ⁴⁹

The doctor displays the traits of a non-functional masculinity. By contrast on reading Principles of Freedom by Terence MacSwiney Macardle declared it “a joy […] the intensity, the heroic […] the purity of this man’s flame”.⁵⁰ MacSwiney’s nobility was manifest in his respect for his enemies. In her journal Macardle recounted a conversation she had with Annie MacSwiney when the latter was imprisoned in Kilmainham in February 1922. She told Macardle how during her brother’s last days on hunger strike in Brixton in October 1920 the doctor had tried to encourage him to take something to alleviate his suffering. When he refused:

The doctor put his face close to the sufferer’s and said fiercely […] “But you’re not going to die in peace! You’re going to die in pain”. Terry smiled, she said, & opened his hand & said, “you, as a doctor, have done your best – I want to thank you, before it comes”.

That is, I imagine to be a saint.⁵¹

In her capacity as a journalist Macardle travelled with de Valera on his post-release tour of Munster beginning in Ennis in August 1924, the site of his 1923 arrest. With suitable hyperbole, she described his arrival into the town: “as the President of the Irish Republic drew near to Ennis a great, luminous moon […] hung in the air, spanning the road before him like a triumphal arch”. Accompanying de Valera on this tour was uplifting work and in her newspaper accounts she sought to transmit a sense of republican fortunes on the upturn; this was propaganda after all. De Valera was presented as a mythic hero who has returned to deliver Ireland from bondage. At every rail station they passed, she wrote, “it was the same – the crowd hushed, waiting people, – the cry when de Valera appeared”. In Cork people were:

leaning from windows; at every turn of the winding streets a great burst of cheering welcomes the President’s car […] “We have him again!” old men are saying in tremulous voices […] A young man suddenly flings out his arms and cries “We’re winning! We’re winning!” like one awakening from a nightmare at dawn. The prediction that Cork “was no longer a rebel city”; that “it had grown […] acquiescent” proved unfounded. Along the streets an army is marching – an army of men four abreast, and an army of women; a fife and drum band, in green kilts and saffron, fills the night with the tune of the “The Soldiers Song”; the people – un-countable multitudes, moving in a dark mass, on either side.⁵²

Beatty discusses the “creation of a specifically masculine sense of Irish historical-national time”.⁵³ Macardle’s propagandist writing must be situated within this framework. Erskine Childers’s death was, she wrote, “a death as splendid and fruitful for Ireland as Emmet’s or Connolly’s”.⁵⁴ When she describes Eugene Fitzgerald’s death at the hands of Free State soldiers in Tragedies of Kerry she wrote how he was taken to Casement Fort in Rahoneen, Ardfert, “the field where Casement was taken in nineteen-sixteen. The thought of Casement, who died for Ireland, was in his mind”.⁵⁵ Michael Sinnott of Tralee was “the grandson of a Fenian” while Jim O’Connor “was one of the hunger strikers in Cork jail at the time of Terence MacSwiney’s death”.⁵⁶ Macardle describes de Valera in his triumphant visit to Cork 1924 as someone who is welcomed “as Emmet might be if he came to Young Ireland from the dead”. The graves of Terence MacSwiney, Tomás MacCurtain and Denis Barry are “three mounds such as the old warriors raised for their dead”.⁵⁷ Dublin by contrast is enfeebled; lacking virility it is a “widowed city”, at the “command of the Free State government” who have, amongst other crimes, “rid the Empire, by murder and execution, of dangerous enemies – heroic and defiant Irishmen”.⁵⁸

Violence against republican women

On 16 April 1923, the Leix-Offaly TD, Dr Patrick McCartan, wrote to Cosgrave pleading with him to be magnanimous even in defiance of the cabinet and the army. McCartan referred to the manner in which the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell by the Germans “did not work to further the German cause”. While Cavell’s offence – harbouring Allied soldiers in German-occupied Belgium – was, McCartan wrote, a “real crime”, the transgression of the women on hunger-strike “is only trivial when compared with Nurse Cavils [sic]”: “You are President and be President Don’t [sic] make war on women. You can save them”.⁵⁹ In reply to McCartan, Cosgrave declared that the former’s “stock is at a discount” due to his earlier intervention on behalf of a “delicate” woman who turned out to be a “dangerous person”. Cosgrave continued that it was “not possible to consider these women as ordinary females”.⁶⁰ In this letter Cosgrave betrayed certain essentialist thinking about women, to be delicate was a woman’s normative state and allowed for male or governmental intervention on her behalf. Not to be delicate, but instead to be dangerous, transported women beyond their sex – they became no “ordinary females”. Cosgrave repeatedly considered such women deviant. Of progress in defeating the republican side in the Civil War he declared in his review in 1922 that it was anti-Treaty women – whom he described as “Die-hards” – not men who had “created a position of much trouble and difficulty – the difficulty of Bedlam out of bounds”.⁶¹ Cosgrave was indicted by republicans for the manner in which he refused to accord women the courtesy and respect that their gender entitled them to; in that way his political ignominy was laid bare. On both sides of the Treaty split male behaviour towards women was often seen as a signifier of the integrity or otherwise of their political stance. Macardle’s political narrative should be placed in that context. Gallantry towards women, Louise Ryan states, was amongst “the characteristics self-ascribed to Irish republican masculinity”.⁶²

In The Irish Republic, Childers was portrayed as having that chivalry towards women that, for Macardle, was inherent in republican males. She recounted how during his capture by pro-Treaty soldiers on 10 November 1922 he did not fire the weapon “with which he had intended to defend himself; he was prevented from firing by the presence of women whose lives would have been endangered by a fight”.⁶³ A refusal to violate the domestic sphere of the home or to engage in violence in the presence of women marked Childers out as different to the Irish Free State soldiers portrayed in Tragedies of Kerry and in her other writings. In Macardle’s short story “The Curlew’s Cry” Mary Gilligan is alone, her two brothers are fighting for the republican cause. Her father and her crippled brother had been taken in during a raid. When Niell O’Lochlawn arrives, looking for a safe house, he is immediately filled with “compassion”. Mary feels “no uneasiness” around Niell as she looks to his needs: “if he had been her own brother returned she would not have shown a more serene, happy countenance in sheltering him”. However, experiencing a portent of future danger, Mary becomes agitated and worried for Niell’s safety. Crucially, Niell, as a republican with the correct moral compass, will not consider leaving her.

Her voice was wild and broken, her eyes staring; she was shaking from head to foot; it was dreadful to see her like that. He spoke firmly: ‘I can’t leave you like this.’

Mary understood. She knew that so long as she seemed unnerved and shaken he would not go and she knew that he must go or die. ⁶⁴

In Macardle’s account of the Civil War in Kerry, she recounted the murder of republican Bertie Murphy, a 17-year-old killed in September 1922. Eluding the Free State army for four months after the outbreak of the Civil War, he was finally captured and threatened with being shot “at his mother’s door”.⁶⁵ Bob McCarthy of Monaree was “sitting in a friend’s house with a child on each knee” when Free State soldiers “rushed in and struck him on the head with a revolver”.⁶⁶ Like these, so many of the incidents she recounts in that text highlight the manner in which the Irish Free State soldiers transgressed the norms of civilised society – a signifier of this for Macardle was the overturning of the female space of the home and violence in the presence of women. The trope of the woman as observer and testifier to the violence and brutality of the Free State soldiers run through the book, even to the point of the inclusion of certain photographs that focus on maternal loss or the domestic space of the home.⁶⁷ Female family members of republican men are represented in the text as “trembling” and white-faced with fear following gratuitous violence by men who have failed to observe proper codes of conduct in warfare.⁶⁸

The manner in which those who accepted the Treaty and worked for the Irish Free State displayed traits of emasculation and degeneracy was particularly manifest in Macardle’s writings when she turned her attention to the treatment of republican women in the Civil War jails. At various points during the period of her imprisonment there were hunger strikes and other forms of protest against unsanitary conditions, overcrowding and lack of parcels and letters. In November 1922, the female inmates of Mountjoy refused to clean their cells or carry food and staged a form of passive strike: “Our policy is to go without the food until we are reduced one after another to lying in bed”. The thinking was that the doctor and nurse would be required to attend and bring them their meals in bed. Some women escalated the protest by staying out of their cells after five pm, the dedicated lock-up time. The response was male violence against the women: “‘a hideous scrimmage’ soldiers with girls in their arms, girls clinging to railings & door handles […] girls being flung into cells”.⁶⁹ During Annie MacSwiney’s hunger strike, outside the walls of Mountjoy in November 1922, in protest at not been allowed entry to see her hunger striking sister, Mary, Macardle referred to the soldiers attacking her “like savages”.⁷⁰ Again, the inference is that this is a type of irrational violence and thereby unmanly.

Released from jail in early May 1923 Macardle focused her attention for the remainder of that year in writing of the brutality women experienced in the Civil War jails. These were highly partisan accounts published in republican propaganda sheets such as Éire. She wrote a series of articles detailing low-level violence and intimidation that were constants in female prison life as well as outlining the full-scale aggression that broke out at intervals. Violence against female Civil War prisoners escalated during the removal of female inmates to the North Dublin Union at the end of April and early May 1923. The brutality and disloyalty of the Free State officials were reflected in her discussion of the violence that ensued. Attacking unarmed women, she argued, was not the “courage that reveals itself in the face of a well-armed adversary”.⁷¹

Macardle’s descriptions of the aggression meted out to the women and the general ill-treatment they received was intended to reflect on the degenerate and spineless men who populated the ranks of Irish Free State officialdom. When Mr Begley informed the women in Kilmainham in May 1923 that the governor of the jail declared that force would be used to remove inmates to the North Dublin Union if necessary he was asked “whether woman-beating was a soldier’s work”. He replied, according to Macardle: “I don’t mind that; I have beaten my wife”. His comments on the legitimacy of gendered violence, Macardle wrote, “suggested malice” against Mary MacSwiney, still on hunger strike, that, “for all we knew, might intend her death”. Begley’s designation as a soldier by Macardle is important in this context. He was a soldier of the Irish Free State and consequently, according to her interpretation of the Civil War split, was guilty of moral failure on a number of intersecting levels. His insouciant attitude towards violence against women was a signifier of a debased masculinity.⁷² Resisting removal to the North Dublin Union while Mary MacSwiney was still on hunger strike, women were held down by male prison officials and soldiers, beaten with “clenched fists”; they were “kicked”, “bitten” and “struck on the mouth”. Meanwhile, “the prison doctor looked on smiling, smoking a cigarette, he seemed to have come for entertainment; he did nothing for the injured girls”. Women were “frightened or overcome” while “many were half fainting”.⁷³ Under the ideology of separate spheres men were expected to provide for and care for women. Despite the brutality of patriarchy expressed in the reality of economic inequality and sexual and behavioural double standards, the public mask of the gendered society was assembled and constructed through the language of chivalry and male care of the “fairer” and “weaker” sex. Failure to behave accordingly rendered the pro-Treaty man transgressive and morally impoverished. By focusing on weak, fainting woman, Macardle underscored the manner in which the Irish Free State soldier and official had deviated from the chivalrous attitude towards women that formed a large part in her construction of an essentialist republican masculinity.

The doctor in the North Dublin Union leant over Albina Broderick “smoking in her face and when she protested he replied ‘I’ll smoke when I like’”. The doctor’s attitude was “so offensive” that the prisoners refused to see him again despite the litany of illness and injuries amongst them. One of the wards had ground flower windows through which four “soldiers jumped […] on to one girl’s bed, frightening her very much”.⁷⁴ An anonymous article in the republican Daily Sheet indicted the Free State prison doctors in a similar manner to Macardle:

the elements of the profession that has been absorbed as officials by the Free State have debased their calling. […] To such an extent have they stooped that for years to come the very name of the Free State Medical Service will stink in the nostrils of mankind.⁷⁵

In her writings on the revolutionary period Macardle, a skilled political propagandist, was concerned to lay bare what she saw as the crimes of the Irish Free State. The soldier who shot and wounded Máire Comerford in Mountjoy Jail during the Civil War⁷⁶ was an unmanly traitor to the Republic. In 1924 Macardle wrote to Joseph McGarrity:

Do you remember my friend Annie Moore? She was brought to Mountjoy just before Christmas ’22, and told us that seven men including her brother Brian, and the man she was to marry, Paddy Nolan, had been taken at the same time. She was terribly anxious about them all. A few days later we saw in the paper that they had been executed – all the seven, and we had to tell Annie. I used to think she would die of grief. It was awful. She was ill all the time and they kept her in eleven months. I dare say you remember her in the North Dublin Union. She was about twenty days on hunger strike in November and then released.⁷⁷

The Daily Sheet declared in November 1923 that “warrior and maid are needed as victims before the Free State appetite for Irish blood is sated”.⁷⁸ For Macardle, Annie Moore’s protracted ordeal was the result of the political failure that was acceptance of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The inference was that no woman would have suffered, as Moore did, in a virile state under the leadership of republican men.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Beatty, Masculinity and Power, 4.

2. Weihman, “Doing My Bit for Ireland,” 241–2.

3. For an insightful discussion of the values, culture and politics of the rising Catholic middle classes see Pašeta, Before the Revolution.

4. Alexandra College, a Protestant-run school, was designed on its foundation in 1866 to provide a more academic second-level education to girls. The passage of the 1879 Act that established the Royal University as an examining body resulted in Alexandra College offering classes to facilitate female students to sit third-level exams. The ethos of the college was “British – well Anglo-British to the core”. Manning, “The Schoolgirls of Alexandra”.

5. Smith, Dorothy Macardle, 29.

6. Dorothy Macardle, BMH WS 457.

7. Alexandra College Magazine, vol. 11, 1950–1960.

8. Macardle, Jail Journal (hereafter JJ) handwritten section entitled “To the citizens of the Republic”.

9. Report on lecture entitled “Ireland in America” delivered by Mary MacSwiney at the Cork Opera House, 16 October 1921, Cork Examiner, October 17, 1921.

10. Macardle, JJ, December 1, 1922.

11. Macardle, JJ, December 2, 1922.

12. Macardle, JJ, November 28, 1922.

13. Macardle, JJ, December 13, 1922.

14. Macardle, JJ, December 4, 1922.

15. O’Halpin, “Historical Revisit,” 390.

16. See Lane, Dorothy Macardle.

17. Beatty, Masculinity and Power, 22.

18. Macardle, “By God’s Mercy” in Macardle, Earth-Bound, 84.

19. Macardle, JJ, February 1922.

20. Macardle, “This Losing Day,” Éire, June 9, 1923.

21. Macardle, JJ, December 4, 1922.

22. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 30; Macardle, JJ, December 4, 1922.

23. Hopkinson, Green Against Green, 189.

24. Kissane, The Politics of the Irish Civil War, 87.

25. Macardle, JJ, December 13, 1922.

26. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 48. See also Macardle, The Irish Republic, 693, 730, for her contention that Republicans released those they captured.

27. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 44–5.

28. Macardle, JJ, December 15, 1922.

29. Beatty, Masculinity and Power, 42. Beatty is referring to similar accusations of irrational behaviour levelled at the anti-Treaty side.

30. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 32, 17.

31. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 26.

32. Beatty, Masculinity and Power, 11.

33. See note 25 above.

34. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, xii.

35. Dolan, Commemorating the Civil War, 167.

36. O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, 36–7.

37. Macardle, JJ, February 9, 1922.

38. Macardle, JJ, February 7, 1923.

39. Hopkinson, Green Against Green, 134.

40. Kissane, The Politics of the Irish Civil War, 113.

41. See note 10 above.

42. Ibid.

43. Macardle, JJ, February 9, 1923.

44. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, x.

45. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 27.

46. Macardle, The Irish Republic, 743.

47. Macardle, JJ, November 24, 1922.

48. Macardle, “A Year Ago,” Éire, July 14, 1923.

49. Macardle, JJ, November 1922.

50. Macardle, JJ, February 1923.

51. Ibid.

52. Macardle, “The Rising of the Moon – to Ennis with the President,” Éire, August 23, 1924.

53. Beatty, Masculinity and Power, 21.

54. Macardle, JJ, February 22, 1923.

55. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 19.

56. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 20.

57. Macardle, “In Rebel Cork”, Sinn Féin, September 20, 1924.

58. Macardle, “The Rising of the Moon”.

59. Letter from P. McCartan to William Cosgrave, 16 April 1923, Department of the Taoiseach Files, S 1369/3 “Civil War Prisoners, 1922: Prison Treatment”.

60. Letter from William Cosgrave to P. McCartan, no date, Department of the Taoiseach Files, S 1369/3 “Civil War Prisoners, 1922: Prison Treatment”. Cosgrave does not clarify who the “delicate” woman was.

61. Irish Times, January 1, 1923.

62. Ryan, “In the Line of Fire”, 54.

63. Macardle, The Irish Republic, 740.

64. Macardle, “The Curlew’s Cry”; Macardle, Earth-Bound and Other Supernatural Tales, 98, 100.

65. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 13–4.

66. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 67.

67. See Lane, Dorothy Macardle, 123–134.

68. Macardle, Tragedies of Kerry, 21.

69. Macardle, JJ, November 30, 1922.

70. Macardle, JJ, November 27, 1922.

71. “Another Statement by a Woman Prisoner on Kilmainham and North Dublin Union Brutalities,” Éire, June 2, 1923.

72. Macardle, “Farewell to Kilmainham”.

73. Ibid.

74. Macardle, “Hospital Conditions in the Military Prison North Dublin Union”.

75. Daily Sheet, October 31, 1923.

76. Macardle, The Irish Republic, 764.

77. Letter from Dorothy Macardle to Joseph McGarrity, June 8, 1924, Ms 17,528/4, Joseph McGarrity Papers, National Library of Ireland.

78. Daily Sheet, November 22, 1923.