There has been a long history of Irish suffering at the hands of the English. During “Great Suffering,” Irish men fought and died, and Irish women suffered and cried. I would like to concentrate this paper on the women of Ireland. They not only had to contend with the British colonization and occupation of Ireland, but they were also subject to patriarchal control by Irish men. As Dr. Kennedy questions, “Was the colonizing mentality transferred to the domestic household?” (Kennedy, Professor). I believe the answer is yes. This paper will demonstrate how the “private parts/lives are policed, monitored, militarized and taken over by the state” (Kennedy, Professor) through essays, articles and poetry. The period this paper will focus on is the 17th century until the establishment of the Irish Republic in 1922. It will lightly touch on the period of 1169 to the 17th century. It will highlight the systems of oppression, domination or discrimination used against the women of Ireland.
Before England invaded Ireland it was the Romans, before them, the Vikings and Normans. Before these invading forces, women were held in the same high regard as men. They were property owners; they enjoyed the same benefits as the men when they engaged in “trial marriages,” and they were leaders.
According to Jo Fox in her article, “Women of the Celts in Myth, Legend and Story”: Celtic women then achieved high positions in society and a standing which their sisters in the majority of other contemporary European societies did not have. They were able to govern; they played an active part in political; social and religious life. They could be warriors, doctors, physicians, judges and poets. They could own property and remain the owner even when married. They had sexual freedom, were free to choose their partners and divorce, and could claim damages if molested. Celtic women could, and often did, lead their men into battle. The Roman Deodorizes Sickles observed – ‘The women of the Celts are nearly as tall as the men and they rival them also in courage.’ Yet another report by Amicus Marcelling states – ‘A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Celt if he called his wife to his assistance.’ (Fox)
When Christianity invaded Ireland, it was another sinister form of subjugation of Irish women. Ojibwa’s article, “Irish History: Marriage Under Brehon Law” states that: In the fifth century, Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland and with-it Roman law whose patriarchal orientation was in conflict with the matriarchal orientation of Irish aboriginal society. (Ojibwa)
Let us define a “matriarchal” society: Matriarchal is not the exact opposite of patriarchal. In a patriarchal society, women are repressed and are not allowed simple freedoms that we take for granted today… In a Matriarchal society, women have power, but so do men, there’s no repressing of the other therefore making it an egalitarian, or equal, society. (Love of the Goddess)
To further illustrate how the British (Catholic, then Protestant) changed the role of women in Ireland consider what Anne Chambers writes in her book Ireland’s Pirate Queen: The True Story of Grace O’Malley, Gradually but insidiously the role of women was confined to childbearing, engaging in charitable deeds, for which they were occasionally lauded in the Irish annals, and being subservient to their husbands. (Chambers)
The pre-Christian Irish recognized ten different types of marriage: In Gaelic-Irish law (Brehon law) all of these forms of marriage were formal contracts which varied with regard to the status of the persons involved and, in the contribution, both parties brought into the marriage. Irish women continued to be full partners with their men, both at home and at war. Under Brehon law, women were equal to men when it came to matters of property. (Ojibwa)
Brehon Law is: Prior to English rule, Ireland had its own indigenous system of law dating from Celtic times, which survived until the 17th century when it was finally supplanted by the English common law. This native system of law, known as the Brehon law, developed from customs which had been passed on orally from one generation to the next. In the 7th century AD, the laws were written down for the first time. Brehon law was administered by Brehons (or Brithem). They were the successors to Celtic druids and while similar to judges; their role was closer to that of an arbitrator. Their task was to preserve and interpret the law rather than to expand it. (Court Service Ireland)
After the Normans invaded England in 1066, they invaded Ireland in 1169. Thus began the end for Irish independence and the beginning of English rule until 1922. Even after 1922 Irish women were brutalized by the newly formed government; one such example of this was the Catholic workhouses that had the “Magdalene Sister slaves.” There were as many as 10,000 of these girls that were sent to the laundries between 1922 and 1996.
According to the Daily Mail: Women who had their childhoods ‘stolen away’, locked up in Catholic-run workhouses received a qualified apology from the Irish government yesterday. Over a period of 70 years, an estimated 10,000 were sent to the ‘Magdalene laundries’ to carry out unpaid manual labour under the supervision of nuns. Some were sent because they were the children of unmarried mothers, others for crimes as minor as not paying a train ticket. Incredibly the last of the ten laundries, which washed clothes and linen for major hotel groups, the Irish armed forces and even the brewer Guinness, was in operation until 1996. (Gladdis)
So, how did Irish women go from: enjoying status, rights, and equality to becoming mere chattel to be sold into slavery? It was due, in part, to the battles and conquests of Irish lands that began with the Earl of Pembroke, Richard Fitz Gilbert de Clare (better known as Strongbow). From 1169 – 1536 Ireland was under the control of Norman Lords and English Kings. During this time the Irish were pushed away from the fertile areas and were forced to eke out a subsistence living on marginal lands, which left them with no safety net during bad harvest years (such as 1271 and 1277) or in a year of famine (virtually the entire period of 1311–1319). The famines were one step in the designed genocide of the Irish.
At one time, America was no friend to the Irish as it is now. Rhetta Akamatsu brings to light a dark chapter in American history that most do not realize ever occurred. Maybe the reason we keep the subject of Irish slavery under wraps is threefold. The first reason, as Akamatsu points out in her book, Slavery, Indenture and Contract labor Among Irish Immigrants, is the fact that Christians were perpetrating this horror on other Christians. Secondly, because the Irish slaves were ill-suited for the labor and heat of the American south, the African slavery trade gained momentum. And thirdly, it would make us look at the racist idea of slavery, as it came to be in America, even though the Irish slave was considered less valuable than the African slave. As proof of this practice, I would like to add this from her book:
The government of England negotiated deals with ships‘ captains to carry the captives, in which the prisoners were to be sold upon delivery and the captain was to make a good profit from their sale, and return some of the money to the Crown, as in this letter from a slightly later date preserved by the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, with the original spelling: Liverpool, England to Yorktown, Virginia 14 January 1716 Virginia
By his Majestys' Lieutenant Governor & Commander in Cheif of this Dominion These are to certify that the above Lift of one hundred & Twelve Rebel Prisoners, Imported into this Colony in the Ship Elizabeth & Ann, of Liverpool, Edward Trafford Master, was taken (by my order) upon the arrival of the faid Ship in York River by the officer of the Customs there, and contains the Names of all the Prifoners Imported in the sd ship & that besides the said one hundres & twelve persons, the Mafter did Report that one other Prisoner by name Duncan Mackfale died at sea, which upon Examination of the other Prisoners apeared to be true Given under my hand at Williamsburgh this Given under my hand at Williamsburgh. (Akamatsu)
America was no friend to not only the native women, but the Irish women forced onto its shores. Andrea Smith points out in her article, "Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples" by quoting Tadiar, “subjugation of women of the Native nations as critical to the success of the economic, cultural, and political colonization” (Smith 74). Smith breaks it down for us in her statement of, “Native women as bearers of a counter-imperial order pose a supreme threat to imperial order” (Smith 74).
Akamatsu illustrates the brutal treatment of the Irish. In the book, The Reconquest of Ireland, James Connelly describes another business arrangement between the British government and a private company to supply servants to New England: Captain John Vernon was employed by the Commissioners for Ireland to England, and contracted in their behalf with Mr. David Sellick and the Leader under his hand to supply them with two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation, above twelve years and under the age of forty-five, also three hundred men above twelve years and under fifty, to be found in the country within twenty miles of Cork, Youghal and Kinsale, Waterford and Wexford, to transport them into New England. This British firm alone was responsible for shipping over 6,400 girls and boys. (Akamatsu)
I think Akamatsu and Connelly add much to the historiographical frame of this disturbing issue: Irish slavery. Most know about the indentured Irish immigrants, serving seven to twenty years to pay for their passage, but that was another chapter of abuse borne on the backs of poor, usually Irish, Catholic men and women. They identify the major contributors on the topic of the Irish Slave trade and establishes the connections between the Irish and African slave trades.
Akamatsu exposes the hypocrisy of the Christian church, the racism of the American, Spanish, English, and Scottish governments, and the long-lasting effects that the Irish are still suffering from with their identity as members of the above-mentioned societies. Akamatsu’s book presents a colonial theory, while the type of history she encompasses are those of political, social, cultural, and economic. Rhetta holds no punches with her opening: At the beginning of the 17th Century, in the reign of James I of England, England faced a problem: what to do with the Irish. They had been practicing genocide against the Irish since the reign of Elizabeth, but they couldn't kill them all. Some had been banished, and some had gone into voluntary exile, but there were still just too many of them. (Akamatsu)
Another informative passage in Akamatsu’s book is: In 1625, the King issued a proclamation that all Irish political prisoners were to be transported to the West Indies and sold as slave labor to the planters there. At that time, he sold 30,000 Irish slaves to the New World. By the mid 1600's, most of the slaves in Montserrat and Antigua were Irish. In 1637, a census showed that 69% of the inhabitants of Monsarrat in the West Indies were Irish slaves. The Irish had a tendency to die in the heat and were not as well suited to the work as African slaves, but
African slaves had to be bought. Irish slaves could be kidnapped if there weren't enough prisoners or former inhabitants of workhouses, and of course, it was easy enough to make Irish prisoners by manufacturing some petty crime or other. This made the Irish the preferred "livestock" for English slave traders for 200 years. A document known as The Edgarton Manuscript, in the British Museum, which dates from 1652, stated: It may be lawful for two or more justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant… in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation. To be vagrant, all a person had to do was to be outside his or her home. Children, especially, were prone to be "vagrant" if they wandered too far in their play. In 1655, according to an article in Catholic World, Volume 8, which was published in 1869 by the Paulist Fathers, all of the Irish in the town of Lackagh in the county of Kildare were seized. There were 41 citizens; 4 were hanged and the rest were transported to be sold as slaves, including two priests. In the 1650's, England captured Jamaica from the Spanish, and suddenly had a huge island to populate and make profitable. At first, the plan was to take some of the Irish slaves from Barbados and offer them freedom and 30 acres of land to work if they would stay there. But the planters in Barbados did not like that plan at all. They complained about not having enough slaves to work the sugar plantations as it was. Some of them did take their slaves and move to Jamaica, where they were given land. But there were still not enough workers. So then Cromwell fell back on his usual strategy and sent his "man-catchers" to round up some more Irish to transport. In 1656, Cromwell's Council of State ordered 1000 Irish girls and 1000 Irish boys to be rounded up and transported to Jamaica and sold as slaves to the English planters there. This is one of the few official records of slave activity, as most was unrecorded. Henry Cromwell wrote to an official in Jamaica, ‘Though we must use force in taking them up...it is not in the least doubtful that you may have as many of them as you see fit.’ (Akamatsu)
Throughout this book, Akamatsu defenses her assertion that the Irish were, indeed, slaves. She shows the different countries’ involvement in the Irish slave trade, their profit from it, and their racist views toward the Irish. Her writing sheds light on why the African slave trade became more profitable, even though the cost of an African slave was ten times more expensive, and she helps explain what would be an ongoing prejudice against the catholic Irish here in America, right up to the smears suffered about Kennedy’s Irish, Catholic heritage. In To Hell or Barbados the ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Sean O'Callaghan, he writes: Between 1652 and 1659 over 50,000 Irish men, women and children were transported from Ireland to the West Indies, and to Virginia in the U.S. While much has been written of the coffin ships that ferried their human cargo to America and Canada very little is recorded or known of those who were shipped to the West Indies. As with other such schemes the reason for their deportation was made clear by King James 1 of England: 'Root out the Papists and fill it [Ireland] with Protestants' he declared. (O'Callaghan)
In Kate McCafferty’s book, Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl, she writes in her preface:
Between the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603) and the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 Irish men, women, and children were shipped to Barbados as indentured servants. Under Elizabeth, the British Empire expanded its labor market through a statute which called for the conscription of “tinkers, jugglers, peddlers, wanderers, idle laborers, loiterers, beggars, and such as could not give a good account of themselves.” 1 After the Battle of Drogheda in 1649, The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, stepped up the forced indenture of Irish political foes to the Crown, Roman Catholic priests, peasants whose farms had been appropriated as plantations and war spoils, and the unemployed or “dissolute” of the towns. During the 1650s, Peter Stubber, Governor of Galway, held as ‘usual practice . . . to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies.’ In 1656, Lord Henry Cromwell, when requested to send ‘1,000 Irish Wenches,” responded that “while we must use force in taking them up . . . you may have such a number of them as you shall think fit to make use upon this account,’ and added that 1,500 to 2,000 Irish boys aged twelve to fourteen could also be captured and sent. (McCafferty)
There is still hope. The social constructs used to oppress the women of Ireland are still somewhat in place, such as abortion rights being outlawed. There is evidence of Irish women; who have gone from “voicelessness” and powerlessness of the poor, usually Catholic, Irish, being sold to countries by the king of England, including here in America, the West Indies and Barbados; to finding their voice and power through literature, especially poetry.
The strides in gaining a political voice as a device for gaining “voice,” as well as the emergence of women poets into the Irish political poetry community, not as “object,” but as “subject” (Boland, Writing the political poem in Ireland). And the reviewer Castor says, “Boland argues that in the past twenty years, Irish women have
advanced from being anonymous mute witnesses in the belly of a male-created “mother” Ireland to being authors of literature” (Castro).
Castro also says of this woman poet: As she squarely confronts the reader with everyday acts, you don't have to be Irish to understand that her messages point toward a future morality a long way off- one in which gender or other classifications do not diminish, essentialize or reduce, one in which our humanity toward one another is evenhanded. (Castro) We have hope for a bright future. The poet may be the one to bring attention to Ireland’s plights and progress. We must remember what Mr. O'Driscoll writes” … In Ireland, where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion were poets, where Yeats's picture appears on the twenty-pound note, where the mayor of Galway is a poet” (O'Driscoll).
Side note: The current President of Ireland is also a poet, Michael D Higgins, whom I have had the honor of reading with while I was there in Ireland! I would like to close with a poem by Eavan Boland, “A Woman Without A Country,” in which she shows us we still have far to go. As dawn breaks he enters
A room with the odor of acid.
He lays the copper plate on the table.
And reaches for the shaft of the burin.
Dublin wakes to horses and rain.
Street hawkers call.
All the news is famine and famine.
The flat graver, the round graver,
The angle tint tool wait for him.
He bends to his work and begins.
He starts with the head, cutting in
To the line of the cheek, finding
The slope of the skull, incising
The shape of a face that becomes
A foundry of shadows, rendering —
With a deeper cut into copper —
The whole woman as a skeleton,
The rags of her skirt, her wrist
In a bony line forever
severing
Her body from its native air until
She is ready for the page,
For the street vendor, for
A new inventory which now
To loss and to laissez-faire adds
The odor of acid and the little,
Pitiless tragedy of being imagined.
He puts his tools away,
One by one; lays them out carefully
On the deal table, his work done.
Works Cited
Akamatsu, Rhetta. The Irish Slaves. Kindle Edition, 2010. Print.
Boland, E. "A Woman Without A Country." Poetry, 2013. Print. —. "Writing the political poem in Ireland." Southern Review 1995, 485-499. Print.
Castro, J. " Mad Ireland Hurts Her Too." The Nation 1994: 791-801. Print.
Chambers, Anne. Ireland’s Pirate Queen: The True Story of Grace O’Malley. MJF Books, 2007. Print.
Court Service Ireland. 22 April 2015. Electronic. 23 April 2015.
Fox, Jo. Women of the Celts in Myth, Legend and Story. 8 June 1996. Electronic. 25 April 2015.
Gladdis, Keith. DailyMail.com. 5 February 2013. Electronic. 25 April 2015.
Kennedy, R. "Professor." HMS 814/PPS 812: Gender, Sexuality and Public Policy. 2015. —. "Professor." PPS 812: Gender, Sexuality and Public Policy. 2015.
Love of the Goddess. 18 February 2012. Electronic. 26 April 2015.
McCafferty, Kate. Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl. New York, New York: McCafferty, Kate (2003-01-28). Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (Kindle Locations 25-31). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2003. Print.
O'Callaghan, Sean. To Hell or Barbados the ethnic cleansing of Ireland by Sean O'Callaghan. Dublin: Brandon, 2013. Print.
O'Driscoll, D. " Troubled thoughts: Poetry politics in contemporary Ireland." Southern Review 1995: O'Driscoll, D. (1995). Troubled thoughts: Poetry politics in contemporary Ireland. Southern Review, 639-655. Print.
Ojibwa. Irish History: Marriage Under Brehon Law. May 5 2014. Electronic. 23 April 2015.
Smith, A. "Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples." Hypatia 2003: 70-85. Print.