The women the Revolution forgot
It was bad enough that their husbands had sacrificed their lives for Irish freedom but then the widows of the Rising leaders were forced into poverty and hardship
AS A nation, we’re all too familiar with the Easter Rising and the 16 Irish leaders who were executed in its wake. Indeed, many of us know the names of each of these men, who died for Ireland, by heart, such is their pride of place in our annals of history.
They gave their lives — the ultimate sacrifice — for an independent Ireland.
But as it turns out, there are worse things in life than death. What is rarely explored is the aftermath of the revolution from another perspective — that of the women and children left behind, who battled on to live for Ireland in the shadows of these men.
Seven of the Irish revolutionaries left behind wives and children, whose stories have been sidelined or airbrushed over the years.
Now, for the first time — on national TV anyway — a fascinating new documentary is finally giving them a voice.
Forgotten: The Widows of the Irish Revolution, produced by Ciara Hyland, tells the stories of these hidden heroines. Neglected, side-lined, left in the shadows of their dead husbands, Lillie Connolly, Kathleen Clarke, Maud Gonne MacBride, Áine Ceannt, Agnes Mallin, Grace Plunkett and Muriel MacDonagh had to fight on for Ireland, in a time when being female alone was difficult enough.
‘These women were from a variety of backgrounds, classes, ideology and education, spanning the breadth of Irish society at the time,’ says historian Lindsey Earner-Byrne, who authored and presents the documentary. ‘Yet they all have several things in common. They all lived through the hell of Easter week, became widows at the same time and were left to pick up the pieces in a rapidly changing and fundamentally uncertain political environment.’
The early years of the Irish Free State were not easy for anyone, but particularly for the poor and vulnerable. It was certainly not an easy place to be a widow: there was no widow’s allowance until 1935, no childcare facilities and no automatic right to a husband’s pension, property or the family home upon bereavement.
‘You were left literally living on the mercies of wider family, charity and very limited, shrinking State services who could quite easily decide that your children should be institutionalised,’ says Lindsey. ‘The widows of 1916 and their children were no exception. All of them, with the exception of Grace Plunkett, had young children to feed and only Maud Gonne had any independent wealth.’
These women faced poverty, miscarriages, humiliation, imprisonment and further tragedy, yet through it all they had to keep their families together and food on the table. At the same time, they faced the enormous task of being at the forefront of the revolution their executed husbands had started and carried the burden of their dead husbands’ legacies.
The family of Lillie Connolly, wife of James, for example, was left destitute. And Aine Ceannt’s feepaying school had been ransacked and destroyed following her husband Eamonn’s execution.
Widows had little access to the workplace and had to rely on charity or workhouses where families were separated from each other and conditions were often grim.
An initial charity drive to provide for the widows and prisoners of the revolutionaries would become the National Aid and Volunteers Independent Fund, and the cornerstone of Sinn Féin.
It became so successful that despite their intense grief, the widows were front and centre of the propaganda, with their stories exploited to aid the nationalist movement.
There was huge international interest in the widows’ tragic tales, in particular that of the romance of Grace Clifford, who married Joseph Plunkett in a rushed ceremony in Kilmainham Jail, hours before he was executed. She never saw him again.
However, when an Irish/American journalist came to interview Grace, she found not the mourning creature wearing widow’s weeds in black, but a flame-haired artist wearing all white, with rings on her fingers, holding a black kitten.
Much is known already of Maud Gonne’s association with WB Yeats as his long-term love interest and muse, and her ill-fated marriage to John MacBride. At the time of MacBride’s execution, she had been separated from him for ten years, having sought a divorce cit
‘They were left living on the mercies of wider family’
ing physical abuse, drunkenness and an allegation that MacBride had sexually abused her ten-yearold daughter Iseult.
After MacBride’s death, Gonne returned to live permanently in Ireland and became an important republican figure, before being arrested in 1923 and then going on to help form the Irish Social Credit Party in 1935.
Kathleen Clarke, the wife of Tom, is a woman many will be familiar with thanks to her political heft as the founder member of Cumann na mBan, later becoming a TD and senator with both Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil, and the first female lord mayor of Dublin. She was key to sustaining the national movement, and herself and Aine Ceannt hired a very important person as the administrator to the National Aid and Volunteers Independent Fund: Michael Collins.
However, a most poignant part of the documentary focuses on something very different in this remarkable woman’s life.
‘When she was asked what she did in the wake of the Rising, she answers, “I lost a child”, and that really illustrates just how devastating that time was, and how first and foremost, these women were mothers,’ says Earner-Byrne. Clarke had three young boys when she lost her fourth late in pregnancy after her husband’s death. Tom had not been told about his unborn child.
The documentary highlights another tragedy, when in 1917, the National Aid committee paid for a holiday for the widowers and children to go to Skerries. While there, Muriel MacDonagh, wife of Thomas, went swimming and drowned; her body washing up on the shore the next morning. ‘The story that I recall is how Don [Donagh], her son, who was in hospital at the time of his mother’s death, was lifted up to the window and sees horses with black plumes dancing on their heads,’ says historian Sinéad McCoole, author of the book Easter Widows, who was historical consultant to the documentary and contributor.
‘Years later it came back to him that he was watching his mother’s funeral.’
The post-Revolutionary period of 1917 saw men returning from prison and begin to take over the political movement that the women had continued to keep alive.
This was evidenced in the general election of 1918, when Kathleen Clarke wanted to run but she is stymied by the men.
This pushing out of women from the public sphere would continue as the country moved to a Free State — an Ireland that didn’t have much of a place for them.
The widows of the revolutionaries became hated targets for the British crown forces during the War of Independence and were then vilified during the Civil War by nationalists who had previously put them on a pedestal, alongside their martyred husbands. They lived in fear — the house raids were particularly terrifying.
‘The first thing the family would hear would be the banging on the door, and that would followed by armed men pushing and physically assaulting the people inside who were invariably women and children,’ explains Tomas MacConmara, historian in UCC, in the documentary. ‘Of course there was the anxiety, the worry, is that the time your children are going to be left, that you’ll be killed yourself?’
When Civil War broke out in 1922, all the widows took the anti-Treaty republican side, and immediately began to pay the price. Gonne, MacBride and Clarke were all arrested in 1923. Famously, Gonne went on a 20-day hunger strike, while Grace Plunkett was brought to Kilmainham Jail, the very place where her husband was killed some years before.
And what of the children who were left? Well most of the children of the revolutionaries were old enough to fight in the Civil War, which they did, so they too were arrested at this time. Seamus Mallin, Sean MacBride, and Iona, Nora and Roddy Connolly were all subject to potential execution. In a cruel irony, the widows had become enemies of the state.
When the Civil War finally ended in 1923, with the Free State forces winning, there was a huge segment of society in dire need and poverty — the widows and orphans who were forced to beg to survive.
In Forgotten, Earner-Byrne cites one official who commented: ‘It was a real source of shame, to see the Irish widows parading their poverty’, forced to beg from charities, and take on small jobs, to cobble together an income.
Assistance received was rarely enough and often ungenerously given, we are told, and qualifying for a pension was notoriously difficult at this time.
The Military Service Pensions started in 1923, with restrictive legislation. The pension process we are told is particularly difficult for Agnes Mallin, whose husband Seamus had not actually signed the Proclamation. As a result, Agnes was treated differently and got less money so she worked many jobs, as a night nurse and school truancy officer, and remained in financial difficulty throughout her later life.
Thousands of other women during this period ran the risk of being taken into care or sent to an industrial school. Then there was the issue of morality in the new Free State — which Forgotten explores — and how it starts to lean heavily into Catholic ideology.
‘The particular type of family was the male breadwinner and the women were primarily in the home,’ explains Sarah-Anne Buckley, a historian in NUIG. ‘The way that was endorsed was through legislation and Catholic social teaching — divorce is made illegal, women’s bodies and their reproductive health is being curtailed, laws are passed to ban contraceptives.’
This was not the Free State that these women fought for, the equality and freedom that was promised back in the proclamation, which Earner-Byrne notes, we are still working towards.
Many of the women continued to campaign, and in 1935 the Irish Government finally signed off on a national pension scheme of ten shillings a week to all qualifying widows.
‘When reflecting on her parents’ role in history, Agnes and Micheal Mallin’s daughter put it: “I’ve often thought that my mother was the heroic one”,’ says Earner-Byrne. ‘It’s a different definition of heroic to the one that we normally associate with the Irish Revolution, but it is one that is just as important.’
They became hated targets for the British crown forces
FORGOTTEN: The Widows of the Irish Revolution, is on Thursday, May 19, 10.15pm, RTÉ One