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Petticoat Revolutionaries: Gender, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Irish Ladies' Land League in the United States
ELY M. JANIS
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THOUSANDS OF IRISH AMERICAN women created and participated in a vibrant Ladies' Land League in the United States in the early 1880s. These women embraced Irish nationalism and, through their activism, asserted a public role in their communities. Most historians have neglected the involvement of Irish American women in Irish nationalism in the United States. The few that have mentioned their participation in nationalist movements have largely dismissed their contributions. Instead, historians have focused primarily on their impact as economic contributors, particularly their roles as domestic servants and teachers.1 A close look at the historical record, however, indicates that large numbers of women were active in Irish nationalism and that their participation provided them with an opportunity to declare their desire for a public voice and inclusion within the male-dominated realm of Irish American nationalist activity and public life. |
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Though intended originally as a way to strengthen Irish American support for Ireland, the Ladies' Land League in the United States quickly became a vehicle for Irish American women to assert their own American-based concerns and ideological convictions. Among the members of the Ladies' Land League, two divergent visions of its purpose emerged: a more conservative belief that the movement should focus exclusively on social and political reform in Ireland, and a more radical view that reform in Ireland should be linked to social reform in the United States. These differences of opinion demonstrate women's conflicting ideological conceptions of Irish nationalism and belie claims of women's aversion to public activity and Irish nationalist politics. It is only with the inclusion of women that a full understanding can be achieved of the impact of Irish nationalism on the Irish American experience in the United States. |
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TRADITIONAL OPPOSITION TO IRISH AMERICAN WOMEN'S PUBLIC ACTIVITY | |
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Historians in the last twenty years have challenged the use of the metaphor of separate spheres to describe women's public and private activity in American society. Separate spheres ideology leaves us with only a partial picture of the full range of women's experiences. Instead, Linda Kerber has argued, historians should treat the "language of separate spheres itself as a rhetorical construction that responded to changing social and economic reality."2 An examination of the prescriptive literature directed towards women when compared to the actual experiences of Irish American women helps to demonstrate the challenges and opportunities facing women's public participation within the Irish American organizations of the late nineteenth century. |
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