Sexual Cultures in Ireland 1890-1930
A study of Irish social and cultural identity from 1890-1930 concentrating on the ways
people engaged with religious and nationalist ideologies. Specifically, this project aims,
through a study of sexual cultures in Ireland, to explore the limits of people’s adherence
to the moral code of the Catholic Church and the Irish identity constructed by nationalist
organisations, and later, the Irish State. It is anticipated that by exploring something as
individual, and simultaneously, communally monitored as sexual behaviour that the
relationships between the individual, the community and institutions of governance and
authority in everyday forms of interaction will be elucidated more clearly than other
frameworks of investigation allow.
The proposed project will use a wealth of scholarship already completed from
within the field of Irish history to inform the position of this authors argument. Notably,
the work of Emmet Larkin on the development of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the
lengthy monographs produced by Roy Foster, G. Boyce and J.J. Lee on the political
development of Ireland during this period. Most significantly, this research will take on
board the work of Terrence Brown and Diarmaid Ferriter on the social and cultural
transformations of Ireland during its revolutionary period as basis against which to situate
the specificity of this research. This particular research area has remained neglected with
the notable exception of Maria Luddy’s recent work on prostitution in Ireland and Tom
Inglis’ popular monograph Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in
Ireland. Despite these interventions there remains a wealth of research avenues left
uncovered and there is, as yet, no work which uses sexual cultures as a framework
against which to test the limitations of revolutionary Ireland’s ideological vision.
Primary research will be gathered from a number of archival repositories such as
The National Archives of Ireland (primarily the Sheehy-Skeffington papers and the Chief
Secretary of Ireland registered office papers); The National Photographic Archive of
Ireland; Irish Parliamentary Papers online; The Irish Folklore commission held at
University College Dublin; Kilmainham Jail Archives; John Paul II library at Maynooth
College; the Dublin Diocesan Archive (primarily the Walsh and Burn papers), and the
Irish Theatre Archives held in Dublin City Archive. The sources consulted will include,
but are not restricted to; clerical training manuals, local and national newspapers
(including the Freeman’s Journal, the Irish Times and the Belfast News), disciplinary
records for workhouses, popular press and magazines, Bureau of Military History witness
statements, ballads, photographs and newsreels (especially of pilgrimages and
community events), early cinema, crime reports and court proceedings, diaries, memoirs,
memorial cards, scrapbooks, oral testimonies, advertisements, play bills and press
reviews for theatre productions and the music hall, parliamentary debates, and the
minutes, pamphlets, and publications of social change groups such as the Irish Women’s
Franchise League .
Whilst this research topic has certainly been influenced by the comparatively
recent development of sexuality studies in history it aims to achieve significantly more
than a recuperative account of homosexual and transsexual historical narratives. In this
regard queer theory has much to offer, in particular the work of Leo Bersani, Heather
Love, Judith Halberstam and Raymond Williams. Bersani’s work on the genealogy of
desire or, the its impossibility will be used in the context of this project to explore the
ways in which individuals can desire different things in differing degrees at different
times. When this is played out on a macro level it becomes impossible to make
homogenised statements about a group or cultures desire for change or a particular vision
of society. It also plays with the temporal notion of change to suggest that an individual
can desire change and stability in equal measures and that these two impulses need not be
incongruent with one another. When Bersani’s theory is used alongside Love’s analysis,
which sees ‘homosexuals [serving] as the scapegoats for the failures and impossibilities
of desire itself’1 it is possible to question the role of dissent in creating discourses of
unity. The methodological approach of this research has been influenced by Raymond
William’s theory of ‘social experiences in solution’ and by Halberstam’s call to expand
the definition of the archive and to question the temporal and spatial unity of society on
the grounds of sexual or gender orientation. William’s arguments that politics and
feelings have different temporal frames and that before something becomes Political or
Historical, it is felt. It is for this reason that sources such as scrapbooks, photographs and
music are so integral to this research. These sources do not provide us with the finished
project of an ‘Imagined Ireland’ but at the inarticulate and temporally ruptured moment
of nationalist modernity. What queer theory has to offer therefore is both a theory and a
methodology for accessing aesthetic strategies of modernity’s others. It is hypothesised
that this research will show that Ireland can be simultaneously pre-modern, belatedly
modern, and anti-modern whilst still attempting to construct and proscribe what modern
1
Love
independent Ireland would look like. Thorough research into sexual cultures it is possible
to take the debates about modernity’s others put forward by subaltern studies and develop
them by considering how one individual can embody different attitudes to claims over the
nation through religious faith, nationalist politics, and relationship to and participation in
popular culture.
The project will be comprised of four main areas of study; the Catholic Church,
nationalism, sexual crime and finally, popular culture and entertainment. Chapter One
will explore the relationship between the Catholic Church and sexual cultures. Amongst
the vast body of literature that critically engages with the growth and development of the
Catholic Church in Ireland a portion concerns itself with the attitudes of the Church
towards sexual behaviour and morality. However, rather than considering the effect the
Church’s public declarations on morality had on individual private practise, I claim that it
is more useful to invert the analysis, and consider what the articulation of sexual identity
can show about the success and limitations of the Church’s reforms and, later, the
institutional infrastructure built upon this moral compass. This chapter will contain three
main focuses; the role of the priesthood within parishes, the training of priests, and, the
role played by the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the fashioning of the Irish Catholic moral
code. Research carried out by Dahley into the contested introduction of reforms
associated with Larkin’s ‘devotional revolution’ has been an influential starting point for
the first concern of this chapter which seeks to assess what messages were being
delivered from the pulpits, the problems encountered in attempting to enforce a strict
moral code and the treatment of parishioners whose behaviour was considered
inappropriate. In addition to an investigation into the role the church played in shaping
parishioners daily moral outlook it is also the intention to assess what the Church offered
erotically and theatrically through an analysis of ritual, clothing, statues and art. A
significant quantity of research has already been carried out regarding the role of the
Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, both in terms of their relationship to Parish Priests and their
association with Rome and Britain. However, it is the intention in this chapter to consider
the hierarchies anxiety over sexual morality in relation to the concerns of the Church of
Ireland to ascertain to what extent the worries and reactions to sexual activity were of a
specifically Catholic nature. Finally, this chapter seeks to engage with and develop
themes presented in Joseph Nugent’s research into the gendering and training of priests.
It asks what it means to be a priest in a country that’s increasingly Catholic and
simultaneously adopting a more militant nationalism that finds articulation through
bodies such as the G.A.A. Specifically, it seeks to address what these young men were
taught about their own bodies, what they were taught to tell others about sex, how sexual
behaviour was controlled in the seminaries, and, how successful these attempts were.
This is a crucial element in understanding these young seminarians later interaction with
wider Irish society in their role as both spiritual and moral guardian.
A chapter discussing the occurrence, treatment and definition of sexual crime in
Ireland will follow this. This chapter acknowledges that of the scant amount written about
sexual cultures in Ireland the majority of the most recent and engaging work has
concerned itself with issues such as prostitution, infanticide, and abortion. In order to
discuss the limits of a socially acceptable level of sexual practise or, alternatively, sexual
deviance, it is necessary to see how those lines were formally debated and addressed by
considering practises that were classed as criminal. It will consider questions such as
what were sexual violence and rape perceived to be? How were victims treated and
defined? What were the penalties given to those who breached the legal parameters of
acceptable sexual behaviour? While crime statistics do exist for this period, and will be
consulted, the intention is to track a sample of cases through the registered office papers
of the Chief Secretary of Ireland and through newspapers to gain an understanding of
how wider society responded to these cases. In this respect influence is drawn as much
from Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight as monographs dealing with a specific
exploration of sexual crime in Ireland.
Building on a vast corpus of literature dedicated to the subject of nationalism in
Ireland and specifically influenced by the writings of Margaret Ward, Fergus Campbell,
Ian McBride and Jonathan Githens-Mazer the third chapter of this research will seek to
question the temporal unity of the ‘revolutionary moment’ in Irish nationalism. This will
require an investigation of the different claims made on the movement for example,
women’s claims for suffrage and equality in civic status, welfare provision, and trade
union calls for improved workers rights. Not all claims were so formally articulated
however and it is therefore also necessary to consider how people changed in more
mundane ways in response to revolutionary fervour. This will be achieved in this research
by analysing how people conducted their sexual relationships and gender performances
during the period 1890-1930 in order to see how people literally came to embody a
moment of immense possibility. Additionally, it is sought to question to what extent the
Free State closed down this window of possibility and to what extent competing claims
continued to be made. This chapter will consider the claims of the Easter Rising in
relation to the looting that took place in Dublin over the same weekend and the reactions
of Dubliners to the Irish Volunteers after their surrender to highlight the temporally
fractured development of nationalist consciousness in Ireland. Artefacts such as
scrapbooks and memorial cards will be used to show how individuals took massproduced images to construct a personalised response to the events surrounding them,
and, how the images of the Irish martyrs were sexualised and eroticised. In short, through
the nexus of gender transgression, sexual deviance and spontaneous action it is sought to
explore how nationalist discourse was consumed and how it related to mundane
discourses of social order such as the family.
Finally consideration will be given to forms of popular culture and entertainment.
While this chapter will reflect upon the role of nationalist forms of entertainment such as
the Abbey theatre, ‘buy Irish’ fairs, Gaelic Athletic Association, and Gaelic League
events, it will predominantly engage with the nature of Music Hall culture, popular
magazines and literature and the emergence of modern technologies such as cinematic
projection and the motorcar. These entertainments were a contested site of cultural
production; they enjoyed high patronage and yet gave priests, who feared the sexual
lewdness and low morality of the music halls and similar venues, great cause for concern.
Forms of ‘low’ popular culture and entertainment introduce a compelling class dynamic
to the narrative about sustained commitment to the morality of ‘Imagined Ireland’.
Critical engagement with the vast amount of literature to be found on the Irish Literary
Cultural Revival is, of course, necessary. However detailed consideration will be given to
the work of Patrick Mathews which considers the popular, nationalist role of the Abbey
theatre, Gaelic League and the co-operative movement, Ben Novick’s work on
propaganda and the popular press, Louis Cullen’s monograph on the popular department
store Eason’s, and Chris Morash’s work on Irish theatre alongside the work of Paige
Reynolds and Roy Foster’s work on Irish literature in the nineteenth century. This chapter
seeks to engage with quantative questions such as: What was on the local stage? How
well attended were productions? Were the theatres geographically close to areas like
Monto that were known for prostitution? These questions will be answered through an
analysis of material held at the Irish Theatre Archive in Dublin. However, this chapter
will also engage with issues such as how people dressed to go to the theatre, what forms
of popular culture and entertainment existed in Ireland in the late nineteenth century and
to what extent these activities were class, or regionally specific. In addition to analysing
the ways in which mainstream popular culture was a contested site of moral consumption
it is also hoped to explore the ways in which more obviously deviant entertainments
circulated through society and it’s sub-cultures. It will be necessary for this task to assess
how people received relationship advice and sex education for example through the
presence of ‘agony aunt’ style columns in penny dreadfuls and also, the existence of
pornography in Ireland, how it was circulated, where it was produced, what it consisted
of, and, finally, how people responded to it’s presence – however discreet.