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AS IRELAND MARKS the centenary of the first national female vote in 1918, an exhibition on how print media was used as part of the suffragist campaign is on show at the National Print Museum.
The exhibition – Print, Protest, and The Polls: The Irish women’s suffrage campaign and the power of print media, 1908-1918 – tells the story of women’s fight for their right to vote in Ireland.
Curator of the exhibition Donna Gilligan said that “we now have the opportunity to reassess this important period of female political reform, and to recognise its deserved place within Irish history”.
Print material, postcards, photographs, posters and newspaper publications are being displayed, some which have never before been exhibited publicly.
The material comes from Irish suffragists as well as their opponents, as both sides battled out their differences often through the use of print media.
Sometimes, suffragists were represented in cartoons, postcards and illustrations as masculine, unstable and dangerous.
Some postcards are being displayed showing how these women were mocked and criticised being depicted as ugly, unfashionable spinsters.
Irish artists like Grace Gifford and Rosamund Praeger produced cartoons which turned the tables on the critics who mocked their cause.
Curator Donna Gilligan is material culture historian who began research into the area of objects and images from the Irish suffrage campaign three years ago.
‘Ridiculed and feared’
Donna told TheJournal.ie that “in general quite a large part of the story of female involvement in Irish history is still only coming to the fore”.
She added that the women involved in the movement were “ridiculed and feared for their attempts to enter the male political sphere”.
They were also criticised as being anti-nationalist for fighting to vote in a British government at the time, as well as for their association with the unpopular British suffragette movement.
Suffragettes were often viewed as wild, violent and unwomanly by their critics and there were fears around future uncertainty if women were given the right to vote.
Suffragettes were women who participated in militant activity such as window breaking, while suffragists made up the non-militant part of the campaign.
Ireland had a large number of both who engaged in active protest, mass rallies and performed public lectures.
Irish Citizen
In 1912, a group of suffragists associated with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, a suffragette group established in 1908, founded the Irish Citizen newspaper, which used writing as a form of political activism.
This publication sought to further the suffragist cause as well as strengthen the voices of those in the labour movement particularly around the rights of women workers.
Women from across the country were invited to express their opinions in an attempt to unite Irish women as well as alert people to suffrage events like meetings, protests and lectures.
The exhibition will run until 30 September and admission is free. A full education programme will accompany the exhibition throughout the summer.
The pieces on display in this exhibition are just a small sample of printed material which would have been produced and circulated during this period of the Irish suffrage campaign.
The objects and images in the exhibition come from private family collections, the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives, UCC Special Collections, DCC Library and Archives and the Museum of London, among others.
With reporting from Aoife Barry.
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So some people mocked something they opposed. And this is news how exactly?
@Norvik_1602:
Irish feminists like reading this sort of stuff. Don’t ask me why…but they do.
@Norvik_1602: you 100% would have loved those drawings if you’d been around back then
@Norvik_1602: it’s part of the Irish female history and how we got the vote. It’s gas that all the usual mocking that goes around women who just want equal rights were around then as they are now. Had they been in existence now they would have been called feminazies, etc to make them sound like Nazis therefore demean their plight. Who knew some men were so fragile even back then? Very interesting.
@Conor Paddington: They fought for middle class women only.
They had contempt for the lower orders.
The precise criticism levelled today.
“Markievicz died at the age of 59 on 15 July 1927, of complications related to appendicitis. She had given away the last of her wealth, and died in a public ward “among the poor where she wanted to be”.
Well, I’ll be. An article about men being upset over women getting votes and a couple of dudes, 100 years later, all over it telling us why it was a bad idea and that such feminism is harmful.
The irony is delicious.
@James Doyle: *ironing
They appear to have fought for basic rights (that many of the opposit sex took for granted) to be given to them by the state.
For that they were lampooned and ridiculed by people who had vested interests in things staying the way they were and who were ably abetted by partisan agenda driven publications that saw their request for institutional equality as a distraction from their own main agenda and so portrayed it as something that right thinking women in general didn’t even want.
Fair dues to them for persisting and winning out against the stacked odds.
It’s probably an inspiration to those who currently find themselves in a similar position in Ireland today. Well worth seeing.
@Nydon: They fought exclusively for middle class women’s rights.
They had contempt for the lower orders.
A sentiment echoed today.
@Battaz: You know this how? Did you ever speak to someone with the lived experience? My grandmother lived with me until her death in 1982. She was hugely involved in all the political arenas from 1912 until my father was born in 1923. She campaigned for voting rights for all women and was disgusted that it was only given to married women or women who had property and were over the age of 30. This meant that she was unable to vote until the 1924 elections and she never missed voting in an election after that.
Why is the word “suffragette” misspelled in the headline and most of the article?
@Ricardo Shillyshally: they’re two somewhat distinct groups, though obviously closely related. The Suffragists were the first wave of activists and were typically more peaceful. The Suffragettes came later and were and were more aggressive/militant in their methods. Both words are correct.
You could also do a piece on how female Irish Unionists who supported votes for women have been written out of our nationalists only please history books.
Suffragettes actually put back and damaged the cause of votes for women. It came about despite them, not because of them.
@Norvik_1602: well there’s a rewriting of history
@Norvik_1602: so wait! This wasn’t good enough to be news according to you yet you’ve commented twice and tried to change the narrative? Typical!
@Norvik_1602: your correct. First world war need for industrial workers was the game changer. Woman proved themselves as equals
@Deborah Behan: Tsk, Tsk, trying to silence male voices has gotta run contrary to your usual ‘diversity’ agenda.
Stop being so closed off from the world.
Censorship is disturbing.
@Battaz: how is replying trying to silence someone or even censor them?
Seriously? I don’t think that’s how it happened. Throughout history, most women have always worked. I had the impression that the Industrial revolution and various plagues and famines caused people to gravitate towards paid work instead. Later, the propaganda in English-speaking countries ran something like this: “The conscripted men are back in town, time to step down and give up your jobs to all the unemployed ex-soldiers.” Naturally no one wanted to resign and live on air. Then it became the law that married women at least had to resign and become dependants. Such a law was not made with the consent of working women, was it? No wonder they wanted a vote.
What the feminists love to leave out of the conversation is that most working class men didn’t have the vote either. Usually only property owners or higher professionals could vote. The process of universal suffrage was a gradual one (and it had to be gradual to match the slow educating of the wider population, remember most people couldn’t read or write), and it wasn’t some conspiracy against women.
@Fred Jonsen: Well it was probably a conspiracy against women in the higher classes to be fair Fred.
@Daniel Donovan:
Absolutely my heart bleeds for those upper class women but the point is the correct dimension to analyse voting history is class and education, not gender.
@Fred Jonsen: Correct. The thousands of men who were killed and maimed fighting for their country’s freedom in the First World war did not have a vote as they did not own property. Many of them lived in army barracks. Women at that time may not have had the vote but they did not have the obligation to go to the trenches to sacrifice life and limb. Men, most of whom did not have the vote either, did that for them and indeed the suffragettes were at the forefront of the White Feather movement who publicly shamed pacifist men who refused to go to war. Equal rights without equal obligations – a core value of the feminist movement even to this day.
Anyone else sick of hearing about this rubbish. The World Cup is on it’s all anyone cares about.
@6ljJQRRU: Yes, we are sick of hearing about the World Cup…
@6ljJQRRU: F off and watch the World Cup then. No one has a gun to your head! Oh you’d prefer to moan on an article about women? As you were.
Are you suggesting that women don’t, or shouldn’t have an interest in football?
What a sexist perspective you hold.
@JamesMcCarthy did nobody tell you that Ireland didn’t make it to the World Cup James
@Teresa Scanlon: don’t you know the World Cup is an elaborate feminist plot to get the guys looking at the bouncy ball instead of up skirting.
I’m sure many did and many didn’t. Identity politics is a layered matrix with horizontal socio-economic layers existing within every vertical identity. I suspect that just like today the lower layers were expected to remain in the background only to be called on if sheer numbers were required to bolster the aims of the vertical.
My point is more to do with the determination of any group to remove an institutionalized inequality where laws bestow advantage on one group above another. Institutionalized inequality is still prevelent in Irish society today.
The thousands of men who were killed and maimed fighting for their country’s freedom in the First World war did not have a vote as they did not own property. Many of them lived in army barracks. Women at that time may not have had the vote but they did not have the obligation to go to the trenches to sacrifice life and limb. Men, most of whom did not have the vote either, did that for them and indeed the suffragettes were at the forefront of the White Feather movement who publicly shamed pacifist men who refused to go to war. Equal rights without equal obligations – a core value of the feminist movement even to this day.
The subjugation of Women…..still happening today, all over the World.
Suffragists were decent legitimate campaigners for equality. Suffragettes were sexist, frustrated, terrorist trolls who who did a lot of damage to more than only the Suffragist’s campaign.
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