In the National Library of Ireland, there is a folder of letters between John McDonnell, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, and his wife, Senta, at home on their farm in County Meath. John spent most of the war in Queenstown (now Cobh), but in August 1918 was posted to the front. His letters to his wife turned darker after that, describing nights of ‘aeroplanes, bombardments and shells’, and ‘2 nights [spent] choking the Boche’. There is only one letter from Senta: the last she wrote to her husband, returned to her after his death at Ypres in August 1918. It describes her pride at running the farm and keeping the household going. We learn later that Senta tried and failed to have her husband's body repatriated to Ireland, that she remarried, and that her only son from her first marriage, Robert, was killed while serving in the British Army in the Second World War. Fionnuala Walsh's comprehensive new study of Irish women during the Great War allows the reader to contextualise the sparse account we have of Senta McDonnell's experience.

The historiography of the Great War in Ireland is now well-developed. From the pioneering work of David Fitzpatrick, Terence Denman and Keith Jeffery, we have a flourishing field, with important edited collections by Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta, John Horne, and Elaine Farrell and Jennifer Redmond, alongside major monographs by Richard Grayson and Niamh Gallagher. To this list we can now add Walsh's work, a landmark contribution which insists that Ireland's wartime experience — which often has been dominated by the stories of soldiers and regiments — cannot be understood without the story of Irish women on the home front. In this regard, Walsh is drawing on parallel historiographies — in particular that of British women's history — but she is careful throughout to emphasise where the Irish and the British history part ways. She also is sensitive to the divergent experiences of women on the island of Ireland, and argues convincingly that the war served to entrench rather than patch over (even momentarily) the already deep political divisions. Crucially, she dates this entrenchment to before the Rising, although the rebellion served to deepen it. The war was a vehicle of radicalisation for Irish women of all political hues: those for or against the war effort in its early stages; the ‘separation women’ vigorously defending their husbands’ interests; the female workers who unionised to unprecedented extents; the suffragists who grappled with the challenges the war posed to their campaign; and, later, the women who mobilised, marched and protested against the threat of conscription. The penultimate chapter, ‘Politicisation’, is perhaps familiar territory, well-charted by Diane Urquhart and Senia Pašeta, among others; but Walsh shows how ‘the state’ (in this case, the British state) had become visible and present in women's lives to an unprecedented extent, through enlistment campaigns, through welfare provision and charitable activities to support the war effort. As such, when radicalisation came, there was more to kick against.

Walsh's research is deep and wide, drawing on an impressive array of sources across twenty-two archives. Successive chapters blend statistical analysis with personal testimonies, private documents, print culture and official sources. Class is a welcome theme throughout, and Walsh is careful to disaggregate women's experiences of the war along intersectional lines: class combined with age, location, religion and marital status to constitute different strands of their great common thread. Women's work during the war is one of the areas where the Irish story diverges somewhat from its British counterpart: Irish women workers were more likely to be unemployed or work reduced hours, there were fewer working opportunities to begin with, due to the lack of conscription in Ireland and the hiatus on emigration, and parts of Irish industry never recovered from severe economic depression at the outset of the war. As such, the notion that the war might offer a path for Irish women to enter the workforce on a long-term basis proved illusory. Nonetheless, women like Senta McDonnell and other women in the agricultural sector enjoyed relative prosperity, and thrived on the opportunities for household and farm management that might otherwise have been unavailable. A suggestive central chapter tackles the question of social morality, and here Walsh moves fluently between separation women, drunkenness, women's patrols and ‘immoral’ sexual activity to paint a convincing picture of a wartime moral panic centred, unsurprisingly, on women's bodies and women's behaviour.

One minor cavil might be that the conclusion is a little too timid, drawing substantially on secondary literature. A more assertive closing section would have been welcome, making clear that this is a major step forward in Irish women's history and the history of the Great War in Ireland. In its detail, its scope, its adeptness in handling diverse sources, it is a welcome and major contribution.