Women and girls are ‘particularly vulnerable’ to conflict-related gender-based violence (G.B.V.), with devastating consequences. Perpetrators, on the other hand, who might be state or non-state actors, soldiers or civilians – but who are nearly always men – have historically benefitted from a ‘climate of impunity which is rampant in armed conflicts’.Footnote 1 Wartime identities drawn along the lines of sex and gender (female victim versus male warrior) have mirrored peacetime laws, which in many past societies treated women and children as the ‘property’ of husbands and fathers.Footnote 2 Male military cultures have fostered further feelings of entitlement to rape.Footnote 3 Recently, however, in the wake of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, international organisations have challenged the implicit acceptance of G.B.V. (including sexual violence) as unavoidable. In 1992, the United Nations (U.N.) Security Council ‘declared the “massive, organized and systematic detention and rape of women, in particular Muslim women, in Bosnia and Herzegovina” an international crime that must be addressed’; the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1993) consequently included rape as a crime against humanity and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994) also deemed rape to be ‘a war crime and a crime against humanity’.Footnote 4 In the decades since, ‘international criminal law has considerably evolved and has criminalized the most serious forms of sexual violence at the international level’.Footnote 5
The work of policymakers, human rights lawyers and activists, in recognising rape as a weapon of war, is supported by academic research on the function of sexual violence around the globe. No longer does ‘wartime rape [loom] as a deplorable and historically unaddressed side effect of war’.Footnote 6 Rather, a consensus has emerged that ‘rape represents just another ordinance [recte ordnance] – like bombs, bullets, or propaganda – that a military can use to accomplish its strategic objectives’; it does so by spreading fear, breaking up families/communities – and thereby diminishing civilian resistance to the will of the attacking force.Footnote 7 For this reason, sexual violence serves closely genocidal aims; raped women may become pregnant by the enemy (thus potentially changing the ethnic makeup of the next generation) or, through death, injury or social/familial ostracism, be unable to reproduce in the future.Footnote 8 Some countries ‘identified as loci of mass rapes conducted by military or paramilitary forces’, in the twentieth century alone, ‘include Belgium and Russia during World War I; Russia, Japan, Italy, Korea, China, the Philippines, and Germany during World War II; and in one or more conflicts, Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo, Croatia, Cyprus, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Pakistan, Rwanda, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Zaire, and Zimbabwe’.Footnote 9 Rape also remains ‘prevalent in a number of contemporary armed conflicts, such as in the Central African Republic, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mali, South Sudan and Syria’,Footnote 10 in which territories (and others) U.N. Action directs its ongoing work.Footnote 11
Violence against women in wartime – as distinct, though not divorced, from violence in domestic and/or social settings – is thus an inherently transnational field of enquiry. This article, on G.B.V. during the Irish Civil War, draws on this literature to highlight the relatively humane treatment of women in Ireland – even during the bitter final stages of the Irish Revolution, c.1912–23. These ten or so years of mass mobilisation and radical politics resulted in a transfer of state power (to part of the island, at least, via the partition of the U.K.-controlled north from twenty-six southern Irish counties established, by the Treaty, as the Irish Free State, in 1922). Indeed, it has become something of a truism that Ireland's was a purely political or constitutional revolution, encompassing little real social change to property rights, farming and economic practices, etc.;Footnote 12 rather, 1922 ushered in greater control of everyday life by conservative institutions (notably the Catholic church), economic protectionism, and attacks on women's rights and working opportunities – dashing the promise of equality contained in the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic. Female sexuality was especially taboo in 1920s Ireland. Lindsey Earner-Byrne has noted that a ‘stringent moral code, which deemed sexual contact outside of marriage to be immoral, enshrined a sexual double standard that generally led to social ostracism and/or institutionalization of sexually “deviant” women’.Footnote 13 As a descriptor of the period c.1912–23, though, ‘revolution’ nonetheless holds some analytical value for me because, accompanying the redrawing of state boundaries, I have observed also renegotiation of social and communal identities – a process of ‘community regulation’ in many local areas (in Munster especially). Everyday violence in the Irish Civil War considers religion and politics as lines of demarcation between Irish people; this current article examines gender as an identifier in violent processes of community regulation, of defining self from other, friend from enemy, during the revolution in Ireland's governance. It asks how distinctive were women's interactions with the Irish Civil War and – a connected question – how useful is a gender framework for understanding these violent and transformative years in Irish history? It is concerned primarily with female non-combatants, while also acknowledging that ‘civilian’ is an ‘ambiguous and contentious category’ in civil war generally,Footnote 14 not to mention that women played militant roles during Ireland's conflict specifically.Footnote 15 I consider the impact of different modes of civil-war violence on women including the relative scarcity in Ireland, as compared with contemporaneous European conflicts and other intra-state wars, of serious interpersonal violence including sexual assault.
I am not the first to raise these vital issues. This work owes a debt to Margaret Ward, Maria Luddy, and others who, since the 1980s, have brought ‘awareness to women's experiences and participation’ in Irish politics, society and culture,Footnote 16 not only during the transformative period of the early twentieth century,Footnote 17 but throughout the modern period.Footnote 18 Yet, with the National Archives of Ireland's 2018 release of previously unseen records of wartime injuries – and the public platform given to the question of violence against women by Linda Connolly – my research adds to an evolving and important field at an opportune moment.Footnote 19 Connolly's allegation that the revolution contains a ‘dark secret’ of sexual violence yet to be uncovered is difficult wholly to prove or refute (for reasons around evidence and specifically reporting of rape, to be discussed);Footnote 20 she aims to challenge the narrative that ‘sexual assault was “rare” both during the War of Independence and Civil War’, but the counter-narrative (that it was widespread) has not yet ‘been adequately proven’ either.Footnote 21 However, Connolly's intervention is a useful reminder – during the ongoing decade of centenaries in Ireland – not to ignore abuses against civilians nor think of the revolution solely ‘as a war about men’.Footnote 22
This article uses the newly accessible records of the Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee (C.P.I.C.), and other sources, to show that women suffered some serious and traumatising interpersonal violence – often on account of their gender (as guardians of the domestic space). However, I argue that it did not serve the strategy or ideology of either warring side (state consolidation for the National Army versus the administration of an alternative nationalism by the anti-Treaty I.R.A.) to denigrate women en masse or destroy a people/its culture. According also to the strongly conservative, Catholic ethos of the emerging Free State,Footnote 23 a worldview that militants in both camps largely shared, maintaining some degree of propriety as an armed force, and loyalty to a people's ‘republic’, militated against the need for sexual violence as warfare – especially for the anti-Treaty insurgents whose weaker military position might otherwise have encouraged greater recourse to violence against (female) civilians.
I
Unfolding from the battle for Dublin's Four Courts in two key phases – conventional-military encounters, June–September 1922, and guerrilla violence, September 1922–May 1923 – Ireland's Civil War took a heavy toll on the general population.Footnote 24 Exact casualty figures are unknown; no one has done for the Civil War what Eunan O'Halpin's pioneering project, ‘The dead of the Irish Revolution’, will do for the Easter Rising and War of Independence (by identifying all deaths arising, April 1916–December 1921, ‘from Irish political violence’).Footnote 25 However, military fatalities of 927, amid total fatalities of ‘probably little more than 1,500’,Footnote 26 suggest that around 573 civilians lost their lives to civil conflict. Many thousands more suffered physical and psychological trauma, financial hardship, and general disruption to daily life – as the national troops of the nascent Free State clashed with anti-Treaty republicans over the independence settlement with Britain (and non-combatants fought their own battles over land and identity politics). While ‘personal issues’ raised by participation in Irish conflict have been relatively under-explored, as compared to the ‘political aspects’ of war,Footnote 27 important new research on pain and trauma is emerging,Footnote 28 alongside studies of the material costs of the revolution.Footnote 29
The pertinent question here is how dangerous and damaging was the Civil War for women specifically? The recently released records of the C.P.I.C. provide a snapshot of the kinds of interpersonal violence suffered by women (or, at least, injuries for which they or their families were willing to make a claim). Historians of the revolution have already examined applications for compensation, to both Free State and British governments, under damage to property schemes.Footnote 30 The investigation of compensation claims brings with it obvious methodological challenges: applicants might exaggerate their experience of wartime violence, for example, for the purposes of financial remuneration. However, these records also offer perspectives on episodes (and prolonged campaigns) of violence and intimidation against civilians that might otherwise go unrecorded. In late 2017, the National Archives announced the opening of a set of files, from the Department of Justice, that parallel the damage to property files. These are the records of the C.P.I.C., appointed in April 1923, as the war was ending, to consider injuries sustained by ‘non-combatant[s] in the course of belligerence’ between British and Irish national forces, or Free State and anti-Treaty armies.Footnote 31 The committee considered in total 6,616 applications from the public, paying out more than £269,000 (around £14.5 million, in today's terms) to the injured and dependants of the deceased. Yet, while its administrative files were conserved by the Ministry of Finance, it was previously believed that the actual applications for compensation had been destroyed or lost in the archives.Footnote 32 The 2018 release by Justice, however, brought to light 2,141 new records, 2,107 of which are individual applications for support relating usually to a single incident (for example, a shooting) and its after-effects on the body and/or mind (although, frustratingly, the compensation narratives are fairly sparse and rarely is supplementary police or medical evidence, requested by the C.P.I.C., included in the files that are currently available). Nineteen per cent of these applications for compensation were submitted by, or on behalf of, women. We can thus infer that women were less likely than men to experience interpersonal violence during the Civil War. Of course, women may have also been less likely to report acts of violence against them, but the fact that male relatives often submitted claims on behalf of their wives, sisters, daughters, etc., suggests that gender was not a major factor in obscuring violent episodes in general, many of which were likely already to be public knowledge – because the injury took place in the open (during an exchange of pro- and anti-Treaty gunfire, for example) and/or resulted in a death reported via other official channels. Of the 19 per cent of claims recording injuries to women, 20 per cent pertain to the period after 11 July 1921 (the Truce with Britain and, following the committee's terms of reference, the demarcating line I also use between the War of Independence and Civil War for this study).
There is, then, a small if interesting collection of seventy-nine compensation claims relating to violence against women during the Civil War, from which some further patterns and inferences might be drawn. Around 20 per cent of Civil War claims come from relatives of deceased women, killed usually accidentally by firearms or explosives, though fatalities during (pro- and anti-Treaty) armed raids on private homes suggest more personal targeting, albeit in ambiguous circumstances.Footnote 33 The most common Civil War injury (from around 60 per cent of female claimants) is non-lethal physical harm – typically wounds (both accidental and deliberate) from gunshots or bombs, though there are also conflict-related road-traffic accidents and assaults without a weapon. Of these rare episodes not involving firearms, one refers in coded language to what may be sexual assault and, in another, a woman's hair is forcibly shorn. The files also record the psychological impact on victims of physical injury: Mary Hyde's ‘nerves are shattered’, for example, after being knocked unconscious by debris from a mine explosion in St Mary's Hall, Cork, on 2 March 1923.Footnote 34 Yet there are also a small number of cases (around 12 per cent of the total from the Civil War) that describe mental illness triggered not by physical injury to the woman in question, but witnessing violence at close quarters. Mary Gallagher, for example, had a ‘very severe shock’ when ‘Irregulars’ attacked her home in the Arigna mountains in County Roscommon (which was being used, presumably by the Free State, as a ‘military post’); a private was killed in the operation and the resultant ‘sleeplessness and nerves’ continued for Mary for at least three months.Footnote 35
Knowing what happened to women will lead us to why they were attacked and, crucially, an understanding of the role of gender in identifying victims and experiencing violence. When female civilians are caught (sometimes literally) in the crossfire of civil war, their sex is seemingly immaterial. James Fletcher explained to the C.P.I.C. the circumstances leading to the death of his wife, Esther, in County Donegal: ‘A party of armed IRA Executive Forces on the 4th May 1922 came to Buncrana and engaged themselves in raiding the local branch of the Belfast Bank, the National or Free State Forces turned out, and attacked the “Irregulars”[,] both parties began shooting, and deceased who was walking down the street was shot.’Footnote 36 Similarly, in July 1922, Annie Meehan was ‘proceeding from my residence at Watery Hill to the residence of some friends in Drogheda on the opposite side of the town in order to get out of the zone of fire, when I was wounded in the right thigh by a bullet fired by National troops’. Watery Hill ‘is close to Millmount Barracks, which at that time was held by Irregulars’.Footnote 37 Accounts like these add to our understanding of the initial intensity of the war in urban spaces and the difficulties both sides faced in maintaining distinctions between combatants and civilians; the shooters were not aiming for Esther or Annie. O'Halpin has similarly found that women were often collateral damage during the War of Independence; only 10 per cent of civilian fatalities of political violence, 1917–21, were female, the majority ‘untargeted killings in riots, or traffic accidents involving Crown forces’.Footnote 38
Many women killed or wounded, by gunshot, during the Civil War, were similarly in the wrong place at the wrong time (as recorded by the C.P.I.C., at least). However, there are some seemingly more targeted cases, in which dubious loyalties or political betrayals allegedly were punished by violence. At Dillon's Cross, County Cork, for example, in December 1922, Mary Barry, and ‘three other girls’, were ‘singing a song in support of the Treaty when a shot rang out and I fell’; she attributed the attack to ‘civilians believed to be anti-treaty or supporters of anti-treaty forces’. It is interesting that she identified the perpetrators as non-combatants; she also received medical attention after a ‘civilian motor car’ took her to hospital in Cork.Footnote 39 Singing a song is a fairly innocuous show of support for the authorities; more serious, in the eyes of republicans engaged militarily in undermining the nascent Free State, was the act of informing – a dangerous game throughout the previous War of Independence, too, with a tense and mistrustful atmosphere pervading in many local communities between 1919 and 1923.Footnote 40 When a ‘party of Irregulars’ raided the home of Patrick Callanan, in Dromelehy, Cooraclare (County Clare), at 9 p.m. on 29 December 1922, his daughter Mai – her ‘boots off’ as she undressed for bed – was shot and ‘seriously maim[ed]’ in the foot. It is not clear if she was deliberately shot in the foot (torture to extract information) or if ‘William Campbell’ (later arrested for the crime) shot generally in her direction, striking barefooted Mai. Evidently the family was known to the assailants (under-resourced and ‘on the run’ anti-Treaty republicans often ‘billeted’ themselves in private homes, as they had at the Callanans, for a number of nights at a time). Mai was ‘suspected of informing the government troops at Kilrush of the whereabouts of Campbell and other Irregulars’, which was the alleged motivation for Campbell's subsequent night-time raid and Mai's shooting.Footnote 41 Women played a key role in intelligence gathering and communications during the Civil War;Footnote 42 evidently Mai was not immune from suspicion from anti-Treaty forces in her area, by virtue of her gender, even if the C.P.I.C. testimony was truthful in assertion that she ‘did not as a matter of fact have anything to say to them [the National Troops]’, though ‘for one reason or another they [the “Irregulars”] concluded she had’.Footnote 43
Mai Callanan's injury reminds us of the ‘definitively intimate’ nature of the Irish Revolution: ‘Beyond direct engagements, both British security forces and the IRA routinely violated private spaces, at times leaving traumatised neighbours and family members in their wake.’Footnote 44 Some women were killed or wounded in public spaces – by shooting in the streets, explosions of mines/bombs or, as in the tragic death of eight-year-old Rose Anne Hamill, a stray hand grenade on a country road.Footnote 45 However, evidently serious Civil War attacks also took place in the home, where women bore the brunt of violence. In the C.P.I.C. cases I have studied from the Civil War, it was often women who opened the door to violent actors searching (usually) for the men of the house – and women who sheltered under the kitchen table when (as in the case of Bridget Barry, Bantry, County Cork) ‘machine gun fire and bullets came through [the] back door’. An exchange between pro- and anti-Treaty troops focused on Bridget's house after she gave ‘a drink of water’ to ‘3 or 4 rebels’ at her front door; ‘whilst there National Troops came in sight and opened fire’, ‘4 or 6’ of their soldiers later entering the property after the ‘rebels ran away’. As shots continued back and forth, Bridget's daughter Helena (thrown ‘prostrate under table’) was ‘struck’ in the ‘left side’ and died a few weeks later from her wounds, in Cork Hospital.Footnote 46
Ireland's conflict was not ‘civilianised’ at a scale seen in many modern civil wars; the term describes the deliberate harming by political actors of non-combatants to maintain and establish control in contested territory – as theorised famously by Stathis Kalyvas – and/or extract natural resources, as seen in brutal forced displacements and mass killings in, for example, post-1970s African internal wars.Footnote 47 Neither were Irish non-combatants targeted en masse on the grounds of gender alone. Non-lethal forms of violence (including property damage, boycott, etc.) succeeded sufficiently in terrorising communities into compliance with the military, political and other demands of insurgent forces. On the opposing side, the incumbent Free State benefitted, even at its most draconian, from support for its legitimacy from a largely war-weary public. Yet, it was also the everyday acts of intimidation – so prevalent during Ireland's relatively restrained civil war – that had a particular impact on women.
The disproportionate impact of violence on the traditional (female) guardians of the domestic space is especially relevant in an independent Ireland that would, during subsequent decades of state consolidation, designate explicitly the home as a woman's sphere.Footnote 48 Arson, for one notable example, can be seen as an invasion of the woman's domain. By the later stages of the revolution, for example, many ‘big houses’ were occupied solely by (female) domestic staff – the predominantly Protestant and unionist mansion-owners having fled during the republicans’ ‘Campaign of Fire’, which was more intense during the Civil War than it had been during the War of Independence, 1919–21.Footnote 49 An attempt to burn the home of Maurice Healy, brother of T. M. Healy (governor-general of the Irish Free State – an obvious symbol, in the eyes of the ‘Irregular’ I.R.A., of the Treaty's failure to establish a republic), followed a familiar pattern when ‘armed men’, after disconnecting the telephone and sprinkling petrol throughout, ‘allowed the maids to remove their property’, before setting alight the upstairs and departing.Footnote 50
The occupant in flight from a burning house (dishevelled, little time to dress) is a familiar motif of civil-war arson; press reports capture the particular vulnerability of women in these attacks. The day after the burning of the family's Tipperary mansion, Marlfield, during which her husband, Free State senator, John Bagwell, was absent, Louisa Bagwell recorded that the arsonists ‘offered no personal violence’ towards her or her children. This is notable because otherwise her account of the burning (stolen overcoats and jewellery; ‘ten minutes to dress, with each of us a man in our rooms’; the ‘bare legs’ of her daughter, Lilla) convey an invasion of privacy and fear for safety, suggestive of more intimate violence.Footnote 51 Evidently there was no bodily violation in this case, though, and neither do perpetrator testimonies (as recorded in witness statements made to the Irish state's Bureau of Military History, in 1949) express the thrill that – some scholars observe – is experienced by men in trespassing on female spaces when they raid or indeed burn a house. Theft may have been an act of necessity for desperate republicans fighting a guerrilla war in Ireland, in other words, but looting has also been linked historically to sexual gratification and punishment.Footnote 52 Members of the counter-revolutionary Freikorps, for example, acted out male ‘fantasies’ on female revolutionaries in post-First World War central Europe.Footnote 53 Long before human rights discourse and the U.N.'s 1992 designation of conflict-related sexual violence as a war crime, Irish men's attitudes to women – as the spoils of war to which men were entitled – were not necessarily more enlightened than European social and cultural mores. The sexual assault of two female domestic staff in an alleged raid for arms on another big house, Sopwell House, Cloughjordan, County Tipperary, is on the one hand a rare and shocking case, on the other a grim reminder of the banality of sexual violence as a side-effect of war. It ‘pained’ the judge to sentence the raiders – farmers’ sons of previously ‘good character’ – for these sexual crimes; he hoped that some ‘mitigation of the penalties might be considered possible … when the country settled down’. He thus did not absolve the men of wrongdoing, but accounted for their actions in terms of the wartime conditions.Footnote 54
However, in contrast to perpetrators of the White Terror, revolutionary Irish militants seldom took pleasure in attacks on the private sphere – and, by extension, female bodies. For I.R.A. leader Dan Breen, for example, the destruction of the (in his words) ‘beautiful residence’ at Marlfield was driven by military necessity alone;Footnote 55 he attached some shame to dirty tactics, like arson, which contrasts sharply with his boastful reminiscences of military ambushes and clashes with armed British forces.Footnote 56 Relative levels of (para)military discipline are used by social scientists to explain the nature of insurgent violence around the globe;Footnote 57 for Breen and other republicans, it was imperative to refute the connotations of ‘Irregularism’ and be seen as a proper army – just as British army recruitment campaigns took the moral high ground over ‘German atrocities’ in Belgium.Footnote 58 The I.R.A.'s insistence on guns as their weapons of war was one facet of this concern with soldierly behaviour;Footnote 59 another, I argue, is the (relatively) humane treatment of women and children in warfare. The volunteers’ need to define Irish military ‘distinctiveness’ and ‘display’ professionalism,Footnote 60 to justify republican violence in contrast to base tactics of other forces, is seen in remembrances of the revolution as recorded in applications for Military Service Pensions, a resource that is just beginning to be exploited by historians.Footnote 61 Through applications for pensions and service medals, ex-guerrillas sought not only financial ‘recognition’ for their service, but also to prove the ‘legitimacy of their revolutionary credentials among their peers’.Footnote 62 A legitimate campaign was one in which boundaries between soldiers and civilians were largely maintained. This section has shown that women did suffer (in raids, burnings, etc.) on account of their gender, that is, socio-cultural expectations (in addition, arguably, to distinctions of class or socio-economic status) that placed women and girls, more firmly than men and boys, in the home. However, as the next section will show, G.B.V. was not used in a systematic way to realise political/military objectives (as were other guerrilla tactics, including arson, attacks on infrastructure, assassination of ex-British servicemen, etc.).
II
Acts of G.B.V. are perpetrated against a person's will and based on gender norms and unequal power relationships; G.B.V. against women directly relates to or is justified by a woman's socially and culturally constructed identity, in turn derived from her biological difference from men (as seen, for example, in female genital mutilation, forced pregnancy, ‘slut shaming’, etc.). Thus G.B.V. can be physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual (the latter encompassing rape, but also any sexual act performed without an individual's consent). While Irish ‘prudery’ kept a veil over issues of sex and sexuality until recent decades,Footnote 63 sexual violence has been a ‘painfully enduring feature of Irish society’ for centuries. However, the ‘general picture regarding historical sexual crime remains sketchy and difficult to discern’;Footnote 64 in other words, it is difficult to talk concretely about levels of G.B.V. and sexual violence before and after the revolution and thus assess whether or not violence against women increased during conflict, c.1912–23. As Connolly notes, we ‘will never know exactly how many women were raped or sexually assaulted in Ireland during the revolution – there is no official register, there cannot be. Rapes are more commonly concealed than recorded/publicized especially in smaller-scale societies like Ireland characterized by close communities and patriarchal attitudes.’ Given the problems inherent in enumerating accurately under- and often un-reported acts including rape, then, Connolly encourages scholars to consider ‘emerging stories and evidence for those who were sexually assaulted and who consented to testifying this (or their families did) in archival sources’.Footnote 65
I make a small contribution to this important task by using newly released C.P.I.C. evidence to bring to light episodes where a woman's gender – exacerbated by wartime situations and agendas – evidently drove violence against her. As is typical of the time, though, the investigation of a (possible) case I have found of Civil War sexual assault, is frustrated by omissions and obscure language. John Henegan wrote to the committee on behalf of his wife, Mary, a ‘person of unsound mind’, recounting the night-time attack by ‘armed and masked men’ that caused a ‘complete breakdown of the nervous system’. The raiders ‘took my three sons and myself out of the house and kept us away for about an hour’; he does not say what happened to Mary during this time.Footnote 66 Was she trapped in the house with the raiders and did interpersonal/sexual violence result in the trauma explained by James as a nervous breakdown? Does being ‘rough handled’ by the British military, as recorded in C.P.I.C. claims from the War of Independence, similarly denote sexual assault?Footnote 67 I have not yet found the answers in these cases.
Perhaps because the forced cutting of a woman's hair has a much more obviously noticeable and public outcome (as opposed to the internalised trauma and private shame of sexual violation), claimants are more forthcoming to the C.P.I.C. about hair-shearing than they are about sexual assault or rape. While it does not involve sexual contact, forced hair cutting nonetheless targets a part of the body ‘historically … associated with eroticism and sexuality’ (which is why men and women entering religious orders often have had their hair cut, to symbolise the ‘renunciation of worldly things and personal vanity’).Footnote 68 If a woman's hair is key to her femininity and attractiveness, then, its removal thus marks out physically women who have transgressed social and sexual norms (by collaboration with the enemy, for example) – and symbolically defeminises the target.Footnote 69 Historically men have also been subjected to forced hair and beard cutting,Footnote 70 though the connection between women's self-identity and their hair is particularly strong.Footnote 71 Prior to the First World War, women typically had long hair, ‘which was called their “crowning glory” and was a major focus of appearance’.Footnote 72 In cultures and societies, for example in Africa, where long hair is less typical, femininity is nonetheless displayed via the elaborate braiding and decoration of shorter hairstyles.Footnote 73 In 1920s Ireland, rough chopping of a woman's hair by an assailant armed, perhaps, with agricultural shears, resulted painfully for her in a messy short crop (not the ‘sleek’ bobbed style circulating via press ‘fashion notes’,Footnote 74 debuted famously by the contemporaneous ‘flapper’).Footnote 75 By its visible marking out of the target, then, shearing is a tactic of exclusion and punishment – seen in other twentieth-century European conflicts, including France during the Second World War,Footnote 76 and the Spanish and Greek Civil Wars.Footnote 77
Hair shearing might be placed within a larger spectrum of unofficial reprisals against civilian populations, which also includes arson, deployed by British forces (‘Black and Tans’, Auxiliaries) in order to control the population and rout republican influence, during the War of Independence.Footnote 78 Republican forces in this period also cut the hair of women who associated with British forces – socially, economically, by passing on information, etc.Footnote 79 It functioned as a disciplinary tactic of communal regulation, focused specifically on women because of the role they played in that community in providing shelter, support, supplies, and information – as mothers, shopkeepers, domestic servants, etc. When she was attacked during the later Civil War, Anne White, for example, was an ‘aged’ housekeeper in the service of a Catholic priest (Murphy) in Cloghduv, Crookstown, County Cork. While her exact age is not reported, we might interpret Anne's ‘advanced years’ as middle age and/or an indicator of unmarried status, since she was young enough that her parents were still alive.Footnote 80 On the night of 24 April 1923, Father Murphy's house was ‘raided by a number of armed men … [who] seized and dragged by force [Anne] into the yard where they assaulted her’. Murphy and Anne's sister, Mary, also a servant, ‘remonstrated’ with the raiders, but they were threatened with revolvers – and Mary was ‘badly dragged about and assaulted’, which, according to the compensation claim (that naturally focuses on the economic impact of the attack), resulted in lasting physical and mental damage rendering her unable to work or care for elderly parents. After this altercation at the house, ‘Anne White was forced into a motor-car by the raiders and taken away to an unoccupied house 5 or 6 miles distance. She was detained there for some time during which her hair was cut off, and she was warned not to return to Cloghduv’.Footnote 81
The targeting of his female servant (via a weapon appropriate to her gender) might be interpreted as an attack on the authority of the priest, Murphy, and with it the ability of the Catholic church to protect norms relating to the status of women in the institution and society more widely (in domestic, caring roles). Perhaps Murphy had acted in some way contrary to the local I.R.A., speaking out (as did some among the church hierarchy) against Civil War violence.Footnote 82 However, anti-clericalism and abuses of religious personnel were largely absent in Ireland – a notable difference from Europe and especially the Spanish Civil War.Footnote 83 Anti-Treaty propaganda, for example, decried the ‘gross violation’ by Free State troops of the ‘sanctity’ of Catholicism, by their occupation of a convent (Religious Sisters of Charity, Stanhope Street) as a barracks during the battle for Dublin, early in the Civil War.Footnote 84 Rape can be seen as a ‘male assertion of sexual dominance’ and, by extension, ‘become the symbol’ of one side's dominance over the other;Footnote 85 we might, then, interpret the relative scarcity of sexual abuse during Ireland's conflict in terms of the well-established gender relations already in place in Irish society. Shaped strongly by the socio-cultural tenets of Catholicism increasingly dominant in the age of the Free State, arguably militants did not need to use extreme violence to establish boundaries between powerful men and subservient women (a power dynamic that served, in Ireland's case, state consolidation and/or the upholding of an alternative (republican) national identity). When there are no ‘previous social relationships’ between victim and perpetrator, by contrast, rape can be more prevalent in wartime, as well as more public and violent; during the American Revolution, for example, British soldiers gang-raped American women to terrorise, control and establish victory (in an external, colonial space).Footnote 86 The ‘conflict-specific factors’ that mark a sharp distinction between rape in war and peacetime,Footnote 87 during hostilities around the globe, were in Ireland's case ideological (a reckoning, between two socially and culturally similar sides, of competing visions for independence) as opposed to genocidal (the impetus seen, in many of the recent and ongoing conflicts cited in the introduction, to destroy completely an enemy people/culture via systematic sexual violence). Ethnic difference can drive conflict-related G.B.V., in other words. While the evidence is far from conclusive, it is possible that sexual violence was consequently more likely in the highly sectarianised atmosphere of Ulster, and at other sites of inter-denominational conflict.Footnote 88
Given the lesser importance of gendered power relations, then, as compared to national/political loyalties, in the Irish Revolution, it is possible that Anne White of Crookstown (above) was targeted, albeit with G.B.V., more as a result of her wartime loyalties than her sex. The warning she received – ‘not to return to Cloghduv’ (its severity underlined by the violence of the hair cutting) – is reminiscent of threats issued against men, too, during the Civil War; that is, that failure to comply with orders to leave (often focused on minority populations or those with land/assets to be divided between the perpetrators) would result in physical punishment.Footnote 89 The C.P.I.C. records cases (for example, Mai Callanan, above) of female informers targeted by interpersonal violence; press coverage of the White case similarly reported a local allegation that Annie had ‘given information to Canon Treacy, PP, Crookstown, as to the movements of armed men’ – presumably the same men that later attacked her.Footnote 90
The compensation claim from Anne and Mary White also evokes, as far as is possible in these legal/financial documents, the ordeal of forced haircutting. In other words, while there is little evidence of sexual contact within recorded acts of violence against women, the highly damaging legacies of the revolution, for the female population, ought not to be forgotten. Perhaps it is to be expected that newly-released files do not contain a barrage of evidence of wartime violence against women. Rape is notoriously under-reported today (arguably as a means of ‘self-preservation’),Footnote 91 and, as Lindsey Earner-Byrne argues, women in 1920s Ireland also had ‘very good reasons’ to keep stories of abuse hidden from public discourse.Footnote 92 Earner-Byrne finds clues, in the Catholic church's post-independence containment of women and female sexuality, of the violence they suffered during the revolution. Her micro-study, and histories of female migration that record the exporting from Ireland of traumatic experiences in this period, are important research models, given the obstacles already identified to quantitative analysis of sexual violence.Footnote 93 It is important certainly to place women's interactions with the Civil War in a wider context of gender attitudes and opportunities (or lack thereof) for female agency in employment, reproduction, etc.; the status of unmarried mothers in 1920s Ireland is vital, for example, in understanding the meaning and efficacy of rape by militants – as well as women's wider sense of danger in their society.Footnote 94
III
Revolutionary Ireland evidently was not a safe place for many Irishwomen (nor indeed for some men) and personal security may have had much more to do with one's domestic environment than participation (or not) in militarism. Still today, the most dangerous place for women is the home; of the 87,000 women intentionally killed worldwide, in 2017, ‘more than half of them (58 per cent) – 50,000 – were killed by intimate partners or family members’.Footnote 95 The abuse of ‘half of our population’ is a ‘major obstacle to inclusive, equitable and sustainable development’ that must be acted on politically, according to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.Footnote 96 International movements to eliminate domestic violence, alongside ‘#MeToo’ and other campaigns of solidarity against sexual assault and discrimination in workplaces and public spaces, have grown sharply in recent years – but we have much more to do. Historians must also work harder to understand the inequality and discrimination faced by women in past (Irish) society, as vital context for their experiences of war. Women's interactions with the Irish Civil War may be said to be distinctive from men's on account of their gender – because of the prevalence during 1922–3 of modes of violence and intimidation, including crimes against property, which transgressed public/private boundaries. Yet, by placing Ireland's conflict in comparative-international perspective, and aiming to understand the extent and function of violence against women, this article underlines the findings of existing histories, by Coleman and others, on the relative scarcity of systematic sexual (as opposed to gender) violence in Ireland's revolution. New evidence from the C.P.I.C. shows how and sometimes why women suffered from civil war; but, as an identifier for violence, gender was not as central to communal regulation – and the establishment of independence – as were demarcations based on religion and politics (micro-factors linked closely also to the macro-conflict over the Treaty). Rape is a weapon of war and crime against humanity; the genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland,Footnote 97 where gendered power structures, shored up by Catholic authority, remained largely unshaken by the revolution – despite the great efforts of many radical females.Footnote 98
