Embodied Ideals and Realities: Irish Nuns and Irish Womanhood, 1930s-1960s

Abstract

Embodied Ideals and Realities:Irish Nuns and Irish Womanhood, 1930s-1960s1 Yvonne McKenna (bio) Introduction In postindependence Irish society, religious life was not just the most important model of womanhood beyond married motherhood, but a significant exception to it. After independence was achieved in 1921 and following on a pattern established in the nineteenth century, the number of Irish women entering Catholic religious convents continued to rise, reaching its peak in the mid-1960s. And yet religious life represented an anomaly. Whether due to a depressed economy, gender-specific legislation, or underlying socio-religious assumptions, the state that was shaped in the wake of Irish independence worked hard to maintain a distinction between the private (female) and the public (male) sphere. Women were regarded first and foremost as wives and mothers, and their primary place within the family and the home was demonstrated in and given statutory approval by the constitution. Religious life, however, served to disrupt this binary: nuns were valued precisely for their celibacy and the work they did. In this essay, in the context of circulating discourses around womanhood current during the period—and based on oral histories collected from women religious—the apparent paradox that [End Page 40] allowed women to eschew marriage and motherhood yet occupy positions of status and respect within Irish society will be explored. In entering religious life, women were expected to cut themselves off from the secular world and their secular selves, adopting a new identity as "religious" in its stead. But what implications did this have for gendered subjectivity? Did entering allow, or indeed demand that, the religious occupy "Irish womanhood" differently? If so, was it in ways that benefited them as women? Crucially, did women religious challenge or subvert Irish notions of womanhood? Despite the number of Irish women who entered religious life, especially in the decades following independence, we know very little about their personal lives. Without doubt, nuns' oral narratives shed light on a group of Irish women whose personal experiences have thus far been neglected. In addition, however, they enable an exploration of the category "Irish womanhood" during a particularly important period of Irish history, one of national—and gendered—identity formation. Situating the Accounts The twenty women religious upon whose oral testimonies this paper is based were born in Ireland between the 1910s and the 1940s, entered "active" (that is, not enclosed) Catholic religious congregations between the 1930s and the 1960s and have lived as religious in Ireland, England, and elsewhere since.2 The interviews, which took place in the late 1990s, explored their whole life histories and therefore covered several decades. This essay, however, is concerned specifically with three and a half decades of their collective lives: from the 1930s to the mid-1960s. It was during these decades that the women grew up, made the decision to enter religious life, and lived within it under the particular system of government that prevailed before Vatican II brought about such momentous change as to render convent life utterly altered by the end of the century.3 [End Page 41] These same decades represent a pivotal period in Irish history as well. Following rebellion and war with Britain, independence for twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of Ireland was only achieved in 1921. It was followed directly by a civil war that lasted until 1923. Not least because of the difficult and violent transfer of power, the decades following independence were crucial in terms of nation building and national identity formation. Religion and gender played important roles in these related processes with very real consequences for the women and men of Ireland, including the women of this study whose decisions regarding what life path to follow were made in the context of a society that held particular, and particularly well-policed, notions concerning permissible behavior for women. The forms of womanhood deemed acceptable or desirable over the period—and which were promoted as such by church and state—provide a context in which to set the women's accounts and against which to assess the impact of entering religious life. Discourses of Irish Womanhood, Acceptable Life Paths Catholicism had played a vital role in...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.