This book provides an overview of Irish gender history from the end of the Great Famine in 1852 until the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It builds on the work that scholars of women’s history pioneered and brings together internationally regarded experts to offer a synthesis of the current historiography and existing debates within the field. The authors place emphasis on highlighting new and exciting sources, methodologies, and suggested areas for future research. They address a variety of critical themes such as the family, reproduction and sexuality, the medical and prison systems, masculinities and femininities, institutions, charity, the missions, migration, ‘elite women’, and the involvement of women in the Irish nationalist/revolutionary period. Envisioned to be both thematic and chronological, the book provides insight into the comparative, transnational, and connected histories of Ireland, India, and the British empire.
An important contribution to the study of Irish gender history, the volume offers opportunities for students and researchers to learn from the methods and historiography of Irish studies. It will be useful for scholars and teachers of history, gender studies, colonialism, post-colonialism, European history, Irish history, Irish studies, and political history.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Jyoti Atwal is Associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, and Adjunct Professor at Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick, Ireland (2017–2022). She specialises in gender history of India in the colonial and post-colonial contexts. She launched a master’s level course on Irish women’s history at JNU in 2017. She has recently co-edited a book with Professor Eunan O’Halpin titled, India, Ireland and Anti-Imperial Struggle: Remembering the Connaught Rangers Mutiny, 1920 (2021, funded by the Embassy of Ireland, New Delhi). Her other publications include a co-edited volume on Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives: Situating India (2020). She has authored Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North India (2016). She has been a Visiting Fellow at various universities across the globe. She is on the editorial board of Women’s History Review. Presently she is working on a biography of Margaret Cousins (1878–1954).
Ciara Breathnach is Associate Professor in History at the University of Limerick and an Irish Research Council Laureate Awardee 2017/32. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her current monograph is Ordinary Lives, Death and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner’s Court, 1876–1902 (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Sarah-Anne Buckley is Head of the Department of History at the National University of Ireland Galway and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Lifecourse and Society (ILAS). Her research centres on the history of childhood and youth, gender, and women in modern Ireland. She has published over twenty peer reviewed articles/chapters, five edited volumes and is the author of The Cruelty Man: Child Welfare, the NSPCC and the State in Ireland, 1889–1956 (2013). Her 2020 co-authored book Old Ireland in Colour was the recipient of the “An Post Best Irish Published Book of the Year 2020”. Her work has been cited in The New York Times and CNN. She is past President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland (WHAI), and current Co-PI of the Tuam Oral History Project.
