Research Catalog

Title

At home in the revolution : what women said and did in 1916 / Lucy McDiarmid.

Author

McDiarmid, Lucy

Publication

Dublin, Ireland : Royal Irish Academy, 2015.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xiii, 285 pages : illustrations, portraits; 24 cm

Summary

On Monday morning 24 April 1916, Catherine Byrne jumped through a window on the side of the GPO on OConnell Street to join the Irish revolution; Mairead Ní Cheallaigh served breakfast to Patrick and Willie Pearse, their last home-cooked meal, and then went out to set up an emergency hospital with members of Cumann na mBan; Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh persuaded Thomas MacDonagh to let her into the garrison at Jacobs Biscuit Factory; and Elsie Mahaffy, daughter of the Provost of Trinity, was in her bedroom completing her toilet when her sister came in to tell her that the Sinn Féiners had risen. At Home in the Revolution derives its material from womens own accounts of the Easter Rising, interpreted broadly to include also the Howth gun-running and events that took place over the summer of 1916 in Ireland. These eye-witness narratives -- diaries, letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and official witness statements -- were written by nationalists and unionists, Catholics and Protestants, women who felt completely at home in the garrisons, cooking for the men and treating their wounds, and women who stayed at home during the Rising. The books focus is on the kind of episode usually ignored by traditional historians: cooking with bayonets, arguing with priests, resisting sexual harassment, soothing a female prostitute, doing sixteen-hand reels in Kilmainham Gaol, or disagreeing with Prime Minister Asquith about the effect of the Rising on Dublins architecture. The womens small behaviours, to use Erving Goffmans term, reveal social change in process, not the official history of manifestos and legislation, but the unofficial history of access to a door or a leap through a window; they show how issues of gender were negotiated in a time of revolution. -- Provided by publisher.

Subject

• Easter Rising (Ireland : 1916)
• 1900 - 1999
• Women > Ireland > History > 20th century
• Military participation > Female
• Women
• Ireland > Participation, Female. > Easter Rising, 1916
• Ireland

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

'Provision for girls' -- Mary Spring Rice, Elsie Mahaffy and domestic space -- Flirtation and courtship -- Women and male authority -- Women among women -- The Kilmainham farewell -- Emotions 1916 -- Working the revolution

ISBN

• 9781908996749
• 1908996749
• 1908996749 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2015303341

OCLC

933426355

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library