Understanding violence against women in the Irish Revolution – a global context

by Professor Linda Connolly

In 2013, the Irish State launched a decade of remembering the turning points in a “revolution” that led to the foundation of the Irish State and partition of the island, a century ago. At certain junctures, the outcome has been largely consensual, such as during the commemoration of the Easter Rising of 1916 in 2016. At other times, it has been deeply contentious. A proposal in 2019 to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary, the police force in Ireland that was under the authority of the British administration (1822-1922), proved extremely divisive. Conflicting understandings of how to confront, or whether to even recognise the history and legacy/ies of imperialism, and the struggle against it, rapidly surfaced in the official State programme and in memory politics. From the outset, the government stated a formal position of parity of esteem and pluralism in what could (or should) be remembered on the island in the “decade of centenaries.” Inconvenient truths and transgressions on all sides cannot be conveniently sanitised or elided either, including in relation to women’s experience of sexual and gender-based violence in the revolution. As David Fitzpatrick noted in 2013: “commemoration, like good history, should help us to understand what forces impelled people to commit courageous as well as terrible acts. Though the outcome of such investigations is often contentious and morally unsettling, it is preferable to a bland recitation of general blamelessness.” As Ireland experiences a concerted period of State remembrance, Paul Ricoeur’s articulation of the reciprocal but unequal relationship between remembering and forgetting is clearly at play – where there is remembering there is also forgetting – especially in relation to the violence that women experienced in the period 1919-23. Further to Francoise Thebaud’s argument, developing a gender-based approach complicates our understanding of war – both of particular wars and the general phenomenon of war. Developing a global understanding of gender, war, and violence sheds new light on transnational influences on the revolution within Ireland. Revolutionary change must be understood within a global, transnational as well as a nation-state framework.

Women, constituting half the population, clearly affect and are affected by wars. Violence against women in wartime is a global phenomenon that constitutes an important field of research. The impact of gendered violence on women, in the War of Independence and the Civil War, was, until recently, essentially unacknowledged in Irish history for many decades, despite that fact that the Irish sociologist Louise Ryan published a groundbreaking article on the subject in 2000. Research by scholars, such as Cynthia Enloe, in studies of militarisation in other disciplines have also long progressed these issues. In the Irish Research Council-funded Women and the Irish Revolution project, awarded in 2017, I have excavated and published a large number of cases of gender-based sexual violence experienced by women in the Irish Revolution 1919-23. The term “forcible” or “forced” hair cutting was coined in my research project to capture a widespread form of sexual policing, bodily violence, and social control meted out by all sides (crown forces and republicans). The interplay of gender, sexuality, and power in militarised contexts is evident in the deployment of such bodily violence specifically targeted at Irish women in this period.

Love, intimacy, sex, and violence exist in all military conflicts. Constructions of gender, female sexuality, and nation have influenced attitudes to any intimate “fraternisation” in wars. Women in Ireland’s revolution who forged friendly or intimate relationships with British soldiers or the Royal Irish Constabulary were often warned off, threatened, sexually policed, repressed, and punished through forced hair cutting and other violence performed by republicans. The cause of such punishment was a combination of security concerns (women passing on intelligence, secrets, or information about the IRA to the British would create real danger), assisting the enemy (through the provision of supplies, accommodation and other services), and sexual policing (the social control of women who consorted or had intimate relationships with enemy men and were considered traitors).

Women fleeing their homes after the sack of Balbriggan in September 1920. (Images: RTÉ Archives)

Women’s hair was usually cropped, shaved, or sheared by groups of several masked men in a secluded space or outside a home. Bureau of Military History Witness Statements in the Irish Military Archives, newspaper reports, and RIC records, for instance, extensively demonstrate how forcible hair cutting was and is a serious assault. Serious injuries were often caused and trauma, shock, or mental illness subsequently occurred because of the terror and force inflicted. Women invariably could be dragged, held down, beaten, cut, chained, blindfolded, tarred, doused in oil or paint, sexually assaulted, or badly shaken by the ordeal. Hair taking both in Ireland and in other wars throughout time also represented a direct symbolic attack on women’s sexual reputation. Removing hair marked women as sexual transgressors, whores, ‘horizontal collaborators’, consorts etc. and the taken hair could also be kept and produced by perpetrators as a kind of war trophy, boast of power and domination of women, or as a badge of masculinity.

Many cases involving large groups of masked republican men, assailing women, are documented in several counties during the Irish War of Independence including in the newspapers. For example, the Belfast Newsletter on 30th June 1920 reported ‘Rebel gallantry Girls’ Hair Cut Off in County Kerry’: “…about 1 a.m. on the morning of 26th a party of men, fifteen to twenty in number, armed and disguised, called at a house in Tralee and forcibly dragged two girls into the roadway. They knocked them down and in other ways brutally assaulted them, and then, whilst two men held their heads, a third cut their hair off with a pair of shears, and, not content with this outrage, they poured tar over the girls’ heads.” Another attack on the 12th of February 1921 was reported in the Donegal Democrat on the 11th of September 1920: “At Ballyshannon Quarter Sessions, before Judge Cooke K.C., Ellen Gillen claimed compensation for the cutting of her hair by armed and masked men on the night of the 11th September, 1920…she was boarding in a house in Erne Street. On the night in question she was taking off her boots when a boy asked if she was in. The occupier of the house said she was, and about fifteen or twenty minutes afterwards four masked men came into the house. They covered the occupier of the house with revolvers, and then caught her and put something into her mouth and dragged her into the street. They then took her to a style and brought her into the big Meadow, and made her swear that she would not go back to the police again; they then cut off her hair with a scissors. One of them said she was a traitor to her country and religion, and she was kicked. They then allowed her to go back into the house. The occupier wanted to get her a drink, and one of its party said that water was too good for her. After the occurrence she lived in the police barracks for nine weeks…When she came back her lips were bleeding, they told her not to leave the house…Her hair was closely cropped and she was marked on the face and mouth. She appeared to be suffering from nervousness.”

Another violent scene from the Ken Loach film The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Image Courtesy of Sixteen Film)

In some examples, defiance and unrequited love is also conveyed and sustained. The Leitrim Observer reported on 4 September 1920: “Girls Hair Cut Off. Twelve armed and disguised men raided the house of a young woman in County Roscommon, says an official report from Dublin Castle, and asked her if it were true that she was keeping company with an RIC man. She replied that she was. She was then told that her hair would be cut off, and retorted ‘Cut away; this will not alter my mind.’ The raiders forced her on to a chair, and one of them held her hands while another cut off her hair. During this process the girl said – ‘Cut it nicely so that it will not be noticed.’ The constable concerned has made the necessary application to his authorities to marry the girl.” In some other instances, however, British soliders or police were also killed by the IRA because they loved or were openly courting “native” Irish women. Such relationships were considered both a danger to the profound secrecy surrounding the IRA’s guerrilla tactics and chance of military success, and as morally transgressive behaviour.

Hair ‘taking’ is a weapon of war and punishment that also appears in other conflicts globally. Ireland was no exception. In D-Day: the Battle for Normandy, Anthony Beevor described how during the Middle Ages, the mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, had biblical origins and was commonly a punishment for adultery and an act of desexualisation. The targeting of women's hair as a mark of retribution and humiliation was, however, reintroduced in twentieth century wars. The deployment of this tactic in Ireland’s revolution (1919-23) is perhaps one of the earlier examples of this. Alongside republicans, crown forces also conducted hair cutting very extensively, typically during frightening night raids on houses in Ireland which are vividly described by women in numerous archival sources. Forced hair cutting or hair taking also appears as a gender-specific punishment and form of sexual policing in several other twentieth century wars, including in much larger scale wars, after the Irish Revolution. German women who had relations with French troops after they occupied the Rhineland in 1923 suffered this fate. Likewise, women who participated in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and in the Spanish (1936-1939) and Greek (1946-49) Civil Wars experienced head shaving. Paul Preston, in his writing, for example has described how many women were murdered and thousands of the wives, sisters and mothers of executed leftists were subjected to rapes and other sexual abuses, the humiliation of head shaving and public soiling after the forced ingestion of castor oil. Falangists shaved the heads of women from republican families and labelled them prostitutes. In Greece, Katherine Stefatos in her work describes how during the period of "white terror" (1945-1947) and the early stage of the Civil War (1946-1947), women were gang raped, forced into prostitution, mutilated, sexually assaulted in public places or in front of their relatives, had their heads shaved, and were stripped naked. Julia Eichenberg has also compared how the cutting, shearing and shaving of hair was a form of violence frequently used in both Ireland and Poland, especially following accusations of alleged sexual and political betrayal. Women who allegedly formed relationships with Nazis experienced head shaving extensively during the Liberation of France in 1944. What Beevor described as basically the misogynistic practice and “ugly carnival” that took place during the Liberation in France, was also repeated in Belgium, Italy, Norway, and the Netherlands. And in several other more contemporary wars globally, there is widespread evidence that women have also been humiliated in this way. For instance, in the 1970s, women in Northern Ireland who formed relationships with British soldiers (soldier ‘dolls’ or consorts) had their hair cut and often were also tarred and feathered by republicans. Likewise Palestinian women in the long-term Bourj al-Barajneh refugee camp near Beirut (first set up in 1949) experienced incidents of public head-shaving, jeering, and humiliation at the Lebanese checkpoints in the 1980s. The taking of women’s hair is therefore an established weapon of war that was both a feature of the Irish Revolution and many other revolutions and conflicts, globally.

Professor Linda Connolly has been investigating the violence against women that took place during the War of Independence, particularly forcible hair cutting. Listen to her conversation on the subject with Myles Dungan on the RTÉ History Show.

Apart from attacks on hair, it must be noted that analysis of a wide range of sources and documents from the period reveals women experienced other types of bodily violence in the Irish Revolution, that appear less common than hair taking but merit acknowledgement in a moment of commemoration. In Dromore village in County Tyrone, for example, a very active member of the women’s republican organisation Cumann na mBann, Eileen O’Doherty, was shot by B-Specials in both legs while standing at her front door and spent eight months in hospital. A subsequent military services pension application states that the wound she got ‘finished her’. The pension she applied for in light of her unstinting service to the cause of Irish independence and injuries suffered was declined. Newspaper reports also document the violence women experienced in Ulster and in Belfast. On 2nd June 1922, the Irish Times reported the total number of deaths in Belfast the previous day was four and thirty-two people were injured, including seven of whom are suffering from burns. A group of men poured inflammable liquid over a woman at the house of Dr McSorley, Donegal Pass. The servant, Susan McCormack (40), was taken to hospital suffering from severe burns and shock.

Some very well documented cases of wartime sexual violence, including ‘gang’ or multiple perpetrator rape, are also evident in the Irish Revolution. So far at least nine serious incidents of military rape and sexual assault associated with the Civil War period alone have been identified in the Women and the Irish Revolution project, involving Free State, Republican and B-Special combatants.  Conflict-related murders of women in this period are also evident, including on the border. For instance, one military services pension application was in respect of the death of Kate Connolly’s daughter Mary (Minnie) who died from gunshot wounds on 23 July 1922 at Edenappa, Jonesboro, County Armagh after delivering milk to the IRA at Ravensdale. It is noted in the death certificate enclosed in the file that the cause of death was "bullet wounds...inflicted by members of his Majesty’s forces". She was with “the Moore girls” – a Margaret Moore was also killed. Again, no provisions under the Army Pensions Acts to consider the claim was awarded.  Andy Bielenberg has also recently written about the thirteen women who died in Co Cork during the War of Independence, including the controversial killings by the IRA of Mary Lindsay and Bridget Noble. The wider spectrum of violence, assaults and other types of injuries women experienced (psychological and physical) must also be fully acknowledged and considered alongside forced hair cutting in Irish revolutionary studies.

Modern Irish historians until very recently have been extremely slow to acknowledge and amalgamate already existing, longstanding, interdisciplinary research on gender-based violence in the Irish Revolution. Global studies of gender, violence, war, and revolution/s have also been largely eclipsed. Scholars such as the Iranian Sociologist Valentine M. Moghadam, among others, have been analysing these issues for decades. Why was this? Was it because the existence of such serious forms of violence and women’s experience of it (including in other countries) was unseen, dismissed or even denied in Irish revolutionary studies? Or because research on this issue was initially produced (and later expanded upon) in Irish sociology and not modern Irish history writing, framed by the nation-state? Whatever the reason, the development of a more comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of how gender intersects with war has clearly enhanced and advanced a new understanding of women’s experience of the revolution in Ireland a century ago. In the process, the received understanding of what women experienced in the Irish Revolution has been inherently challenged and significantly broadened. 

Linda Connolly is Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University. She is the author of articles and chapters on the sexual and gender-based violence women experienced in the Irish Revolution and is currently finalising a new monograph on this subject based on the Irish Research Council funded project Women and the Irish Revolution. Her previous books include, The Irish Women’s Movement: From Revolution to Devolution, Documenting Irish Feminisms: the Second Wave (with Tina O’Toole), Social Movements and Ireland (with Niamh Hourigan), The Irish Family and Women and the Irish Revolution: Feminism, Activism, Violence.