Abstract
Cara Delay's work on Irish Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular its intersections with gender, is of long-standing and worthy of much respect. Her pioneering contributions on the topic in numerous important journal articles and chapters over the last two decades have significantly reshaped older grand narratives of late modern Irish Catholicism that marginalised women, and simultaneously uncovered a complex female agency that advances us beyond a more recent, rather malign caricature of ‘the Irish mother’ as merely the suggestible moral agent of an oppressive institutional church. Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, therefore, comes freighted with expectations of pushing this original perspective yet further. It succeeds admirably in doing so and will surely be a spur to further valuable work.
The book contains six thematically organised chapters. Chapter one is a bird's eye view on the construction of an Irish Catholic culture, which ranges widely, and in large part simply aims to create a context for what comes afterwards. Consequently, reflections on gender sometimes take a backseat here and the chapter is relatively light on deep analysis of primary source material. However, in a sign of things to come, it does cite some comically apocalyptic language from certain members of the hierarchy; Cardinal Logue, we are told, complained of how modern living threatened to turn young Irish women into ‘coarsened … degenerate … hoydens’ (p. 26). The chapter goes on to sweep over Irish Catholic print culture – with its dizzying extent, high circulation figures and consequent ability to send particular gendered messages well outlined – before concluding with a short section on material culture which spins through various aspects of women as consumers and producers of devotional items rather more quickly than many readers may wish.
Chapter two on Catholic girlhood relies on multiple memoirs, Alice Taylor's, Edna O’Brien's and Mary Kenny's famous examples among them. Recollections of religious fantasies linked to saints, schoolgirl romantic crushes on nuns and corporal punishment connected with catechetical learning combine to put the body and the senses at the centre of the analysis, producing some most intriguing insights. The degree to which mothers and daughters began pushing hierarchical guidance on first communion attire to its limits in the early twentieth century, moreover, makes Delay's argument about the female agency that operated within Catholic boundaries of respectability very well.
Chapter three concentrates on the Irish Catholic mother, confounding in equal measure the idyllic view of cleric Walter McDonald and the hypercritical perspective of sociologist Tom Inglis. It aims, Delay tells us, to get at ‘actual mothers’ words and experiences’ and move beyond the literary trope (p. 99). Sections on unmarried motherhood go over rather a familiar territory, but fresher is fascinating material on motherhood as martyrdom and the agency that this lent mothers. Chapter four on the Catholic household covers the religious material culture of the home, the nightly saying of the rosary, ‘stations’ and associations between religion and food, concluding that the centrality of the home in faith and nation alike allowed women to construct identities as, in a neat pun, ‘home rulers’ (p. 168).
Chapter five takes us to ideas around gender and space, analysing chapels and other religious spaces as, in James Smith's term, an ‘architecture of containment’. The chapter weaves its way through matters as diverse as the ‘churching’ of women who had recently given birth; the role of women at wakes, often in ‘keening’; the burial of transgressive women outwith consecrated ground (the same treatment was not meted out to similarly offending men); gender segregation in church pews; chapels and women's clothing and Mass as a social ritual.
The final chapter on ‘women, priests and power’ explores the intimate relationships between women and their priests, cataloguing numerous female appeals to priestly and episcopal authority, as well as revealing the agency of ‘troublesome women’. This chapter rehearses some of Delay's most interesting previous work on language use by women against priests, although it contains new material too. As earlier in the book, there is strong engagement with Lindsey Earner-Byrne's path-breaking work on begging letters found in the Dublin Diocesan Archives.
The book, as the brief run-through above suggests, teems with fascinating and often difficult-to-access archival material, hard-won in years of diligent research. Perhaps understandably, as a result, there is sometimes a breathless quality to its presentation; chapters are relatively short, and often have much to cover, and this reader found herself wanting more of the author's (very astute) wider arguments. Certainly, a meatier introduction – there is a bare ten pages here – could fruitfully have done more than point out the gaps and misapprehensions surrounding women and Irish Catholic history, and a four-page conclusion does not make up for that omission.
Two points, in particular, might have been given more consideration. First, since the book proposes to cover an entire century, a greater sense of change over time might have been injected. The 1850s and the 1950s were very different decades, yet there is a chronological intermingling of evidence throughout. This frequently does work, but some explanation of this methodology at the beginning would have been welcome. Moreover, clearer interrogating of what can seem anachronistic terms like ‘conservative’ (pp. 39, 69) may have been apt: there was, surely, a fairly radical change in notions of Catholic womanhood in the early part of this period if women were instrumental in creating a wholly new form of Irish Catholicism.
Second, despite a title that leaves ample room for it – referring to modern Catholicism and not modern Irish Catholicism, specifically – the book could do more to make its case to scholars of religion and gender beyond Ireland. Delay, as expected, finds constant reiteration of the view that Irishness and Catholicism were two sides of one coin; but there is surely a universal female experience of religiously inflected patriarchy to be drawn out here. This book has valuable insights for scholars of modern Ireland, but it could very easily speak to a much larger audience.
This is all to conclude that Delay has written a very good book with an important premise and genuine insight that should be on modern Irish history reading lists everywhere. I greatly enjoyed reading it and would happily have read a much longer iteration.