Unity

From Unity, 6 March 2004

Irish women and the First World War, part 1

Common history, common enemy

By Lynda Walker

(Based on a talk given on 11 March 2004 for International Women’s Day)

This and the following articles give some analysis and description of the lives of Irish women and the First World War at the beginning of the twentieth century. It takes on board the ideas expressed by Marxists such as Maurice Cornforth in his book The Theory of Knowledge (1976), where he writes (p. 144): “Complete, full, absolute truth is something that we can never attain. But it is something that we must work towards.” He examines the ideas relating to absolute truth, how facts are presented, and how opinions can differ from the truth. His work is theoretical in nature and is worthy of examination in its own right. It was no accident that the paper that the communists produced in Russia was called Pravda—truth. But that some communists deviated from the truth is something that we are now paying for. Marxists believe that people reflect their own environment, so that ideas, opinions, truth, the way facts are presented will often reflect the background that a person comes from. And from this complex background we can begin to show the whole story by looking at other people’s experiences.
     This work is also taking on board the ideas expressed by Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (Irish Women’s History Reader, 2001), who wrote (p. 2): “The dawning realisation that women were almost wholly absent from historical records, bar the exceptions of a few isolated ‘greats,’ and the subsequent search to reclaim the history of all women—both the ‘great’ and the ‘ordinary’—has presented a potentially revolutionary challenge to teaching, research, and publishing of Irish History”—and one might add “world history.” In a chapter in the same book Mary Cullen anticipates that when enough history of women has been uncovered, history will have to be rewritten.
     Thus I suddenly realised the mammoth task that I had set myself in offering to talk about this subject, because, just as men cannot study a history that is without women, so the opposite is also the case; and equally we cannot study the working-class aspects of history without looking at the capitalist class. I suddenly wished that I were back at university with nothing else to do but study, research, and listen to academics. The work I did for this talk sent me scurrying back to re-read books and to take up new books. It also led to looking at the 16th (Irish) Division and 36th (Ulster) Division web sites and put messages on their contacts list, asking for information about Irish women’s lives during the war. To some extent I have to say that there is evidence to show that Marxists did pay attention to the women’s lives. August Bebel’s writing is one example. The works of Connolly and the pamphlet of Connolly’s writings on women the CPI produced, Breaking the Chains (1981), show that he understood not only the nature of the class struggle but also the importance of women’s part in this struggle
     The book Women and Communism (1950) also contains ideas for discussion; it is a selection of writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, with an appendix by Clara Zetkin. And perhaps that says it all: that the development of the Marxist feminist ideas written about by Clara Zetkin and Aleksandra Kollontai, Lenin, Connolly and others never really happened until much later in the twentieth century, and to the detriment of the Soviet state. Marxists from the USSR (and others) have yet to give an analysis of this lack of development. (Maybe it exists and I have not come across it.)
     When I heard that Irish men were retracing history—looking at the common history that they had with their grandfathers and great-grandfathers and the First World War, looking at the political implications for nationalists, who went in their thousands but who have a vacant memory about this, and at loyalists, who claim the war as their own culture—my immediate thoughts were, “But what about the women?” Another dimension to this study is the glorification of the war, and the truth of why it happened in the first place. This and other articles set out to look at women’s role in the First World War and the truths that exist. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and people who want to know more must go to direct sources—feminist historians like Maria Luddy, Myrtle Hill, Margaret Ward, Mary Cullen, Rosemary Cullen Owens, Connolly, and a growing number of other historians who, for whatever reasons, have discovered women.

Common enemy?

“You would sacrifice your life for a landowner, a factory owner or some wealthy boss. But today it’s war and you stab, cripple, and kill the ‘enemy,’ a worker or peasant as ill fated as you . . . And you would sacrifice your own life and destroy that of a comrade from another country for the benefit of your common enemy—the millionaire.” So wrote Kollontai, in Tsarist Russia, in September 1915 (Selected Articles and Speeches, 1984, p. 82).
     “The cause of war is the struggle of national capital on the world market. English and French capital is fighting German capital in Africa, Asia, and on the markets of smaller states.” (Kollontai, Selected Articles and Speeches, p. 88).
     “I believe that the socialist proletariat of Europe in all the belligerent countries ought to have refused to march against their brothers across frontiers, and such a refusal would have prevented the war and all its horrors, even though it might have led to civil war.” So wrote Connolly in Ireland on 30 October 1915 (Labour and Easter Week, 1949, p. 54).
     “Everywhere it [the British Empire] holds down races and nations, that it might use them as slaves, that it might use their territories as sources for rent and interest for its aristocratic rulers.” (Connolly, 9 October 1915, Labour and Easter Week, p. 84.) “From out of these slums these poor misguided brothers of ours have been tricked and deluded into giving battle for England—into waging a war upon the German nation . . . The people of Dublin reasserts itself, and the men and women begin to protest against this suicidal destruction of the Irish race in a war that is not of their making, and for an Empire that they abhor.” (Connolly, 26 February 1916, Labour and Easter Week, p. 147.)
     So wrote the communists and some socialists of Europe, who, in giving an analysis of the existence of the First World War, identified the common struggle of the workers against the common struggle of the capitalists to hold on to or expand its wealth. We speak so often of British imperialism that there is a tendency to forget the other imperialist countries that rule the world, whose capitalist class also use the workers as fodder for their bloody wars. In contrast to Aleksandra Kollontai, Myrtle Hill writes (Women and Ireland: A Century of Change, 2003, p. 79): “War against a common enemy had not therefore brought orange and green to a closer understanding of each other’s positions, as John Redmond had hoped that it would.” In this quotation the term “common enemy” is not recognised in the same way: for Kollontai and for Connolly the German workers were not the “common enemy.”
     In 1910, International Women’s Day was established as a day that would help to bring working women together in a struggle for peace, independence, and socialism. It is what feminist historians called the first wave of feminism, when women the world over were fighting for the right to an education, against poor working conditions, for the right to vote, and for political inclusion. In Ireland, demands were no different, but the women and men who were active in the suffrage movement faced specific political conditions. Ireland was going through the home rule period, which meant that politics in Ireland focused more on the question of national independence.

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