Afterlife: Single Cork women left destitute after the revolutionary period

Pity the impoverished single women who took part in the campaigns of Ireland’s revolutionary period but were often left afterwards with no means to support themselves.

An exhibition at Cork City Library (until November 30th) entitled Cork Afterlives: Single Women and the New Irish State, by Cork-reared Leeann Lane of Dublin City University, highlights how a patriarchal social structure prioritised marriage and motherhood.

The exhibition examines the impact of male-breadwinner wage policies, unequal pay and a lack of social insurance or secure employment for unmarried women. They were forced to rely on family or charity.

Cork did not rise in Easter 1916. However, during the War of Independence and the Civil War, women in Cork City and county were involved in republican activism. Such activism was dangerous and often resulted in the loss of employment and/or imprisonment.

In the Irish Free State in 1926, the number of unmarried women was 50 per cent greater than in England and three times greater than in the US. Many of these women experienced poverty, poor health, economic dependency and loneliness.

The exhibition is based on applications for pensions under the 1934 Military Service Act. The letters sent by the women to the Military Service Pension Board (MSPB) lay bare their straitened circumstances.

Lane writes that “access of Irish women to paid employment and full rights as citizens was increasingly restricted in the 1920s and 1930s through legislation heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching ... The assumption that women, once they reached adulthood, would marry, was embedded in the culture and legislation.”

Mary and Annie MacSwiney, sisters of the republican lord mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, were educated to third level. This allowed them to escape some of the obstacles faced by single women.

Following her arrest after the 1916 rebellion, Mary lost her teaching job in St Angela’s College in Cork and set up, with her sister, St Ita’s School, the first lay Catholic school for girls in Cork City.

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“Never worked for wages” is a phrase that appears regularly in the applications to the MSPB for special allowances by single women.

Nora Martin was an important figure within Cumann na mBan. She wrote references for many Cork women who applied for a military service pension.

Martin drew attention to the gender bias of the MSPB. “Lawyers and civil servants,” she wrote, “no matter how sympathetic, can never visualise the feelings of those women during the period 1916-1924. In justice to them, one woman at least should be on that advisory board.”

As co-owner of Café na Cruinne on Marlboro Street, Sheila McCarthy allowed the premises to be used for IRA activities during the War of Independence. By 1941, she was “almost destitute”. McCarthy wrote to Éamon de Valera: “Life is being made easy for most of those who fought for Ireland. It is hard to be looking on, being still humiliated after all those years.”

From running a thriving business, a boarding house in Langford Row in Cork’s inner city and a newspaper shop, Mary Crowley’s customers were mostly Protestant.

The shop was used during the War of Independence and the Civil War as an arms dump and a call house for dispatches. It was subject to numerous raids. In one such raid in May 1921, Patrick Lenihan, one of Crowley’s regular boarders, was shot dead. After the ceasefire, Crowley’s house was again raided and all of her boarders were arrested.

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The shooting ruined Crowley’s business. She wrote that when “everything was over, I still felt the price of being associated with the IRA as the true blue customers never came back and I had to eventually close my doors”.

By 1951, Crowley was living in one room in Dunbar Street “in what is little better than a hovel in which I try to make a meagre living by hawking letters round in hail and sleet and summer and winter, early and late”. The next year, after waiting in vain for a service pension for the years 1918-1923, she applied for a disability pension due to ill health.

While marriage was no protection for women against poverty, unmarried women were particularly vulnerable.

Hannah Cronin was beside herself with gratitude because she was able to pay her rent arrears on receipt of a military pension in 1941. She made a promise, writing that if she was in Dublin, “before I have it all spent, I will call to the Board with a bottle of whiskey”.

But by 1969, Cronin’s appreciation had dissipated somewhat as she faced an increasing cost of living. “Our pensions were very small ... five shillings a week extra would mean a lot to me. I have a hearing aid and batteries and they are very costly ... I am not looking for a fortune, just five shillings a week.” She feared ending up in the workhouse – a fate surely worse than death.