Women, Art and Nationalism in the Irish Revival

The contribution of women to the construction of modern society has been largely forgotten in Irish history. Even though the interest in women's studies has improved in the past decades, adding women's names to history is not enough: we need to question its basis, Adela Flamarike argues in this original new book. The author explores how the distinctive features of Irish cultural nationalism led to a distinctive understanding of both womanhood and the role of women's arts in Irish cultural self-realisation.

The focus on female visual art gives new clarity to the participation and circumstances of Irish women in the Irish revolution and the creation of modern society. It recovers some of the voices that have been silenced and the experiences that have been forgotten by giving them an aesthetic platform. This book is a major attempt to explore the construction of womanhood created by nationalism and the Irish Revival, to investigate whether female artists challenged this idealised representation of the feminine and, if so, how they did it.

It exposes female participation in the Irish cultural scene by interrogating the new styles and techniques that women artists and craftswomen in Ireland developed between 1890-1922. It focuses in particular on two groups of women - those in the Arts & Crafts movement - whose guilds sought to offer poor women a self-determining future - and those women who travelled to the continent (notably Paris) to gain an art education which they then they integrated into their creative practice on returning to Ireland.

In the period leading up to the formation of the Irish State, governed as it was by masculine and authoritarian values, it was not acceptable for women in Irish society to claim or pursue the life of the artists. Creativity, renovation and innovation were valued as key components of life before, during and after revolution, and yet intellectual women at the beginning of the 20th century had to claim their capacity, talent and values in the shadows of their female fellows. As culture emerged as the mode of expression of nationalist ideas, visual artists were still considered less than those who dedicated themselves to literature.

In this context, female artistic talent was considered a simple pastime for well-off women, even though many of these artists were active in the nationalist political and cultural revolution at the end of the 19th century. Yet the author shows that the image of the woman as a nation was systematically used by the nationalist discourse, especially in the cultural context. Both nationalism and Catholicism had a major influence developing a very particular imagery of the Irish woman whose consequences are still perceptible in the experiences of Irish women.

The book analyses Irish writings, literature and art of the period so as to sum up the image of womanhood developed before and during the Irish Revival. Many of these sources are, paradoxically perhaps, reflective of the patriarchal context to which they were speaking, and so a transversal perspective is the main axis of this study. Through this perspective, the Adela Flamarike examines society, history and art in this period, when the circumstances of female artists were significantly different to male artists.