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ONE

Mother Ireland and the Queen of Irish Fiddlers

Women Musicians and the Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland

INTRODUCTION

And yet if you took the hero out of the story, what was left? What female figure was there to identify with? … The heroine, as such, was utterly passive. She was Ireland or Hibernia. She was stamped, as a rubbed-away mark, on silver or gold; a compromised regal figure on a throne. Or she was a nineteenth-century image of girlhood, on a frontispiece or in a book of engravings. She was invoked, addressed, remembered, loved, regretted. And, most important, died for. She was a mother or a virgin. Her hair was swept or tied back, like the prow of a ship. Her flesh was wood or ink or marble. And she had no speaking part.¹

In this quotation, the Irish poet Eavan Boland (b. 1944) describes her dawning awareness that the heroic stories of Irish nationalist struggles left little room for women activists or commentators. She continues: “To the male principle was reserved the right not simply of action but of expression as well. I was ready to weep or sing or recite in the cause of Ireland. To do any of that, however … I would have to give up the body and spirit of a woman.”² Boland thus identifies a primary problem for women activists in the early twentieth century, who sometimes negotiated gender stereotypes by embracing androgyny, but who more often participated in nationalist struggles by working within accepted categories of femininity established by personifications of the Irish nation as a woman in poetry, song, and rhetoric. For women traditional musicians who were publicly active in the early 1900s, such strategies of symbolic identification were vital.

Although this chapter focuses on the activities and social positions of women, it would not be possible to discuss the gendered aspects of nationalism without also addressing both sexuality and race / ethnicity, since the basic premise of ethnic nationalism is the reproduction of “appropriate” citizens. This reproduction requires normatively white and ethnically Irish citizens to engage in sanctioned procreative activities, which in turn requires the maintenance of social mores, religious doctrines, and legal codes to uphold “correct” sexual behaviors. Gendered anxieties around Irish whiteness based on British colonial discourse shaped ideas about both gender and race and produced complicated relationships between Ireland and India, its fellow colonial subject, as well as between Irish immigrants and enslaved African peoples in the Americas. While I do not extensively chart the relationships between Ireland and India or Irish attitudes toward blackness here, these topics bear further study, especially in relation to music and sound.

This chapter first examines the construction of the Irish nation as a woman and discusses Mother Ireland / Hibernia and India’s Bharat Mata (“Mother India”) in relation to their shared colonizer, England’s Britannia. Personifications of the Irish nation as a woman required that Irish men behave in certain ways toward the feminized nation and the nonmetaphorical women within it. I then outline poetic representations of the Irish nation between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries to introduce the images of Mother Ireland, the Shan Van Vocht, and Erin / Hibernia that were ubiquitous by the early twentieth century. Using work on the cultural politics of emotion, I argue that the affective power of these representations was as influential as the visual and moral parameters that they established for living women.

The cultural meanings of personifications of Mother Ireland, Erin, and their counterparts determined how women’s public nationalist activity would fit within, reproduce, and sometimes challenge discourses of nation and home. The next section of this chapter examines the Gaelic League and the Irish Ireland movement to trace the gendered aspects of cultural nationalism encoded in their missions and policies. Then I briefly describe the ways some women’s organizations in the early twentieth century used gender stereotypes as justification for nationalist—and sometimes militant—action. Such rationales for women’s political activity resonate with discourses around women’s public nationalist musical activity in the same era.

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE: A VERY BRIEF HISTORY

Ireland’s relationship with England is at the center of its modern history and is encoded in Irish popular memory through such events as English settlers’ seventeenth-century “plantation” of Ireland, Oliver Cromwell’s invasion and bloody conquest of it in the mid-seventeenth century, the institution of penal laws in 1691, and the 1800 Acts of Union, which made Ireland part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and were instituted in response to the Rebellion of 1798.³ In the nineteenth century, attempts to win Irish sovereignty through rebellion or parliamentary process included the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s and a series of Home Rule bills that ultimately led to the partition of Ireland in 1920. As a result of such nationalist political, cultural, and military activity, including the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1921 Irish War of Independence, the Irish Free State was formed in 1922 after a brief civil war.⁴

The Irish historical gaze also looks beyond its own shores—for military help, as it looked to France during the Rebellion of 1798; and for homes for millions of emigrants, including those who left Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the 1840s and those who went to England, the United States, and elsewhere during the economically bleak years of the mid-twentieth century. Among those who left were Francis O’Neill (1848–1936), a Cork native who moved to Chicago and published the tune collections that now define the core repertoire of Irish traditional music, and Lucy Farr (1911–2003), a Galway fiddler who emigrated to England and became one of the few Irish women musicians of her generation to become known beyond her immediate circle. Farr’s memories of her musical childhood in Ireland provide material about the flute player Mary Kilcar (dates unknown), whose story will emerge later in this chapter.

The circulation of musicians and musical texts among Ireland, England, and the United States is integral to any study of Irish traditional music, and these exchanges have helped define the style, repertoire, and social practice of the music. Individuals like O’Neill and Farr are remembered for their individual musical contributions, but they also occupy a historiographically rich space as Irish commentators on music within and outside Ireland. Following the idea of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero that a narrator bestows upon his or her protagonist the gift of drawing the shape of that protagonist’s life, I contend that O’Neill’s and Farr’s diasporic positions allow them to tell the stories of several early twentieth-century women musicians in a way that traces larger patterns among nationalism, representation, and gender.⁵ These patterns also tell us about symbolic understandings of race / ethnicity and sexuality. To see the shapes of these musicians’ lives, however, we must first understand the landscape behind them, a background of personifications of nation-as-woman and conservative social mores that influenced individual and collective expectations about the behavior and representation of women.

GENDERING THE NATION ON BOTH SIDES OF THE IMPERIAL GAZE

Since the early 1990s, scholars have examined the circulation of power between and within nations and between men and women inside the nation. The sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis has enumerated the ways in which women participate in nationalist activity: by biological reproduction, cultural production and transmission, symbolic identification with the nation, and participation in nationalist struggles.⁶ These categories are inseparable, and the work of cultural production and transmission done by Irish women musicians in the early twentieth century is meaningful only when understood in connection with the multiple personifications of the Irish nation and in dialogue with histories of women engaged in the fight for Irish independence in public and at home. We must also consider the interplay of gendered symbolism and political action between Ireland and the nations closest to it geographically or conceptually: France, the United States, India, and Britain. These nations inspired its fight for independence, received its immigrants, and shared its colonial past on either side of the imperial gaze.

Metaphors of land as woman abound, with her body fruitful, nurturing, beloved, or in need of protection from those who would ravish her. This feminization of land changes with the viewer’s position: within the would-be national territory, the land is a bountiful (or barren) mother or a protected virgin; while in the eyes of the colonizer, the land is naked, a maiden to be deflowered. The multivalent metaphor of land-as-woman can reflect both gazes and is thus useful for powerful and emerging nations alike. The representation of England as Britannia, for example, is not fixed synchronically or diachronically: although she first appears on second-century Roman coins as “a captive … fallen before the might of the Roman Empire,” her fortunes eventually improve.⁷ By the nineteenth century, Britannia has become a warrior, a protector, and the wife who cleans up the home and empire for her male counterpart, John Bull. In Victorian times, she appears as the militant but mute saleswoman for whitening, brightening products like toothpaste and metal polish that sought to “civilize” so-called savages from Africa, Ireland, and elsewhere; and she appears as Hibernia / Erin’s stern maternal protector in cartoons in the popular press.⁸ France’s Marianne also appears variously as a reformulation of feminized Liberty, a harlot, Every-woman, and as a goddess of revolution.⁹

For Ireland and India, both in Britannia’s imperial embrace, female personifications of nation were also changeable. Like Britannia, nineteenth-century versions of Mother Ireland and Bharat Mata derived from ancient historical or mythological figures with variable characteristics and identities. Bharat Mata was first mentioned in the Ramayana, and by the time she came to personify India in the late nineteenth century, she represented a wide array of feminine archetypes, including “a glorious figure of abundance, the powerful mother Kali and Durga, a destructive ‘shakti’ … [and] an enslaved, all-suffering figure, a tearful victim and a frail widow.”¹⁰ In Ireland, the ancient goddess Ériu is alternately portrayed as a warrior queen, mother, and raven.¹¹ Her eponymous connection with Ireland (Éire) foreshadows the later popularity of multiple female metaphors for the Irish nation organized around tropes of the ravished, sorrowful, and enslaved maiden or the grieving, beloved old woman. Speaking from poems, songs, and plays, by the late eighteenth century these maidens and mothers customarily called for the sons, fathers, and husbands of Ireland to rescue and protect them.¹²

In history’s usually heteronormative backward glance, metaphors of nation-as-woman are further complicated by metaphorically gendered relationships between colonizing and colonized countries and by the feminization of men othered by imperial projects. Anne McClintock writes that the colonizer’s “discovery” of the woman-continent is always late, and whether the colonizer envisions the land as virgin or mother, the colonial imagination must account for—and deal with—the native men who got there first.¹³ North America’s native men are portrayed as cannibals, Indian men are depicted as dangerously lustful,¹⁴ and Irish men are drawn as childlike apes or effeminate bards.¹⁵ From England’s point of view, Hibernia is too good for the Hibernians, from whom she must be protected—even though these same Hibernians also understand themselves as her protectors.¹⁶ Luke Gibbons argues that “recourse to female imagery … turns the colonial stereotype against itself, positing an alternative ‘feminized’ public sphere (imagined as the nation) against the official patriarchal order of the state.”¹⁷ Although the notion of an “alternative ‘feminized’ public sphere” is evocative, I contend that maintenance of the nation-as-woman metaphor was necessary because Irish men were feminized in the relationship between England and Ireland: imagery of the nation-as-woman does not challenge colonial domination, but it allows the disempowered native man to contain the femininity assigned to him.¹⁸ Representing the nation as a helpless woman—as Mother Ireland or the maidenly Erin—gave Irish nationalist men symbolic and actual power over the land, as well as over real women.

IRELAND-AS-WOMAN IN POETRY AND SONG IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY

In Ireland, opportunities for women musicians in the early twentieth century were intimately tied to familiar connections between women and the domestic sphere. Personifications of the nation as Mother Ireland, Cathleen Ní Houlihan, and other figures helped direct the fight for independence but further prescribed the behavior of actual women. The geographer Gerry Kearns asserts that “the circulation of allegorical women in national narratives overshadows their flesh-and-blood cousins” and presents women as passive symbols of picturesque sacrifice rather than as humans capable of action.¹⁹ By the early twentieth century, literary, artistic, and musical representations of these allegorical women were plentiful. An exegesis of songs that represent Ireland as a woman would span the repertoire of songs from the Rebellion of 1798 to the fight for Irish independence in the early twentieth century, and such a project might also examine the circulation of music and metaphors of mother-as-home in the Irish diaspora through Tin Pan Alley songs and British street ballads.²⁰ Thus, a brief examination of some exemplary treatments of Ireland-as-woman grounds my discussion of Irish women instrumental musicians in the early twentieth century.

THE SHAN VAN VOCHT

O the French are in the bay,

They’ll be here by break of day,

And the Orange will decay,

Says the shan van vocht.

Yes! Ireland SHALL be free,

From the centre to the sea;

Then hurra for Liberty!

Says the shan van vocht.²¹

“The Shan Van Vocht” (“The poor old woman”) portrays Ireland as a cailleach—a mythological pan-Celtic figure of creation and destruction, a visionary and untameable crone. In the song, the Shan Van Vocht incites Irish rebels to action by predicting victory in the ultimately doomed Rebellion of 1798.²² The song’s catchy melody and easily adapted lyrics proved popular, and several versions were in circulation by the early 1840s. In 1882, A. M. Sullivan remarked that he “never knew an Irish election poet that did not invoke the ‘Shan Van Vocht.’”²³ The ballad scholar Georges Denis Zimmermann argues that it and other street songs represented the beliefs and aspirations of working-class Irish people. Although this generalization is suspiciously broad, it locates the personification of Ireland-as-woman in both oral and written traditions.²⁴

The song also retains a political message and feminine personification of Ireland similar to that of the aisling (vision or dream) genre, in which Ireland appears as a human woman. Most aisling poems establish a pastoral setting in which the male narrator falls asleep and, in a dream, meets a supernatural spéirbhean (literally, “sky-woman”)—usually a breathtakingly beautiful maiden, but sometimes a stately queen or an old woman. She identifies herself as Ireland incarnate, laments her fate, and calls for or foretells liberation. At this happy news, the sleeping man awakes to find nothing changed in the waking world: independence was only a dream. An adaptation of the aisling form, “The Shan Van Vocht” departs from it by omitting the dream from which the dreamer must wake, thereby enabling nineteenth-century singers to retain the original lyrics of “The Shan Van Vocht” or adapt them to address immediate political circumstances without replicating the formulaic delay of victory. But despite the Shan Van Vocht’s prophetic powers, preoccupation with military action, and welcome declaration of imminent triumph, she remains imaginary—the idea and the ideal that spurs Irish men into action, but no more.

Mother Ireland

If the Shan Van Vocht is an otherworldly figure, Mother Ireland is much closer to home—in fact, Mother Ireland is home. This metaphor of motherland is common among emerging nations, which invariably cast the nation’s men in the roles of hero, protector, and dutiful son. This filial nationalism relies on constant reimaginings of personal and political history, as Julie Mostov’s description of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia implies: “The national space (Motherland) must be protected by new heroes, willing to join in the nation’s age-old battle against the forces of evil.”²⁵ Ireland and India also share this longstanding spiritualization and use of the motherland metaphor in defining and building a nation. Charu Gupta writes: “Mother as map as nation also served to define a loyal political citizenry, devoted in the service of the nation…. These dutiful children were largely articulated as the male Hindu sons of the nation, who were promoted as constituting an ideal Indian.”²⁶ About Ireland, Richard Kearney writes that “it might be argued that the transposition of Irish women into desexualized, quasi-divine mothers corresponded in some manner to the ideological transposition of Ireland from a fatherland (the term an t-athardha was often used to denote Ireland in much bardic poetry up to the seventeenth century) into idioms connoting a motherland.”²⁷ This transposition, Kearney argues, occurred when political sovereignty began to seem inaccessible and intangible—just like the figure of the Virgin Mary.

Juxtaposing the Shan Van Vocht and Mother Ireland allows us to explore the role of love in the construction of Ireland as a motherland—a construction that many Irish women readily took up, but whose authors were almost exclusively male.²⁸ In “The Shan Van Vocht,” the woman’s voice fills the song, but as quoted speech from a presumably male narrator. The song did not prescribe desired or ideal behaviors for real women, and the Shan Van Vocht does not seek, expect, or inspire love for herself, but for Ireland. She is merely the messenger who calls men to arms, and the problem that Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies for modern nationalisms remains:

It does not take much effort to see that a photographic realism or a dedicated naturalism could never answer all the needs of vision that modern nationalisms create. For the problem, from a nationalist point of view, is this: if the nation, the people, or the country were not just to be observed, described, and critiqued but loved as well, what would guarantee that they were indeed worth loving unless one also saw in them something that was already lovable?²⁹

The Shan Van Vocht, with her clear connection with the cailleach, is not “already lovable” and occupies an ambivalent position between veneration and revulsion.³⁰ Therefore, she is less effective as an instrument that inspires nationalist devotion, however powerful her message.

The metaphor of Mother Ireland, in contrast, assumes and requires that her sons love her, and because they love her, they must fight to protect her. Reverence for the Blessed Mother Mary and for mortal mothers connects love and protection of the familial home with love and defense of the nation: “Love … reproduces the collective as ideal through producing a particular kind of subject whose allegiance to the ideal makes it an ideal in the first place.”³¹ Sara Ahmed’s additive phrasing here performs the erasure of the nation as the object of love in favor of the loving subject whose agency produces the lovable—who then must be loved. Love for Mother Ireland and love for the Virgin Mary become inextricable, and to render these two loves sensible, the proper nationalist must also love his own mother. In addition, because the metaphor of Mother Ireland depends on the idealization of a son’s love for his mother, Mother Ireland, and the Virgin Mary, the metaphor in turn defines what is lovable in the idealized yet real woman, whether she is mother or lover, as Ahmed points out: “Love becomes a sign of respectable femininity, and of maternal qualities narrated as the capacity to touch and be touched by others. The reproduction of femininity is tied up with the reproduction of the national ideal through the work of love.”³²

Just as the nationalist son loves his mother, so must the nationalist mother love her son. To do otherwise jeopardizes “respectable femininity” and the national project and threatens the reciprocity implicit in maternity and belief in an ever-loving Virgin Mother. In “A Mother Speaks,” written two days before his execution in 1916, the revolutionary Pádraig Pearse likens his mother to Mary, thus completing the circle of reciprocal love between metaphoric, holy, and real mothers and their nationalist sons:

Dear Mary, that didst see thy first-born Son

Go forth to die amid the scorn of men

For whom He died,

Receive my first-born son into thy arms,

Who also hath gone out to die for men,

And keep him by thee till I come to him.

Dear Mary, I have shared thy sorrow,

And soon shall share thy joy.³³

The fight for Irish independence thus receives divine sanction, and Irish mothers’ losses are made glorious by being likened to the sorrows of Mater Dolorosa, the long-suffering Virgin Mother.

Songs reinforced mother-son love as an organizing principle of Irish nationalism, and popular culture in the early twentieth century relentlessly presented images of the idealized mother for consumption in Ireland and its diaspora. Instrumental and vocal music circulated in both directions, and emigrants often shipped sheet music and sound recordings to their relatives at home. Tin Pan Alley participated in the idealization of the Irish mother in songs like “Mother Machree” (1910):

There’s a spot in my heart which no colleen may own.

There’s a depth in my soul never sounded or known.

There’s a place in my memory, my life, that you fill.

No other can take it, no one ever will.

[Chorus:] Sure, I love the dear silver that shines in your hair,

And the brow that’s all furrowed and wrinkled with care.

I kiss the dear fingers so toilworn for me.

Oh, God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree.³⁴

The actual and symbolic connection between women and the domestic sphere aligns with the lived experience of emigration. To the ideal immigrant son, mother and country become synonyms for home, and the Anglicization of mo chroí (my heart) transforms the son’s love into a functional surname, “Machree.”³⁵ Like the love-created collective that Ahmed describes, Mother Machree is defined entirely by her son’s love. In turn, the ubiquity of the Mother Ireland metaphor ensures that mothers in literary works can never escape a symbolic connection with Ireland, and that Irish women are tied to the work of reproducing ethnically Irish sons.³⁶

“Dark Rosaleen” and “Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan”: Two Maidens

The personification of Ireland as a mother inspired the protective love of a son, and its personification as a maiden, the passion and single-mindedness of a lover. The aisling genre allowed the adaptation of love songs and poems into expressions of fervent nationalism. Popular opinion assumes that writers of rebellious songs coded incendiary notions in metaphor and allegory, but Zimmermann argues that poets and songwriters usually used these literary devices in the service of art, not concealment.³⁷ By the early twentieth century hundreds of songs and poems had portrayed Ireland as a woman, and some, like “Roisín Dubh” (“Dark-haired little rose,” an inspiration for “Dark Rosaleen”), had been read allegorically often enough by the late nineteenth century that nonnationalist interpretations were impossible for Irish readers of newspapers like the Nation (1842–1900) and of poetry by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814–45) and James Clarence Mangan (1803–49).³⁸

Like the metaphor of Mother Ireland, the personification of Ireland as a maiden requires the gaze of a male protagonist who strives to protect or liberate the woman-nation he loves. And as in the case of the metaphor of Mother Ireland, the connection works because the man fighting for his nation can also envision the girls of his own village. In turn, these maidens are bound to maintain the qualities deemed worth fighting for: youth, beauty, regal grace, and virgin “purity” in an ethnically Irish body. Mangan’s versions of “Dark Rosaleen” and “Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan” both celebrate these qualities.³⁹ In “My Dark Rosaleen,” the speaker pledges himself to action on behalf of his “virgin flower,” with her “bright face” and “holy delicate white hands”:

Woe and pain, pain and woe,

Are my lot, night and noon,

To see your bright face clouded so,

Like to the mournful moon.

But yet will I rear your throne

Again in golden sheen;

’Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,

My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!

Over dews, over sands,

Will I fly for your weal:

Your holy delicate white hands

Shall girdle me with steel.

At home in your emerald bowers,

From morning’s dawn till e’en,

You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,

My Dark Rosaleen!

My fond Rosaleen!

You’ll think of me thro’ daylight hours,

My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,

My Dark Rosaleen!⁴⁰

A reader might also liken Rosaleen to the Virgin Mary: earlier in the poem, the speaker addresses her as his “saint of saints” and mentions her “holy white hand” and her virginity. Although the rose often symbolizes England, an unsuitable association for expressions of Irish patriotism, it can also represent Ireland and imminent freedom, and it is iconographically connected with the Virgin Mary.⁴¹ “Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan” also supports an interpretation linking beloved woman, beloved country, and Mary:⁴²

Long they pine in weary woe, the nobles of our land,

Long they wander to and fro, proscribed, alas! and banned;

Feastless, houseless, altarless, they bear the exile’s brand;

But their hope is in the coming-to of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan!

Think her not a ghastly hag too hideous to be seen,

Call her not unseemly names, our matchless Kathaleen!

Young she is, and fair she is, and would be crowned a queen,

Were the king’s son at home here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan!

Sweet and mild would look her face, O none so sweet and mild,

Could she crush the foes by whom her beauty is reviled;

Woolen plaids would grace herself, and robes of silk her child,

If the king’s son were living here with Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan!

He who over sands and waves led Israel along,

He who fed with heavenly bread that chosen tribe and throng,

He who stood by Moses when his foes were fierce and strong,—

May He show forth His might in saving Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan!⁴³

As the literature scholar Catherine Innes points out, Mangan “dilute[d] and etherealize[d]” the sexual imagery present in earlier versions of both poems. She asserts that the spiritualization of Erin in the nineteenth century was deeply related to the “increasingly puritanical and asexual ideal of women by the Irish Catholic Church.”⁴⁴ The Virgin Mary became the conduit through whom Irish men understood the nation and Irish women understood ideal behavior. But as Marina Warner argues, the paradox of virgin conception means that mortal women exist in a state of constant and inevitable failure, never able to reach perfection: “Mary establishes the child as the destiny of woman, but escapes the sexual intercourse necessary for all other women to fulfill this destiny.”⁴⁵ Social and economic conditions in Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries further complicated such contradictions between purity and reproduction, helplessness and self-help—contradictions absent in nationalist poetry and rhetoric but inescapable in everyday life. Ideas about race and ethnicity based on Britain’s other colonial encounters also drove this idealization of white womanhood. Thus, patriotic readings of “Dark Rosaleen” and other works depended on an understanding of the woman-nation as pure and helpless, her need of rescue expressed through her youth, size, delicacy, and mild manners. These qualities appear again in early twentieth-century descriptions of Irish women musicians.

DOMESTICATING NATIONALISM: WOMEN IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND

Living the Ideal—or Not

The Irish historian Rosemary Owens writes that veneration of the Virgin Mary in early twentieth-century Irish life “placed women on such an ideological pedestal that no middle ground for ordinary, struggling women remained. … The only salvation … lay in realising the ideal by becoming either mother or virgin, wife or nun.”⁴⁶ However, women in early twentieth-century Ireland found the idealized transformation from youthful virginity to devoted motherhood difficult for economic and social reasons, and most women remained single or married later in life. In the decades after the Great Famine of the 1840s, the numbers of single women in Ireland rose steadily. Most historians attribute this rise to farm consolidation and subsequent changes in inheritance patterns, as well as to increasing emigration and difficulties raising dowries. Between 1851 and 1901, unmarried women and widows outnumbered their married counterparts: in 1901, approximately 44 percent of Ireland’s adult female population was single, while only 26 percent was married.⁴⁷ Yet marriage and staying in Ireland remained the ideal, if not the reality—a sentiment stridently asserted by a New York priest named Father Joseph Guinan in 1903: “How blessed would have been the lot of an Irish girl, the poor betrayed victim of hellish agencies of vice, had she remained at home and passed her days in the poverty, aye and wretchedness, of a mud wall cabin—a wife and mother, mayhap—her path in life smoothened by the blessed influences of religion and domestic peace until it ended at a green old age.”⁴⁸ Despite the “blessings” of home, 89,409 women emigrated from Ireland between 1871 and 1911.⁴⁹

The women who remained home often did pass their days in poverty, and more women than men entered workhouses after the 1850s. According to the historian Maria Luddy, women in Ireland were more susceptible to economic hardship than men because they lacked employment opportunities outside the home, fair pay, and official support systems to deal with spousal desertion, pregnancy, child raising, ill health, and old age.⁵⁰ Single women were especially vulnerable. Some entered religious orders, and the number of convents and nuns rose drastically in the nineteenth century: in 1800, there were only 120 Irish nuns in 11 convents, but by 1901, 95 convents housed over 8,000 nuns.⁵¹ Although convent life offered women the symbolic success of remaining chaste and becoming brides of Christ, only dowried women could become choir sisters—the educated nuns who performed the prayers and teaching particular to their order. Women without dowries became lay sisters and performed the menial work of the convent, and even they were usually expected to provide some money to contribute to their upkeep. The church, then, was not a solution for Ireland’s poorest women.⁵² Other single women lived with married siblings, a position that often provided more security, and one in which they contributed significantly to the family economy. The Galway fiddle player Lucy Farr (1911–2003) often spoke of the four maiden aunts who lived with her family during most of her childhood. While living with Lucy’s family, two of the aunts clothed the family, and another, who remained unmarried, tended to the housework while Lucy’s mother worked in the fields after Lucy’s father’s death in 1932.⁵³ Lucy immigrated to London in 1936 and married there.⁵⁴

For many Irish women in the early twentieth century, lived reality bore a troubled relationship to the idealized domestic sphere wherein the sons of Mother Ireland courted maidenly Kathleens. For women in the workhouse or lay sisters in convents, “home” and “housework” had institutionally specific meanings different from the tasks carried out by married women in their own homes. Single women who lived with family members contributed to a family-based domestic economy, but their labor disappeared beneath the idealized image of married mothers who ran the household while their husbands worked the land or for wages. For some women, especially the relatives of prosperous farmers, single life may have been vastly preferable to married life. Even so, their position outside the mother / colleen ideal rendered them invisible to the nationalist public sphere, however familiar they were in Irish society. The broken connection between the idealized home and single women, poor women inside and outside workhouses, and itinerant Traveller women⁵⁵ meant that these women’s relationships with the domestic sphere were not the ones nationalists fought to protect. These women were symbolically nonexistent and often materially disadvantaged.

Women and Activism

This idealization of woman and home meant that publicly active nationalist and suffragist women risked censure for transgressing appropriate gender roles. Furthermore, the relationship between these two causes was tense, and the larger nationalist movement considered suffragists a distraction from the “real” fight for independence.⁵⁶ Most male nationalists agreed that Ireland did need all her children, but many men were personally ambivalent and collectively divided about the forms that women’s nationalist action should take. Most found women’s military participation unacceptable and preferred women to fill the supporting roles of rearing and teaching children to be good Irish citizens, and of raising funds for men’s nationalist organizations.⁵⁷ Therefore, most Irish women nationalists—unlike suffragists—were not considered transgressive because their public activity was primarily tied to the domestic sphere. Except for a few women who engaged in military action, Mother Ireland’s nationalist daughters contributed to the cause through private familial action and domestically inflected public activism.

During the past several decades, historians have studied the institutions and activities through which Irish women contributed to the fight for Irish independence, and upper-class nationalist luminaries like Constance Markievicz and Maud Gonne have received much biographical attention. Despite the historical attention paid to a few women activists, the work of others has been downplayed, as in the literal erasure of Elizabeth O’Farrell from a famous photograph of Pádraig Pearse’s surrender after the 1916 rising.⁵⁸ A brief look at women’s nationalist work demonstrates the influence that discourses of woman-as-nation had on the activities and reception of real women—including women musicians—in the period 1893–1922. Three institutions illuminate the connections between the symbolic representations of women and the activities of real women: the Gaelic League and the related Irish Ireland cultural nationalist movement that began in the 1890s; the women’s group Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin), organized in 1900; and Cumann na mBan (Irishwomen’s Council), founded in 1914.

By the late nineteenth century, several Irish home rule bills had failed in the English Parliament, and many nationalists decided to direct their energies toward first achieving cultural independence from England.⁵⁹ Douglas Hyde’s influential 1892 lecture, “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland,” questioned the legitimacy of a patriotic Anglophobia that hypocritically shunned the words and works of Irish Gaelic and whose adherents “protest[ed] as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every hand’s turn they rush to imitate.”⁶⁰ A year after this speech, Hyde and several other men founded the Gaelic League to further the nationalist project through the use and teaching of the Irish language. In 1897, it sponsored the first annual Oireachtas, an event modeled on the Welsh Eisteddfod that hosted song competitions and an evening concert along with its literary activities.⁶¹ In practice, then, the Gaelic League promoted a broader cultural nationalism than its roots in language revival suggest.

This cultural nationalism found voice in the Irish Ireland movement founded by the journalist David P. Moran in 1905, which called for the adoption of select traditions of Catholic Irish speakers in the rural West.⁶² While some criticized the religious sectarianism implicit in Moran’s articulation of an “Irish Ireland,” nationalists agreed that a cultural approach to nationalism was worthwhile.⁶³ This view extended beyond the urban Irish intelligentsia, and many members of the rural lower middle class participated in the movement.⁶⁴ Like the Gaelic League, the Irish Ireland movement was strong in Ireland’s West, and statements like this from the Clare Champion were common in early twentieth-century local newspapers:

All that is now required to make the feis [festival] an unqualified success is that the people of Clare should show by their attendance that they fittingly cherish the most beautiful heritage of their race, the language which carries them back to the day’s [sic] of Erin’s glory and power, and which inspires them with new faith and fervour in the struggle to create an Irish Ireland which will be free, in manners, customs and language, as well as in Government from English influence or rule.⁶⁵

Although the urban Gaelic League mind-set was often at odds with that of rural native speakers, the Irish Ireland movement provided a popular and galvanizing political outlet for mass participation in the fight for Irish independence.⁶⁶

Unlike most other nationalist organizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Gaelic League admitted woman members, and the Irish Ireland movement developed a clear sense of women’s roles in creating an independent Ireland. Indeed, several women served on the league’s executive committee at a time when women rarely held leadership positions in organizations that also included men. Women members’ dedication to the language revival was noteworthy, as Timothy McMahon points out:

Reports from throughout the country indicate that women made up significant pluralities—if not outright majorities—of those regularly attending the branches over time. As early as September 1899, the Limerick branch reported that the “ladies easily outnumber the men two to one.” In Lisdoonvarna later that fall the majority of those who enrolled in the branch were women, while in June 1900 an account from County Monaghan stated that the women students in Castleblayney were “much more serious, earnest, and persevering in the cultivation of Irish than the young men of the town.”⁶⁷

The participation, faithful attendance, and earnest study of women league members fit squarely within the view that women’s responsibilities included transmitting traditional knowledge through the Irish language, storytelling, and song, as well as bolstering economic independence by purchasing Irish-made household goods.

Under the pseudonym “Máire,” one writer articulated the responsibilities of nationalist Irish women in “Irishwomen’s Work,” published in the United Irishman in 1899.⁶⁸ This columnist embraced the prevailing notion of gendered spheres of activity but affirmed that women could do nationalist work within the domestic realm. “Irishwomen’s Work” addresses the mothers and maidens of Ireland and offers suggestions for both that sidestep the question of civic equality. Máire urges mothers to teach patriotism to their sons and asks maidens to eschew the “growing fashion for dandies and dandyism” associated with Anglicized Irishmen in favor of the homespun charms of young men rooted in the Gaelic tradition. She uses feminine personifications of the nation to assert that women could contribute to the fight for Irish independence and cites “the sacred ties of Mother and Motherland.” By addressing mothers and maidens, she reinforces the categories of symbolically legitimated Irish womanhood and excludes other kinds of women, just as the call for housewives to consume Irish-made products erases the labor of the women who often produced those goods.⁶⁹

This domestication of women’s nationalist activity reinforced the image of the ideal Irish mother who sang patriotic songs to her children, taught them the Irish language, told stories of ancient Irish heroes, and bought only Irish linen—or, alternatively, of the fresh-faced young virgin who industriously applied herself to learning home economics and Irish and allowed only salt-of-the-earth Irish Irelanders to court her.⁷⁰ In this formulation and in the reality that it constructed, neither mother nor maiden considered herself what we today would call “feminist.” To many nationalists, progressive political activism—including the fight for women’s suffrage—was damned by its connections with political developments in England, and the social conservatism that maintained separate gendered domains became “Irish” by contrast.⁷¹ Women musicians, then, could potentially occupy two contradictory positions: within the home, singing, lilting, and playing Irish songs and tunes were patriotic activities; but outside the home, public speaking challenged the separation of spheres, and public traditional music performance at fairs and market days was almost exclusively the province of men.⁷² Women activists and musicians often negotiated this challenge to social mores by maintaining discursive and actual connections with the domestic sphere.

The stated goals of the second organization, Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Erin), upheld the roles for women put forth by the Irish Ireland movement:

The re-establishment of the complete independence of Ireland.

To encourage the study of Gaelic, of Irish literature, History, Music and Art, especially among the young, by organizing the teaching of classes for the above subjects.

To support and popularise Irish manufacture.

To discourage the reading and circulation of low English literature, the singing of English songs, the attending of vulgar English entertainments at the theatres and music hall, and to combat in every way English influence, which is doing so much injury to the artistic taste and refinement of the Irish people.

To form a fund called the National Purposes Fund, for the furtherance of the above objects.⁷³

The difference was that Inghinidhe na hÉireann sponsored public action instead of adhering quietly to the guidelines for private behavior promoted by Máire and others. As a public organization, Inghinidhe na hÉireann challenged the gendering of civic and domestic spaces, but most of its actions fit women’s domestic roles as mothers, teachers, nurses, and bearers of traditional cultural material. By maintaining these roles, its work was a logical continuation of several political advances achieved by propertied women in the late 1890s: the right to vote in some local elections and to serve on district councils, and the right to act as Poor Law guardians.⁷⁴ Inghinidhe na hÉireann’s work, though domesticated, occurred entirely in the public sphere and cast the naturalized work of women as an integral contribution to the nationalist cause.

In addition to working for the social welfare of Ireland’s poor and attempting to discourage Irish men from enlisting in the British Army, Inghinidhe na hÉireann combined philanthropy with cultural nationalist activism. Formed in 1900 to organize a “children’s treat” as a nationalist alternative to the celebration of Queen Victoria’s visit, the organization also conducted free classes in Irish music, history, and language; staged tableaux vivants portraying Irish legends, and organized monthly céilís.⁷⁵ Male nationalists lauded Inghinidhe na hÉireann’s activities, and its concentration on typically “womanly” activities enabled the group to function unchallenged—even though, as the historian Margaret Ward writes, a member of the organization undertook her work “in the role of political activist, and not as wife and mother.”⁷⁶ This distinction between mother and activist echoes Inghinidhe na hÉireann founding member Maud Gonne’s description of herself as Ireland’s daughter, and the name of the organization placed members of the group in the same relationship to Mother Ireland that her nationalist sons enjoyed. Inghinidhe na hÉireann, then, resisted the elision of real women and ideal symbols, although it did not posit an alternative to the maiden / Kathleen personification.

Cumann na mBan provided a different though still domestically conceived challenge to the gendered separation of spheres. The organization initially raised funds for the Irish Volunteers, a nationalist militia. Agnes O’Farrelly, Cumann na mBan’s first president, articulated this purpose as vital to the safety of hearth and home: “Each rifle we put in [the hands of the men] will represent to us a bolt fastened behind the door of some Irish home to keep out the hostile stranger. Each cartridge will be a watchdog to fight for the sanctity of the hearth.”⁷⁷ As with Inghinidhe na hÉireann, which became a branch of Cumann na mBan in 1915, tensions between feminist and nationalist goals played out within the ranks of the organization: although Cumann na mBan later sought autonomy from the men’s Volunteers, it put Irish independence before women’s political equality. But unlike Inghinidhe na hÉireann, and contradicting earlier statements of purpose, some branches of Cumann na mBan did prepare for armed conflict and held first aid classes, foot drills, and arms smuggling exercises and practiced loading and firing rifles.⁷⁸ Cumann na mBan thus publicly and officially placed the instruments of warfare into the hands of some women. The Gaelic League and Irish Ireland movement likewise publicly and officially allowed a few women access to an instrument of musical technology previously reserved for men: the uilleann (or union) pipes.⁷⁹

Next, I demonstrate that symbolic representations of the nation as a woman established the boundaries of intelligibility within which women traditional musicians in the early twentieth century did—or did not—operate: for women musicians who fit the visual, behavioral, and demographic norms reinforced by personifications of Ireland as maiden or mother, the nationalist movement created unique opportunities for nationally recognized performance, but for women musicians who did not fit these norms, public or semipublic music making was difficult or impossible.

PLAYING WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE HOME AND THE IDEAL: WOMEN TRADITIONAL MUSICIANS

Introduction

Feminist scholars since the 1960s have worked diligently to return women to historical narratives and to explain their erstwhile invisibility as a function of gendered power dynamics past and present.⁸⁰ However, visibility is not sufficient, and interpretation is vital, as the historian Joan Scott writes: “When the questions of why these facts [have] been ignored and how they [are] now to be understood [are] raised, history [becomes] more than the search for facts.”⁸¹ While this book returns some women musicians to visibility and audibility, this is primarily a historiographical project: I ask how we might understand the vast differences between the public activity of women traditional musicians and the popular remembrance of them within the Irish traditional music scene today.

I begin by identifying a set of interlocking categories that describe women traditional musicians active in the period 1890–1970. First, a few—including Elizabeth Crotty, Bridget Kenny, Nell Galvin, Julia Clifford, Lucy Farr, and Aggie Whyte—were nationally or internationally visible and tend to be remembered as extraordinary rather than exemplary. The assumption that these women musicians, however skilled, were exceptional helps erase less famous women musicians from popular historical memory. The discourse of Irish traditional music throughout the twentieth century has enlisted this exceptionalism for two contradictory purposes: to refute claims that the Irish traditional music scene was (or still is) irascibly sexist and to imply that these more famous women were the only skilled women traditional musicians publicly active before 1970. This second pitfall is insidious, particularly for work that attempts to right the omission of women in the history of Irish traditional music. The tendency to focus on these women is understandable, however: information about them is more accessible, and several of them made commercial recordings.

Second, evidence shows that many women musicians were visible at one time but have since been forgotten outside their families and immediate communities. This category includes Mollie Morrissey and May McCarthy, as well as Peggy Hegarty, Joan Hanafin, Bridgie Kelleher, Maire Fitzgerald, and many more. Some of these women are easier to trace because they appear in Francis O’Neill’s Irish Minstrels and Musicians (discussed below), one of the few published volumes that profiles individual musicians active before 1920. Most, however, were better known in their own communities and did not make any commercial recordings, although some appear on archival field recordings. Thanks to interested musicians outside academia and scholars like Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, whose fine-grained history of traditional music in County Clare is sensitive to the inclusion of women, more of these players are gradually becoming known, even if sometimes only by name.⁸²

Third, I contend that in addition to these better-known women musicians, an unknown and possibly significant number of women musicians occupied social positions that rendered them illegible and therefore invisible to the musical public sphere, like the Galway spinster and flute player Mary Kilcar. A related category includes women musicians like the banjo player and singer Margaret Barry, a well-known performer in Cork and London who remains on the fringes of traditional music’s historical memory because of her uncommon declamatory style and her origins in the marginalized itinerant Traveller community.

A fourth and often overlapping category involves second-degree visibility and includes women musicians primarily remembered as tradition bearers—mothers like Molly Morrissey (no relation to the piper Mollie Morrissey) and Margaret O’Callaghan, who gave songs and tunes to their sons.⁸³ Many of these women rarely played outside their homes, but motherhood allowed them to pass on the tradition in time-honored and politically supported ways. Today their names most often appear in connection with their sons.

Encoded in these categories is an intentionally essentialized assumption that traditional music’s historical gaze still belongs to male musicians. With rare exceptions, Irish traditional music’s texts are all written by men, and the brain trust of the tradition still consists of its “gentlemen scholars.” Nearly all the accounts and recordings we have of pre-1970 women musicians come from male authors, interviewers, and collectors. Although this imbalance is slowly being redressed, the dearth of female commentators and collectors reveals as much about the situation of women in all areas of Irish life in the mid-twentieth century as it does about the enduringly homosocial traditional music scene.

In the first part of this chapter, I examined feminized representations of the Irish nation and traced some of the ways early twentieth-century Irish women negotiated political activity through or despite these representations. Using biographical profiles from Francis O’Neill’s Irish Minstrels and Musicians, I first argue that similarities between personifications of the Irish nation and representations of women musicians enabled these women to perform as good nationalists rather than as threats to the social order. I then contrast these publicly sanctioned women musicians with Mary Kilcar, a nearly forgotten flute player from Galway whose social position as a spinster rendered her illegible as a tradition bearer and thereby helped ensure her exclusion from the semipublic sphere of local musical events, as well as from the national stage.

O’Neill’s Irish Minstrels and Musicians: Mothers and Maidens on Stage

Captain Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) is most famous for his collections of dance tunes, including The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, which many musicians still call “the book” or “the Bible.” Born in County Cork, O’Neill immigrated to the United States, joined the Chicago police department in 1873, and began collecting and publishing tunes in the early 1900s.⁸⁴ Therefore, he was not in Ireland during the height of the nationalist movement. What, then, might this famous but distant collector offer as a commentator on traditional music, nationalism, and the place of women musicians in both?

First, O’Neill’s reputation as a tune collector helped popularize his other works, including Irish Minstrels and Musicians, a collection of biographical profiles first published in 1913.⁸⁵ As a collector, he inherited a rich tradition of music scholarship that had reached fever pitch in Ireland in the nineteenth century—first with collections by Edward Bunting and Thomas Moore before 1850, and then with publications by Patrick Weston Joyce, William Bradbury Ryan, and George Petrie in the latter half of the century. Connections with antiquarian studies elevated the status of folk music scholarship during this time, and O’Neill’s collections were favorably received as resources for repertoire and examples of the single-minded devotion to traditional music that even now marks the “serious” traditional musician. The success and continuing availability of O’Neill’s tune collections has ensured an enduring audience for his other books—an audience not shared by the traditional music scholarship of his contemporaries Henry Grattan Flood and Richard Henebry. O’Neill’s influence on the repertoire and discourse of Irish traditional music means that Irish Minstrels and Musicians bestows upon its profiled musicians a public memory not otherwise available: they are remembered in internationally circulated print, while most of the musicians of either sex who weren’t mentioned have either been forgotten or are remembered only within their families or localities.⁸⁶ For example, knowledge of the early twentieth-century musicians May McCarthy, Mollie Morrissey, and Bridget Kenny is almost entirely dependent on the ways O’Neill and his sources depict them.⁸⁷

Second, O’Neill’s residence in Chicago and his active participation in the already transnational Irish traditional music scene gave him critical distance from viewing Irish traditional music solely as an instrument of cultural and political nationalism. He treats traditional music as an art form in its own right, even though he also allows his belief in the power of Irish cultural nationalism to shape his treatments of the harp and pipes. The information and writing style of some of his biographies also derive from articles by nationalist-leaning newspaper reporters in Ireland and its diaspora, and descriptions of the women musicians in Irish Minstrels and Musicians resonate with images of the ideal Irish woman and with feminized personifications of the nation in the popular press.

Finally, Irish Minstrels and Musicians allows us to explore the relationships between nationalist discourse and women’s music making. How did nationalist discourse affect opportunities for women to play in public? How was women’s public performance rationalized or recast as nationalist activity? Here, O’Neill and his newspaper sources supply a sense of the historical present and provide material for uncovering contemporary attitudes about women musicians unshaped by the revisions of oral history. Although Irish Minstrels and Musicians and the newspaper articles that describe Kenny, Morrissey, and McCarthy leave no evidence about what these musicians may have thought about their musicianship or the rhetorics of cultural nationalism, these sources present vital clues about how and why they might have performed publicly, and how and why they might have been encouraged to do so despite an overwhelming social conservatism that asserted that a women’s proper place was in the home.

Mrs. Kenny’s Excellent Adventure: From One Public to Another

Of the women traditional musicians publicly active in the early twentieth century, Bridget Kenny remains the best known. The daughter of the piper John McDonough, Kenny grew up in Galway in the mid-nineteenth century. O’Neill writes at length about her domestic situation and emphasizes her ability to bear children and instill in them a knowledge of Irish traditional music:

Devotion to art does not appear to have unfavorably affected the size of Mrs. Kenny’s family, for we are informed she is the prolific mother of thirteen children. Neither did the artistic temperament on both sides mar the domestic peace of the Kenny home, and, though the goddess of plenty slighted them in the distribution of her favors, have they not wealth in health and the parentage of a house full of rosy-cheeked sons and daughters, several of whom bid fair to rival their mother, “The Queen of Irish Fiddlers,” in the world of music.⁸⁸

Although we can only guess at Kenny’s political views, O’Neill portrays her as a proper Irish mother who provides her children with a love of music and nation along with their porridge, which though thin is surely Irish.

In keeping with the role of traditional music and its newly formed institutions in the practice of cultural nationalism, O’Neill also emphasizes Kenny’s success in music competitions: “The Gaelic Revival brought Mrs. Kenny into the limelight, and after she had outclassed all competitors as a traditional violinist at the annual Feiseanna, winning first prize year after year, she was proclaimed ‘The Queen of Irish Fiddlers.’” Yet he is indignant on her behalf for what he perceives as underappreciation: “This remarkable woman’s talents ought to have been regarded as a national asset. Yet it does not appear that any effort was made to take advantage of the opportunities presented by her discovery, by the establishment of a school in which the much-vaunted traditional style of rendering Irish music would be taught and perpetuated.”⁸⁹

Newspaper accounts suggest that the nationalist movement did recognize and use Kenny’s talents in venues outside her home community, however. For example, she received top billing at a festival sponsored by the Gaelic League and the Limerick Irish Pipers’ Club in Kilkee, County Clare, in September 1903, and advertisements in the Clare Champion assured readers that “the best Gaelic talent has been secured for this year’s Festival.”⁹⁰ The existence and success of this concert relied on the importance of music in the expression of cultural nationalism. Because the philosophies of the Irish Ireland movement situated the teaching of traditional music in the domestic sphere and therefore with women, Kenny’s public concert appearances could be seen as an extension of the activities she was encouraged to perform in the home. Likewise, Irish Ireland discourse about the role of women as tradition bearers gave Kenny opportunities for performing that would almost certainly not have been available to her otherwise as a woman.

By emphasizing her poverty and her occupation as a street musician, O’Neill’s sketch raises questions about social class, the nationalist movement, and musical practice—and ethnicity. First, how did Kenny become the respected “Queen of Irish Fiddlers”? We know from surviving wax cylinder recordings that she was a tremendous musician, and we can guess that her origins in a musical family lent her playing and her persona an air of “authenticity” useful to the nationalist movement. But it is also possible that Kenny had roots in the Traveller community, another group marginalized by nationalist discourse: her maiden name, McDonough, is a common Traveller surname in the province of Connaught, and she was born in Galway, a county in that province.⁹¹ Travellers are a long-standing nomadic population resident in Ireland, and to a lesser extent in Scotland and England. Various popular legends about their origins exist, including some stories that link them with the Roma of Eastern Europe, but this connection is largely discounted. Despite their romanticization as a “pure” and “ancient” Irish people, anti-Traveller sentiment has been widespread for at least the past century.⁹² Despite the Travellers’ stereotypical musical skill and the power of myth, the Gaelic revival and the nationalist movement were almost entirely the domain of settled folk: Travellers, like women, were not the citizens whose independence was fought for, and as a group they enjoyed even less access to the public sphere than did middle- and upper-class women.⁹³ If Kenny did indeed come from a Traveller family, the nationalist movement did not broadcast that information—and if she did, such origins could also help explain her disappearance from the collective memory of the nonitinerant traditional music scene.

By mentioning Kenny’s occupation as a street musician, however, O’Neill’s account also leads to an important point about the differences between “public” and “the public sphere”: “In no country save Ireland, would a violinist of such demonstrated ability as the subject of this sketch remain unappreciated and practically unnoticed, while obliged by necessity to contribute to the support of a large family by playing for a precarious pittance along the highways and byways of Dublin for a generation or more.”⁹⁴ Poverty directed Kenny toward the street, where she could be seen and heard—but not where she would automatically be noticed or accepted by the nationalist public sphere (the realm where decision making and directed action took place).⁹⁵ The nationalist movement’s disregard for music performance outside concert settings also surfaces in the absence of contemporary published accounts of music making in commercial and semipublic spaces: although numerous oral histories mention traditional music at markets, fairs, pattern days (discussed below), and similar events, such musicking is missing from the written record except when a hapless musician runs afoul of the law.⁹⁶ For Kenny, an urban busker and a woman, participation in the nationalist public sphere was remarkable—yet O’Neill’s profile remains the only widely available account we have of this “Queen of Irish Fiddlers.” Her daughters Christina Sheridan and Josephine Whelan, who recorded at least one 78 rpm disk with the Siamsa Gaedheal Ceilidh Band, remain similarly unknown and uncelebrated today.⁹⁷

Mama, Don’t Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Be Pipers

On the very rare occasions when musicians today mention Kenny, they call her a “fiddler”—a remarkably automatic attribution of traditionality, given the early twentieth-century tendency to use “fiddler” and “violinist” interchangeably (see the discussion of “fiddle” versus “violin” in chapter 2).⁹⁸ The vehement distaste for the term “violinist” in today’s traditional music circles sometimes leads to confused readings of earlier sources—a topic I address in chapter 2. But the Irish traditional fiddle and the violin are the same instrument, and if traditional styles were associated with rural people and attitudes in the nineteenth century, the instrument itself does not seem to have carried these associations. The instrument’s integral role in art music as well as folk styles also meant that it was much less likely to become iconically Irish.

The uilleann pipes, however, have been considered ineluctably Irish since at least the late eighteenth century, and unlike the fiddle / violin, the pipes evoked poverty and debauchery during the nineteenth century.⁹⁹ By the time O’Neill published Irish Minstrels and Musicians in 1913, the dominant narrative held that pipers—whether common men or gentlemen—had once been respected members of society, but that the occupation and its practitioners had fallen into disrepute. “Kelly the Piper,” a famous story by Mrs. S. C. Hall, illustrates the relationship between a piper and his Anglo-Irish “betters.” First published in 1829, the story presents Kelly as a ne’er-do-well drunkard who earns a meager living by playing at the local “pattern” (or patron’s) day, a celebration featuring music and dancing.¹⁰⁰ The squalid laziness of Kelly and his family contrasts with the industry and wealth of the Anglo-Irish “quality,” and the skill of the piper, though considerable, is nonetheless inextricable from his poverty and, ultimately, his Irishness. The story seems to have been widely available in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and O’Neill includes it as a source for Irish Minstrels and Musicians and Irish Music: A Fascinating Hobby.¹⁰¹

A similar report on the falling fortunes of the uilleann pipes comes from “A Plain Piper,” the pen name for a contributor to the Kerryman. This author, presumably male, implores readers to celebrate Ireland’s traditional music as an object of national pride:

The poverty-stricken piper became an object of contempt, and the contempt was naturally extended to his instrument, the cause of his indigence. It is only a few years since a friend of mine, a good fiddler, who expressed an intention of learning the pipes, was told by his relatives that if he did so disgrace himself he need never show his face at home again! Small wonder that the pipes ceased to be generally played just as the language ceased to be spoken and so many of the old customs to be observed! The race of “gentlemen pipers” had died out and no respectable person would touch the instrument.¹⁰²

This tale corroborates O’Neill’s similar interpretation of the pipes’ decline in Irish Minstrels and Musicians.¹⁰³ If a male fiddler faced familial disgrace for wanting to learn the pipes in the late nineteenth century, a woman with the same desire must have risked opprobrium of an even greater magnitude, especially since the pipes lacked the connection with parlor music enjoyed by the fiddle / violin and the piano.

According to O’Neill’s sources, however, several women did play the pipes in the nineteenth century, even if doing so in public was acceptable only for a woman faced with “dire necessity”: “Tradition has preserved the name of Kitty Hanley, a Limerick widow, who on the death of her husband—a blind piper—buckled on his pipes and made a living playing on the streets.”¹⁰⁴ And “from [Jimmy Barry, late nineteenth century] was learned the story of a woman known as ‘Nance the Piper,’ who flourished at Castlelyons and who had become a performer from dire necessity, on the death of her husband.”¹⁰⁵

O’Neill admits that blind Nance must have already played the pipes before her husband died, but in Kitty Hanley’s case, a reader could assume that she strapped on the pipes without previous experience. This assumption is absurd—the pipes are difficult to learn to play: according to a popular saying often attributed to the twentieth-century piper Séamus Ennis, it takes seven years of learning, seven years of practicing, and seven years of playing to become a decent piper. We have no information to suggest that Kitty Hanley was a particularly good piper, but the fact that she was able to make a living at it suggests that she too was a proficient player.

These reports of nineteenth-century women musicians, however few, indicate that women were playing instrumental dance music, either privately or to avoid privation, before the institutions of cultural nationalism began to celebrate the sounds of the pipes, harp, and fiddle. Such cultural nationalism ultimately counteracted the stigma against the pipes and briefly allowed some young, probably middle-class, women access to national public performance opportunities on the uilleann pipes and the warpipes.¹⁰⁶ The fact that this level of access and encouragement was so short-lived makes it even more remarkable: only in the past two decades have women returned in significant—if still comparatively small—numbers to uilleann piping circles.

How, then, did the sensibilities of nationalist fervor enable upwardly mobile young women to play the pipes publicly in the early twentieth century? How did the rhetoric of Ireland-as-woman intersect with representations of women playing what had so recently been considered a lower-class, disreputable, and male instrument? O’Neill’s sketches of Mollie Morrissey and May McCarthy demonstrate the rhetorical work necessary to portray women pipers as valuable semiprofessional participants in Irish public life rather than as unacceptable transgressors or as merely tolerable private amateurs. First, O’Neill and his sources emphasize these pipers’ youth and femininity to render them harmless to the social and musical order. Second, descriptions of Morrissey and McCarthy resonate with poems and song texts that portray Ireland as a maiden—a stylistic device that naturalizes the idea that playing traditional music, even on the pipes, is an appropriate activity for young nationalist women. Finally, O’Neill and his sources avoid connecting musicianship with identity in their descriptions of Morrissey and McCarthy. This avoidance sidesteps class and potential gender role confusion and separates them from their male counterparts, for whom the label “piper” is an identifying feature and most likely a source of pride.

O’Neill’s biographies of Morrissey and McCarthy leave no doubt that these two proficient pipers are women—young, graceful, and mild mannered. Unlike most of O’Neill’s profiles of male musicians, which begin with reports of their musicianship, his accounts of Morrissey and McCarthy first situate each in relation to John Wayland, their teacher. In Morrissey’s sketch, O’Neill also lauds the ease with which she memorizes new tunes—an important attribute, but hardly the cornerstone of traditional musicianship.¹⁰⁷ O’Neill quotes a 1905 article in the London-based Ladies’ Pictorial at length:

I give you an interesting portrait of Miss Mollie Morrissey of Cork, fideogist,¹⁰⁸ harpist, pianist, violinist, bagpiper and stepdancer, at the age of fourteen. I venture to say that not many Irish colleens can boast of such a long list of accomplishments, but such are the attainments of this little girl, whose charming and unassuming manner has endeared her to all who know her. She is the youngest and most proficient female piper in Ireland, playing the famous Irish melodies with great expression, and is also a correct exponent of dance music. She appeared at the Cork International and Industrial Exhibitions with very pronounced success. The clever little artiste is decorated with many medals, won at competitions in piping and step-dancing, and at last year’s Oireachtas she carried off first prize in female hornpipe dancing from all comers, her graceful carriage and movements combined with precision being much admired. Recently at Thurles Feis she won no less than three first prizes in step-dancing, and marched to the field in company with another young genius playing the now revived primitive Irish Warpipes. Miss Morrissey got a special invitation from the mayor of Carnarvon to attend a reception during Pan-Celtic week, which she could not accept on account of being indisposed at the time.¹⁰⁹

Published eight years before Irish Minstrels and Musicians, this account emphasizes Morrissey’s femininity and youth. Overall, O’Neill’s sketch portrays Morrissey as a girl of fourteen, rather than as the adult woman she had become by 1913. In the Ladies’ Pictorial article, her musical skills are “accomplishments” that would seem to lead to an advantageous match and a future playing in the parlors of middle- or upper-class homes. While the article calls her “the most proficient female piper in Ireland,” it further feminizes her prowess by citing her expressive performance of airs even as it damns her renditions of faster—and arguably more challenging—dance music as merely “correct.” At every turn, Morrissey’s successes are diminished by phrases like “little girl” and “clever little artiste.” The article’s final reference to her “indisposition” reinforces an overall impression of delicacy that eclipses her prizes, precision, and proficiency and leaves the reader with a picture of an endearing young thing, a retiring, mild-mannered maiden whose medals and pretty face merely decorate the public practice of Irish cultural nationalism.

McCarthy’s biography produces a similar tension between musicianship and its rhetorical erasure. McCarthy is also young—in her teens in 1910—and according to O’Neill, her “progress in piping and dancing is said to have been little short of marvelous.”¹¹⁰ Complimentary as that seems, “marvelous” suggests that McCarthy’s progress is extraordinarily uncommon or even supernatural. Attribution of musical skill to otherworldly entities is common in stories told about Irish traditional musicians—like the spéirbhean of aisling poetry, the fairies who bestow musical prowess are instruments of a magical nationalism that attributes exceptional qualities to the Irish.¹¹¹