Women, reform and resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950 examines the experiences and activities of women living in nineteenth and twentieth-century Ireland. The backdrop of an increasingly patriarchal society exerted a powerful role on Irish women in those centuries. The Catholic church, the Irish state, hospitals, prisons and charitable organisations all exerted their influence on women or, in the editors’ view, control. Modernisation went hand-in-hand with the regulation of women who had to contend with principles of sexual morality and expectations of ‘normal’ Irish femininity and behaviour. Even middle-class female philanthropists contributed to the imposition of female standards.

While this is a well-known narrative in modern Irish history, Christina S. Brophy and Cara Delay’s main contribution is to assess the avenues of resistance and opposition pursued by Irish women in the various social contexts which sought to circumscribe their behaviour. The main focus is on the poor, although the relations between middle- and lower-class Irish women is an important aspect of the volume. The source base is notably diverse, incorporating well-worn official and archival documentation with often neglected sources such as folk narratives, memoirs and begging letters (‘hidden transcripts’, to use the editors’ terminology).

The opening section examines the ways in which philanthropic women found ways to assist the ‘deserving poor’. Margaret Preston, Vanessa Rutherford and Jennifer Redmond discuss the attitudes and agendas of middle-class reformers and the complex ways in which those targeted resisted (what they often saw as) the condescending class attitudes embedded in philanthropy. As Rutherford argues, even seemingly harmless institutions such as the St Ultan’s Infant Hospital (established in Dublin in 1918) ostensibly sought to reform working-class motherhood. In essence, hospital staff attempted to assert power and authority over working-class infants, a strategy fiercely resisted by many Irish women.

Jennifer Redmond examines mixed denominational welfare groups who sought to protect female Irish emigrants from the ‘demoralisation’ and ‘improper behaviour’ on their journeys. The young women who encountered philanthropic groups were supposed to feel ‘lucky’ that such distinguished middle-class people were interested in their fate, although the responses of the recipients appears to have been mixed. The main focus here is on the power relations that emerged between Irish women themselves, adding complexity to a historiographical debate that too often focuses exclusively on the relations between men and women. Having said that, Lindsey Earner Byrne’s contribution examines the content of begging letters sent by impoverished women to post-independence church authorities. It reveals the ways in which many women traversed, negotiated and perhaps even manipulated the class system in place to secure financial assistance. By exploring the narrative strategies deployed in these letters, Earner Byrne grants poor Irish women considerable agency.

Incarceration is perhaps one of the most obvious sources of power and authority in modern Irish society. Chapters by Elaine Farrell and Conor Reidy look at prisons and the State Inebriate Reformatory, respectively. Farrell focuses on breaches in prison behaviour, arguing that the punishments meted out to rebellious female prisoners was largely dictated by gendered consideration. Building upon this theme, Conor Reidy suggests that attitudes to female drunkenness and alcoholism were equally gendered. To be a drunken women was deemed far more unsavoury than being a drunken man. Rather than attempting to understand the nature of female alcoholism among the poorer classes, authorities were more inclined to judge, punish and malign women whose standards failed to meet Victorian ideals of femininity.

Using a linguistic anthropological approach, Brigittine French examines district court records to demonstrate how gendered citizenship was considered and negotiated. Similarly, Cara Delay turns to the written word to argue that women’s life narratives reveal that women who came of age in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to bypass Ireland’s culture of sexual silence through reading, gossip and exploration. Given the overarching influence of institutions such as the church, Delay presents this as an act of open defiance. In subsequent chapters, Christina S. Brophy explores the violent suppression of keening women to illustrate the plight of labouring women and the movement of defiance to the imaginative realm of banshee and fairy lore. E. Moore Quinn examines the widow’s curse in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland.

Combined, the essays in Women, reform and resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950 offer a nuanced interpretation of Irish women’s history that incorporates class relations, resistance and defiance. This well-edited and coherent volume is a theoretically rich and highly original contribution to Irish gender history.