At the end of the Second World War, the Irish Times described the Irish state’s policy of neutrality as one of ‘national emasculation’.Footnote 1 The paper’s opposition to neutrality is not particularly surprising given the publication’s history of scepticism of virulent Irish nationalism. What is notable about this statement is its gendered character. Clair Wills, in her seminal cultural history of Emergency-era Ireland, suggests that the paper saw the state’s position as ‘neuter-ality’, something that went against the ‘correct’ gendered order.Footnote 2 As Dudink, Hagemann and Tosh argue, warfare has long been perceived as a ‘natural homeland of masculinity’.Footnote 3 From this, and the Irish Times’s comment, one might infer that Irish neutrality was perceived at the time as a distinctly effeminate — or, at least, ungendered — position.
Yet, in the neutral Irish state, the Irish Times was in a minority. Neutrality was supported by most of the population and was agreed upon by all parties in the Oireachtas. As the novelist Elizabeth Bowen reported to the British Ministry of Information, ‘Support of Mr. de Valera’s policy of neutrality is general in almost all classes, and is impressive’.Footnote 4 Where critiques of neutrality did exist, they were more likely to come from pro-Allied viewpoints in the USA and the British Empire. This article argues that both proponents and opponents of neutrality viewed the policy in gendered terms and, in particular, through the lens of masculinity. The topic of masculinity — that is to say, studying men as men — warrants particular attention. As both Linda Connolly and Jennifer Redmond have argued, the ‘illumination of masculinity’ by scholars is vital to fully coming to terms with questions of gender and power in Irish history.Footnote 5 Discourses of masculinity both motivated and supplied rhetorical ballast to the state’s position of neutrality (while also being deployed by opponents of the position as well). This rhetoric is evidenced by a wealth of material in the Department of the Taoiseach files in the National Archives of Ireland, along with the papers of Éamon de Valera and those of Frank Aiken (the minister for co-ordination of defensive measures) in the archives of University College, Dublin.
For its proponents, Irish neutrality represented masculine self-determination and independence, while also being the only viable and practical course that the Irish state could take amid a Europe-wide conflict. While the Irish state was born from a physical force revolution which valorised armed masculinity, by 1939, new conditions meant that abstention from physical force now had to be recast as masculine. Fundamentally, with a tiny army and a largely agrarian economy, the state lacked both the military and economic resources needed to cope with the exigencies of total European war.
During the conflict, the twenty-six-county Irish state was, in theory, steadfastly neutral.Footnote 6 It was one of a very small group of states which did not declare war, did not invade any other states, nor was it invaded. To support Irish neutrality, the Oireachtas passed the 1939 Emergency Powers Act, giving the government extensive powers relating to press censorship, control over supplies and internal security, thus ushering in a time euphemistically referred to as ‘The Emergency’.Footnote 7 Yet, in practice, the Irish state covertly aided, or at the very least, avoided hindering, the Allied war effort. Approximately, 70–80,000 Irishmen joined the British armed forces.Footnote 8 The Irish state also reached an agreement in the summer of 1941, allowing men and women to work in civilian employment in Great Britain.Footnote 9 Axis airmen who landed in Ireland were interned, while those belonging to the Allies were discreetly allowed to cross the border into Northern Ireland.Footnote 10 Weather reports and intelligence was also shared with the British government.Footnote 11
The Irish state’s approach to neutrality was thus one which pragmatically balanced self-determination with self-preservation. Neutrality allowed the state to preserve its sense of ‘manly’ self-determination, while not being placed in an ‘effeminate’ position of domination by either the Allied or Axis powers. Indeed, this fear of domination by a foreign power had almost sexual overtones. The state’s socially conservative patriarchal social structure could be maintained, without the vast upheavals that other European societies experienced. While a great many political, economic and social factors influenced the Irish state’s position of neutrality, ideas and assumptions about Irish masculinity played a significant role.
As a position, neutrality was easily situated within a nationalist tradition which spoke a markedly masculine language. Yet, crucially, Irish masculinity during the Emergency was distinguished from earlier configurations by a rejection of violence as a necessity for masculinity. The state was armed but not belligerent. Thus, while Irish neutrality was justified by discourses of masculinity, by exploring the connection between the two, a simplistic equation of violence with masculinity in Irish history can be problematised. There is indeed a long history of linking abstention from violence to masculinity. As Matthew Kuefler has shown, amid the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire, early Christian writers ‘were able to distance themselves from the failure of the empire and from its militaristic tradition without at the same time sacrificing their masculine identity’.Footnote 12
Masculinity is not a fixed entity; it is open to constant reconstruction and renegotiation. While in one context, violence may be constructed as necessary for masculinity, in others, abstention from violence can be imbued with masculine strength. As R. W. Connell has argued, ‘“hegemonic masculinity” is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable.’Footnote 13 It is, in short, ‘the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy’.Footnote 14 Connell applies Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony here to gender and masculinity. For Gramsci, hegemony is constantly shifting at any given moment, so the hegemonic order reflects a particular set of historical circumstances.Footnote 15
The elevation of a ‘neutral’ masculinity in the Irish state offered an answer to the specific challenges that the Irish patriarchal social order faced during the Emergency. This is not to say it was universally accepted: as Connell also notes, hegemonic masculinity will be challenged by those presenting alternative or deviant forms of masculinity. During the Emergency, one such group who did so were the Irishmen who fought for the Allies, as well as those Irishmen and women who engaged in civilian employment to support the Allied war effort. Moreover, Irish neutrality was critiqued by countless voices among the Allies, who drew upon a gendered language of emasculation and cowardice. For both sides, the masculinity of the Irishman in Allied service functioned as a useful rhetorical device in arguments both for and against active participation in the Second World War. To understand ‘neutral’ masculinity as hegemonic masculinity, we must, therefore, also acknowledge those who rejected its norms.
I
Since the 1990s, the relationship between war and masculinity has attracted significant scholarly attention.Footnote 16 As work by Martin Francis, Juliette Pattinson, Arthur McIvor, Linsey Robb, Sonya Rose and Christina Jarvis have shown, the Second World War has proven to be a particularly fruitful area of study.Footnote 17 While the experience of belligerent states has tended to predominate, Christof Dejung’s work on Switzerland demonstrates that masculinity could be easily reconciled with a policy of neutrality, as has research by Jacobus du Pisani on Afrikaner nationalist support for neutrality.Footnote 18 The history of Irish masculinities is a relatively nascent field. As a recent edited collection on this field remarked: ‘In many Irish historical studies, gender continues to be seen as a “women’s issue”: in other words, that questions regarding gender relate to the effects of patriarchy on women alone.’Footnote 19 In addition to my own work on representations of de Valera, some progress has been made in this field by scholars like Sikata Bannerjee, Conor Heffernan, Jane McGaughey and Kenneth Shonk.Footnote 20 Aidan Beatty, in particular, has helped to bring masculinity to the forefront of central questions in modern Irish history around nationalism, language and property.Footnote 21 The approach of this article is similar to that of Beatty’s work. As Beatty argues, between 1884 and 1938 ‘[n]ational power was conceived of as male potency and the recovery of one would supposedly parallel the recovery of the other’.Footnote 22 In the same way, this article argues that during the Emergency, the pursuit of neutrality in order to maintain national sovereignty was conceived of as a masculine policy which would help to sustain a patriarchal social order.
Scholarship on Irish masculinities has tended to focus on masculinities during times of conflict within Ireland itself — namely, the Irish Revolution (c.1912–22), the early years of the Irish state (1922–38) and the Northern Irish Troubles (c.1969–98).Footnote 23 As a result, masculinity in neutral Ireland during the Emergency has been relatively underexplored, perhaps due to a tendency to conflate masculinity with violence in the scholarship. As Heffernan notes, masculinity, physicality, physical force and the military have long been closely associated with one another.Footnote 24 At the same time, Heffernan urges historians to view masculinity ‘not as a monolithic construct, but as an ever evolving and negotiated process, one at times lacking in studies of Irish gender’.Footnote 25 This also informs the approach taken here; a key aspect of the Emergency was the assertion of a non-violent masculinity, in a society where, until fairly recently, masculinity had been associated with physical force.
Earlier historiography of the Emergency tended to focus on neutrality within the arena of high politics and diplomacy.Footnote 26 Much of this scholarship, written in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘either defended or attacked Ireland’s neutrality in World War II’ in the context of the Cold War and Northern Irish Troubles.Footnote 27 One rather strident condemnation came from F. S. L. Lyons, who described neutrality as ‘an entire people … condemned to live in Plato’s cave’, effectively shut off and oblivious to the wider world.Footnote 28 More recent work has drawn out the complexities of the Emergency experience. From an international relations standpoint, Karen Devine has critiqued earlier negative characterisations of neutrality from scholars like Lyons and Trevor Salmon.Footnote 29 Similarly, Clair Wills has presented neutrality in more nuanced terms: rather than merely amounting to a negation, it was ‘a marker of Irish distinctiveness, as potent as Catholicism or the Irish language’.Footnote 30 In addition, scholars such as Bryce Evans and Michael Kennedy have explored the ways in which the Irish population was both affected by and was highly cognisant of the global conflict.Footnote 31
This increased focus on social history has, in turn, opened discussion of the relationship between gender and the Emergency, exemplified by Mary Muldowney’s pioneering oral history research into Irish women in the Second World War. Nonetheless, this monograph focuses primarily on individual women’s experiences, rather than broader sociocultural understandings of gender. Moreover, Muldowney adopts an all-Ireland approach, which means there is limited space to consider the specific relationship between Irish neutrality and gender.Footnote 32 Significantly less has been said about the topic of masculinity and on the ways in which broader political debates about the Emergency were gendered, with one possible exception being Karen Garner’s recent work on the relationship between de Valera, Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. Here, Garner largely focuses on masculinity as a way of understanding the personal relationships between the three primary subjects. Nonetheless, Garner offers some interesting insights which warrant further interrogation, noting that de Valera’s neutrality policy ‘was an assertion of Ireland’s “muscular Catholic manhood”’.Footnote 33
Irishmen could be members of this muscular brotherhood, without participating in the conflict. The lived realities of masculinity may indeed mean that violence does not figure in an individual’s masculine identity. As Pattinson, McIvor and Robb note, British ‘retained’ male workers in civilian positions in the Second World War could maintain a sense of masculinity built around physically demanding labour, high wages and breadwinner status in a family home to which they remained tied.Footnote 34 Irishmen who remained in Ireland and were able to work also enjoyed these benefits. In pursuing neutrality, the Irish state was keen to preserve a patriarchal social order focused on these men.
II
For its proponents, neutrality did not merely mean abstaining from warfare: rather it represented a positive assertion of national sovereignty and Irishmen’s masculine dominance of the feminine body of the Irish nation. Neutrality ensured that the Irish state did not lose its independence through either invasion or by being dominated in an alliance with a more powerful state. This understanding of neutrality was encapsulated by Frank Aiken in a speech in the USA in 1941, when he declared: ‘we are not cowards or pacifists, we are belligerently neutral … Neutrality … is the crown and symbol of the independence of the free portion of Ireland which we so hardly won after centuries of struggle.’Footnote 35
Neutrality ensured that the hegemonic nationalist male elite in the Irish state could continue in its position. The connection between nationhood and masculinity has long been attested. As Joanne Nagel argues, ‘militarism, revolution, political violence, dictatorship … are all best understood as masculinist projects, involving masculine institutions, masculine processes and masculine activities’.Footnote 36 Aidan Beatty has argued that Irish nationalism is similarly gendered, noting the ubiquity of a trope in its discourse ‘wherein nationalist men … [have] their actions … guided and watched over joyfully by past generations of patriotic Irish men’.Footnote 37 When Irish politicians spoke in favour of neutrality, they drew upon a well-established line of rhetoric, which equated Irish self-determination with masculinity. True masculinity for Irishmen could only be attained in support of Irish sovereignty. Commentators could claim that Irishmen who joined the defence forces and other supporting organisations to defend Irish neutrality were following in the footsteps of manly nationalist forebears in generations past.
During the Emergency, the defence forces presented the nineteenth-century nationalist Thomas Davis as a model of masculinity to be followed by Irish soldiers. In January 1941, An Cosantóir, the journal of the Irish Defence Forces, reminded its readers that Davis had said: ‘To carry arms is the first right of man, for arms are the guardians of property, honour and life … to man [god] gave skill to furnish himself with bodily comforts and with weapons to defend them.’Footnote 38 In the eyes of Irish leaders, Davis believed that a true Irishman could only prove his masculinity by defending the feminine body of the island of Ireland. In a broadcast speech in November 1941, de Valera remarked that Davis ‘spoke of the time when “every grown man [would be] able to defend her coast, her plains, her towns and her hills”’.Footnote 39 This is an example of another common trope in nationalist discourse, which Beatty characterises as one ‘where the “nation” is often imagined as a timeless woman in need of “her” sons’ masculine protection’.Footnote 40 Ireland has often been visualised in nationalist discourse as a vulnerable and defenceless woman, such as ‘Mother Ireland’, ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’ or the ‘Shan Van Vocht’.Footnote 41 This image has, in turn, legitimised masculine domination within the Irish nationalist movement.
Military and political leaders also looked back to the Irish Revolution and frequently drew comparisons between the masculinity of the Irish Volunteers decades earlier and the men of the Irish state’s defence forces. Speaking at Ennis, County Clare in April 1939, as the prospect of war in Europe loomed, de Valera declared that he was ‘confident that the young men of to-day will be ready … as were their predecessors who joined the Irish Volunteers over a quarter of a century ago’.Footnote 42 The Easter Rising of 1916 was particularly significant, as a foundational moment for both the Irish state and de Valera’s political career. Indeed, as Beatty and I have both argued, the presentation of de Valera as masculine was vital to his political ascension.Footnote 43 The twenty-fifth anniversary of the rising was marked by a series of commemorative events in 1941. The Derry Journal described a parade of the defence forces, Local Defence Force (LDF) and Local Security Force (LSF) past the General Post Office as ‘a striking demonstration of the virility of Irish manhood’.Footnote 44
During the Emergency, the parallels between the possession of guns to defend Irish neutrality in the present, and the possession of guns to defend Irish nationalist aspirations in the past were not lost on An Cosantóir. The journal published a highly gendered statement from the revolutionary activist Padraic Pearse that ‘A citizen without arms is like a priest without religion, like a woman without chastity, like a man without manhood’.Footnote 45 Here, Pearse’s statement draws heavily on the language of Catholic patriarchy, while also likening the absence of guns to castration. This language of castration is echoed in the essay ‘The Murder Machine’, in which Pearse remarked that the British education system in Ireland had ‘made of some Irishmen not slaves merely, but very eunuchs, with the indifference and cruelty of eunuchs’.Footnote 46 In both the Irish Revolution, and a generation later in the Emergency, Irish nationalists saw the possession of arms in phallic terms, while regarding the disarmament and domination by a foreign power as akin to castration.
During the Emergency, Irish politicians were deeply anxious about the possibility of the nation losing its position as a masculine, self-determining, self-defending state that it had won a generation earlier and being emasculated by another, more powerful state. Armed neutrality, not belligerence, would thus ensure that the Irish state and nation could retain a manly sense of self-reliance. In a speech on the outbreak of the war, Frank Aiken declared that the defence of the nation at that time was ‘a very noble task, indeed, for the manhood of Ireland to fulfil’.Footnote 47 On a visit to the United States, in a meeting with Summer Welles, US under-secretary of state, Aiken similarly noted that ‘one rifle in the hands of an Irishman defending Irish soil would be more effective for that purpose than ten rifles in the hands of Englishmen’.Footnote 48 In other words, Irish-men could best maintain their hegemonic position if left to get on with the job of defending Ireland themselves. As the Donegal Democrat reminded its readers in 1941: ‘In manliness, pride, devotion to our country we yield place to no other nation on God’s earth. We never have wished to interfere with other races, nor shall we willingly break interference with our own liberties.’Footnote 49
As in previous generations, Irish neutrality necessitated the possession of arms to uphold the hegemonic status of nationalist (and predominantly Catholic) Irishmen. The difference this time was, however, that violence was only a possibility, not a necessity. When the invader was present in the Irish body politic (as it was under British rule), violence was necessary to attain masculine self-mastery. During the Emergency, the invader was absent from Irish territory (save for Northern Ireland and a few instances of accidental crash-landings and bombings). As such, violence was not necessary and only would become so if the invader appeared on Irish shores. In any case, Ireland’s manhood had to be prepared for such an eventuality.
In the early stages of the conflict, the Irish government was keenly aware of the risk of invasion and planned accordingly. By March 1941, eighteen months after the outbreak of war, 41,000 men had joined the regular defence forces. In addition, a further 180,000 men enrolled in the LDF and LSF.Footnote 50 Senior officers in the LDF emphasised the importance of physical training and Gaelic games for the inculcation of masculine ideals. In an article entitled ‘Tasks for the L.D.F.’ published in An Cosantóir, Donnchadh Mac Gabhann emphasised the need to ‘create an atmosphere for the revival of native culture and native games’.Footnote 51 Regular ‘step-together’ events held across the country involving live public displays of the defence organisations parading, training and engaging in competitive sports were also very popular. In July 1940, for instance, a ‘step-together week’ in Dún Laoghaire included a combined services parade, a sailing regatta, a seven-a-side football tournament, a swimming gala, a boxing carnival, gymkhana and a ‘star athletic meeting’.Footnote 52
Aside from supporting the defence forces, Irish civilians were also asked to bear shortages of basic consumer goods. The Drogheda Independent reminded its readers in 1941 that manly stoicism was the only appropriate response to the difficulties imposed by the European conflict: ‘we must only grin and bear it, endeavouring as time passes to make that grin a smile of manly resignation to a fate much less severe than that of many other European peoples.’Footnote 53 As Evans remarks, ‘far from the bliss of life on a neutral “air-conditioned ocean liner” or the obliviousness of Plato’s cave … the war brought great disruption to daily routines, life experiences and long-term aspirations’.Footnote 54 As a policy, neutrality affected the wider socioeconomic organisation of the Irish state. It was, to paraphrase Connell, part of the answer to the question of maintaining a patriarchal social order.
III
Neutrality broadly cohered with the wider social policies of the de Valera government. A draft speech to be given by de Valera at the Irish Chamber of Commerce in 1942 noted that ‘in all the belligerent countries … the entire population, male and female, from the ages of fifteen to sixty-five have been conscripted … Family life has been completely broken up.’Footnote 55 This points to a profound sense of anxiety around the impact of warfare on the gender order of the nation. During the Second World War, men in belligerent states were removed from their families, while women rushed to fill the gaps they left in workplaces. Conversely, in the Irish state, neutrality was pursued in harmony with a socially conservative, patriarchal order. De Valera’s vision of Irish nationhood was heavily infused by Catholic thought. His draft speech to the Irish Chamber of Commerce noted: ‘we can with reasonable hope of success devote ourselves with less distraction to moral and spiritual things.’Footnote 56 As Anna Teekell notes, ‘pacificism as a Catholic practice was an entrenched part of de Valera’s neutral rhetoric’.Footnote 57 The Catholic Church, both in the Irish state and in the Vatican, supported neutrality, and indeed the Vatican ultimately provided the Irish state a useful model of neutrality to emulate.Footnote 58
The Irish Catholic hierarchy closely followed both the line of the Vatican and the Irish government.Footnote 59 Indeed, it keenly highlighted the agreement of the two institutions during the conflict. In June 1940, Cardinal MacRory, primate of all Ireland, noted that while the pope ‘strove earnestly and untiringly to avert the threatened catastrophe … our country … has not been involved in this devastating war’.Footnote 60 Similarly, at an event where the colours of the Lisdoonvarna (County Clare) LSF branch were blessed, the bishop of Galway noted that ‘the Catholic Church does not glorify war … but she has always taught … that the legitimate authority of any country has the right and duty to use force when necessary’. In this speech, the feminine church would be protected by the ‘brave men’ of Ireland, with ‘strong arms’ who would ‘preserve at all costs their altars, their homes and their liberty’.Footnote 61
This discourse of brave men protecting their homes reflects a broader conception of the Catholic family. Throughout the war, as Frank Coppa notes, papal pleas for peace were couched in the language of ‘the Christian reconstitution of the human family’.Footnote 62 In Irish Catholic thinking, Irish sovereignty expressed through neutrality was closely aligned to the patriarchal familial structure lauded by Catholic teaching. On St Patrick’s Day, 1943, Edmund A. Walsh (a Jesuit priest and professor of geopolitics), at a dinner in Boston, argued that Irish nationalism reposed on ‘Catholic teaching respecting patriotism’ and that ‘after the family, it is one’s native land that furnishes the social organisation’. Aside from divine protection, the Irish nation could count upon the strength of appropriately feminine ‘Irish womanhood [which] has sanctified the purity of maidens and ennobled the chastity of wedlock’ and the ordinary Irishman who ‘is not a stranger to violence but is quick to forgive and forget’.Footnote 63 For Walsh, Irishmen could fight (if necessary), but chose not to.
On the very same day, Éamon de Valera gave a radio address to the Irish nation, which spoke of his idealised vision for Ireland. As Beatty has noted, the language of this speech was very gendered.Footnote 64 It envisioned a patriarchal social order which spoke of a land marked by the masculine ‘contest of athletic youths’ and the feminine ‘laughter of happy maidens’, who together might produce ‘sturdy children’. Crucially, this idealised Ireland was implicitly Catholic, the home ‘of a people, who satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit’.Footnote 65 While it was made clear that this idealised Ireland would be defended by ‘successive generations of patriotic men’, if necessary, the active prosecution of warfare did not appear.
It is evident that a masculine, patriarchal hegemonic order was an essential component of de Valera’s own conception of a self-determining Irish nation. Less than two years before the Emergency, a new constitution facilitated the policy of neutrality in asserting that the Irish nation would affirm ‘its inalienable, indefeasible, and sovereign right to choose its own form of Government [and] to determine its relations with other nations’, while simultaneously declaring that ‘the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved’.Footnote 66 It is worth noting that the latter of these passages provoked strident opposition from feminist organisations.Footnote 67
Few historians would disagree that the political culture of the Irish state from 1922 onwards privileged masculinity over femininity, while defining the role of women, along the lines of Catholic social thought, as primarily being mothers and wives (as may be seen in the 1937 constitution). Legislation, for example, sought to limit women’s participation on juries in 1924 and 1927, while also limiting their access to contraception in 1929 and 1934.Footnote 68 During the Emergency, only four women sat in Dáil Éireann, all of whom were widows of former deputies.Footnote 69 In January 1942, the humorous journal, Dublin Opinion, ran a cartoon depicting Dáil Éireann and the feminine figure of Erin, captioned ‘138 men and a girl’.Footnote 70 The fact that the female deputies were not factored into this is telling.
As Beatty notes, the discourse of the masculine ‘strong farmer’, who was able to provide for his wife and family, was central to de Valera’s socioeconomic thinking.Footnote 71 This discourse carried on into the Emergency era. In a prepared statement for the 1943 Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis, de Valera again reiterated the fact that: ‘We believe that the maintenance of the greatest practicable number of family units in contentment and well-being on the farms is in the natural tradition of our social organisation.’Footnote 72 This belief was strikingly gendered. Around 1937–8, a memorandum was drafted in the Department of the Taoiseach, whereby in the so-called ‘dower house’ scheme, farmers on larger farms would be supported to construct a second, smaller cottage with its own portion of land. Here, the farmer’s son could live with a wife, and raise a family, until his father’s retirement, at which point the two households would then swap.Footnote 73
Marriage was essential to the attainment of one of the key hallmarks of masculinity, and older bachelors, therefore, risked being effectively stuck in a state of suspended childhood.Footnote 74 By the late 1930s in Ireland, marriage rates were considerably lower than elsewhere in Europe and emigration remained high. Rural society thus seemed to be vulnerable. Indeed, some were anxious that the high levels of emigration and rural depopulation would lead to the ultimate collapse and failure of the Irish state.Footnote 75 The prospect of Irish entry into war presented a further threat, and this, in turn, demonstrated the need to double down on gendered rhetoric around neutrality. Neutrality would allow the masculine strong farmer, idealised by Fianna Fáil to remain in control of his homestead and family, as he would be untouched by the mobilisations of the European war. He need not worry about his wife entering the workplace or whether he could return to his employment after the war.
IV
Masculinity also played a pivotal role in the construction of de Valera’s public image during this time. I have previously argued that in the popular press between 1922–39, as de Valera’s political power and influence grew, he became increasingly represented as a physically strong, masculine figure.Footnote 76 Far from being a cowardly policy of ‘national emasculation’, neutrality was presented by de Valera’s supporters in Ireland and in the diaspora (and, in particular, the Irish Press newspaper) as the logical conclusion of his calm and rational mind, which showed restraint in not rushing impulsively into the conflict. It is worth noting that western ideals of manliness have long emphasised the importance of rationality and self-restraint in distinction to the supposed hysteria of women, and the emotional impulses of children and animals. As Joseph Valente has noted, Victorian British colonial attitudes perceived the Irishman as being either too beastly (thus lacking in self-restraint) or too emotional to be manly. In response, Irish nationalist discourse during this time responded by presenting exemplary figures (such as Charles Stewart Parnell) of Irish manliness as being calm, collected and rational.Footnote 77
This process can be seen, several decades later, in the depiction of Éamon de Valera during the Emergency in the Irish-American press. The depiction of de Valera in this context (at least up to the entry of the United States into the war) was overwhelmingly positive. It should be noted that de Valera’s popularity was especially pronounced there. This popularity stemmed partly from his birth in New York and partly from a concerted campaign to cultivate Irish-American opinion — starting with a visit in 1919 and continuing with several further visits into the 1920s and 1930s. A letter from a T. F. Healy to the New York Sun in October 1939 argued that de Valera’s personal qualities made him the ideal individual to broker a peace treaty between the two sides: ‘Personally, politically, psychologically, intellectually Eamon de Valera is the man to mediate … He has the forward-thrusting faculty of his people, the sympathy of the Gael … his tact, his acumen, his good judgement, and his integrity is above question.’Footnote 78 For Harold Denny writing for the New York Times, ‘the moral and intellectual authority of this unassuming man’ were ‘great indeed even apart from his high official position’.Footnote 79
While some voices might have critiqued de Valera’s stance of neutrality as unmasculine, the Philadelphia Record reminded its readers of his consistency and contrasted his leadership in the ‘application of sanctions against Italy in the Ethiopian affair’ in 1936 with ‘British pussyfooting’.Footnote 80 De Valera’s healthy, masculine mind seemed to stem naturally from a healthy virile body which appeared to defy the natural process of ageing. A journalist from the Carroll United Press remarked in a published interview, that ‘it was hard to realise that this vigorous forceful man … had been an international figure for twenty-five years’.Footnote 81 De Valera’s position as a family man was also emphasised. One E. Royston Price remarked that ‘he is … a strictly practising Catholic … a man of simple life who neither smokes nor drinks … He has a wife and family, and they live in quite a small house in a Dublin suburb.’Footnote 82
As the minister for the co-ordination of defensive measures, Frank Aiken was viewed in a similar way by American audiences. On a visit to the United States (to persuade its government to grant Ireland material to defend itself in the event of invasion), Aiken cut a dash in the American press. His physique no doubt aided this. The Washington Post described Aiken as ‘Ireland’s towering 210-pound Minister of Defense … a broth of a man from Armagh who stands 6 foot, 3 inches’.Footnote 83 The Los Angeles Times similarly characterised him as ‘6-feet-1, 200 pounds and dark Irish — a fine big darling of a man … His dark face … shows no emotion when he talks.’Footnote 84 For the Irish World, Aiken’s manly physique was synecdochic for the masculinity of Irish neutrality: ‘The clear, resolute tones of voice emanating from this tall, robust gentleman, with that strong and prominent chin, left no shadow of doubt in anybody’s mind about Ireland’s determination to maintain neutrality’.Footnote 85 Notwithstanding the fact that Aiken’s mission to the US was ultimately unsuccessful, this admiration for him reflected significant support for Irish neutrality in the United States. This was partly due to the influence of Irish America. The Advocate in July 1940 declared that Ireland would ‘fight aggression from whatever side they come while the manhood and machinery at his command last … The Irish may be licked by superior forces of men and equipment by either belligerent, but the spirit of Irish nationality will not be conquered.’Footnote 86
Although de Valera (and Fianna Fáil more generally) could not claim the same popularity within Ireland itself, the Emergency nonetheless marked the high point of de Valera’s political career. Apart from a brief period of minority government between June 1943 and May 1944, Fianna Fáil enjoyed a majority in Dáil Éireann (no small feat under the single transferable vote system). All parties in the Dáil supported neutrality, and neither the opposition Fine Gael Party nor Labour Party were able to mount a convincing challenge to Fianna Fáil hegemony. Accordingly, in 1943, a Dublin Opinion cartoon depicted de Valera as a virile, physically attractive man who had successfully earned the affections of the feminine Erin, while the dejected W. T. Cosgrave (Fine Gael) and William Norton (Labour) looked on from the sidelines. The cartoon was captioned ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me’ — a reference to a 1942 Glenn Miller song about two young lovers separated by the war.Footnote 87
De Valera’s popularity during the Emergency was underscored by the reception of the speech he delivered on 16 May 1945, itself a response to a comment made by Winston Churchill three days earlier. In Churchill’s speech the masculine restraint of the British government in not laying a ‘violent hand’ on neutral Ireland was contrasted with the childlike actions of de Valera’s government, which was free to ‘frolic with the Germans and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart’s content’.Footnote 88 In response, de Valera argued that he could demonstrate the calm use of reason and masculine restraint just as well as, if not better than, Churchill, by prefacing his speech with the declaration: ‘I shall strive not to be guilty of adding any fuel to the flames of hatred and passion which … promise to burn up whatever is left by the war of decent human feeling in Europe.’Footnote 89 De Valera’s performance of a restrained and rational masculinity was widely applauded in Ireland. One Margaret Mair, in a letter to de Valera’s secretary, praised its ‘almost superhuman restraint’.Footnote 90 Similarly, a Charles Schoeppler described de Valera’s speech as a ‘gentlemanly reply to a bitter ungentlemanly attack’.Footnote 91 Dundalk Town Council passed a motion, praising ‘the noble and manly stand he took on behalf of all Irishmen’, while a county councillor in Laois County Council applauded de Valera’s statement as ‘that of a Statesman and a gentleman’.Footnote 92
The day after de Valera’s speech, the Irish Press reported that ‘The Taoiseach’s address had caused the complete potential of circulated copies [in Dublin] to be sold out at the half-past ten mark … Wires from the Belfast, Liverpool, Galway, Cork, Limerick and Waterford offices of the Irish press arrived early asking for more copies. The demand could not be acceded to, as the newsprint allotment would not allow for extra printing.’ In Cork, a reporter ‘was shown a copy of a telegram by an old and ardent supporter of Fine Gael in the city, which he said he had sent to Gen. Mulcahy asking him to withdraw Gen. MacEoin’s candidature for the Presidency, in order to show to the world that the Irish people are behind Mr. de Valera in this situation’.Footnote 93 Some messages of congratulation were particularly creative. A Tomás Tóibín sent de Valera a copy of a panegyric song that he was due to perform at Dungarvan town hall:
While de Valera’s response to Churchill certainly earned him great plaudits, not all were convinced by the speech. Ben Mayo, writing in the Sunday Independent, depicted de Valera not as a calmly rational statesman, but rather as bitter and driven by old enmities:
Mr. de Valera may speak loftily of his ‘vision of a nobler and better ending,’ but in this crazy attempt to split the Irish people into ‘those who blindly follow his lead’ and those ‘Quislings’ who do not, there is no vision but a vision of hatred; hatred of England, hatred of every Irishman who sees any merit whatever in England, and that hatred; if Mr. de Valera’s lieutenants have their way, will go on for our lifetime, and embitter yet another generation of boys and girls.Footnote 95
V
The depiction of de Valera and the policy of neutrality as being overly emotional was a common trope in the United Kingdom. British colonial discourse has long depicted the Irish unflatteringly as an excessively emotional people: either as the feminine, childlike Erin who needed the protection of the more masculine Britannia, or as simian beasts lacking the self-control to truly be considered men.Footnote 96 Ulster unionist critiques were particularly strident. As Jane McGaughey notes, Ulster unionism has traditionally defined itself around the characteristics of ‘fortitude, discipline and martial prowess, in contrast to the [perceived] traits of fickleness, laziness and disloyalty’ of northern Catholics.Footnote 97 Rev. Dr James Little, a Presbyterian clergyman and MP for County Down, in a church service arranged by the Orange Order, described neutrality as ‘the coward’s castle for timorous, faint-hearted and craven souls’ and argued that ‘the neutral individual or State in such a conflict had earned not only the contempt of man but the displeasure of God’.Footnote 98 In a similar statement, the dean of Belfast’s Church of Ireland cathedral contrasted ‘the Roman Catholic nations … [who had] either collapsed speedily or were neutral … or allied to the anti-Christian horror,’ with ‘Protestant England [who] led the world in … manly democracy’.Footnote 99
Other British critiques of neutrality were more explicit. In a report prepared for Frank Aiken it was alleged that the deputy leader of the British trade mission to South America accused ‘the Irish and Prussians of “brutality” and “moral cowardice”’, while contrasting these qualities with ‘the “sense of freedom” and the “dignity” to be found in English and Scotsmen’.Footnote 100 The National Review meanwhile likened neutral Ireland to a wayward young woman who ‘for all her fancy costume’ should still be regarded as ‘an integral part of the British Empire’. This stance was contrasted with the masculine ‘staunchness of Northern Ireland’, without which ‘the Germans would dominate the whole Ireland’.Footnote 101 Similarly, a circular letter which was attributed to Churchill himself, declared: ‘Let us resolve to show the Eireans [sic], when we have won the war, what we think of their cowardice and truculence.’Footnote 102
While American opinion was more sympathetic to Irish neutrality initially, American entry into the war in 1941 changed matters. For several American critics, Irish neutrality could be ascribed to an effeminate or childlike level of emotional confusion, which contrasted against the calm, rational resolve of the Allies. As Garner notes, Allied critiques depicted de Valera as running counter to Enlightenment norms of calm, restrained and, above all, rational masculinity.Footnote 103 The Baltimore Evening Sun declared on 19 February 1940 that ‘Ireland’s present attitude represents a combination, therefore, of frivolity and short-sightedness’.Footnote 104 Another newspaper declared that ‘the Irish are unhappy and emotionally confused as a result of the policies of the de Valera government … It … [has brought] the whole race of fighting Irish to a mood in which they are ready to risk slavery to the Nazi.’Footnote 105
This image of neutral Ireland preferring effeminate slavery to the masculinity of fighting was made even more gendered by the Boston Herald, which likened Hitler’s alleged designs for Ireland to rape, declaring on 21 June 1940 that ‘Hitler will respect Irish neutrality only until it becomes convenient for him to violate it. The ravisher of Scandinavia, Holland and Belgium prides himself on realism.’Footnote 106 Other critiques suggested that, due to neutrality, Ireland was condemned to a state of arrested development, unable to attain full manhood. In an article in The Nation, Keith Hutchinson remarked that ‘Eire [sic] will remain a land of old folks and children …which must feed its spirit on the hatreds of the past because it can have no real hopes of the future’.Footnote 107 Here, it is worth noting that Hutchinson hinted at the demographic anxieties in Ireland about a declining population.
Occasionally, figures in the Irish government and diplomatic service responded directly to critiques of Irish neutrality in the press. In a letter to the editor of Time magazine, Robert Brennan (as Irish minister to the United States) critiqued the publication for comments which intimated that de Valera was ‘handcuffed by his British-hating colleagues’. In Time’s depiction, de Valera seemed emasculated and constrained by overly emotional colleagues. Brennan responded by emphasising that neutrality had the support of ‘all the people’ and that this was ‘based not on hatred of anyone’, but rather the patriotic (and masculine) ‘love of Ireland and an equally natural desire to keep war from her shores’.Footnote 108
Although the vast majority of the population of the Irish state supported neutrality, a few critical voices did exist, drawing, as British and American voices had, on gendered language. In a report prepared for Frank Aiken, it was alleged that a speaker at a Rathmines debating society had declared that ‘Ireland is hiding behind the skirts of Britain’.Footnote 109 Such critiques of neutrality, in a bid to evade censorship, were generally rather tacit. In an editorial, The Bell, a trenchant critic of Irish cultural conservatism, wondered whether the Irish people were stuck in a state of childish arrested development, having ‘descended to mere pupillage — a cowering, timid pack of children, afraid of the dark bogey-men’.Footnote 110 Denis Johnston, an Irishman based in Dublin, similarly remarked in a letter to his employer (the BBC) that: ‘The Irish Government are suffering at the moment from a bad attack of nerves … [they] have an almost hysterical fear of anything calculated to push them out of their neutrality.’Footnote 111
The few politicians who critiqued neutrality did so in similar terms. Senator Frank MacDermot argued that Irish entry into the war would ease the divisions caused by partition, as a united Ireland ‘must be the dearest hope of an Irishman worth the name’.Footnote 112 In the Dáil, James Dillon, meanwhile, was more forthright, suggesting that Irish entry into the war would demonstrate true manliness, as ‘resistance to evil and injustice is the affair of … every Christian man … No prudent man will minimise that danger: no just man will deride that fear.’Footnote 113 Conversely, Dillon’s many critics in the Dáil saw his intervention as symptomatic of a childish lack of manliness. Aghast at Dillon’s speech, the Fianna Fáil deputy, Andrew Fogarty, threatened to ‘put him out quick, the corner boy’.Footnote 114
Perhaps most notably of all, de Valera’s visit to the German embassy in Dublin to present condolences to the German representative, Eduard Hempel, on the death of Hitler, generated a stream of angry letters which repeatedly called his masculinity into question. One Angela D. Walsh remarked: ‘We in the United States thought you were a man of vision; a leader; a man capable of developing Eire … But … I think it’s time that you … gave a real [emphasis in the original source] Irishman a chance.’Footnote 115 This could be a comment on both de Valera’s perceived want of masculinity and want of Irishness: his father, Juan Vivion de Valera, was of Spanish descent. Occasionally, references to de Valera’s parentage surfaced in debates over neutrality, with Dillon jibing that ‘My ancestors fought for Ireland down the centuries … while yours were banging banjos and bartering budgies in the backstreets of Barcelona.’ As I have previously argued, it is worth noting that critiques of de Valera’s supposed lack of Irishness often merged seamlessly with critiques of his lack of manliness.Footnote 116 Others were more explicit in their criticism. A Jane Callaghan wrote to de Valera: ‘you are … a plain son of a bitch [emphasis in the original source].’Footnote 117 One anonymous American remarked: ‘you would not have to get on your knees to kiss the ass of a potato bug’, while a Mary Murphy in Brooklyn likened him to a ‘dirty bum … a dog’.Footnote 118 Unfavourable contrasts between de Valera and the masculinity of the Allies were frequently made. One Caroline Burchell asserted that ‘you didn’t stop to think of the number of American boys of Irish extraction who’ve lost their lives’.Footnote 119
VI
Burchell’s letter highlights the complexities of gendering Irish neutrality. While Allied critics depicted neutrality negatively, the bravery and achievements of Irishmen were also highlighted to provide an alternative model of Irish masculinity. For example, Carroll Binder, the Chicago Daily News foreign editor, had a despatch syndicated in many American papers, which remarked: ‘considering the Irishman’s traditional love of a fight, this passion for keeping out of the biggest fight in human history is hard to comprehend … [yet] something like 175,000 Irishmen have gone to Britain and joined the British fighting forces.’Footnote 120 Similarly, an article in Collier’s Magazine noted that: ‘Some of the boys in our American Army who like a fight are of Irish extraction.’Footnote 121 As Brian Girvin notes, a consistent feature of British discourse vis-à-vis Irish neutrality was the contrast made between the ‘good and bad Irishman’.Footnote 122 Most notably, Churchill (in his speech criticising Irish neutrality) paid tribute to ‘the thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the battlefront to prove their ancient valour’.Footnote 123
For the Irish government, Irish men and women in Allied service presented difficulties. Censorship regulations prevented publication of almost all news about Irish citizens fighting in the conflict (which was almost entirely on the Allied side), and Irish servicemen in British armed forces were banned from wearing uniform in the Irish state. Nonetheless, Irish valour in Allied service could be deployed to counter notions abroad about Irish cowardice. In 1940, in a speech to the Empire Parliamentary Conference, the Fianna Fáil Deputy Robert Briscoe, arguing in favour of neutrality, stated: ‘I do not think any Englishman has ever yet said to me that an Irish soldier was not a good soldier no matter what army he fought in.’Footnote 124
Similarly, in the Atlantic Monthly, Hugh O’Neill Hencken argued sympathetically that ‘if we are impatient sometimes with Irish neutrality, let us try to understand the Irish point of view. And let us not forget Paddy Finucane and Fogarty Fenen.’Footnote 125 Nonetheless, even though Finucane was lauded for his fighting spirit, he could still be subject to British colonial discourses which depicted him as still somewhat lacking in the ‘masculine’ characteristic of rationality and self-control. As Martin Francis notes in his work on masculinities in the Royal Air Force, ‘despite being a highly disciplined officer, placed in command of an Australian squadron, Finucane was still subjected to the stereotyping of the Irish in British culture which had long presented them as unruly and hot-headed.’Footnote 126
At times, the Irish government even privately acknowledged that the achievements of these Irishmen worked to maintain Ireland’s image internationally. In a letter to the secretary at the Department of External Affairs, the Irish minister to the United States, Robert Brennan, reported that ‘there is loud acclaim, principally amongst the Irish Americans, for those of Irish blood, however thin, who have won distinction in the war. You hear echoes of this, time and time again.’Footnote 127 At the end of the war, the Irishmen in Allied service were cited to refute accusations of Irish cowardice. In August 1945, the Meath Chronicle reacted angrily to a statement made by William Grant (the Northern Ireland minister for health and local government), which alleged that men from the Irish state who joined British forces did so out of desperation brought on by hunger. It argued: ‘we respected those young men … who had the manliness and the courage to go out to fight for what they considered was right … we resent the statement of Sir William Grant accordingly.’Footnote 128
This statement illustrates the fact that even when the neutrality debate became more nuanced, the discourse was still remarkably gendered. Where pro-Allied voices were reluctant to critique neutrality explicitly, praise for the masculinity and valour of Irishmen in Allied service functioned as a useful rhetorical tool, to argue that Ireland naturally belonged fighting manfully on the Allied side. Conversely, for pro-neutrality voices, Irish contributions to the Allies were deployed to argue that neutrality did not, by any means, stem from a lack of manliness in the Irish character.
VII
The patriarchal social order that existed in the Irish state during the Emergency lasted at least up to the late twentieth century. In some respects, it endures up to the present day (the proportion of women in the Oireachtas remains well below the average for western Europe, to give just one example). Moreover, this social order has its roots in developments in both Irish and wider European society which began in the nineteenth century. Yet, it would be a mistake to think that the configuration of masculinity during this time was wholly unchanging. The popular view of the middle decades of the twentieth century in Ireland is one of stagnation, stultifying conservatism and drift. There is some truth to this image: throughout the twentieth century, men remained (and continue to remain) the dominant gender. Yet, this continuity was accompanied (and indeed made possible) by subtle shifts in the gendered social order. As Connell notes, the hegemonic form of masculinity at any given time reflects a specific answer to the specific problems of maintaining patriarchal power at that time.
During the Emergency, neutrality allowed a Catholic nationalist male elite to remain in power. If anything, the perceived masculinity of those political elites (particularly that of de Valera) was enhanced. The Irish state was not invaded, nor did it have to subordinate its diplomatic or economic policies to a wider Allied war effort (though the war undoubtedly imposed constraints on political and socioeconomic life in Ireland). This is not to say that neutrality would have guarded against invasion had the course of the war gone differently: the tiny Irish Defence Forces would have quickly been overwhelmed by an all-out Allied or Axis invasion. But it at least maintained the possibility of a continued independent existence, and as events would prove, this status quo was indeed maintained.
Neutrality also helped to maintain the existence of a wider patriarchal social order: Irish men did not need to forego their hegemonic position as fathers, breadwinners, workers and farmers, nor were Irish women required to enter the workforce or auxiliary armed forces as their counterparts did across belligerent Europe. Neutrality was pursued in lockstep with both the diplomatic policies and the social thought of the (inherently patriarchal) Roman Catholic Church. This is not to say that there was dissent from the ideals of ‘neutral masculinity’ and the social order which it maintained: as is evidenced by the thousands of Irishmen and women who emigrated to participate in the Allied war effort (either through the armed forces or civilian work), as well as critics of the policy among the Allies. But in any configuration of hegemonic masculinity, it is inevitable that there will be men who fall short (through choice or inability) from its norms.
What was distinctive about the ideals of ‘neutral masculinity’ during the Emergency? For one, ‘neutral masculinity’ necessitated the espousal of non-violence. During the Irish Revolution, the possession of arms and violent defiance of British rule were regarded as central to Irish manliness. A generation later, the events of this period were fondly remembered, but changed geopolitical circumstances now meant that the ideal Irishman was non-belligerent (though he still might bear arms in the LDF or LSF, in anticipation of the possibility of circumstances changing). While the singular, masculine hero was venerated during the revolution (and indeed continued to be fondly remembered during the Emergency), in neutral Ireland, ordinary men in spaces like the LSF or LDF were also valorised.
There was admittedly still some space for military heroism, but this was only possible in Allied service — something which deviated from the norms of hegemonic masculinity in neutral Ireland. In the heavily censored Irish press, male heroism was far more likely to be celebrated behind the plough than the machine gun. While Irish masculinity has long been linked (and to some extent, continues to be linked) to agrarian ideals, during the Emergency the connection between manliness and agriculture was particularly marked. By the 1930s, ‘the land question’ had been largely settled for most Irish men, and the exigencies of European war meant that the contributions of Irish farmers took on a new importance during the Emergency. It was only with growing urbanisation and economic liberalisation that, in the 1950s, agrarianism began to be less significant in the construction of hegemonic masculinity in Ireland.
The continuation of a patriarchal social order in twentieth-century Ireland thus masks the subtle shifts in hegemonic masculinity during this time. Indeed, it is inherent to hegemonic masculinity that there be almost continual shifts in response to changing circumstances. While it is beyond the scope of this article to chart the changes in hegemonic masculinity in Ireland over this period, the example of the Emergency provides a highly instructive example of a shift in Irish hegemonic masculinity. It was during this time that non-belligerence became increasingly valorised over violence.
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