Imperial Feminists and the Irish Question

This book examines the participation of English feminist socialists in Irish suffrage, labour and pacifism movements to analyze political solidarity between English and Irish women in the early 20th century.

In the early 20th century, women across the British Isles united to fight for the right to vote, for fair pay and good working conditions, and for an end to war, but what did this unity look like across the colonial border between Ireland and England? This book offers a fresh perspective on the history of empire and feminism by exploring the changing nature of political solidarity between English and Irish feminists, socialists, and pacifists during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Demonstrating how Ireland offered English women a space in which to act upon their patriotic duty as ‘mothers’ of empire in order to alleviate the degraded status of their ‘colonial sisters’, Geraghty shows how this imperial feminism was an integral part of English women’s demand for political freedoms. Their political ideologies, shaped during a time of heightened imperial loyalties, did not disappear with the gaining of partial franchise in 1918, but remained a pervasive part of their politics and impacted the ways in which they engaged with the Irish struggle for independence and Irish women’s political emancipation. Imperial Feminists exposes the difficulties of building and maintaining grassroots feminist and socialist solidarities at a time of heightened imperial loyalties and changing internationalist politics.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Open University.