Knowing Their Place? E-Book

• Herausgeber: THP Ireland
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Knowing their Place is a comprehensive account of the public, private and intellectual life of Irish women in the Victorian age. In particular, this book looks at the steady progress of girls and women within the education system, their gradual involvement in intellectual life through amateur societies (such as the Royal Dublin Society); their emergence of independent, highly motivated scholarly and philanthropic individuals who operated within local spheres with often very considerable degrees of success and influence.

Leseprobe

This volume is dedicated to our students

so that they might know …

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Pam Hirsch

Introduction

Brendan Walsh

1. ‘Starry Eyed’: Women in Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Clara Cullen

2. ‘The Fun of Being Intellectual’: Helen Waddell (1889–1965) and Maude Clarke (1892–1935)

Jennifer FitzGerald

3. Intellectual Lives and Literary Perspectives: Female Irish Writing at Home and Abroad

Kathryn Laing

4. General Practice? Victorian Irish Women and United Kingdom Medicine

Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh

5. Intellectual Women: Irish Women at Cambridge, 1875–1904

Susan M. Parkes

6. A Woman’s Reply: Women and Divorce Law Reform in Victorian Ireland

Diane Urquhart

7. A Terrible Beauty? Women, Modernity and Irish Nationalism before the Easter Rising

Margaret Ward

8. Knowing Their Place? Girls’ Perceptions of School in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Brendan Walsh

Appendix

Notes

Notes on Contributors

Copyright

Foreword

I sat down to write this foreword on International Women’s Day, which seemed singularly appropriate. I knew of Maud Gonne – but perhaps rather as the muse of W.B. Yeats than as a woman with her own agency, work and life. Gonne herself spoke of ‘an old prophecy which says that Ireland will be saved by the women, and if Irish women will only realise the importance of this work of national education for children, I think this prophecy may come true’. And indeed, the uncovering of previously unsung heroines, the significance of teachers and the pursuit of learning by Irish women, all explored in this book, fills a significant lacuna in historical studies. As I read the book I began to realise that my ignorance was vast and I imagine I am not alone in this.

It turns out that there exists a vast roll call of female Irish intellectuals and, to take just one example, I was reminded of the story of the astrophysicist, Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Burnell discovered the first radar pulsars when she was a graduate supervisor, yet her male thesis supervisor was awarded the Nobel Prize, rather than her. So some of the women in this book have been hidden from history because their worth has been occluded by male rivals, but much more commonly, for many of them, getting the good work done has been more important to them than making a name for themselves.

A letter to The Irish Times in 1878 had claimed that:

Home is the sphere of a woman; modesty is her supreme virtue; softness and sweetness are her true accomplishments; innocence is her best experience; economy is her highest ability; and constancy and self-sacrificing love her only legitimate heroism.

Fortunately, generations of Irish schoolgirls have ignored this. For intellectual girls, prior to the development of higher education for women in Ireland, the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham offered opportunities, firstly as students, but sometimes, later, returning as Heads of House. Part of my own failure to realise that a particular woman was Irish is that the story of learned Irish women has – at least in the past – been centrifugal, as Irish women sometimes studied, lived and worked in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. In that sense they refused to know their place, but followed their ambition wherever it took them.

Dr Pam Hirsch

Newnham College

University of Cambridge, 2014

Introduction

Writing in 1970, Germaine Greer observed:

It is remarkable how many of today’s militant women can remember some extraordinary old lady who sought (in vain) to plant the seeds of rebellion in their minds. From time to time vivid old women appear on TV, or are written up in obituaries in The Times, to remind us not only of the continuity of the movement but of the tactical address and joyful courage of the petticoated, corseted and hatted gentlewomen of a lifetime ago.1

Perhaps it was not always ‘in vain’, as Greer suggests, but it is certainly true that informing much of the modern women’s movement are the actions and words of a small but persistent cohort of women, particularly in England, in the nineteenth century. This collection of essays is not intended as a précis of that movement, nor is it gender history; rather it is an attempt to add to the growing body of literature uncovering and celebrating the achievements of women in the past. This historical duty should not be taken lightly. Valiulis and O’Dowd make the point that ‘the work of discovery – of digging women out of obscurity – goes on’.2 The old adage has it that history is written by the victors and, in the gender wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that history was written by and about men. It was not until the 1970s that a widespread body of feminist literature began to appear that reflected the varied concerns, but generally unified aims, of the women’s liberation movement. It is noteworthy that early titles focused on that sense of coming into the light (or being dug out of the dark), titles such as Hidden from History and Becoming Visible.3 These books were concerned with understanding the place of women in history, with knowing their place and helping us to know it.

Undoubtedly, women’s history is the most significant new field in historical studies in the last four decades. Its appearance and gradual refinement has alerted historians to similar areas of neglect and encouraged them to look to the peripheries, where rich seams of possibility exist in bringing the mute and invisible into the light. This has led to a reimagining of methodologies and, in particular, the use of oral history to capture lived experience and memory. In doing this, women’s history has not only invigorated historical studies but added significantly to the way we ‘do’ history. In Ireland, philosophical debates regarding theory and its impact on method have tended to remain within the academic community and have not permeated mainstream studies, but this is not unusual and, in time, textual analysis, gender theory, poststructuralism and cultural and economic history will possibly impact upon the narrative in more ways than are now evident. For now, Irish historians are busy ‘digging’ women out from our history, and perhaps when the record is crowded we can begin to allow more theoretical considerations to slightly occlude its vividness. Indeed, the process has already begun. As Valiulis and O’Dowd point out, ‘we have now entered a different phase in women’s history’, evolving from the ‘emphasis on great women’ to a model where the ‘broad historical outlines remain the same except women’s participation is noted’.4 But they correctly note that it is when ‘we move beyond that stage that the truly revolutionary potential of women’s history is revealed – the potential to challenge what we think is historically important, what we consider the defining moments in history’.5

In the nineteenth century, women become involved in great battles. In Ireland, as in England, they campaigned for equal access to education – a liberty that informs all others. They have fought for equality in the workplace, politics, family life, the sporting arena and, perhaps most difficult of all, in the ways in which the notion of ‘woman’ or ‘female’ is understood in social, political, moral, public, private and economic settings. The extent to which these battles have been won or lost is not the subject of this book. Without question, those ‘petticoated, corseted and hatted gentlewomen’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would look with awe upon the gains made by women in the modern era. How disbelieving my students are when I read for them Mary Hayden’s diary entry for 20 March 1880, where she notes that, having spent the day at Trinity College Dublin taking examinations (women were, at this time, allowed sit examinations but not attend lectures or enrol as full-time students), she:

should like of all things to be a student at Trinity, it would be jolly having rooms to yourself and asking your friends to sprees and playing cricket and football … I’m sure that I wouldn’t study much … I should be very wild … I can not [sic] help thinking of it several times a day.6

But historical periods must first be measured against their own times and, in order to understand the work of the women considered here, we must take a brief look at the roles allowed and allocated to women in nineteenth-century Ireland – we must look at the ‘places’ they occupied and those they were banished from. This ‘place’ was not simply physical but professional and intellectual; private as well as public. Husbands, fathers, politicians and Church leaders knew the ‘place’ their mothers, wives, sisters or daughters should occupy. The disabilities they suffered are so familiar to us now they have almost lost their ability to shock. But the origins of emancipation are intellectual. The subject reflects on his/her position in relation to ‘other’ and, realising that their respective ‘places’ are very different, begins a process of moving from one to the other; slavery to freedom, disenfranchisement to enfranchisement, inequality to equality. The intellectual ‘place’ occupied by women in the nineteenth-century, before they could access or seize a political or professional ‘place’ is crucial in understanding the transformation of women’s lives in that period. It is all the more pertinent when we consider that, for most of that century, their participation in secondary and university education was deemed unnecessary, if not a threat to the social order.7 Denied education, women were excluded from those ‘places’ open to their fathers, brothers and husbands: law, medicine, business, parliament, academia, the church. Their contribution was limited to philanthropic ventures deemed appropriate to middle-class females; their ‘place’ was restricted in the same way their dress was.8 Disenfranchised, all women, regardless of class, operated in a ‘place’ outside the walls of parliament and in struggling to gain access to, and a vote for members of, that institution, they were frequently the terrorised victims of other, darker ‘places’, such as Holloway Prison where British suffragettes were force-fed both orally and anally.9 While the first female Member of Parliament was the Irish nationalist Constance Markiewicz (a Sinn Féin candidate who did not take her seat), women were not allowed sit in the House of Lords as life peers until 1958. Markiewicz’s identification of the House of Commons as a foreign and politically oppressive ‘place’ is relevant not only in understanding the legal restrictions imposed on Irish women by Parliament before 1922, but also, as discussed by Mary Ward in this book, in understanding the evolution of nationalism in female circles in Ireland before the Easter Rising of 1916.

Women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries knew too well the ‘place’ allotted to them and recognised those ‘places’ they wished to inhabit. These were literary, political, intellectual, professional and social. Unquestionably women in Britain were instrumental in winning concessions for women in Ireland but women there were also active and vocal in more recognisably ‘feminist’ forums such as the Irish Catholic Women’s Suffrage Association established in 1915 by Mary Hayden and Mary Louisa Gwynn.

While towards the end of the century cultural and political differences became more manifest, the place occupied by women in Ireland was almost identical to that in Britain and indeed Europe and America. In these arenas, the fundamental differences concerned not gender but class. Joan Burstyn’s persuasive study of Victorian education and the ideal of womanhood in England is equally relevant when considering Ireland in the same period. The working class laboured in factories and sweatshops while middle-class women remained at home, consuming the products they generated. Leisured women were ‘symbols of the economic success of their male relatives’.10 With the evolution of the middle class, women were prized as sympathisers and comfort-givers. The man’s place was the harsh world of business and trade, the physical world of earning and doing. The woman’s place was the home, and in contrast to, but complementing, the male world of ‘doing’, she came to represent the passive but morally superior listener and advisor. Her place was receptive, inactive, spiritual and dependent. She became the mistress of the home, the Victorian ‘angel of the hearth’. She was, in the words of John Burgon, professor of divinity at Oxford, ‘the great solace of Man’s life, his chiefest [sic] earthly joy’, whose ‘strength [lay] in her essential weakness’.11 This ‘weakness’, understood as moral strength, could only be preserved by remaining removed from the contingencies of the cut-and-thrust of living, and so unworldliness became a prerequisite of moral superiority, almost of a deeper knowledge of the human condition. By remaining uncontaminated by modern living, women could operate in a ‘place’, a sphere, where they intuited more the profound meanings of existence, and stored them so that their husbands could be rehabilitated and refreshed when worn down by the harshness of the world, and they passed these on to their (female) children in the shape of womanly virtues. It was not just, therefore, that political or economic factors militated against middle-class women engaging more fully in their local or national community; rather, they were enshrined, as if in amber, in a dense casing of theological, social and gender-based credos which took absolutely for granted that their role was preordained, defined in relation to men, and that they were in fact superior to men in virtue. This was a silken trap, as it forced early feminists to dispute the place accorded them which society believed was protective, appreciated, fitting, noble, cosseted, financially secure and removed from the brutality of physical work. It is not surprising that working-class women felt little sense of sisterhood, or that early Marxists pointed to class rather than sex as the basis of oppression. Indeed, the case might also be made that the pioneers of education for girls (who rightly won laurels for their efforts) neglected to investigate the social constructs of late nineteenth-century Ireland which allowed the vast cohort of lower middle- and working-class girls to enter shop work, service, factories and so on, with no prospect of securing entry into the select, elite girls’ schools.

Newly acquired middle-class status, particularly among urban Catholics in nineteenth-century Ireland, was in most ways identical to that which characterised the same phenomenon in England. The much maligned ‘Castle Catholics’ and those a few rungs down the social ladder aspired to the financial security offered by the growing wealth of the mercantile class, while also adapting to social developments. For middle-class families, perhaps the most important of these was the development of intermediate education for girls, dealt with in Chapter 8 of this volume. Prior to the evolution of limited employment opportunities for middle-class women in the late nineteenth century, women relied upon fathers, brothers or husbands for financial security. Work indicated modest means and therefore undermined middle-class status, rendering women less attractive to prospective suitors. The frustration of those who saw the possibilities beyond this state of affairs can only be imagined, and historians must hope that diaries and journals lie undiscovered in attics and basements – perhaps those of our ‘petticoated, corseted and hatted’ ancestors.

For the middle-class girl, no occupation or undertaking must jeopardise her chances of marriage, which meant not only financial security for her but the removal of a burden from her family. Learning and the world of the intellect were deemed to militate against the cultivation of submissiveness and befuddle the much-cherished moral intuition attributed to women, who required training rather than education. They needed to learn to manage the household, and Latin and mathematics were of no use in such a venture. In 1848 Punch characterised the ‘model daughter’ as ‘clever and adept in preparing gruel, white-wine whey, tapioca, chicken broth, beef-tea, and the thousand little household delicacies of the sick room … She knows nothing of … “Woman’s Mission”.’12 In Ireland things were little different. As late as 1878 – the year in which the Intermediate system was established – The Irish Times pronounced that ‘Home is the sphere of a woman … and self-sacrificing love her only legitimate heroism.’13 Restriction characterised all places which women might occupy. Even their garments formed a place of confinement. Tightened waists, heavy fabrics and cumbersome and plentiful underclothing prevented all but the most socially desired feminine movements. Vigorous physical activity was frowned upon. Ladies who took to cycling in Dublin in the 1880s were subjected to verbal abuse. A risqué and unladylike activity, it provided women with the opportunity to move about the urban landscape as they pleased and was physically and socially emancipatory. In short, it allowed them expand the ‘place’ they might occupy.14

With the growth of the middle class toward the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of acceptable forms of employment for girls began to change. The social dynamic was altered by, but also reflected in, the inclusion of girls under the terms of the Intermediate Education Act (1878), although, initially, they had been excluded.15 While schools were eager to grasp the new opportunity, they were also concerned that Intermediate (secondary) education might unsex girls. Their concerns sometimes reveal a hesitancy; on the one hand eager for their girls to succeed yet nervous lest too much education make them unmarriageable, unemployable and unfeminine – a little learning might truly be a dangerous thing! Indeed, the ability of girls to withstand the new examination process ushered in under the Intermediate system was causing concern as late as 1899, when Alice Oldham, honorary secretary of the Central Association of Irish Schoolmistresses, submitted before the Palles Commission that ‘[i]n the Dublin schools there appears to be an increasing dislike among the most cultured parents to send their girls in for the Intermediate, owing to the high pressure, and to the fear that the girls will injure their health by over-study.’16 The ambiguity surrounding these issues becomes evident when we consider this submission to the same commission by Margaret Byers, principal of Victoria College, Belfast: ‘The examinations have revolutionised girls’ education in Ireland. The results fees enable head mistresses to increase the school staff … accommodation and general efficiency and to offer salaries that secure high-class teachers.’ She also reported that ‘pupils of Victoria College have been in the foremost ranks at Newnham and Girton, Edinburgh and Glasgow.’17

Perhaps the tensions are best captured by the submission of Henrietta White, principal of Alexandra College, Dublin, who, arguing against a separate course of study for boys and girls for the Intermediate examination, urged that:

girls go in [to the Intermediate examinations], as in the Royal University, on equal terms with the boys … as there is an increasing idea that girls should be educated to be independent … and get an education to fit them for the world. In saying this, [she had] not mainly in her mind the professional women, but the mother of sons, for in order to be able to train them properly, a woman’s faculties should be developed and cultivated.18

The appeal relating to the ‘mother of sons’ is typical of early feminists, who had to be constantly sensitive to the accusation that freedoms would unshackle women from their ‘natural’ duties. White, an early and strident advocate of educational opportunities for women and principal of a school that has championed them, clearly understood the risk.

But school was only one ‘place’, although, undoubtedly, a prerequisite to occupying others. Indeed it was the widening of access that allowed women such as Maud Clarke and Helen Waddell to develop their fledgling interest in science; twentieth-century beneficiaries of those ‘petticoated’ and ‘corseted’ forerunners (see chapter 2). ‘Place’ could be internal, intellectual and private, a space where women, such as Mary Hayden could contemplate the prohibited possibilities of a room of one’s own at Trinity College. It was a private topography of imagination and the physical landscape traversed by women such as those considered by Kathryn Laing in her essay on female Irish writers. For others it was a combination of intellectual engagement and alien place as witnessed by those women who attended Cambridge University in the nineteent century and discussed by Susan Parkes (chapter 5). Amongst these were the Irish Dr Sophie Bryant, a key figure in the establishment of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and the less well-known Conan sisters whose high-spirited dislike of ‘Cambridge butter’ introduced a note of fun into the busy early days at the first home of Hughes Hall in Merton Street.19 For women of this period the ‘place’ that brought personal fulfilment, by which they were defined and found the perfect means of contributing to humanity was deemed, by all levels of society, to be marriage. Laws emanating from Westminster meant that, in both Ireland and England, upon marriage, a women became the property of her husband, a position Mary Wollstonecraft described as ‘legal prostitution’. Upon marriage a woman’s property, including any income she earned, passed into the possession of her husband. Nineteenth-century marriage stripped a woman of almost all legal entitlement; custody of children in the case of separation was customarily decided in favour of the father, while the burden of proof in divorce cases lay almost entirely upon the female party. Women such as Caroline Norton in England or Lady Emily Cecil in Ireland challenged the ‘place’ accorded them within marriage, a ‘place’ that allowed husbands to behave recklessly, immorally and violently with impunity. In doing so they challenged the sacred reverence in which the institution of marriage was held and exposed the hypocrisy and misogyny that informed the contract in the nineteenth-century. Unravelling aspects of, or reconstructing, by forcing changes in law, these ‘places’ meant that women began to occupy new ‘places’ – classrooms, hospital wards, observatories, laboratories, parliament. Later still to occupy the ‘flapper’ dress, unrestricted and stridently and sympathetically female – as much a statement of intent as the safety-pin of a much later Punk generation. While this volume does not discuss this extraordinary period, the essays of both Jennifer Fitzgerald and Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh’s reveal how the achievements of the nineteenth-century provided, at least, a solid foundation for those that followed in the twentieth.

Because we have insisted that the intellectual life of women in nineteenth-century Ireland was complex and potent we wish to conclude by outlining, however briefly, the extent to which intellectual disparity was held to exist between the sexes.20 This aspect of history is easily overlooked, but the frustrations and achievements of women in this period cannot be understood or appreciated outside this context. The literature pertaining to intellectual inferiority is too vast to consider here, but a few examples may suffice to demonstrate the ingrained nature of ‘scientific’ thought and social assumption. The artistic, economic and political world had been created by men, not, apparently, because of socio-economic constructs but because men were superior in these areas – men succeeded because they were men, not because they had been afforded limitless opportunities. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart and Brunel had no female counterparts; hence, men were superior. These assumptions were not limited to the Irish. Writing in the Christian Observer in 1865, Oxoniensis [pseud.] suggested that ‘the reasoning powers’ of men were ‘more perfect’ than in women. No woman had succeeded in drawing an Othello or Faust because ‘it was impossible for her ever completely to know or to realize the tempest of passions which sway’ such characters.21 Again, in The Lancet (1868) a contributor notes that ‘to apply the same systems of education and training to both sexes alike … would be to act in defiance of natural laws, and to diminish the usefulness and lessen the moral and spiritual influences which women unquestionably exert’.22 Others argued that if men and women were, in fact, equal, a more even distribution of power would have been found among primitive societies, whereas Victorian anthropologists had not discovered such communities. Craniometry was also employed to scientifically prove the intellectual inferiority of women, leading R.S. Charnock, president of the London Anthropological Society, to declare in 1874 that:

the difference between the sexes as regards the cranial cavity increases with the development of the race, so that the male European excels more the female than does the negro the negress; and hence, with the progress of civilization, the men are in advance of the women, so that the inequality of the sexes increases with civilization.23

Indeed, it was argued that because men had expended so much energy on developing the modern world and protecting women from its vagaries, they had inevitably developed a more sophisticated and responsive intellect. In effect, man had become superior to woman in order that she might be safe within her subjugation.

These, then, are some of the contexts within which the women and schoolgirls considered in this volume existed and operated. With the exception of Maude Clarke and Helen Waddell (see Chapter 2), the work they undertook and the courses they pursued belong mostly to the nineteenth century. Without them, we might well have never had a Clarke and Waddell or, indeed, the ‘petticoated, corseted and hatted gentlewomen of a lifetime ago’.

I wish to convey my deepest thanks to those who have so kindly contributed to this volume and hope that it might inspire others to seek out ‘hatted gentlewomen’, or perhaps to become those of this generation!

1

‘Starry Eyed’: Women in Science in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

CLARA CULLEN

Introduction

A recently published book, How Irish Scientists Changed the World, covering three centuries, includes essays on just two Irish women: the astronomer Annie S.D. Maunder (1868–1947) and astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943).1 This is not unusual. In the 2003 publication Physicists of Ireland, covering four centuries, thirty-two men are included but not one woman (although the twentieth-century physicist Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–71) is given a mention in the introduction).2 A collection about Irish mathematicians from 1560 to 1966 has sixteen essays on various people, none of them women.3 An earlier compilation on Irish chemists lists sixty-three scientists – all men.4 Indeed, compilations on Irish scientists in general are sparse in their mention of women who played a part in the development of science or scientific institutions in Ireland. Mollan’s recent two-volume work on people with Irish connections born between the early seventeenth century and 1916 who contributed to the development of the chemical and physical sciences contains 118 essays, five of them on Irish women.5 An earlier compilation of biographies of Irish scientists, Irish Innovators in Science and Technology, and its predecessors6 include eleven women among the 154 ‘pen-portraits of men and women involved in Irish science and technology’.7 Amongst them are half a dozen nineteenth-century ladies – entomologist Mary Ball (1812–98) and her sister Anne (1808–72), Mary Parsons, Countess of Rosse, photographer and philanthropist (1813–85), artist and naturalist Mary Ward (1827–69), astronomer Agnes Mary Clerke (1842–1907), lichenologist Matilda Knowles (1864–1933) and Margaret Lindsay Huggins (1848–1915), a pioneering astrophysicist. Susan McKenna-Lawlor, in her 1998 book on female scientists in Ireland, treats the lives and scientific achievements of these same ladies.8 They also figure in the Women in Technology and Science (WITS) publication, Stars, Shells and Bluebells, which records the life and work of sixteen female scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9 A companion WITS publication, Lab Coats and Lace,10 adds to the study of pioneering Irish women who sought to acquire a scientific education and a career in the sciences or technology and includes studies of veterinarian Aileen Cust (1868–1937), Alice Perry (1885–1969) – the first woman to graduate in engineering in Britain or Ireland, the aviator Lilian Bland (1878–1971), the astronomers Annie Maunder (1868–1947) and Alice Everett (1865–1949), the geologist Sydney Mary Thompson (1852–1923), Mary Andrews (1852–1914) and the Boole sisters – the mathematician Alicia Boole Stott (1860–1940) and Lucy Boole (1862–1905), believed to be the first female professor of chemistry in Britain. Four of these women – Agnes Clerke, Margaret Lindsay Huggins, Alice Boole Stott and Annie Maunder – were among the ten women who had achieved a high reputation in different scientific fields and who were shortlisted in a competition in summer 2013 to decide on Ireland’s greatest female inventor.11

As individuals, most of these nineteenth-century women had to acquire scientific knowledge and expertise without formal training, but all of these women came from aristocratic or professional backgrounds; they were in ‘a materially privileged position and had the opportunity to “see” through the activities of their male friends and relatives how professional scientific life was lived’.12 Their material contributions to science were, for most part, published under pseudonyms,13 or as illustrators and contributors to the publications of their male friends and colleagues, or in partnership with their husbands. For example, Ellen Hutchins illustrated books and contributed records and specimens to others but did not publish herself, allowing her male colleagues and fellow collectors to publish her findings instead.14 These women’s names recur in any study of nineteenth-century science and one would be forgiven for believing that they were extraordinary in their interest in scientific subjects.

Historical Context

However, women’s interest in science was not a new phenomenon in nineteenth-century Ireland. Although women had benefited from the inclusion of girls in the terms of the Intermediate Education Act in 187815 and from 1879 could present themselves for the degree examinations of the new Royal University of Ireland (RUI), they were excluded from formal scientific academic education in Ireland until the 1880s.16 It was 1883 when the president of Queen’s College, Belfast, J. Leslie Porter, reported that ‘the Council of the College, at the commencement of the Session, resolved to admit women to the Arts Classes … This is the first instance in which women have been admitted as Students to a University College in Ireland; and the result has been in all respects most satisfactory.’17 Before that, women with an interest in scientific subjects attended lectures organised by several Irish scientific and learned institutions – attendance being available to those who, or whose families, were members of these societies. From early in the nineteenth century the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) had opened its scientific lectures to all and in 1815 William Higgins’s courses of lectures on chemistry were ‘so successful that stringent “ticket only” regulations were enforced for admission to the four hundred places, some of which were appropriated for ladies only’.18 Dublin’s Zoological Society from its foundation in 1830 admitted women as full members, and they, together with the female relatives of other members, attended the regular scientific papers presented at the society. When the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) met in Dublin in August 1857, ‘the total number of tickets issued to Members and Associates was 2,005, of which fifteen were new Life Members, 276 Annual members, 900 Associates and 569 Ladies’.19 Trinity College Dublin admitted the public to some lectures; by 1868 many of the lectures were open to the public and ‘ladies may attend all of them which are suitable for ladies, but […] no one can receive a certificate of instruction unless he be a student in arts of the college’.20

For the less well-connected, local Mechanics’ Institutions and scientific societies, established throughout the country from the 1820s, offered the opportunity for self-help and improvement to many ordinary men and women who could afford the institutes’ fees. Some of these institutions were unashamedly middle-class in tone but there were many others whose attention was directed at improving the moral and intellectual well-being of the working classes. Dublin Mechanics’ Institution, for example, was established in 1824 with the stated aim of promoting the scientific education of artisans. The annual ten-shilling subscription entitled the members to attend lectures on various subjects, including the sciences, and to use and borrow from the institute’s library. In 1839 females were admitted and by 1850, the Institution’s Reading Room had ‘crowded assemblages of readers that frequent it every evening, as well as a large attendance during the day’.21 The growing popular interest in science was encouraged by regular exhibitions of Irish industry, organised by the RDS from 1834, especially the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1853, organised by the society at its headquarters on Leinster Lawn in Dublin and visited by over a million people.22 This popular interest was encouraged by Irish scientists such as Robert John Kane, who saw scientific and industrial education as the best way of improving the economy of Ireland and the living standards of its people.

Interest in science was not confined to Dublin. In Belfast, for example, Belfast Academy and Belfast Academical Institution opened their meetings to women, and by 1836 a good many girls attended classes at the Belfast Academy and ‘many adults, both ladies and gentlemen, attended the Academy Natural History Society meetings’.23 In Cork, scientific interest supported the Royal Cork Institution (founded in 1813) and in 1835 Denis Bullen, the professor of chemistry at the institution, could assure a government commission that ‘The ladies of Cork have a great taste for scientific reading.’24

By the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland, therefore, women were a familiar part of the audience at scientific lectures. For many of these ladies, attendance may have been because of a recognition of ‘the importance of maintaining the “benificent activities” of science by their patronage’25 and they may have been aware of the influence this gave them over their husbands and sons, and the good example that they might set by their interest in science and the support of science. However, for others, their support and attendance was due to personal interest, a desire to learn and, in some cases, the opportunity these lectures offered to improve their employment prospects.

This study will focus not on those women who attended scientific lectures out of social interest, but will instead look at the activities and interests of numbers of other women who pursued scientific knowledge, who were not ‘high profile’ and whose activities have been barely noted or recognised. It will show that the very active scientific environment in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland was not exclusively male and that although, as in England, a large number of ladies attended lectures and demonstrations on popular science, there were also a significant number who participated in formal courses of lectures on scientific subjects. Their studies were facilitated by two institutions in Dublin: the Museum of Irish Industry and its successor, the Royal College of Science for Ireland (RCScI), which from 1854 until 1926 offered courses of lectures which were equally available to men and women.26

The Government School of Science at the Museum of Irish Industry

In the 1850s the management of the provision of scientific education in Ireland changed. The newly established Department of Science and Art (DSA) in London determined that the teaching of science outside the universities should be put on a formal basis. In 1854 a Government School of Science was established at the recently opened Museum of Irish Industry (MII) in St Stephen’s Green, with the intention that this new school would confirm that institution’s role as a provider of industrial education.27 The museum building, with exhibitions ‘embracing the general range of the industrial arts’, contained ‘a series of proper museum galleries, a large lecture theatre and laboratories’.28 When it opened to the public in 1853, the Museum of Irish Industry contained not only galleries holding a wide range of industrial exhibits and a lecture theatre, but offices, a library, the Geological Survey for Ireland and ‘a special chemical department, with laboratories, for carrying out such scientific researches as might be required for the public services, and also for giving instruction in practical and analytical chemistry’.29

The courses at the School of Science at the MII were intended for a specific constituency, Ireland’s ‘artisans and the industrial classes’,30 and it was to be ‘a centre and a school of Instruction and Research in the Industrial Arts – a School of Industry for the country’.31 The director of the museum and of the new School of Science was Sir Robert John Kane (1809–90). Kane was a Dubliner, second son of a prosperous manufacturer, and a Catholic.32 He was by training and education a scientist, internationally recognised by contemporaries as one of the best scientific minds of his day. By the 1840s his interests had moved on from pure science to its industrial applications and to ‘promoting … industrial knowledge’ and scientific education.33 Robert Kane believed that the new institution had been ‘founded … for the benefit of the people’ and was determined that it would be a place where ‘the rivalries of creeds and parties [would] find no admission’.34 He carried his commitment to equality of access to scientific education further when he announced that in ‘the formation of the classes of the present institution they recognised no distinction of sex’.35 Kane’s commitment was supported by his colleagues, described in a contemporary newspaper as ‘a first-rate staff of professors … Jukes whose scientific and literary reputation requires no comment … [and] Professor Sullivan, the talented pupil of Liebig’.36

To deliver these commitments, the School of Science offered courses of popular lectures on scientific subjects during the day, with corresponding courses delivered in the evening for the benefit of those whose business prevented them from attending during the day.37 These ‘popular’ lectures were free and were attended by audiences of hundreds, both men and women. Apart from these popular courses, the professors and lecturers were responsible for more advanced courses in botany, chemistry, physics, geology and practical laboratory work, for which fees were charged. The fee was to encourage serious students and ‘in order to test the reality of the wish to learn on the part of those attending’.38 Those who attended these advanced lectures were expected to have at least an elementary knowledge of the subject, although W.K. Sullivan on occasion complained about the poor arithmetic of the students in his chemistry classes. From the beginning the lectures went beyond classroom teaching and the students were required to apply their acquired knowledge in practical experiments in the school’s laboratories. The courses were detailed and over the years the core scientific subjects expanded to include other subjects such as zoology, organic and inorganic chemistry and crystallography. These systematic courses of scientific lectures might be considered as the first fully organised arrangement, outside academia, to facilitate the access of ordinary people to popular scientific education. Examinations were held at the close of each session. The majority of the students who presented themselves for the museum’s examinations were those for whom a certificate of proficiency in one of the industrial sciences might assist their future career, and successful students had the opportunity to recoup their fees by winning one of the monetary prizes awarded to the most successful students.

Very few records of the School of Science at the MII and its students have survived and the original student registers no longer exist. The printed annual reports of the MII to its paymaster in London, the Department of Science and Art (DSA), give only the numbers of students attending the various courses and the names of those who excelled in the examinations. These lists of prize winners, together with the reports of the annual presentation of prizes published in Irish newspapers from 1855 to 1867, remain the only constant, albeit incomplete, source of information regarding those students whose attendance at the museum’s educational courses was more than passing or casual.39 It is from these reports that we know of the numbers and some of the names of the women who attended the courses of lectures in the School of Science. Out of the 330 students who were successful in the examinations at the Museum of Irish Industry and for whom there are records, at least forty female students are listed as having been awarded prizes or certificates. We have no idea what percentage of the student body were women – but, given the proportion of women among the prize winners, we can assume they attended in significant numbers.

At the school’s first prize giving, on 28 May 1856, Kane congratulated these women students as follows:

[h]itherto it had been the practice not to include the female portion of the community in their educational arrangements, and, generally speaking, the whole scheme of education had been to supply scientific education to gentlemen only; but in the formation of the classes of the present institution they recognised no distinction of sex. Consequently, several ladies had been students, and in the competition for prizes distinguished themselves in a high degree … The commencement that had been made that session in developing female talent in the pursuits of industry could not but be productive of the most beneficial results.40

Fifteen students registered for the first course in natural history; in examination in May 1856 there were four women among the ten successful students and of these ‘Miss Halgena Hare’s answering was remarkable for its excellence, general correctness, and number of answers’.41 Her sister, Miss T.S.A. Hare, was awarded a certificate in the same examination and both women gave their address as 76 St Stephen’s Green, where Mathias Hare, LLD was the proprietor of Dublin High School.42 Halgena continued her scientific studies, being awarded prizes in geology, chemistry and physical science in 1857 and 1858 as well as first place in the overall ‘general’ examination in 1858.43 She was described by Robert Kane at the 1858 prize giving as ‘the most distinguished student of the present session’, and the Lord Lieutenant, when presenting Halgena with her prizes, expressed his ‘gratification at being enabled to confer the most distinguished honour on a lady, and his admiration of the gallantry of the gentlemen students in permitting themselves to be beaten by the ladies’.44 Frances Annie Hare joined her sisters as a student at the School of Science in 1857, winning prizes in zoology and botany, whilst also being awarded prizes at the RDS School of Design. The educational efforts and scholastic attainments of the three Hare ladies may have been intended to contribute to the family enterprise, the Dublin High School, but by 1862 the school had been closed.

Amongst the other ladies who had been successful students in 1856 were Frances Elizabeth Armstrong and Katherine H. Egan, both of whom were awarded prizes or certificates in various subjects. Frances Elizabeth Armstrong was almost certainly the daughter of Francis Thomas Armstrong, builder, and both lived at the same address at 55 Baggot Street, Dublin.45 She was awarded prizes and certificates in geology and physical science in 1856 and 1857 and may have been pursuing her studies for her own interests or in preparation for an educational career. She was probably one of the ‘young ladies’ described by Robert Kane in 1859 who ‘are themselves more or less connected with education, and will go forth to diffuse through society, by the most powerful and favourable influence, sound scientific truth’.46 These first prize winners are typical of the women who followed them as students at the Government School of Science at the MII. The majority were Irish and middle-class and, although the institution’s records do not include the religious affiliation of the individual students (as it was open to all regardless of creed), the surviving records indicate a range of religious backgrounds – Catholic, Quaker, Methodist, Presbyterian and Church of Ireland.

From 1854 to 1867, every year, without exception, saw the names of female students appearing in the lists of prize winners, and almost every year they also figured in the lists of students awarded medals by the Department of Science and Art. Three Harman sisters, Hester, Harriet and Henrietta, were notable among the prize winners at the School of Science and at the RDS School of Design at the end of the decade. Between 1858 and 1860, Harriet was awarded prizes in zoology, practical zoology and botany and a certificate in geology, and Hester was a prize winner in zoology, practical zoology and botany. During these years they also participated in classes at the School of Design at the RDS, along with Henrietta, who was appointed as a pupil teacher at the RDS in 1858, causing the Lord Lieutenant to comment that he was glad to observe that in this, as ‘in the twin institution in Stephen’s Green, the young ladies have at least borne their part in obtaining the honours’.47 All of the Harman sisters made good use of their qualifications and knowledge, and were employed as required at the Museum of Irish Industry, drawing diagrams to illustrate lectures during 1858 and 1859 and possibly later, and making quite a good living.48 They may also have been teachers, although this is impossible to confirm. In 1901 ‘Harriette’ and ‘Esther’ Harman were living in London, aged 65 and 73 respectively, and maintaining themselves by ‘drawing and archaeological work’, working from home.49

Other students’ addresses were registered to solicitors, to private schools, to widows, to merchants, farmers and bank managers. Many of them were teachers, either in the model and national schools or in private ‘seminaries’. Robert Kane and his colleagues continually emphasised the educational role of many of the female students, and the majority of those who attended courses at the MII were intent on a career in the field of education. In 1862, for example, Kane told the Treasury Inquiry that ‘Practically all the ladies who attend the day systematic courses are either governesses or persons preparing to be governesses. They receive here an instruction which they would get nowhere else, and similar to that which is given in the Ladies’ College [Queen’s College, London, founded in 1848] in London.’50 Miss Adelina Rorke, who took first prize in botany in 1865, was one of those who derived her income from education. Thom’s Directory for 1864 noted John Rorke, ‘teacher of English and Science’, and Miss Rorke’s ‘ladies academy’, both at 4 Pembroke Place in 1864 and at 7 Pembroke Road in 1866, where the academy was still situated in 1872.51 Certainly some the women were of the group described by Anne O’Connor as ‘young women of the middle classes, living in reduced circumstances’, who were forced to earn their living.52

Although many of the students were in, or intending to join, the teaching profession, there were others who probably attended courses at the School of Science from personal interest – students like Miss Eleanor Cope, ‘periodical dealer’ of 34 Castle Street, who was awarded certificates in zoology and geology in 1860 and 1861 respectively. There were some families who may have attended the courses at the MII in order to expand their scientific knowledge, like John F. Murray, Mrs J.F. Murray and Hannah Murray, who between 1859 and 1860 were awarded certificates in physical science, botany and geology.

Apart from the Hares, the Harmans and the Coneys, there were other family groups (probably sisters) registered as students at the museum. There were Clara A. and Gretta D. Stritch, both of whom were awarded prizes in botany and medals at the museum examinations between 1865 and 1867, and Mary L. and Gertrude Hayes, prize winners in botany in 1867. Others are typified by Jane Anne [Jeannie] Leeper, the daughter of the secretary of the Church Education Society and sister of Alexander Leeper, the first warden of Trinity College, University of Melbourne, who won prizes in botany (1863) and geology (1864).53 Jeannie Leeper, who, like her mother before her, greatly resented that, as a woman, she was barred from higher education, attended these courses as her only option in furthering her education. By 1876 Jeannie had taken over as housekeeper for her family in Dublin and had become involved in the movement for women’s rights. She maintained her interest in science and education, heard Huxley’s address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science when it met in Dublin in 1878 and, with her sisters, attended the ‘strange sight of nine ladies in caps and gowns receiving degrees’,54 although she believed that Trinity College Dublin should have taken the lead in admitting women to higher education in Ireland. Jane Anne Leeper typified the corpus of female students who a few years later benefited from the establishment of Alexandra College and similar educational institutions. In 1921 her family described her as the ‘only member of the family here who had any brains; it was a pity she lived in the wrong generation’; they believed her to be ‘extraordinarily clever and if only she had been born in this generation, would have been really happy working for exams and honours’.55

Robert Kane was very proud of the achievements of these women. He took every opportunity of referring to them and to their achievements in official reports, in evidence given to various government committees, and at the annual distribution of prizes. In 1868, for example, in his evidence to the Commission on the Department of Science and Art in Ireland, he described the audience at the science lectures as:

attended by large numbers of girls and ladies of the middle class, and thus they supplemented in a most valuable manner the ordinary elements of female education. I think that the system of public instruction of an elementary and popular character in Dublin has exercised, for the last couple of generations, a most valuable influence upon the training of female society in the middle classes.56

The Earl of Carlisle, who as Lord Lieutenant attended several of the distributions of prizes at the School of Science and who was a supporter of Kane’s ideas regarding technical education, also frequently referred to the successes of the female students. In 1859, he described the school as:

the serene temple of knowledge … the rivalries of creed and parties can find no admission here … no distinction of class, or creed, or opinion, can find admission, so likewise there is no monopoly of sex. The laurels that are to be gathered here are twined around fair as well as around manly brows.57

Two years later, in 1861, he remarked that ‘in every other quarter where we hear of classes and competitive examinations, the actors in these operations are exclusively of the sterner sex, while here, without any departure from the rigid rule of impartiality, the lists are entered and the palm, as we have seen, frequently carried off by the gentler aspirants’.58

Carlisle and Robert Kane were justified in emphasising the examination successes of the female students. These women did not confine their studies to the ‘softer’ sciences and were very successful in the more technical subjects. Robert Kane seemed to have been particularly proud of this. He told the Treasury Inquiry in 1862 that the ladies:

[c]ompete with the best of the male pupils and carry off a great number of the prizes … their greater sensitivity and power of appreciating differences secure to them a proficiency in Zoology and Botany; but their success is not confined to those sciences. In Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and Geology, some of the highest prizes have been taken by ladies.59