Women and Liberation

Mr. James Connolly… is the soundest and most thorough-going feminist among all the Irish labour men…He has done more, by speech and writing, than any other man to bring about that strong feeling of sympathy for the suffragist cause which now exists among the Irish Labour Party. – Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, 1913

As we have already shown in our previous pamphlet, Connolly masterfully showed the historical link between the national and social question in Ireland. He proved in Ireland the struggle for freedom, independence and democracy is ultimately the struggle for emancipation of the working masses. To this Connolly also added the emancipation of women from male dominance and supremacy. Just as one class rules another so too does one gender rule the other.

Connolly, largely influenced by Friederick Engels, explains the historical material facts behind female oppression and dependence and traces this to the ‘law of primogeniture’ which forcibly ruled women out from inheritance making them a subject gender. He showed how this, just like social and national exploitation, was brought in by outside rule and violence into Ireland. The Irish clan system, like many other parts of the world, had a gender division of labour however through the structures of the clan it was largely non-exploitative as the produce of labour produced no surplus. This was all brought to an end with technological advancement and the victory of private over public property. Connolly outlines this best in his usual biting manor in his chapter on women contained in the book ‘The Reconquest of Ireland’, of which we reproduce much of in this pamphlet.

On top of the historical causes, Connolly correctly shows how the gender relationship, like the national, is subject ultimately to the class question. That is, women can not just be seen as a united social group as they are very much divided upon class lines. The emancipation of working class women is very different to that of bourgeois women. The position of the wife of a boss or feudal lord is entirely different to that of working class women. As with everything Connolly did he was concerned with the lives of ordinary people, the vast majority of us.

Working women can be seen to toil under worse conditions than working men. They get paid less, one-fifth less today for the equivalent job done by a man, and they generally work in the less cared for professions such as childcare or nursing. Childcare suffers from an amazing lack of regulation and legislation given the social importance of this industry. This is connected to the under representation of women in parliament and unions. Only 13% of Irish TD’s are women, while 27% of Cuban parliamentarians are women. This helps prove one of the main thesis of Connolly on both the social, national and gender question. You must fight to free yourself you will never be handed freedom on a plate by your oppressor. ‘None so fitted to break the chains as they who wear them…’

Women work what Connolly described as the ‘double-day’. They work their ordinary job but then come home and do most of the housework. They are the slave of the slave in capitalist society. That was certainly true in Connolly’s time and most social studies today still point to this being the case.

Connolly practiced what he preached, organising women into unions across Belfast, Dublin, Liverpool and New York, wherever and whenever they asked. In fact he was sacked from his job as a life assurance salesman in Troy, USA, for spending all his time collecting money to support young female starchers who were striking for their right to union membership.

The Irish Citizen Army, ICA, was the only force active in 1916 that allowed and had women members and but for Larkin’s opposition women membership would have been permitted in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, ITGWU. The 1916 proclamation can and should be seen as a radical step forward for women’s rights and suffrage, which was mostly the work of Connolly. Connolly also adopted tactics used by the suffragette movement, like hunger strike, in his many battles.

On the practical side no one can question Connolly’s commitment to women organising themselves for their own emancipation. However on the theoretical side, briefly mentioned at the beginning, one major criticism can be made. This however is a reserved criticism in understanding that Connolly was very much a man conditioned and moulded by his times.

Connolly exposed the economic side of the women’s question but failed to carry this fully through to the social side. In his bitter argument with Daniel De Leon of the Socialist Labour Party of America, of which Connolly was a member at the time, Connolly relegated issues such as divorce, and one would presume abortion had it been an issue, out of the socialist program and into the realm of a private matter. In this Connolly failed to see the struggle for the right to divorce as part of the democratic struggle for women’s rights.

While Connolly did argue socialism would only solve the economic aspect of the question he didn’t seem to fully grasp the level of ideological and social control men have over women. And in today’s society this ideological and cultural control is even more important and even more evident, just watch any music video or advert.

The history of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe will show us that even after women are economically free and equal to men they will still need to fight and struggle to overcome social stereotypes and prejudices. Correcting the material exploitation is, however, the first side to overcoming the ideological aspect. The criticism in mind Connolly was still a militant social feminist and way ahead of his time in democratic thought and action.

Of what use to such suffererers can be the re-establishment of any form of Irish state if it does not embody the emancipation of womenhood.


James Connolly on ‘Women’s Liberation’

I personally reject every attempt, no matter by whom made, to identify Socialism with any theory of marriage or sexual relations.

We all know how insidiously writers like Bebel, Bax and others have striven to link Socialism with hostility to the monogamic marriage system, and how sedulously the idea has been spread that Socialists are bound in principal to have a solution for the Mormon question.
The Socialist, June 1904

[On a ‘typical Irish colleen’ in romantic nationalist literature] In all of those pursuits she was waited upon by a slave women, a different slave woman for each separate amusement; in all, there must have been at least a dozen different slave women waiting upon the one princess, and what appeared to my cold Socialistic mind as curious was that the writer wrote and treated of the princess as a typical ‘colleen’ of ancient Ireland, and utterly neglected to recognise in the slave women any right to be regarded as Irish types at all.

Yet when we remember that for every princess living the life of luxury and ease sketched by the Pilot writer there must have been at least a dozen other women attending her and a hundred other Irish women working in the fields attending cattle and weaving and spinning to feed and cloth and house and ornament her, it must be conceded that any one of these hundred useful Irish women had more right to be considered ‘typical Irish colleens’ than the useless drone whose life our authoress has reconstructed with such fidelity and care.

By all means tell us about the typical colleens of ancient Erin, shake up for us the dry bones of history and tell us about the wives and mothers and daughters of the producing classes of our native country, but do not ask us to believe that a princess was anything more than a type of the class to which she belonged – a predatory useless class – a class whose predatory proclivities hindered the free development of the nation and prepared the way for its subjection.

What a history that would be which would tell us the history of the real women of Ireland – the women of the people!
The Harp, September 1908

[Connolly quoting Marx] ‘The lifting up of women to be a mans helpmate and equal, not his plaything or his property.’ She has not yet attained to that elevation in fact , and the Socialists are the only ones who claim it for her in their programmes, whereas his Holiness the pope has recently denounced her for seeking the right to vote.
Labour, Nationality and Religion, 1910

[The Independent Labour Party of Ireland must make] complete political and social equality between the sexes one of the first planks in its platform.
Irish Citizen, June 1912

It will be observed by the thoughtful reader, that the development in Ireland of what is known as the women’s movement has synchronised with the appearance of women upon the industrial field, and that the acuteness and fierceness of the women’s war has kept even pace with the spread amongst educated women of a knowledge of the sordid and cruel nature of the lot of their suffering sisters of the wage-earning class.

In Ireland the women’s cause is felt by all Labour men and women as their cause; the Labour cause has no more earnest and whole-hearted supporters that the militant women. Rebellion, even in thought, produces a mental atmosphere of its own; the mental atmosphere the women’s rebellion produced, opened their eyes and trained their minds to an understanding of the effects upon the their sex of a social system in which the weakest must inevitably go to the wall, and when a further study of the capitalist system taught them that the term ‘the weakest’ means in practice the most scrupulous, the gentlest, the most humane, the most loving and compassionate, the most honourable, and the most sympathetic, then the militant women could not fail to see that capitalism penalised in human beings just those characteristics of which women supposed themselves to be the most complete embodiment of. Thus the spread of industrialism makes for the awakening of a social conscience, awakes in women a feeling of self-pity as the greatest sufferers under social and political injustice; the divine wrath aroused when that self-pity is met with sneer, and justice is denied, leads women to revolt, and revolt places women in comradeship and equality with all the finer souls whose life is given to warfare against established iniquities.

The daughters of the Irish peasantry have been the cheapest slaves in existence – slaves to their own family, who were, in turn, slaves to all social parasites of a landlord and gombeen-ridden community.

Never did the idea seem to enter the Irish peasant’s mind, or be taught by his religious teachers, that each generation should pay to its successors the debt it owes to its forerunners; that thus, by spending itself for the benefit of its children, the human race ensures the progressive development of all. The Irish peasant in too many cases, treated his daughter in much the same manner as he regarded a plough or a spade – as tools with which to work the farm. The whole mental outlook, the entire moral atmosphere of the countryside, enforced this point of view. In every chapel, church or meeting house the insistence was ever upon duties – duties to those in superior stations, duties to the church, duties to the parents. Never were the ears of the young polluted by any reference to ‘right’, and, growing up in this atmosphere the women accepted their position of social inferiority.

We believe, with that movement [Labour], that the serene performance of duty, combined with and inseparable from the fearless assertion of rights, unite to make the highest expression of the human soul.     

The militant women who, without abandoning their fidelity to duty, are yet teaching their sisters to assert their rights, are re-establishing a sane and perfect balance that makes more possible a well-ordered Irish nation.

The system of private capitalist property in Ireland, as in other countries, has given birth to the law of primogeniture under which the eldest son usurps the ownership of all property to the exclusion of the females of the family.

Driven out to work at the earliest possible age, she remains fettered to her wage-earning – a slave for life. Marriage does not mean for her a rest from outside labour, it usually means that, to the outside labour, she has added the duty of a double domestic toil. Throughout her life she remains a wage-earner; completing each day’s work, she becomes the slave of the domestic needs of her family; and when at night she drops wearied upon her bed, it is with the knowledge that at the earliest morn she must find her way again into the service of the capitalist, and at the end of that coming day’s service for him hasten homeward again for another round of domestic drudgery. So her whole life runs – a dreary pilgrimage from one drudgery to another; the coming of children but serving as milestones in her journey to signalise fresh increases to her burdens.

Of what use to such sufferers can be the re-establishment of any form of Irish State if it does not embody the emancipation of womanhood.

None so fitted to break their chains as those who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what is a fetter. In its march towards freedom, the working class of Ireland must cheer on the efforts of those women who, feeling on their souls and bodies the fetters of the ages, have arisen to strike them off, and cheer all the louder if in its hatred of thraldom and passion for freedom the women’s army forges ahead of the militant army of Labour.

But whosoever carries the outworks of the citadel of oppression, the working class alone can raise it to the ground.

The Reconquest of Ireland, 1914.