Forgotten migrants: Irish women religious in England, 1930s-1960s

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

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Gendering inequalities: the case of Irish women

Paragraph ◽

10.3366/para.1993.16.1.5 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 5-22 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

SABINA SHARKEY

Keyword(s):

Irish Women

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Non-ordained

Fieldwork in Religion ◽

10.1558/firn.32964 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 11 (2) ◽

pp. 137-156 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jeanine Kraybill

Keyword(s):

Social Policy ◽

Women Religious ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Social Issues ◽

Female Leadership ◽

Religious Leaders ◽

Religious Congregations ◽

Effect Change ◽

Policy Goals ◽

Institutional Church

The Catholic Church, constructed on an all-male clerical model, is a hierarchical and gendered institution, creating barriers to female leadership. In interviewing members of the clergy and women religious of the faith, this article examines how female non-ordained and male clerical religious leaders engage and influence social policy. It specifically addresses how women religious maneuver around the institutional constraints of the Church, in order to take action on social issues and effect change. In adding to the scholarship on this topic, I argue that part of the strategy of women religious in navigating barriers of the institutional Church is not only knowing when to act outside of the formal hierarchy, but realizing when it is in the benefit of their social policy objectives to collaborate with it. This maneuvering may not always safeguard women religious from institutional scrutiny, as seen by the 2012 Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, but instead captures the tension between female religious and the clergy. It also highlights how situations of institutional scrutiny can have positive implications for female religious leaders, their policy goals and congregations. Finally, this examination shows how even when women are appointed to leadership posts within the institutional Church, they can face limitations of acceptance and other constraints that are different from their female religious counterparts working within their own respective religious congregations or outside organizations.

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