This seminar, organised by Women’s Studies in UCC, will examine aspects of Irish women’s views and experiences of the war

Women’s Studies Seminar – Sat. 1st March, 2014

Kane GO1 at 10.00 a.m. (registration from 9.30 a.m.)

There is no attendance fee. All welcome.

Do contact Sandra McAvoy at sandra.mcavoy@ucc.ie to register that you are coming so we can sort teas and coffees.

In August 1914 Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington summed up the position of the women of Europe:

 ‘all alike in their voteless condition … their hands are clean; they have no responsibility for this war. Like us, they have to pay the price none the less to the uttermost farthing. They have to deliver up the sons they bore in agony to a bloody death in a quarrel of which they know not the why or wherefore, on the side of the particular ally their Government has chosen for the moment: they have to face starvation at home for themselves and their children … many of them are exposed with their helpless daughters to the lust and outrage of a war maddened soldiery.’ (Irish Citizen, Aug 15, 1914)

We are in the early stages of raising awareness of the complex activities, views and experiences of Irish women during the First World War.

Programme for 1st March:

10:00 Seminar opening and poetry reading by Eadaoin O'Donaghue:

Munition Wages by Madeline Ida Bedford

Hallow-e’en 1915 by Winifred M. Letts (1916)

10:15 – 11:25: Panel 1: Women and Forms of Work

Dr Mary Muldowney: ‘Unsuitable work for women’. Employment in munitions and railways during the First World War.

Dr John Borgonovo (UCC) Unionists, Nationalists, and Separation Women:  The Mobilisation of Cork Women, 1914-1918.

Dr Sandra McAvoy (UCC) Relief Work in a  War Zone: Cork Suffragist Susanne Day’s Experience.

11:25 – 11:30 short break

11:30 – 12:05 Keynote Speaker (Chair Maeve O’Riordan)

Dr Rosemary Cullen-Owens: 'WOMEN OF EUROPE, WHEN WILL YOUR CALL RING OUT?' Appeal by Louie Bennett in Jus Suffragii, 1 March 1915, (Journal of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance).

12:05 -12:20: Break

Teas and coffees will be served

12:20 – 1:10 Panel 2: Women and remembrance

Maeve O’Riordan (UCC): ‘I read the Times every day’: Lady Inchiquin’s First World War experience.

Clodagh Tait (Mary Immaculate College): Landscapes of loss: mourning and memory in an east Cork parish.

1:10 – 1:30 The Diary of Mary Martin

Rachel Murphy (UCC): We have started saying the rosary together for you every night’: A Mother’s Perspective on the First World War, based on The Diary of Mary Martin 1916, a Digital Project. (See: http://dh.tcd.ie/martindiary/ )

Close of event