FUAIM Lecture - Dr Eileen Hogan & Dr Ruth Stanley - 13/03/25, Ó Riada Hall, 11:00am

1 Jan 2025

Happening On 13/03/2025

“'Dancing across the pages': Women and jazz in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in the 1920s-30s”

Abstract

Thinking about music and dance on the island of Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s brings to mind images of set-dancers and step-dancers with rigid upper bodies and dull clothing more readily than it conjures the iconic figure of the jazzing flapper. Nonetheless, her presence was prominent in music and dance scenes of that era. This presentation explores women’s participation – in various forms – in jazz music and culture in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland during this interesting historical period through a (re)examination of relevant archival sources. Locating these women in the archives requires, what Ní Ghríofa describes as, an ‘oblique reading’, ‘luring female lives back from male texts… [to] reveal the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink’ (2020: p. 76). In the process, we hope to restore women’s place in jazz histories and simultaneously, to contribute to a different perspective on the history of women’s experiences on the island of Ireland in the interwar years through the prism of jazz music and dance. 

Using gender as an analytical category and applying a feminist lens enables us to make visible women’s contribution to, influence on, and interest in jazz music and dance in new ways. In this lecture, we firstly contextualise gendered concerns about jazz as a moral threat in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. We also reflect on religious and political attempts to limit Irish and Northern Irish people’s – but especially women’s – enjoyment of jazz and explore how people conformed with, negotiated, or resisted this social control in different ways. Secondly, we counter the androcentrism of jazz historiography by highlighting the significance of the flapper or ‘Modern Girl’ as a conduit for the dissemination of jazz music and dance in the interwar years. This creates the necessary space for, thirdly, locating women in jazz music and dance post-partition, a project in which we engage with respect to women’s participation in (a) jazz dancing and (b) dance bands in the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. In the process, we uncover a hidden history of women’s involvement in jazz music and dance, which is surprising even to ourselves, as researchers who have previously published in this field. 

This lecture is presents new research which will be published in a forthcoming book about flappers and modern girls in Ireland and Northern Ireland, edited by Dr Eileen Hogan and Professor Louise Ryan (Manchester University Press, 2025). 

Eileen Hogan is a Lecturer in Social Policy in the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. She holds a PhD from the Institute for Popular Music Studies, University of Liverpool. Her research explores the social significance of popular music in Ireland. Her early research examined racialized and sexualized constructions of jazz music and dance in Ireland in the post-independence era (Hogan, 2010). More recently she has contributed research on music and youth cultures in Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond (2014) and on music-making, identity, and place in Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music (2020) and Ethnomusicology Ireland (2016).

Ruth Stanley is a musician and musicologist, with a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast (2011). Her research interests lie in the cultural and social history of music in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. Her published work includes contributions to the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013) and book chapters in Women and Music in Ireland (2022), Music Preferred (2018) and Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond (2014). Ruth has presented her jazz research on ‘The History Show’ on RTÉ Radio 1 (2019), Lyric FM (2018) and BBC Radio Ulster (2016).  

Readings
Hogan, E. (2010) 'Earthly, sensual, devilish": Sex,'race' and jazz in post-independence Ireland. Jazz Research Journal, 4(1), pp. 57-79.

Stanley, R. (2018) 'Jazzing the soul of the nation away': The hidden history of jazz in Ireland and Northern Ireland during the interwar years. In L.F. Bodley (Ed.) Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History, and Analysis in Honour of Harry White (pp. 231-50). Wien: Hollitzer.