What was the Enlightenment and how did it change society in eighteenth-century Europe? These questions have been at the core of the historiographical debate on the Enlightenment since the 1960s. For the historian of women, the questions are compounded by the imperative to identify which aspects of this complex intellectual, political and social movement impacted on women and on ideas about women. In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition among historians and literary scholars that consideration of the nature of women and their education formed an important element in enlightened discussion and debate. Philosophers, political thinkers and writers...

Chapter one traced the amassing in eighteenth century Ireland of printed literature on the education of women and, more widely, on the role and contribution of women in society. Interest in this type of literature declined in the early nineteenth century. By 1800, there is a noticeable absence in the pages of Walker’s Hibernian Magazine of articles that focused on the merits of female education or that discussed the role of women. They were replaced with items that were to become the standard fare of women’s magazines: advice on marriage and married life, serialised romantic tales and fashion.¹ The unsuccessful...

Irish women’s encounters with Enlightenment ideas about female education and societal roles were complex and defining for some women. The first section argued that there was a radical and a moderate view on women’s role and status emanating from contrasting concepts of equality between the sexes. Roman Catholicism, embourgeoisement and Enlightenment influences combined to shape the values of Catholic society as well as to define female behaviour in the pre-Famine period. The two chapters in the first case study in the volume, suggest that most women were influenced one way or another by at least a moderate view of equality....

This chapter demonstrates that Ireland’s encounter with America was neither one-way nor static. Emigration illustrated the outward and inward nature of the contact. Another dimension to the twentieth-century American–Irish connection is the engagement that occurred through various cultural influences arising from reading, consuming, cinema-going and dancing. Each of the latter activities was complex and the encounter was negotiated and mediated by internal constraints relating to income, location and interest, and external constraints relating to societal and religious mores and the predominance of the British and Continental economic, political and cultural hinterland. Neither should it be forgotten that as with...

The last two sections have been informed by the empiricist approach of the historian and they focused on the process of cultural transfer during two defining historical junctures. By contrast, this section uses the methodology of the literary and cultural scholar to engage in analysis of women’s engagement with the cultural movement referred to as ‘modernism’ and with the popular cultural forms produced and read by women. Combining cultural history and textual analysis, it examines the role of women as cultural producers and consumers and the popularity and marketing of Irish women’s writing in the USA.

Traditional literary histories identify...

The previous chapter argued that the concept of vernacular modernism provided a useful framework within which to examine Irish women’s cultural practices in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter elaborates on this suggestion through a focus on theatre and particularly the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The modernist agenda of the Gate Theatre provided women playwrights with considerable opportunity for experiment. More generally the Gate Theatre was a forum where new and often radical ideas about modern women were presented to a public audience untroubled for the most part by the vigilance of the censor’s supervision. The aim...