Writing Women Out Of History.

WRITING WOMEN OUT OF HISTORY:

FANNY AND ANNA PARNELL
AND THE IRISH LADIES^' LAND LEAGUE

Jane Cote.

(Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario)
Link to original article.

In the autumn of 1991 an interesting discussion was carried on in the Irish and English press concerning the vexing question of why historians have virtually ignored the important contribution of Irish women to the main political, literary and social events of their country’s history. The discussion was initiated in part by Margaret Ward’s pamphlet The Missing Sex: Putting Women Into Irish History, published by Attic Press in Dublin in mid-November. Ward took to task (among others) R.F (Roy) Foster and Joseph Lee, two highly respected academics and authors, for writing histories of modern Ireland which are “strangely women free’.

Then came the publication, with great fanfare, of the three volume Field Day Anthology of Irish History (edited by S. Deane). To the dismay of male and female critics alike this 'comprehensive' survey of Ireland’s social, political and literary history had excluded from consideration almost all of the women who have figured prominently in their country’s past.

Finally, my own book, Fanny and Anna Parnell: Ireland’s Patriot Sisters, which recounts the story of the ladies' Land League and of the lives of its founders and leaders, Fanny and Anna Parnell, was reviewed in The Irish Times of November 16, 1991 under the title ‘Two women written out of history’. The reviewer wondered why such an important organisation as the Ladies’ Land League had been virtually omitted from all written accounts of the movement for Irish land reform in the late 19th century.

The term ‘written out of history’ suggests a form of conspiracy on the part of (mainly) male historians either to obliterate all traces of women active in the public domain or to belittle their achievements. Is this indeed what occurs? In order to consider this question I will examine the case of the Ladies’ Land League, an organisation which was celebrated in its day, which contributed to what historians have identified as the achievements of the Land League movement, yet which disappeared from the historical record for close to 100 years. To begin with I propose to relate as briefly as possible the conditions which led up to the founding of the ladies’ Land league, describe the main activities in which the Ladies were engaged and examine the attitudes and personalities of its leaders, Fanny and Anna Parnell. I will then review the way in which the Ladies and their leaders were viewed by their contemporaries, by historians of the early years of the century and finally, by modern historiography.

Background to the Founding of the Ladies’ Land League:
The Irish National Land League — that is, the men’s league — was founded in Dublin on 21 October 1879. Charles Stewart Parnell, the acknowledged leader of the advanced Home Rule party at Westminster, was elected president. Thus, for the first time, the two major preoccupations of the Irish people, Home Rule and land reform, were symbolically united in one man. Michael Davitt was chosen as the new league’s secretary but he was in fact its animating spirit and principal organiser. The aim of the Land League, summed up in the slogan ‘The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland’ was to make the Irish tenant farmers the owners of the land they tilled. This was to be achieved by inducing the government in England to supply interest free loans to the Irish farmers who could then buy out their holdings from the mainly Anglo-Irish landlords, many of whom were absentees living in England.

Although neither Charles Stewart Parnell nor Michael Davitt were in principle opposed to physical force, both were very much against leading the unarmed Irish people into futile revolution against the most powerful military nation then in existence. Thus the Land League would pursue its aims of land reform and ultimately Home Rule through the nonviolent methods of mass meetings, peaceful marches and demonstrations which under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell had been so effective in persuading the English government to grant Catholic emancipation. At the same time the parliamentary party at Westminster under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell would press for the necessary legislative changes to bring about both land reform and Irish Home Rule.

Now, if the ultimate aim of the Land League was to convert the Irish tenant farmers into the owners of their holdings, the aim in that autumn of 1879 was to gain immediate rent reductions; after three years of bad harvests and falling prices for agricultural produce, many tenant farmers were deeply in debt to the shopkeepers and to the banks, were unable to pay their rent and faced eviction. Consequently Davitt and other Land league leaders organised mass meetings at which they exhorted the tenant farmers to band together on each estate and demand a rent reduction from their landlord. Those able to pay full rents were expected to refuse to do so until the landlord granted the reduction to all the tenants. Furthermore, anyone taking a holding from which another tenant had been evicted for refusing to pay a rack rent was to be boycotted — a non-violent sanction which isolated the landgrabber from the rest of his countrymen as if he were a leper of old.

Meanwhile, Charles Stewart Parnell, the Land League’s newly elected president, sailed for the US and Canada where he was to raise funds and support for the Land League; the substantial amounts of money needed to carry on the land agitation could only come from the generosity of the Irish nation beyond the seas. By the time Parnell arrived in New York in early January, 1880, the knowledge that the poorest farmers of the south and southwest were facing starvation led him to open immediately the Irish Land League Famine Relief Fund. He then set off with John Dillon across the United States and Canada to raise the funds needed for both famine relief and the land agitation.

Fanny and Anna Parnell were then living with their mother, Delia Tudor Stewart Parnell, in Bordentown, New Jersey, on the estate ‘Ironsides’ which the American-born Delia Parnell had inherited upon the death, in 1869, of her father, Commodore Charles Stewart, the naval hero of the War of 1812. The two sisters left immediately for New York where they began to put in twelve-hour days in the offices of the Irish Land League Famine Relief Fund. Fanny was then 31 and Anna 27. (Their brother Charles was 33). Both women were self-reliant individualists, well read and well-travelled, who possessed great practical and administrative abilities. They had been ardent Irish patriots from childhood. As a teenager Fanny had published poems in the Fenian newspaper Irish People expressing sympathy with Fenian notions of violent revolution. Now she was a mature woman who had lived to see the disastrous aftermath of the Paris Commune and knew well the terrible price that is exacted from fomenters of unsuccessful popular revolution. She and Anna had become keen believers in the need for the Irish to seek land reform and Home Rule through non-violent means. Indeed, it was this very component of the Land league strategy that had first ensured their steady support, as is evident from the well-researched articles and pamphlets they published in New York in 1879-80 in order to explain to Americans the social, political and economic background of the land agitation then going on in Ireland.

On the 11th of March, 1880, just before sailing home from New York to fight the general election of that year, Parnell founded the Irish National Land League of the United States. Two months later — in May, 1880 — Davitt arrived in New York to put the new organisation on a firm footing.

Although Fanny by this time had returned to Bordentown to take up again the administration of her mother’s farming estate, Anna remained in New York. Here she began to divide her time between the offices of the Land League Famine Relief Fund, which was winding up as the danger of famine receded, and the new headquarters of the US Land League set up by Michael Davitt on Washington Square. While working closely together at this time, Davitt was able to appreciate not only Anna Parnell’s practical administrative abilities but also her dedication to the cause of peaceful agitation for land reform and Home Rule and her close understanding of the intricacies of parliamentary tactics and procedure, all of which she carefully spelled out to him in a letter of June 10, 1880.

By October 1880, Davitt had done all he could to put the American Land league on a firm footing but the results were negligible and very little money was being raised for the Land League in Ireland. Consequently, Fanny Parnell decided to found a ladies’ league which, through energetic fund raising, would come to the aid of the land agitation in Ireland and, in the process, inspire the American men’s league to greater efforts. Although both novel and unconventional, Fanny’s proposed women’s league did have its precedents. During the Civil War, American women, through auxiliary branches of the US Sanitary Commission, had raised vast sums of money and goods for Union troops. Fanny herself, while living in Paris, had assisted the American dentist Dr. Thomas Evans, to raise funds and material for the American Ambulance — a field hospital which had such spectacular success in treating the wounded of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. Before putting her plan into action she consulted Davitt who gave it his immediate and enthusiastic approval. Accordingly, the Ladies’ Irish National Land League was founded in New York on October, 15, 1880, with Delia Parnell as its president and Fanny its secretary and effective organiser. (Anna Parnell had returned to Ireland in the summer of that year).

The Ladies wasted no time in getting to work. Within three weeks they had organised a public meeting, attended by over 3,000 people, which realised the large sum at the time of $1,000. They would continue to raise substantial sums of money throughout the life of the Land league in Ireland (and did indeed succeed in spurring the men’s league on to greater efforts).

When Davitt returned to Ireland in November 1880, he was well aware that his continued activities as organiser and speaker on behalf of the Land League would cause the British authorities to return him to prison. It was also evident that the government would suspend habeas corpus in Ireland thus enabling them to imprison without trial the leaders of the land agitation and bring the whole movement to a close before its most basic demands had been met. Recalling the success of Fanny Parnell’s Ladies’ Land League, Davitt decided to found a similar organisation in Ireland which would keep the land agitation alive during the men’s anticipated imprisonment. At its head he envisaged Anna Parnell whose administrative abilities, political acumen and dedication to peaceful agitation he knew well. To his surprise the plan was opposed by Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon and Thomas Brennan but since they had nothing better to suggest, they reluctantly concurred. Accordingly, on 31 January 1881, the Ladies’ Irish National Land League was formed at a public meeting held in Dublin. The titular president of the new organisation was Anne Deane, a successful businesswoman from the west of Ireland, but its effective leader from the beginning was Anna Parnell, one of four honorary secretaries. Three days later, on 3 February 1881, Davitt was returned to prison in England where he was deprived of all political news until his release in May, 1882. Thus he would know nothing at all about the activities of the organisation which had been founded at his urging, but which — regrettably — he would not hesitate to describe twenty years later in distressingly fallacious detail.

The Ladies’ Land League in Ireland:
During the first few months of its existence the Ladies’ Land League gradually took over from the men much of the administration at Land League headquarters on Upper Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, including the processing of applications for relief and the distribution of money to qualified tenants and their families. Aware of the need for careful accounting in order to avoid charges of mismanagement of money, Anna Parnell kept a record of all funds received and expended which she was later able to present to Michael Davitt upon his release from prison in May 1882. (Unfortunately, this did not prevent the myth of financial irresponsibility and extravagance on the part of the Ladies from taking hold).

Anna Parnell began to travel extensively in Ireland and in those parts of England and Scotland where large Irish communities resided. Here, speaking at large open air meetings, she explained the aims of the land agitation and encouraged the founding of Ladies’ Land League branches. Before the end of the first year there were over 400 Ladies’ Land League branches in Ireland, some consisting of only a few members, others of close to 100.

When habeas corpus was suspended under the terms of the ‘Protection of Property and People in Ireland Act’ — popularly known as ‘Coercion’ — in early April, 1881, and large numbers of Land League members throughout the country began to be arrested ‘on suspicion’, the ladies supplied food to the prisoners. At the same time, they provided relief to the families of those imprisoned for their Land League activities, thus alleviating the hardship they might otherwise have suffered and, in the process, encouraging the tenant farmers to continue their peaceful agitation for rent reductions.

In October 1881, Charles Stewart Parnell was arrested ‘on suspicion’ and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol (the cell he occupied is now a tourist attraction) where he was joined a few days later by most of the leaders of the Land League. In retaliation for their arrest, they issued a manifesto from Kilmainham exhorting the Irish farmers to pay no rent until the Land League leaders had been released. The signers of the Manifesto did not really expect that those Irish tenant farmers able to pay their rent would refuse to do so and thus find themselves evicted from their homes and farm, without a roof over their heads or food on their tables. They also knew that the Church hierarchy would not back such a move. Furthermore, a new Land Act had come into force in August, 1881, and although it was very far from meeting the demands of the Land League in making the farmers the owners of their holdings, it contained much to please them. The No-Rent Manifesto was in fact a rather cynical attempt to mollify the more militant Irish- Americans who had been clamouring for such a strike for several months and were beginning to wonder why they should send money to Ireland while the ‘land robbers’ continued secure in their possessions.

The first consequence of the No-Rent Manifesto was the decision by the Irish Secretary, William Forster, to proclaim the Land League as an illegal organisation. To his great surprise the Land League obediently folded up and ceased to exist. And to the equally great surprise of its leaders in Kilmainham, the Ladies’ Land League (which had not been named in the proclamation and was now on its own) took the No-Rent Manifesto at face value and attempted to enforce it as best they could. This they did principally by the very practical expedient of building over 200 pre-fabricated wooden huts (shipped from Dublin with carpenters to erect them) for tenant farmers who were evicted for obeying — at the urging of the Ladies — the No-Rent Manifesto.

Throughout the late winter and early spring of 1882, there was a steady increase in the number of evictions, reaching a total of 14,600 evicted in four years, more than in the thirty previous years. Evictions in unprecedented numbers had always called into existence the secret societies in Ireland. Now with the imprisonment of close to 1000 Land Leaguers, including some of the most responsible and influential men of the townlands, the field was open to the young hotheads and physical force advocates. The peaceful weapon of boycotting or social ostracization was enforced with violent intimidation — night time raids, burning of hay ricks, mutilation of animals and the like. Clearly the Ladies could do nothing to control these unruly elements in rural society. The number of young women who could travel about the country on Ladies’ Land League business was small and they were constantly harassed by police and the Royal Irish Constabulary who attempted to prevent them from attending evictions or supervising the building of Land League huts. Indeed, 13 members of the Ladies’ Land League were imprisoned for terms ranging from a few days to a month; not however, under the Coercion Act but under an ancient statute from the time of Edward III designed to keep prostitutes off the streets.

Gladstone, anxious to see an end to the continuing crisis in Ireland, struck an informal bargain with Parnell — known as the Kilmainham Treaty — in April 1882 : Parnell and the other Land League leaders were to be released from prison; Gladstone would push through an Arrears Bill enabling the small impoverished farmers of the West and Southwest to take advantage of the Land Act of 1881. Parnell for his part undertook to cool down the agitation — not a difficult task once the Arrears Bill was passed since this would bring an end to the cycle of evictions and resulting agrarian crime. Outraged by the release of Parnell and the other Land League leaders, the Irish Secretary William Forster resigned.

Soon after Parnell’s release from prison the Ladies, disheartened by the failure of the No-Rent Manifesto and disillusioned by Parnell’s acceptance of the Arrears Act as the final settlement of the land agitation, signaled their wish to disband. It would take them several months and some skillful maneuvering before they could extricate themselves from what had become a wearisome and unwelcome task. In the process Anna Parnell became permanently estranged from her brother who, she believed, had behaved towards her and the Ladies in an unprincipled manner.

The Ladies’ Land League in Contemporary Reports:
Throughout its 18 months of existence in Ireland the Ladies' Land League had been constantly on the front pages of the Irish, Irish-American, Irish- Canadian and English press. All of Anna Parnell’s speeches were recorded verbatim in the provincial Irish press and reprinted in abbreviated form in national weeklies or dailies. To the more extreme opponents of the land agitation in England — for example the London Standard — the Ladies were pestilent disturber’s who should be lodged in Kilmainham. The conservative pro-government Irish press, on the other hand — the Irish Times or the Leinster Express — while giving substantial coverage to the important work the Ladies were performing on behalf of evicted tenants and imprisoned land leaguers, demonstrated their unease with both the land agitation and the presence of women in the noisy arena of public life by ridiculing the Ladies themselves as ‘patriots in petticoats’ or even ‘the screaming sisterhood’. In the pro-Land League press — the influential New York weekly Irish World, the Land League’s own organ United Ireland the Dublin Nation and Freeman’s Journal — editorial comment was invariably laudatory and the Ladies themselves were considered to be modern ‘Joan's of Arc’ for courageously coming forward to take the place of the men in a national emergency. Nowhere, not even in the most hostile accounts of the Times or the London Standard, was there any suggestion that the Ladies’ Land league had in any way encouraged or condoned violence.

The first lengthy, public post-mortem on the Ladies’ Land League appeared in an interview with Michael Davitt, published in the New York World of July 9 and 16, 1882, in which he declared quite succinctly that the Ladies’ Land League had been thoroughly successful in fulfilling the two objects for which it had been formed: receiving and distributing all kinds of charity to support the evicted tenants and relieve all cases of distress; and keeping up a semblance of organisation during the period of repression. Then, ignoring the existence of the Kilmainham Treaty which had precipitated Forster’s resignation, he went on to add that the Ladies had saved the Land League and banished the Irish Secretary, William Forster, from Ireland. The British government, he explained, had threatened to imprison the ladies of the League, the British people would not tolerate this, Forster had been forced to resign and thus the Land League had won the fight and the finishing blow had been struck by the ladies of Ireland. This feeble conclusion may be seen as Davitt’s not very convincing attempt to disguise his own (amicable) break with Parnell over the latter’s decision to accept Gladstone’s terms and end the land agitation at the very moment when, Davitt believed, it was close to achieving its goals; by handing to the Ladies a totally spurious and unconvincing victory Davitt was able to omit all mention of the Kilmainham treaty, the true cause of Forster’s resignation and of Davitt’s own rupture with Parnell and the Irish Party for over a decade. Anna Parnell spurned this fictitious victory for she was well aware that Forster had not been beaten — a fact that ought to have been quite plain to everybody — and that the land agitation had ended in failure. Since there was nothing personally objectionable in Davitt’s interview, she made no public comment on it.

Seven years later when Davitt testified at the Parnell Commission hearings into the (false) allegation that Parnell had been privy to the plot to assassinate Lord Frederick Cavendish in 1882, he repeated more or less verbatim the statement he had made in New York including the far-fetched and unconvincing victory of the Ladies’ Land League over Forster, again passing over in silence the objectionable Kilmainham Treaty.

In 1904, over twenty years after the Ladies’ Land league had been disbanded, Davitt published The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland or The Story of the Land League which was instantly hailed as a classic of Irish political literature and the true story of the Land League agitation. In a chapter devoted to the Ladies’ Land league he again attributed the defeat of Forster and the so-called success of the Land League to the action of the Ladies. This time, however the success was no longer attributed to the chivalry of Englishmen whose unwillingness to see Irish ladies in prison had forced the Irish Secretary to resign but to the action of the Ladies themselves who, Davitt now claimed, had encouraged the Irish farmers to commit acts of violence and outrage, thus making Ireland ungovernable and forcing the British government to settle in favour of the Land League.

Despairing at her failure to have Davitt rectify this gross distortion of her every act and word (including a threatened libel suit which she was too impoverished to pursue) Anna Parnell wrote The Tale of a Great Sham, her own account of the Land League — the ‘great sham’ of the title — but was unable to find a publisher. Thus Davitt’s Fall of Feudalism which portrayed Irish girls as being a pack of murderers, mutilators, hysterical idiots and fools, became the authority on which later authors relied to libel and ridicule the Ladies in the most outrageous manner. The first was F. Hugh O’Donnell whose History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, published in London in 1910, compares Anna Parnell to the Grande Mademoiselle and the Ladies’ Land League to ‘Captain Moonlight in Petticoats’. Others followed, invariably accepting Davitt’s 1904 portrait of the Ladies’ Land League (if it was mentioned at all) as a band of harridans sowing dissension and murder throughout the country. Curiously, though, none thought it necessary to include the corollary to Davitt’s depiction of the Ladies — the spurious victory over Forster which he attributed to them. While it may be argued that the ‘victory’ as Davitt presented it is hardly credible since it was historical fact that the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ brought about the resignation of Forster, one must wonder why historians did not then question the credibility of Davitt’s injurious portrait of the Ladies’ Land League.

The Ladies' Land League in Modern Historiography:
How then have the Ladies’ Land League and its leaders fared with modern, revisionist minded historians? Until recently, not very much better, F.S.L. Lyons, in his 1968 biography of John Dillon, devotes a few lines to Fanny and Anna Parnell whom he describes without substantiating evidence of any kind as ‘intransigent nationalists, but entirely lacking their brother’s coolness and judgement’. One decade later, having studied more closely the documentary evidence pertaining to the land agitation, he rejects implicitly the notion of Anna Parnell inciting to acts of violence but nevertheless describes her in his biography of her brother as ‘quite reckless’ and ‘possessing a tincture of revolutionary fanaticism’ — again with no substantiating evidence — and dismisses the Ladies’ contribution to Irish history in a few dozen words.

In 1976, the then unknown R.F. (Roy) Foster, now celebrated as one of the leading modern Irish historians, published his Charles Stewart Parnell: the Man and his Family, in which he devoted a lengthy chapter to the lives and political activities of each of the Parnell sisters. Although Foster’s admiration for the decisive character of Anna Parnell is evident, his depiction of her political life can best be described as posthumous justification for Davitt’s fabrications, clad now in the dress of modern, foot-noted historiography. In a cleverly written and fast-paced narrative style, choosing a martial vocabulary and employing brief, out-of-context excerpts from her public speeches, Foster, in the space of a few pages, offers a portrait of Anna Parnell in 1881 and 1882 as a woman careening out of control; the ‘mounting anger of her public utterances’, ‘lambasting her critics’, ‘hectoring the R.M.’, ‘skirting the issue of violence by an increasingly narrow margin’ with ‘more and more passionate appeals to the Irish tenants to choose open war instead of appeasement’. A speaking tour in England and Scotland is described as ‘carrying the war into the enemy’s camp’.

Finally, in 1982 T.W. Moody published his monumental biography, Michael Davitt and Irish Revolution: 1846-1882. Having acquired access to the recently recovered manuscript, Tale of a Great Sham, Anna Parnell’s own account of the land agitation and her involvement with it, Moody implicitly rejects Davitt’s tendentious depiction of the Ladies’ Land League. Inexplicably, however he makes no overt reference to that depiction and although the relevant correspondence was well known to him, he passes over in silence Anna Parnell’s desperate efforts to have Davitt correct his ‘mass of vicious lies’ concerning her and her organisation. In view of Moody’s attempts throughout his book to come to grips with the many distortions and factual errors in Davitt’s written works, these omissions are particularly disturbing. Clearly, Moody was not prepared to devote to Anna Parnell and the Ladies’ Land League the amount of time and study that would be necessary if he was to explore thoroughly this discreditable and strangely out-of-character episode in the life of Michael Davitt, one of the more attractive personalities to stride across the stage of Irish history.

It was only with the publication in 1986 of Anna Parnell’s The Tale of a Great Sham, three-quarters of a century after it was written, that the tone and content of references to her and the Ladies’ Land League have begun to change. Where Lyons in 1968 found the Parnell sisters ‘intransigent’ and lacking political judgment, Paul Bew in Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland: 1890-1910, published in 1987, describes Anna Parnell as ‘the sharpest and most politicized of the Parnell's. Unfortunately, The Tale of a Great Sham, published by a small feminist press in Dublin, is now out of print while Moody’s Michael Davitt and Irish Revolution, which devotes less than a dozen scattered (and dismissive) pages to the Ladies’ Land League (out of a total of over 300 dealing with the land agitation), continues to be reprinted and readily available.

In conclusion, then, it would appear that the absence of the Ladies’ Land League and its leaders from the historical record of the land agitation in Ireland is due less to a conspiracy on the part of (mainly) male historians to exclude them than to their unwillingness to devote to the role of women in history the serious attention and lengthy analysis generally considered essential for reputable historiography. By routinely viewing women in history as marginal figures to be confined to brief footnotes or dismissive thumbnail portraits, historians present an incomplete picture of the past, blurring its outlines and depriving events and personalities — male and female alike — of definition and clarity. In short, they engage in flawed scholarship and do a serious disservice to the discipline they attempt to serve.