Women and girls are especially vulnerable to gender-based violence (G.B.V.) in wartime. Academic and humanitarian interest in the causes of these often-devastating acts (which are perpetrated against a person’s will and based on gender norms and unequal power relationships) has grown sharply since the 1990s. Following the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, international organisations have challenged the historic acceptance of G.B.V. as unavoidable. Female bodies are no longer considered the spoils of war to which male soldiers are entitled; rather, policymakers, lawyers and scholars recognize (and prosecute) G.B.V., including sexual violence, as a weapon of war.

My article in Irish Historical Studies draws on this transnational literature, and newly accessible Irish archives, to examine gender as an identifier in the Civil War. Records of the Irish Free State’s Compensation (Personal Injuries) Committee, opened in 2018, show that female civilians suffered traumatising violence during 1922–23 – often on account of their gender. When under-resourced ‘Irregulars’ billeted themselves at private houses, for example, women bore the brunt of associated raids, burnings, etc. A shoot-out between national troops and anti-Treaty forces focused on Bridget Barry’s home, for example, in Bantry, Co. Cork, after she gave ‘a drink of water’ to ‘rebels’ at her front door; her daughter, Helena, was struck by a bullet in the leg and died in hospital.

The disproportionate impact of guerrilla tactics and property damage on women is especially relevant in an independent Irish state, shored up by Catholic authority, that designated explicitly the home as a female sphere (via attacks on their rights and working opportunities, culminating famously in the 1937 Constitution’s enshrining of Irishwomen’s natural domesticity). Compensation material I analysed reveals that on some, rare occasions a woman’s gender was also used against her via serious interpersonal violence (sexual assault; hair shearing). However, G.B.V. was not deployed systematically to realise the political/military objectives of either warring side; it did not serve state consolidation by the National Army – nor the administration of an alternative nationalism by the anti-Treaty I.R.A. – to denigrate women en masse. The genocidal aims underlying conflict-related G.B.V. (especially rape) elsewhere in the world were absent in Ireland’s civil war.

By highlighting the relatively humane treatment of women in Irish warfare, it is not my intention to lessen the experience of those women who were brutally assaulted during 1922–3. It is vital to investigate significance alongside scale – not only because of the obstacles (identified in my article) to quantitative analysis of sexual violence, but also, crucially, to give a voice to women excluded from the academic record – as seen in Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s important ‘microhistory’ [1] and Linda Connolly’s reconstruction, via military archives, of ‘stigmatised’ histories of individual women [2]. Rather, my aim, shared with colleagues in this IHS special issue, is to showcase the value of a comparative-global approach to understanding Irish Revolutionary themes that resonate today.

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[1] Lindsey Earner-Byrne, ‘The rape of Mary M.: a microhistory of sexual violence and moral redemption in 1920s Ireland’ in Journal of the History of Sexuality, xxiv, no. 1 (Jan. 2015), pp 75–98.
[2] Linda Connolly, ‘Sexual violence in the Irish Civil War: a forgotten war crime?’ in Women’s History Review (published online 6 March 2020).

Main image: Los desastres de la guerra, Francisco Goya