The latest book from renowned biographer Leeann Lane on the uncompromising (the author’s own term) Mary MacSwiney builds upon her previous studies of Rosamond Jacob (2010) and Dorothy Macardle (2019). All three biographies are acutely observed and sensitively rendered accounts of women who lived through Ireland’s tumultuous bid for independence and the shocking aftermath of political dissent. All three are also about women who were prominent in their own time but whose work and legacies were lost, and who did not attract plentiful biographical analysis before Lane’s studies. All three have also been produced by University College Dublin Press, now leading the way in the publication of biographical accounts of women in Ireland. Mary McAuliffe’s biography, Margaret Skinnider (2020) and Trish Ferguson’s study, Maud Gonne (2019), are both part of the ‘Life and times’ series, placing these biographies of prominent women alongside contemporaries such as Cathal Brugha, Sean Lemass, Frank Ryan, Thomas Kettle and more. In the case of Skinnider and Gonne, a certain amount of ‘rescuing’ by feminist historians has also had to be done to their reputations and legacies, validating and valorising the physical bravery of Skinnider and detangling Gonne’s reputation from her role of muse and mother, and her own unique activism. UCD Press has also produced McAuliffe and Harriet Wheelock’s The diaries of Kathleen Lynn (2023), Margaret Ward’s biography of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Fearless Woman (2019), and is leading the way in publishing women’s words: Sonja Tiernan’s two volumes of Irish women’s speeches (2021; 2022) and the publication of Anna Parnell’s Tale of a great sham, edited by Dana Hearne and including an historical overview by Margaret Ward (2020). This suggests a healthy interest in women’s lives, especially those that made headlines during their lifetimes, not always the case in considering the patriarchal norms that shaped women’s lives in the past and often confined women to the invisibility of the private sphere.

Lane’s latest monograph offers a chance to reflect on the fields of women’s history and political biography, shown in this case to be overlapping, raising new questions about the lack of scholarly research on MacSwiney in the past. Of the three biographical subjects so far researched by Lane, MacSwiney is perhaps the more conventionally ‘famous’ (or infamous) for her steadfast political views so vociferously expressed throughout her lifetime and most potently in her two-hour-and-forty-four-minute-long speech during the Anglo-Irish Treaty debates. How is it, then, that she has not attracted more attention? Is it MacSwiney’s personality or political standpoint, or is there a reticence to make way for women’s narratives of well-worn political terrain? Until now, no biographical account of MacSwiney had appeared for forty years, a fact in stark contrast to the multiple biographies of many of the leading male political figures of the revolutionary era, particularly during the recent decade of centenaries. Historian and broadcaster David McCullagh, for example, joked in a 2019 History Ireland piece that his initial thoughts on writing about Eamon de Valera were: ‘Not another book about Dev!’Footnote ¹ His subsequent two volumes dedicated to the man and published by Gill Books (De Valera, volume I: Rise 1882–1932 (2017) and De Valera, volume II: Rule 1932–1975 (2018)) proved the enduring appetite for political biographies and provided a riposte to any who might venture to ask ‘when has a political figure been studied enough’? Or to pose this question another way, is there any woman from Irish history who will ever provoke an eye-roll at the prospect of yet another book?

Across nine chapters, Lane describes MacSwiney’s life over decades in which women took up more space on the public scene than ever before, only to be then forcibly ‘retired’ to spaces outside the main political realm after independence. These decades saw women loudly protest for their right to vote on equal terms to men, their deep involvement in the funding and staging of the Irish revolution, their key roles in national and international propaganda, their contributions to the debate on the nature of Ireland’s independence, and their subsequent sidelining in a country that was bitterly divided on the wording of the oath of allegiance but silently allied on the need for women to be out of the public and firmly back in the private sphere to make their ‘greatest’ contribution to the nation. Is it much wonder that so many emigrated?

MacSwiney was not one of those, however, staying to fight for the version of Ireland she and her family sacrificed so much to attain. Lane’s first page states the case clearly: MacSwiney was not one-dimensional; she was not merely ‘a cipher for the extreme element within republicanism during the Treaty debates’ (ix). Lane is careful to observe that MacSwiney was a republican in her own right and the founder of Cork’s Cumann na mBan branch; she did not simply mimic the political conviction of her brother Terence, who died by hunger strike for his political beliefs. She was a university-educated woman at a time when that was a rarity; she established a school for girls in Cork; she was a supporter of women’s suffrage (although committed to the republican cause first and foremost); she was an elected TD for Cork; she was a confidant of Eamon de Valera; and she was a woman who had experienced a profound loss that shaped her but did not entirely define her.

It is Lane’s contention that her depiction as a virago, irrational and extreme, is gendered: such passion and conviction would not have been interpreted in the same way if she were a man. Indeed, as the quantitative analysis of the Treaty debates completed by Liam Weeks and Micheál Ó Fathartaigh has shown, although just 1,800 words itself, the Treaty sparked 440,000 words of debate, many of which could be characterised as emotional.Footnote ² In this context, and because she is most well known for her impassioned rejection of the Treaty in the debates, it is worth examining MacSwiney’s own words. During the debates, MacSwiney revealed her profound belief that the military battle against the British could continue, for in her analysis it seemed entirely plausible that women would step into the fight if men could not, an image that seems evocative of her political campaigning in the wake of her brother Terence’s death:

Not many would have supported MacSwiney’s analysis at the time or subsequently, and it seems this inflated depiction of republican fervour in the country was characteristic of her life in the post-independence period. Lane has observed that from 1926 until her death in 1942, MacSwiney’s ‘political position became progressively divorced from political realities’ (xv). Wrong or not, it is worth recalling what Senia Pašeta observed: that ‘the many Irish women who were active in nationalist circles in the early twentieth century did not expect to be forgotten’.Footnote ⁴

This biography, coming almost fifty years after Margaret MacCurtain and Donnchadh Ó Corráin’s groundbreaking Women in Irish society: the historical dimension (1979), provokes some serious reflection on where we are now in scholarly studies of women’s experiences of Ireland’s past. The rich tapestry of social history that has bloomed in the past five decades in Ireland has broadened the field of Irish history and made an undeniable case for the importance of studying those outside of the high-profile realm of national politics. Yet, even when a woman did make her name at national level in the political arena, making the longest of the long speeches in the Anglo-Irish Treaty debates, and dramatically and emphatically stating her political beliefs in public, the silence is striking. The lack of attention to MacSwiney, an undoubtedly political figure, cannot be explained in this context. We are still, it seems, in Gerda Lerner’s ‘compensatory phase’ of women’s history, which she described as historians being like the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes with a lantern, searching for women’s presence in the histories they wrote. This was, in Lerner’s prediction, to be just the first phase, there coming a time when we would know enough about women’s experiences to be able to move on to a more integrated history in which our understanding of events included reckoning with the experiences of both men and women equally. As far back as 1969, Lerner explained the lack of attention to women as being due to the traditional view of historians ‘that only the transmission and exercise of power were worthy of their interest’, and therefore ‘women were of necessity ignored’.Footnote ⁵ Was MacSwiney not a rare example of a woman wielding her cultural and political power? How was she not the subject of many biographical studies long before 2025? A reflection from Lerner at a symposium in 1978 is instructive in interpreting MacSwiney, described in the press release for Lane’s book as ‘one of Irish history’s most misunderstood women’: ‘We must encompass the tensions and contradictions and allow each woman her own definition of her choices’.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, as Lane observes, ‘an individual life should never be reduced to a single dimension’ (xv) and in this book, MacSwiney’s life is richly detailed and observed. The wealth of endnotes and bibliographic sources leads one to hope that this is not the only book that touches on her life, or indeed those of the women who also fiercely objected to the Treaty on republican grounds.

Kathleen O’Callaghan (Limerick City-Limerick-East) made very clear in her contribution to the Treaty debates that it was not simply personal loss that motivated the six women TDs to object to the terms of the Treaty:

O’Callaghan inverted the paradigm in this speech: the women were not echoing their dead relatives’ words; their menfolk had been mirroring the beliefs of the women in their lives, be they mother, wife or sister.

There is much to celebrate in the development of women’s and gender history in Ireland, including in this journal. Let’s continue to be guided by Gerda Lerner, late as we are in developing the work that truly lets the historical record sing with the words of women. Let’s allow women the definition of their own choices in biographies we construct about them, as Lane has so ably done here.