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ABSTRACT
Drawing on archival material and oral testimony of former students, this paper examines the lives and experiences of women in Catholic primary teacher training colleges in Ireland in the period 1922–1974. It commences with a brief overview of the historical context in which these colleges emerged, situating their development within the socio-political and cultural context of the emerging Free State and the changing primary school curriculum. Residential and single-sex, the paper argues that the colleges promoted a gendered ideology and culture of femininity which mirrored the conservative, nationalistic and ultramontane agenda of post-Independence Ireland. Paradoxically, while this often led to a limited, anti-intellectual experience and a hegemonic framing of women teachers’ professionalism, many graduates used their new-found professional status as teachers to embrace high-profile leadership roles in twentieth-century Ireland, often in male-dominated fields.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Alison Prentice and Marjorie Theobald, Women who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996); Judith Harford, The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008); Janina Trotman, Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Australian Women Teachers, 1911–1940 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008).
2 Maria Tamboukou, ‘The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher’, Gender and Education 12, no. 4 (2000): 463–78.
3 Jackie Blount, ‘Spinsters, Bachelors, and Other Gender Transgressors in School Employment, 1850–1990’, Review of Educational Research 70, no. 1 (2000): 83–101; Kay Whitehead, ‘Postwar Headteachers’ Perspectives of “Good” Teachers’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 35, no. 1 (2003): 23–35; Jennifer Redmond and Judith Harford, ‘One Man One Job: The Marriage Ban and the Employment of Women Teachers in Irish Primary Schools’, Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (2010): 639–54; Judith Harford and Jennifer Redmond, ‘“I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it”: The Marriage Ban, Teaching and Ideologies of Womanhood in Post-Independence Ireland’, Gender and Education 33, no. 2 (2021): 186–201. See also See also Úna Ní Bhroiméil, ‘“Sending Gossoons to be Made Oul’ Mollies Of”: Rule 127(b) and the Feminisation of Teaching in Ireland’, Irish Educational Studies 25, no. 1 (2006): 35–51.
4 Judith Harford, ‘The Gendering of Diaspora: Irish American Women Teachers and Political Activism’, Gender and Education 32, no. 1 (2022): 112–28; Jane Martin, Gender and Education in England since 1770: A Social and Cultural History (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
5 The oral testimony of the women teachers is drawn from four sources. The first is a study of 14 women on the marriage ban and teaching in Ireland published as Harford and Redmond, ‘“I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it”’. Participants were aged between 74 and 84 at the time of interview and drawn from 10 counties from the island of Ireland. The second source is Carysfort College Remembered, ed. Séamus MacGabhann (Dublin: Carysfort College Commemoration Committee, 2018), which is a collection of essays penned by graduates and staff on their experience of the college. The recollections of four women who provide essays in this collection are drawn on for this article. The third source is a typescript memoir of Catherine Daly, a student at Mary Immaculate College in the period 1919–1921 published in Brian Hughes, Úna Ní Bhroiméil and Benjamin Ragan, eds., Studying Revolution: Accounts of Mary Immaculate College, 1918–1923 (Limerick: Limerick City and County Council, 2022). The final source is the testimony of the second author of this article, who was a student at Carysfort College in 1959 and Admissions Officer and senior lecturer in the College from 1980 to 1987.
6 John Coolahan, ‘The Republic of Ireland’, European Journal of Teacher Education 14, no. 3 (1991): 287.
7 Judith Harford, ‘Teacher Education Policy in Ireland and the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century’, European Journal of Teacher Education 33, no. 4 (2010): 349–60.
8 Tom O’Donoghue, Judith Harford and Teresa O’ Doherty, Teacher Preparation in Ireland: History, Policy and Future Directions (Bingley: Emerald Group, 2017).
9 John Coolahan, Irish Education: Its History and Structure (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 1981); Brian Fleming and Judith Harford, ‘Irish Educational Policy in the 1960s: A Decade of Transformation’, History of Education 43, no. 5 (2014): 635–56; Tom O’Donoghue, Bilingual Education in Pre-independent Irish-Speaking Ireland, 1800–1922 (Ceredigion, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).
10 Political party meaning Association of Irish People.
11 INTO (Irish National Teachers’ Organisation), Irish School Weekly, February 11, 1922, 127.
12 Tom O’Donoghue and Judith Harford, ‘A Comparative History of Church–State Relations in Irish Education’, Comparative Education Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 315–41.
13 Daithí Ó Corráin, ‘Catholicism in Ireland, 1880–2015: Rise, Ascendancy and Retreat’, in The Cambridge History of Ireland, ed. Thomas Bartlett, vol. 4, 1880 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 733.
14 J. H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–1979 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1980).
15 Anthony Keating, ‘Censorship: The Cornerstone of Catholic Ireland’, Journal of Church and State 57, no. 2 (2015): 290–1.
16 Harford and Redmond, ‘“I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it”’; Redmond and Harford, ‘One Man One Job’.
17 Harford and Redmond, ‘“I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it”’, 187. See also Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
18 Alison Oram, ‘Serving Two Masters? The Introduction of a Marriage Ban in Teaching in the 1920s’, in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance, ed. London Feminist History Group (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 134–48; Alison Oram, Women Teachers and Feminist Politics, 1900–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
19 Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Women, Citizenship and Catholicism in the Irish Free State, 1922–1948’, Women’s History Review 6, no. 4 (1997): 563–85.
20 Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) served several terms as Taoiseach (head of government) and President of Ireland. He played a leading role in the drafting of the 1937 Constitution.
21 J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 206.
22 Anne McClintock, ‘“No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Women and Nationalism in South Africa’, Transition 51 (1991): 105. https://doi.org/10.2307/2935081
23 Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, ‘The Politics of Gender in the Irish Free State, 1922–1937’, Women’s History Review 20, no. 4 (2011): 569–78.
24 Yvonne McKenna, ‘Embodied Ideals and Realities: Irish Nuns and Irish Womanhood, 1930s–1960s’, Éire-Ireland 41, no. 1–2 (2006): 40–63.
25 Tom Inglis, Truth, Power and Lies: Irish Society and the Case of the Kerry Babies (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2003).
26 Tom O’Donoghue and Judith Harford, Secondary School Education in Ireland: Memories and Life Histories, 1922–67 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
27 ‘Address by Seán Moylan, Minister for Education’, CCSS Report 1952 (Dublin: CCSS, 1952), 24.
28 Jenny Beale, Women in Ireland: Voices of Change (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1986).
29 L. O’Dowd, ‘Church, State and Women: The Aftermath of Partition’, in Gender in Irish Society, ed. C. Curtin, P. Jackson and B. O’Connor (Galway: Galway University Press, 1987), 3–36.
30 Eileen Connolly, ‘The State, Public Policy and Gender: Ireland in Transition, 1957–1977’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Dublin City University, 1998).
31 Rosemary Cullen Owens, A Social History of Women in Ireland 1870–1970 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005).
32 Ó Corráin, ‘Catholicism in Ireland, 1880–2015’, 742.
33 Tom O’ Donoghue and Judith Harford, Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
34 Sisters of Mercy, The Rule and Constitutions of the Religious Called Sisters of Mercy (Dublin: James Duffy, 1863)
35 A Guide for the Religious Called Sisters of Mercy, Parts I and II, p. 20, cited in Eilis O’ Sullivan, ‘The Training of Women Teachers in Ireland, 1824–1919,’ with special reference to Mary Immaculate College and Limerick’ (Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Limerick, 1998), 36.
36 There were three preparatory colleges for Catholic girls aged 13 to 17 that provided free secondary education for girls who wanted to become primary teachers. These colleges were boarding institutions and were located in Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo; Dingle, Co. Kerry; and Falcarragh, Co. Donegal.
37 This information was provided by the second author of this paper.
38 From the limited information available in relation to university fees in the middle of the twentieth century, e.g. the Report of the Commission on Higher Education (1968) and the Report on University Reorganisation (1972), it is reasonable to conclude that fees for university courses were about £50 per annum.
39 The Leaving Certificate was the national examination at the end of senior cycle secondary education. It was introduced by the Free State government to replace the Senior Certificate, which had been administered by the Commissioners of National Education since the passing of the Intermediate Education Act in 1878.
40 O’Donoghue, Harford and O’ Doherty, Teacher Preparation in Ireland.
41 In 1922, there were five teacher training colleges in all: Carysfort College; Mary Immaculate College Limerick; St Patrick’s College Drumcondra; De la Salle College Waterford; and the Church of Ireland College, Kildare Place, and subsequently located in Rathmines, Dublin.
42 Minute books of Carysfort College Governing Body, in the possession of Áine Hyland.
43 The Irish school inspectorate, established in 1832, and pre-dating the founding of inspectorates in England and Wales, has had a long and intimate involvement in the development of the school system in Ireland at all levels. See John Coolahan and Patrick F. O’ Donovan, A History of Ireland’s School Inspectorate, 1831–2008 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009). See also John Coolahan, ‘The Fortunes of Education as a Subject of Study and of Research in Ireland’, Irish Educational Studies 4, no. 1 (1984): 1–34.
44 See Deirdre Mathews, ‘On the Cusp of Change: My Experience of Carysfort College in the 70s’, 173–4, and Áine Hyland, ‘The Closure of Carysfort College of Education’, 95–146, both in Carysfort College Remembered, ed. Séamus MacGabhann (Dublin: Carysfort College Commemoration Committee, 2018),
45 Sr Loreto O’Connor, Passing on the Torch: A History of Mary Immaculate Training College 1898–1998 (Limerick: Mary Immaculate College), 36.
46 The 1922 Programme for National Education had laid a heavy emphasis on the Irish language and included a requirement that all work in infant classes should be carried out through the medium of Irish. This very quickly proved unrealistic and the programme was amended in 1926 to reduce to some extent the emphasis on Irish. When the Fianna Fáil government came to power in the early 1930s, the Irish language was again re-emphasised and the 1934 National Programme reflected this. Changes in 1956 presaged what would later (1971) be a significantly more child-centred curriculum and introduced more modern methods to the teaching of infants. These changes were mirrored in the training college programmes and were reflected (for example) by the introduction of a revitalised infant teaching course in the mid-1950s and the provision of a specially equipped ‘Seomra na Naíonán’ (infant classroom). The Infant Programme for National Schools was revised by the Department of Education between 1948 and 1951 and fundamentally altered the approach to infant teaching in Ireland. Young children were no longer viewed as receptacles of knowledge – they were to be seen as active agents in their own learning. The significance of play and informal learning in infant classes, which had been ignored in the 1922, 1926 and 1932 National Programmes, was emphasised and this had implications for the training of teachers. As happened subsequently when the new Primary Curriculum of 1971 was introduced, it took some time before the underlying philosophy of the new 1951 Infant Programme impacted on the training of teachers. However, by the mid-1950s, in both Carysfort College and Mary Immaculate College, the Infant Education teacher training programme was an enlightened one. In MacGabhann, Carysfort College Remembered, former students recall fond memories of the prototype infant education classroom in the college – which was described as ‘bright and colourful and a haven of peace and tranquillity’ (97).
47 Cited in Harford and Redmond, ‘I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it,’ 191.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 192.
50 See for example Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–31, on gender as performative.
51 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 138–9.
52 Memories of Miriam O’Brien, as told to her daughter Ann Creaner, in MacGabhann, Carysfort College Remembered, 38. See also Harford and Redmond, ‘“I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it”’; Fiona Poole, ‘Reflections on My Time in Carysfort Training College 1952–54’, in MacGabhann, Carysfort College Remembered, 273.
53 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘The Culture of Femininity in Women’s Teacher Training Colleges 1900–50’, History of Education 22, no. 3 (1993): 277–88.
54 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
55 Cited in Harford and Redmond, ‘“I am Amazed at how Easily we Accepted it”’, 197.
56 Ibid., 196.
57 Ibid.
58 Poole, ‘Reflections on My Time in Carysfort Training College 1952–54’.
59 Ibid., 272.
60 Hyland, ‘The Closure of Carysfort College of Education’, 97.
61 Ibid.
62 The introduction of a three-year BEd programme meant that colleges of education (previously training colleges) were now affiliated with universities, and teaching was now an all-graduate profession.
63 Mathews, ‘On the Cusp of Change: My Experience of Carysfort College in the 70s’.
64 Judith Harford and Tom O’ Donoghue, ‘Challenging the Dominant Church Hegemony in Times of Risk and Promise: Carysfort Women Resist’, Gender and Education 33, no. 3 (2021): 372–84.
65 André Robert and Jeffrey Tyssens, ‘Mapping Teachers’ Strikes: A “Professionalist” Approach’, Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 5 (2008): 501–16.
66 Catherine Byrne, ‘The Inside Story of the Carysfort College Strike’, in MacGabhann, Carysfort College Remembered, 9.
67 Teaching Practice Reports of students from Mary Immaculate College, 1915–1924, published in Hughes et al., Studying Revolution, 34–7.
68 Memoir of Catherine Daly, a student at Mary Immaculate College in the period 1919–1921, published in Hughes et al., Studying Revolution, 19–21.
69 Louise Ryan, Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 1922–1937: Embodying the Nation (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 43.
70 Mary Immaculate College Training College Annual, vol. 1, 1927, p. 36, cited in Úna Ní Bhroiméil, ‘Images and Icons: Female Teachers’ Representations of Self and Self-Control in 1920s Ireland’, History of Education Review 37, no. 1 (2008): 8.
71 Mary Immaculate College Training College Annual, vol. 1, 1927: 36; vol. 2, 1928; 17–18, cited in Ní Bhroiméil, ‘Images and Icons’, 9.
72 James Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
73 Sandra Mc Avoy, ‘The Regulation of Sexuality in the Irish Free State, 1929–1935’, in Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, ed. Greta Jones and Elizabeth Malcolm (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 253–66.
74 Maria Luddy, ‘Unmarried Mothers in Ireland, 1880–1973’, Women’s History Review 20, no. 1 (2011): 110.
75 Máire Leane, ‘Female Sexuality in Ireland 1920 to 1940: Construction and Regulation’ (PhD Thesis, University College Cork, 1999).
76 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
77 Cited in O’Connor, Passing on the Torch, 40.
78 Dónal O’Donoghue, ‘Speak and Act in a Manly Fashion: The Role of the Body in the Construction of Men and Masculinity in Primary Teacher Education in Ireland,’ Irish Journal of Sociology 14, no. 2 (2005): 231–53.
79 Ibid.
80 O’ Donoghue, ‘Speak and Act in a Manly Fashion’, 237.
81 For example, Éamonn de Valera lectured in Mathematics in Carysfort in the first and second decades of the twentieth centuries. Vincent O’Brien and subsequently his son, Oliver O’Brien, lectured in Music from the 1920s until the closure of the college in 1988. Tomás Ó Con Cheanainn lectured in the Irish Department in Carysfort in the 1950s before his appointment as Professor of Irish in University College Dublin. Seamus Heaney was a lecturer and subsequently Head of English during the 1970s.
82 Rebecca Rogers, ‘Retrograde or Modern? Unveiling the Teaching Nun in Nineteenth Century France’, Social History 23, no. 2 (1998): 147.
83 Judith Harford and Tom O’ Donoghue, ‘Continuity and Change in the Perspectives of Women Religious’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2011): 399–413.
84 Although it was in effect a female college, the Principal of the College was always a male, usually an ordained clergyman, and almost all of the teaching staff were male until the 1960s. See Susan M. Parkes, Kildare Place: The History of the Church of Ireland Training College and College of Education 1811–2010 (Dublin: Church of Ireland College of Education Publications, 2011).
85 MacGabhann, Carysfort College Remembered.
86 Ibid.
87 See H. R. Ebaugh, ‘Patriarchal Bargains and Latent Avenues of Social Mobility: Nuns in the Roman Catholic Church’, Gender and Society 7, no. 3 (1993): 400–14.
88 Recollection of Áine Hyland.
89 Ibid.
90 Mary Immaculate Annual 1960, 12, excerpt of letter from past student, quoted in O’Connor, Passing on the Torch, 13.
91 O’Connor, Passing on the Torch, 49.
92 One of the authors of this paper, Áine Hyland, was interviewed by Sr Loreto in 1959 and remembers the interviewer as being respectful, interesting and enthusiastic.
93 Tom O’Donoghue and Judith Harford, ‘Addressing the Apparent Paradox of the Catholic Sister Principal: Insights from an Oral History of Catholic Female Religious’, History of Education 42, no. 6 (2013): 765–82.
94 Tamboukou, ‘The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher’, 476.
95 Geraldine Clifford, Those Good Gertrudes: A Social History of Women Teachers in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, eds., Women and Education: Major Themes in Education, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2010); Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Kathleen Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Judith Harford
Judith Harford is Professor of Education at the School of Education, University College Dublin. Her research area is history of education with a particular focus on gender and social class. Her books include The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2008); Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922–67 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); A Cultural History of Education in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2020); and Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922–67 (Oxford University Press, 2021). A Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Life Member, Clare Hall, Cambridge, she has also held visiting fellow appointments at Harvard University, Boston College and the University of Toronto. She was awarded the Irish Research Council Impact Researcher of the Year Award for 2022 in recognition of her work in the area of gender and social class inequalities in education.
Áine Hyland
Áine Hyland is Emeritus Professor of Education at University College Cork and former vice-president of the university. She has been involved in teacher education since the 1970s and has published widely on educational policy, inclusive education and history of Irish education. She chaired a number of government committees including the Commission on the Points System and the (statutory) Education Disadvantage Committee. Although retired from University College for over 15 years she continues to be involved in educational research and is a passionate advocate for inclusive education. A recipient of several honorary doctorates in recognition of her contribution to Irish education, she has been a Member of the Royal Irish Academy since 2018.