Abstract
Margaret Cusack and Alice Stopford Green were prominent Irish nationalist historians with international reputations in the period between 1868 and 1922. Though they came from Protestant unionist backgrounds like Ferguson, Hickson, Lawless, and Hull, they ultimately became committed political nationalists. Both were very public, influential historians who attained prominence for their involvement in social and political causes, as well as for their histories. This chapter discusses Cusack’s and Green’s careers as historians and considers their political commitments, contending that they were instrumental in constructing the persona of an Irish nationalist woman historian as a combative, politically engaged public historian. Their careers shed light on the opportunities for women associated with intellectual establishments outside the universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cusack, as a member of a religious order, was affiliated with a powerful church that dominated education in Ireland, giving her a sphere of influence. Green was linked with intellectual circles associated with the rising Irish nationalist establishment, which contributed to her success and fame as a historian.
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Notes
Irene Ffrench Eagar, Margaret Anna Cusack, a Biography (Dublin: Arlen House, 1979), 18–19
Kit O’Ceirin, Women of Ireland: a Biographical Dictionary (Kinvara: Tir Eolas, 1996), 54
Mary O’Dowd, “From Morgan to MacCurtain: Women Historians in Ireland From the 1790s to the 1990s”, in Maryann Gialanella Valiulis and Mary O’Dowd, eds. Women & Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1997), 43–4
O’Ceirin, Women of Ireland, 55; Eagar, Margaret Anna Cusack, 147–50. See also John White, “The Cusack Papers: New Evidence on the Knock Apparitions”, History Ireland, 4, 4 (Winter 1996), 39–43.
Elizabeth Smyth, “‘Writing Teaches Us Our Mysteries’: Women Religious Recording and Writing History”, in Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds, Creating Historical Memory: English Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 102.
Cusack, The Present Case of Ireland, Plainly Stated (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1881), 5
R.B. McDowell, Alice Stopford Green: A Passionate Historian (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1967), 5–17.
Anthony Brundage, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian England (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 1–6
See Joan Thirsk, “The History Women”, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wiehert, eds. Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State, and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish studies, 1995), 1–11
Ibid., 133–5, 143; Louise Creighton, A Social History of England (London: Rivington’s, 1887).
Alice Stopford Green, Henry II (London: Macmillan, 1888)
Alice Stopford Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1894).
Angus Mitchell, ed. The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), 61
Alice Stopford Green, The Old Irish World (London: Macmillan, 1912), 11.
Terry Eagleton, “Revisionism Revisited”, in Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 320.
A.K. Longfield, Anglo-Irish Trade in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1929)
M.D. O’Sullivan, Old Galway History of a Norman Colony in Ireland (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1942).
Kenneth Nicholls, “Gaelic Society and Economy in the High Middle Ages”, in A New History of Ireland, II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 397–438
Wendy Childs, “Ireland’s Trade with England in the Later Middle Ages”, Irish Economic and Social History, 9 (1982), 5–33
Timothy O’Neill, Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1987).
J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 28–31.
Lucy McDiarmid, The Irish Art of Controversy (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005).
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© 2006 Nadia Clare Smith
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Smith, N.C. (2006). Nationalist Women Historians, 1868–1922. In: A “Manly Study”?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596481_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230596481_3
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