Irish History: 'Genteel Revolutionaries" hardly trips off the tongue. Like "Restless Buddhists" or "Mormon Philosophers", it sounds the sort of title destined for the remainders pile. We do not associate revolution with refinement, or celebrate mass movements for their good manners and moderation, writesWilla Murphy.
Revolution requires a certain number of smashed windows and dirty fingernails, and participants who keep their hands clean are unlikely to be remembered. So it is that the narrative of Irish feminism has forgotten the quiet achievements of the Quaker couple Anna and Thomas Haslam, founders of the Dublin Women's Suffrage Association in 1876, campaigners for birth control, the education of women and the protection of prostitutes. Revolution means "revolve" as well as "revolt", however, and it was just such a slow, steady turn of public opinion that the Haslams hoped to bring about. Vindicating its title, Carmel Quinlan's lucid study reclaims their 40-year career of letter-writing, lobbying, pamphlet-distribution and drawing room meetings in the cause of women's equality. Their work prepared the way for a new generation of educated women whose loud and unlawful activities set the agenda for radical reform. When those militant suffragettes talked about destruction, though, the Haslams counted themselves out.
For Quinlan, this is precisely what makes them interesting. A law-abiding lady who found rebellion as distasteful as sex, Anna nevertheless challenged the system from within. It is no coincidence that such a gender dissenter was brought up among the Quakers, whose belief in a spiritual democracy leads logically to the fight for a social one. For if women require no mediation before God and don't need men to save them, they don't need men to vote for them either.
Thomas Haslam's pamphleteering belongs to the explosion of writing about sexuality in his day when, as Michel Foucault has argued, sex came out of the bedroom and into the book. Medical, philosophical, and political texts of this period translated flesh into words, chased sex out from between the sheets to between the covers. Sex became the occasion not of silence but of endless verbal intercourse. It was the secret no one could stop talking about. Despite their celibate marriage, the Haslams kept abreast of the latest technologies in Victorian contraception,from the sponge and syringe to the cap and the condom. Thomas himself was an early theorist of the rhythm method, or "safe period", though his miscalculations caused women more blues than rhythm (and might explain why his wife chose celibacy as the safer option). One of Ireland's first New Men, Haslam challenged the perceived wisdom that boys will be boys and prostitutes will be necessary, and suggested that for women to be truly free, men must become more like them.
As if to prove their conviction that sex is bad for your health, the Haslams' lived from the Emancipation era to the Easter Rising. Yet the turbulent events which led to the formation of the Irish State are strangely absent from their writing. These genteel unionists have more to say about copulation than about the nation, a preference not unknown in the Dublin of today. Quinlan is too uncritically enthusiastic about her subject, seeing all of the strengths but few of the weaknesses of this liberal, "cosmopolitan" unionism. She seems unperturbed that the philanthropist Thomas spent the Famine years in the reading room of the British Museum, sitting forward and thinking of England.
Willa Murphy is a lecturer at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages, University of Ulster
Genteel Revolutionaries: Anna and Thomas Haslam and the Irish Women's Movement. By Carmel Quinlan. Cork University Press, 265 pp. €57.25