Did Paul Henry really use thatched cottages as a metaphor for imprisoned Irish womanhood, asks Mary Leland

Eamon de Valera wasn't the only person with that long-ridiculed notion of Irish womanhood as a group of comely maidens dancing at the crossroads. No, Michael Collins was prey to the same romantic idiocy in his assessment of the Ireland he wanted to create, full of the native beauty and grace he had witnessed in Connemara: "One may see processions of young women riding down on the island ponies to collect sand from the seashore, or gathering in the turf, dressed in their shawls and in their brilliantly-coloured skirts made of material spun, woven and dyed by themselves as it has been spun, woven and dyed for a thousand years. It is only in such places that one gets a glimpse of what Ireland may become again."

Again? What did they want of us, these new men describing women much as they might describe the rock of ages? Was that what he really thought, this hero who would take Lady Hazel Lavery out to dinner, holding her furs and her flowers as she moved into and out of reverent hotels and taxi-cabs?

Was that what he really wanted, women in red skirts cutting turf forever on the bogs of Ireland, condemned to island ponies even while he courted society beauties at the RDS?

Because even when this was written (in The Path to Freedom - Dublin, 1922) the imagery was a lie, according to the theories inspiring the linked exhibitions Cooling Out: on the Paradox of Feminism and Gendering the Irish Landscape at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork.

It was a lie because by then the rural idyll portrayed by such painters as Charles Lamb, Sean Keating and Paul Henry was only geographically accurate: the people were fleeing from their small, impoverished holdings and from their spinning wheels.

Such a lie in fact that Dr Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, curator of Irish paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland, can suggest that those dear little white cottages so artfully placed in Henry's landscapes of the west are nothing less than metaphors for imprisoned Irish womanhood.

It was on issues raised in her paper on "Landscape, Space and Gender and their role in the construction of female identity in newly independent Ireland" (in Gendering Landscape Art - 2000) that the "gendering" element of the Glucksman event was based.

All the same, I asked her, when we spoke last week, was Paul Henry really deliberately replacing human figures with thatched cabins (they'll never look the same to me again!) as a way of pandering to the political ethos of the time which was firmly restricting women to the domestic layer of the new Ireland?

Well, no, of course not; this is a personal, possibly self-indulgent reading of the Henry paintings. She doesn't believe that he had banished people from his work to make a political point, but he did banish people for no discernible reason after 1917 or so - "maybe he decided that the landscape itself was enough?".

It certainly paid, all those blue mountains and roiling clouds, and certainly the cumulative effect encourages an unsettling suspicion of what Henry, Keating (a passionate believer in "a nationalist Gaelic Ireland"), Lamb and McGonigal might have been aiming for at the time they produced these pictures.

That was the time when, as suggested in Dr Bhreathnach-Lynch's essay, "the homosocial bonding of nationalism required the exclusion of women from the body politic."

The legal framework supporting this strategy included the Civil Service Amendment Act of 1925, the ban on divorce, the juries bill of 1927, the ban on women remaining in the civil service after marriage, the Censorship Act, which meant women couldn't even read about birth control let alone practise it (it was already banned) and of course the domestic landscape envisioned for women in the Constitution of 1937.

It does add up, and when I ask assistant curator Ciara Healy if she bought this reading of the times and their images, she responds with a sharp affirmative. She is responsible, with Glucksman director Fiona Kearney, for mounting this area of the exhibition which attempts (not altogether successfully, perhaps) to review the career of feminism itself - "a political or social movement which has created so many positive changes while simultaneously developing negative connotations".

A paradox, in other words, alternatively examined by an international group of curators led by the Glucksman's Rene Zechlin.

Yet with this collection of installations, panels and videos murmuring away downstairs like a counterpoint, even with the tower of Attic Press memorabilia indicating the intervening achievement of liberty, equality and sorority, this "gendering" sequence comes as something of a shock to the sensibilities.

It becomes clear that for Irishwomen of the last century, this is where it all began, and Healy has a crisp way of deflating the viewer's disbelief. Was she saying, I wondered as we looked at Keating's shawled and scarfed young Aran woman, that she wasn't wearing that costume when he painted her?

"Well if she was, she didn't want to be," says Healy, who decodes Lamb, Whelan and Sir John Lavery with a stern modern eye. "These women were painted in defiance of a new time in a new country; this wasn't quite the way women saw themselves before and during the War of Independence."

So these familiar, almost iconic, pictures from the 1920s and 1930s weren't representative of what Irish women were wearing at the time in those places? "I think this is somebody he dressed up," says Healy, dismissing Lamb as she reminds me of the way in which so many of these paintings became powerful tourist advertisements.

As her wall text makes clear, Healy sees the early years of the Free State as a time when many myths about Irishness, especially about Irish women, were appropriated for political propaganda to provide a sense of original identity. Romantic depictions of the west of Ireland, and idealised representations of women in that landscape, became part of a shared memory among Irish people and made the connection between painted landscapes and a mythic motherland inseparable.

There's more than one "construct" going on here, for Healy - in defining the political ideology which reduced and restricted women, legally, sexually and spiritually - has organised her assembly with some cunning.

It begins with the now-ironic assertion of Irish womanhood in that bank-note portrait of Lady Hazel Lavery (far from island ponies and turf-cutting she was reared!).

Allegory and archetype, painted by Sir John Lavery in response to a commission which was offered as a token of gratitude for the help he and his wife had given to the Irish delegation during negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, this projected the desired image of idealised Irish womanhood.

From there, the narrative leads to Keating's hard-muscled, strong and silent men - The Race of the Gael - to emigration, to images of grief and loneliness, to the outbreak of little grottoes and devotion to the Virgin Mother in a kind of conspiracy of deprivation connived between church and state, and to Leo Whelan's solitary woman polishing the household silver in The Kitchen Window. We knew, surely, what we were seeing when we read these pictures - lovely, lonely, mothering self-sacrifice; strong, dominant, decisive manhood?

The virgin statues provided by artist Mick O'Shea as examples of local shrines indicate the prevailing ethos for womanhood: present and visible but devoted to the family, a devotion which masked the injustices against women in an extraordinary ideological contradiction - the Free State, but free for whom?

Remembering Susan Sontag's opinion that interpretation is the intellect's revenge on art, it is with something like a sigh of relief for the viewer searching now with new eyes that this narrative ends in the colourful roundels of Mainie Jellett's Madonna and Child. Well now, what have we here? We have the new Ireland indeed, and it's female, largely Protestant, with some family money, probably unmarried, travelled, adventurous and far from island ponies.

"At the time", says Healy, "Jellett was the only Irish artist expressing national culture in a modern vocabulary - and of course she was banned from the RHA exhibitions, where academicians still saw Ireland as rural and the Irish people as still tied to the land."

Jellett, of course, with Nano Reid and other colleagues, set up their own forum with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Her presence here is a kind of counter-blast to the bare feet, rosaries and bogs she was intent on leaving behind, and the Lady Lavery portrait which was meant to enshrine a cultural hinterland to which Hazel herself was totally foreign.

So - a construct, a lie, a paradox? Bringing these connected questions into the 21st century allows a swirl of practitioners from Germany, Canada, France, Ireland and Finland to offer interpretations of women in modern society, from Doris Lessing to Elizabeth Arden.

Engaging and often compelling, none of them quite adds up to the powerful iconography of the gendering sequence, perhaps because none of them quite adds up to the actual artistic power of the images themselves, even if they are a falsehood.

Cooling Out: on the Paradox of Feminism and Gendering the Irish Landscape continue at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork until Nov 26. The above questions will be debated in the panel discussion "What Happened to Feminism?" at the Glucksman at 3pm on Nov 4, led by participants in the exhibitions, including Dr Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch