Revealing women's hidden lives

Some uncomfortable realities of women's lives feature in forgotten work by Munster playwrights, writes Sara Keating

Traditional narratives of Irish history have imagined Ireland as a cohesive nation with a uniform cultural and historical experience. Recent Irish social development, however, has insisted that a more plural reality is shaping Ireland's present, but this contemporary acknowledgement of Ireland's diversity has also necessitated a return to the past, where the lost histories of those silenced by the narratives of national history can be given back their voice.

At a conference in Cork recently, four theatre scholars brought their findings together to highlight the work of a series of pioneering female writers from Munster whose work was variously involved in exposing the often uncomfortable reality of women's lives throughout the first half of the 20th century. From three of the four playwrights that the conference was devoted to, only one would be remotely recognisable to even the most historical mind, yet in their time the women were prolific writers, and politically active philanthropists, with various areas of experience in public affairs, not least in campaigning for women's rights and, ironically, Ireland's independence.

The careers of the "Munster Women Playwrights" being celebrated spanned more than five decades, and the similarity in dramatic form and political concern create an historical pattern that suggests that Irish women's feminist concerns came to a standstill as Ireland's political goals were achieved.

Although many Irish women, like the earliest of the playwrights, had found their public vocation in the nationalist movement, it was actually nationalism that defeated their purposes. Their place in national and cultural history was overlooked as Irish history embraced its glorious national past and certain legal changes consolidated history's conservative concerns.

While the 1922 constitution of the Irish Free State guaranteed equality of treatment to women, much of the legislation passed in the 1920s and 1930s contradicted such liberal concerns, and in 1937 de Valera rewrote women's position in the constitution in line with Catholic social teaching.

Irish women were given a special place within the home as guardians of the State's "common good", but this privileged place was confined to a symbolic space that curbed, rather than advanced, women's hard-earned freedoms.

Playwrighting duo Geraldine Cummins and Suzanne Day were early pioneers of a feminist drama that aimed to draw attention to the widespread social oppression of Irish women. Velma O'Donoghue Greene, organiser of the conference and a research student at Trinity College, presented an interesting argument about the collaborative writers, who had two premieres at the Abbey during their lifetimes, but whose interesting lives as practising pioneers of their political beliefs eclipsed their dramatic output after Ireland's independence. Suzanne, the daughter of the 19th-century antiquarian Robert Day, for example, gained her public profile as a philanthropist and suffragette, rather than a writer, and worked as nurse during both World Wars.

Geraldine Cummins, on the other hand, abandoned her own philanthropic projects to her prolific writing career, which abandoned traditional theatre for the drama of the spiritualist movement, and she gained much notoriety as Ireland's most famous automatic writer.

Having fine-tuned her intuition with Hester Dowden, Cummins's regular practice gave her a fluency of communication with the spirit world. She claimed contact with two particular spirits, one an impulsive and erratic guide whose narratives remained largely incoherent, and another, more fluent, guide called Silenio, who communicated the entire content for a full-length book called The Scripts of Cleopatra to her. The Scripts of Cleopatra resembled Christian Apocryphal writings and Cummins's apparent ignorance of the subject certified the authenticity of her unusual literary practices for her greatest fans, but for others it raised more questions about the legitimacy of the process.

A high-profile law suit in which one of her assistants claimed equal ownership to the text - he had guided her hand throughout the spiritual visitation that produced the book - invited more scepticism about her methods, but the presiding judge concluded that "the law did not recognise that a spirit owned property in the world that if the MSS was the composition of the spirit, the spirit had used the brain of Geraldine Cummins to interpret and write the composition - so it belongs to Geraldine Cummins."

O'Donoghue Greene wishes that the more legitimate work of Cummins, particularly her collaborations with Day, generated such interest.

Despite a huge volume of material from both writers at the Cork Archive Institute, Cummins and Day are largely unknown for their abundant dramatic output, and O'Donoghue Greene could well do with a guiding hand from beyond the grave to grab public attention, as many of the plays are "little gems" that add significantly to the variety of women's writing being continuously uncovered by feminist scholars. Her small-scale production of their one-act play Fidelity at the Granary Studio certainly proved that their work merits contempor-ary revival for its insight into issues ignored in wider social histories, such as the plight of Ireland's female emigrants and the cruel affiliation of love and economics that dominated Irish life up until the 1960s.

These social issues permeate the work of BG Mac Carthy, Geraldine O'Leary and Teresa Deevy, whose work was also represented at the conference. Waterford-born O'Leary had the premiere of her play, The Woman at the Abbey, in 1929, upon Yeats's appraisal of her as "the best realistic peasant dramatist who has yet appeared".

O'Leary's struggle to maintain her artistic freedom under Yeats's keen editorial eye was not that unusual - even Synge and O'Casey were subject to his revisions - but the nature of the changes Yeats imposed speaks volumes about the social status of women at the time, which O'Leary's play, in fact, attempted to address.

His insistence that the dark, violent heroine commit suicide at the end of the play makes a clear statement about the patriarchal parameters of women's social freedom at the time, although O'Leary left enough room for contemporary interpretation to infer that the heroine's wilfulness does not necessarily sow the seeds of her damnation.

Teresa Deevy's personal wilfulness, meanwhile, sowed the seeds for her success rather than her damnation. What was most astonishing about her career - apart from her success in the male-dominated world of the theatre - was her understanding of the musicality of language when she herself was completely deaf by the time she was 20.

Indeed, her first real exposure to drama was in London where she spent a year learning how to lip-read; mostly by reading play-scripts and then watching them performed on stage.

The Abbey premiered four of her plays in the 1930s to great critical success, but Katie Roche is the work that she is best remembered for today. Its revival at the Abbey in 1994, with Derbhle Crotty as the volatile servant girl struggling to overcome the social limitations of her sex, was a belated acknowledgment of Deevy's place in the canon, but Deevy herself had to battle the same problems as her heroines even after her various successes as a playwright and a radio dramatist (she devoted the latter part of her career to radio drama despite her total deafness).

In fact, it was the success of work such as Deevy's which gave her fellow dramatist and contemporary BG MacCarthy the faith for beginning an academic project to recover the work of Ireland's little-known female writers.

Meanwhile, it is the dramatic skill still recognisable in MacCarthy's own plays, and the plays of Deevy, Day, Cummins, and O'Leary, that fuels the contemporary project of revival to which O'Donoghue Greene and herfellow scholars have devoted themselves.

For, while the plays reclaim the lost heritage of women's voices drowned out by the idealism of Ireland's "national history", they also reclaim some of Ireland's finest lost literature through a series of dramas worthy of recovery on their own merit.