Mná na hÉireann – John Mulqueen on a fiery debate over women’s role and the Constitution

We will have to wait a bit longer for the promised referendum to change the constitutional status of women. The widespread view that this status should be updated echoes the arguments made by feminists in 1937 during the debate on Éamon de Valera’s proposed constitution, when Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington argued that his government’s attitudes towards women were not just old-fashioned but “fascist” – a woman’s place was not “in the home”.

Newspapers reported opposition to the clauses in the Fianna Fáil government’s draft constitution as they related to women: female graduates of the National University of Ireland deplored the omission of the principle of equal rights and opportunities. A well-attended meeting in Dublin heard that these had been enunciated in the Proclamation of the Republic and the Free State constitution; dropping them would leave the door open for “reactionary legislation” against women.

Mary Kettle contended that women who worked outside the home would not have any security if the voters approved the new constitution. De Valera, she argued, should fall back on the “classic simplicity of language” of the 1916 Proclamation, which guaranteed religious and civil liberty, and equal rights and opportunities to all citizens.

Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington argued that the draft constitution was anti-republican: it deprived women of the equal status and opportunities accorded them. She wrote, in the pro-Fianna Fáil Irish Press, ironically, that the Proclamation of the Republic, with its explicit guarantee of equal citizenship, was being scrapped “for a fascist model”, where women were relegated to “permanent inferiority” as “the weaker sex”. The proposed constitution, Sheehy-Skeffington stated, reflected de Valera’s “well-known reactionary views” on women – his ideal was “the strictly domestic type of woman” who eschewed politics as a male concern. “Nor is he alone in this. Other members of his cabinet and present entourage are similarly tainted.” For Sheehy-Skeffington, this mirrored the situation in which women found themselves under Hitler and Mussolini, and Salazar. Worse could follow in Ireland: she warned that the government’s proposals might foreshadow deprivation of voting rights. In Quebec, due to what she termed oppressive “clerical influences”, women could not vote in provincial elections. All this was inevitable, Sheehy-Skeffington thought, as the best had been lost during the 1916 Rising and the civil war, and power had fallen to “lesser men” who no longer cared for “the ideals inspiring Easter Week”. She pointed out that James Connolly, a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation, had supported Ireland’s suffragettes “heart and soul”.

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Kathleen Clarke, widow of Tom Clarke, the first signatory of the Proclamation, publicly supported Sheehy-Skeffington on the draft constitution. This was not the first time the independent-minded Clarke, a Fianna Fáil councillor and former senator, had defied the party leadership on a measure affecting women’s rights.

Women of all parties, Sheehy-Skeffington declared, should “wake up” and demand the restoration of the constitutional principle of equal rights and opportunities.

While some of de Valera’s critics thought that his proposed constitution was too Catholic, in 1937 the Fine Gael Opposition accused him of not being Catholic enough during Dáil exchanges on the civil war in Spain. Franco’s rebel forces, with major military backing from Hitler and Mussolini, and the full support of the Catholic Church, sought to overthrow the elected government of the Spanish Republic. Fine Gael’s James Dillon asked de Valera if he had considered taking steps to recognise Franco’s regime. Did he intend to maintain diplomatic relations with what Dillon termed a “notoriously communistic” government which was primarily concerned to drive religion out of Spain? In his reply, de Valera stated that it could not be assumed that those governments who had diplomatic relations with Spain condoned “the horrors which have been committed against nuns, priests and civilians”.

Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington became the best-known defender of the Spanish Republic – it granted equal rights to men and women – in de Valera’s Irish state. She also fronted the Women’s Aid Committee that attempted to raise funds for the beleaguered defenders of democracy in Spain. Frank Ryan, the commander of the Irish unit in the International Brigades, fighting for the Spanish Republic, made an obvious point about the regime likely to be installed after a Franco victory: in such a totalitarian state no one would have the right to vote.

As a child, the daughter of Seán MacEntee, the prominent Fianna Fáil minister, prayed that de Valera would maintain relations with the Spanish Republic. Máire MacEntee’s parents, she remembered, fought “vigorously, not to say violently” over his proposed constitution, particularly the “woman’s place” clause – “doors slammed, voices raised, blows threatened, the lot”.

Twelve years later, in 1949, she arrived in Madrid as an Irish diplomat, where women were denied all participation in public life, and where she discovered that she might be the only female driver of a car in Madrid, if not in all of Spain.

The men and women of Spain endured a 41-year wait before they could cast their votes again, in 1977, in a democratic election.