The early years of the last century were a period of intense intellectual and political ferment in Ireland and it was not at all certain that the Irish State would take the narrowly Catholic form it subsequently did.
Some commentators - such as Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin, editors of Reinventing Ireland. Culture, Society and the Global Economy (2002), say we should not be afraid of delving into the past to rediscover strands in Irish life that transcend narrow forms of nationalisms and that can be reinterpreted to suit contemporary Ireland.
The writings of Hubert Butler provide one of these strands: his questioning Protestantism and cosmopolitanism, combined with his love of local things, strike chords with readers today. What could be more pertinent for a multi-cultural Ireland than the following sentences from his 1965 essay, Am I an Irish Republican? "We have come to see the state as an organisation for causing uniformity instead of for ensuring and guaranteeing the widest diversity. For men and women, when they are free, are infinitely various."
In the search for a more inclusive identity there are many lesser-known writers and activists from the early 20th century, particularly women, who are now being rediscovered. Rosamond Jacob is one example. Her writings deserve to be better known, both because of their intrinsic interest and because the things she had to say and some of the causes she espoused still speak to us today.
She was born into a middle-class Quaker family in Waterford in 1888. For knowledge of her life literary scholars are indebted to an illuminating short chapter by Damian Doyle in Female Activists: Irish Women and Change 1900-1960 (edited by Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy 2001). There is, so far as I know, no full-scale biography of Jacob, unlike her fellow activists and writers across the water Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, about whom there are substantial works. Jacob's feminist views have many parallels with those of Brittain and Holtby, but there is one significant difference: Jacob was fiercely anti-British. She was a member of the Gaelic League, Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBann. She also joined the Irish Women's Franchise League and was a lifelong friend of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington.
Like some other members of the IWFL, Jacob put her nationalism before her feminism, declaring that she was prepared to delay receiving the vote if it meant she could accept it from an Irish government rather than the British. She opposed the Treaty and argued provocatively that if a woman had been in the delegation to Downing Street the Treaty would never have been signed. She was imprisoned for a time by the Free State government.
So far, an unreconstructed nationalist; but as Jacob became disenchanted with the new Catholic state her politics widened. Her feminism came to the fore when, for example, she protested against government efforts to remove women from jury service. She also campaigned against the Censorship Bill. As with Brittain and Holtby, Jacob's politics turned in the 1930s from feminism to peace. She campaigned for disarmament and opposed capital punishment. In the last years of her life she was a member of CND. She was also worried about the effect around the world of large industrial corporations - what we might now call globalisation. Other interests included vegetarianism and animal welfare (her novels contain several striking portraits of animals). She died in 1960.
Rosamond Jacob anticipated contemporary research into women's history by writing an account of the life of Matilda Tone, The Rebel's Wife, published in 1957 and now out of print. Her first novel, Callaghan, published under the pseudonym F. Winthrop, is set in the years 1913 and 1914 and depicts the growing relationship between a Catholic nationalist and a Protestant suffragist. The fresh and lively portrait of Frances Morrin, a woman who forces Andy Callaghan to treat her as his mental equal, is astonishingly modern compared with later fictional portrayals of the limited horizons, mental and physical, of Irish women's lives. The novel gives a vivid insight into the political and intellectual ferment of the time. It too is out of print.
Jacob's next novel, The Troubled House, published in 1938, is set during the War of Independence and traces the fortunes of the Cullen family. One son is in the IRA, another is a pacifist and the father is an upholder of the status quo. The mother, while secretly sympathising with her republican son, tries to hold the family together.
Again the portraits of the women are modern. Maggie Cullen refuses to sentimentalise motherhood and does not believe in smothering her sons. The novel opens after she has been apart from them for three years nursing her sister in Australia so her niece can finish her college course. The usual practice at this time, as Vera Brittain bitterly points out, was to summon daughters back home from college in the event of a domestic crisis. Maggie has taught her sons how to sew and take care of themselves domestically (if only this had caught on in Ireland!). The novel also features two female artists who live independently and earn their own living. Jacob's novel thus provides a very different picture of Irish womanhood from, say, the downtrodden women in Edna O'Brien's fiction. But The Troubled House also is out of print.
There is an alternative Ireland to be found in the past. It languishes in libraries, waiting to be discovered.