Welcome to the homepage of the Women and the Rising project! Three students from SUNY Geneseo explored the role of Women in Ireland during the 1916 Rising and symbols surrounding them, and tried to view women in a contemporary, intersectional, and class-conscious lens.
Through the processes of symbolization and historical delegitimization, the contributions that the Women of Ireland have made faced the threat of marginalization. Until the recent revolution of gender and sexuality studies in history, women’s history was often put on the back burner and seen as secondary to masculine, cis-gendered heterosexual history. Our goal, as female historians in the era of the history of gender and sexuality, will be to both highlight and challenge these limiting spaces.
We will use examples of famous Republican, symbolic and mythical women to identify the contemporary resistance to the tropes and limitations of the modern conceptions of revolutionary Irish women. We will be asking many questions, and attempting to answer them. How do famous Revolutionary women like Maud Gonne both subvert and perpetuate symbolization of their femininity? How was the legacy of Warrior Queens thwarted in order to represent an objectifying Revolutionary ideal? How did female Irish presidents rework how we understand symbols?
We hope that our research will answer some of these intriguing questions and that you will enjoy exploring this topic with us!
Click here to view a Timeline of the Hidden Heroines of Irish History