Tenements (Gender)

The urban conditions found throughout the poorest parts of Dublin were prominently inadequate. Housing over 20,000 families, Dublin’s borderline uninhabitable tenements housed much of the lower working class. Women, already predetermined to play the roles rigidly placed by society, were most victimized by these conditions as they attempted to raise families in small, deeply unsanitary rooms.
Unsanitary Conditions
The tenements were often very unsanitary, with households sharing a single unclean bathroom and lacking facilities for washing. In addition, the infrastructure was often weak, with buildings collapsing from time to time. Malnutrition exacerbated the chance of disease, which often went untreated and spread through households quickly due to the prevailing lack of personal space and hygiene. This is evident in both Kevin Kearns’ Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History and various articles published during 1912 and 1913 in Dublin. In Charles Dawson’s 1913 paper regarding Dublin’s sanitation practices, he attributed these conditions to “hard-hearted” owners exploiting the desperation of the lower class, a lack of investments which fueled decay, and a government which left them at the mercy of coincidental charity.

Francis Street Tenement Room 1913 (RSAI – DD, No. 56)

Workload
Women were typically expected to care for the family and clean the rooms, which proved increasingly difficult as more children were common for poorer families, whose households required more upkeep. For single mothers, these expectations were coupled with the overbearing pressure to acquire finances to feed and clothe the family, a feat often only possible through begging and and the chance reception of charity.
Finances
Women had very little to no access to outside jobs and paid work, as the urban work environment was commonly dominated by men, with women being expected to limit themselves to the demands of the domestic sphere. This was especially problematic as one man’s wages were not enough to sufficiently feed a whole family, and only got worse as many fathers were engulfed by alcoholism or left the picture altogether, a theme present in Kearns’ An Oral History. For mothers in these situations, obtaining a job was typically not a realistic option because of the rigid gender roles and expectations by society for women to remain at home and be provided for by a husband. Even in situations where these norms were overcome, single women working jobs while simultaneously trying to care for their family were placed in predicaments humanly impossible to wholly solve.
Domestic Abuse
Poor Irish women were often the victims of domestic abuse, with men turning to alcoholism and physical violence as a means to maintain some sort of power in a class characterized by the lack thereof. This placed women in additional danger, as they were not only encumbered by the demands of urban poverty, but also by their socially-labelled “caretaker’s” violent outbursts. This is made evident in both Kearns’ aforementioned documentations and a 1913 article which draws connections between housing conditions and rampant crime.
Children
Under the 1908 Children Act, many men and women served time at Mountjoy Prison by 1911 for mistreating and neglecting their children, with many children also ending up in confinement, whether it be penitentiaries for petty crime or boarding and industrial schools.

Life for urban women, characterized by demeaning circumstances and an overwhelming workload, contributed to the fervor which defined the Rising in Dublin and prevailed after.

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