Helena Molony’s ‘Radical Reconceptualization of History’: Commemorating Revolution on the Stage and in the Streets

Abstract

In his survey of Irish media over the last two centuries, Christopher Morash explains that, during the Revival years, Irish literature, politics, and public life existed ‘in a frenzy of print’, with hundreds of different nationalist newspapers and periodicals produced during these years – a print culture that ‘was not simply the vehicle for the literary revival; it was a constituent part of it’. R. F. Foster has emphasized that ‘little newspapers and magazines of the nationalist fringe’, more than High Culture, ‘galvanized the imaginations and opinions of young radicals” who would go on to shape Ireland's literary and political future. This essay explores Irish literature and periodical culture of the nationalist fringe through a close examination of Bean na hÉireann (‘Woman of Ireland’, 1908-1911), Ireland's first nationalist periodical expressly written for and by women. Tracking the radical networks cultivated by this one-penny monthly, it focuses on editor Helena Molony (1884-1967), who provided a forum for marginalized thinkers, such as women, trade unionists, and militants nationalists, to ‘have a voice and influence in the matters… of their country’. In noting the tensions present in Molony's radical networks, this essay illuminates the local and national networks of Irish journalism, whether in terms of business practices, models for political separatism, pragmatic organizing principles, or abstract philosophy concerning the imagined communities that were a primary readership for this journal.