Irish liberty and British democracy: the third Irish home rule crisis, 1909–14. By James Doherty. Pp. 308. Cork: Cork University Press. 2019. €39.

Abstract

bers of society. Even though the onset of war in 1914 and radicalisation of Irish nationalism leading to the 1916 Rising divided the suffrage movement, Hayden did not mind whether enfranchisement of women was awarded by a Westminster or Dublin parliament. When the bill was passed in London in 1918, Hayden and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington among others, were identified by a journalist as accompanying the pioneering suffragist Anna Haslam to the polling station. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hayden’s professional life expanded in U.C.D. Publishing articles and book reviews, her sole history book, A short history of the Irish people, written with George A. Moonan, was published in 1921. The authors made no claim to originality and admitted it was written from a nationalist perspective. It became the main school and college textbook into the 1960s. Hayden also remained a commanding figure within political and public circles. She accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) and William T. Cosgrave’s government but was among the few women who opposed the ‘reactionary and paternalist’ (p. 278) positions of the Cosgrave and then Éamon de Valera governments towards women. She campaigned against legislation that undermined women’s citizenship rights, particularly their right to sit on juries, and restrictions that affected women’s employment and career prospects. Hayden favoured the participation of women in the formulation of public policy because it would bring new insights into discussions about all aspects of national life. Hayden is probably best known for her opposition to articles 40, 41, and 45 concerning the status of women in the 1937 constitution. Padbury details her prominent role as leader of the National University of Ireland Women Graduates Association (N.U.W.G.A.) in the highprofile campaign to secure amendments not just to the above articles but also articles 9 on citizenship and 16 on voting rights in the draft constitution. The N.U.W.G.A. and other female deputations secured a significant amendment to articles 9 and 16 with the inclusion of the phrase ‘without distinction of sex’ (p. 295) but failed to secure any amendment or deletion of the other articles. After her retirement in 1938 she continued working with the poor and was active on behalf of women graduates. She remained a scholar and feminist through to her death in 1942. This short review does not do justice to Padbury’s industrious mining of the fifty-nine volumes of Hayden’s diaries and papers and all the other attendant collections and secondary sources, to present what another reviewer correctly called a ‘page-turner’ of a book. Reading this elegantly-written biography bringsMary Hayden to life as a public intellectual and scholar with conflicted emotions and feelings, while providing the reader with fascinating and new information on a woman who sought and found her own identity and agency. Mary Hayden must be considered a central figure in the formation of twentieth century Ireland just as much as any military or political figure.