Power, Gender and the Nation: Negotiations of Belonging in Evelyn Conlon’s Short Story “Park-Going Days”

Abstract

Introduction During the decades following the Civil War, the Government of Ireland devoted itself to reconstructing a nation that had been a colony for several centuries. Aided by a protectionist national policy, the State cultivated its own rigid and uncompromising version of Republican Motherhood based on a self-sacrificing attitude that would put the good of the nation above any personal desire (Valiulis 1995, 2011). That political, economic and ideological process served to revive the old concept of "Mother Ireland" which took a new shape under the dictates of the State and the Catholic Church. Thus, in the central decades of the 20th century, the feminine icons of Mother Church and Mother Ireland were presented as conduct models to follow to the extent that women were "actively interpellated as national subjects through identification with territory, soil, land and landscape" (Gray 1999: 205). In practice, that meant a tough legal and moral control over the Irish population founded on traditional patriarchal values. According to Heather Ingman, "nations construct their identity around fixed concepts of gender" (2007: 3), and Ireland has been no exception as, for too many decades, the social status of women was framed by institutions that oppressed them one way or another. These institutions, identified as family and household structures, and employment and welfare policies, were supported in the 1937 Constitution. More particularly, in terms of employment, by 1926 only 6% of married women were working outside the home and this figure remained low until the 1960s (O'Dowd 1987: 27). Consequently, the vast majority of the married women were economically dependent on their husbands what inevitably had an impact on their personal autonomy and agency. Accordingly, a series of laws designed to seclude women and mothers in the home were passed in the 1920s and 1930s (Steiner-Scott 1997). At the same time, all sorts of violent behaviour were secluded within the walls of the home and socially perceived as domestic affairs. Legal attention to the matter had to wait until 1996 when the Domestic Violence Act was passed. In response to that multi-tiered repressive context, women exerted many forms of negotiation to accomplish some degree of agency. For example, Gray and Ryan (1997), O'Keefe (2013) and Walter (2014) among others, have indicated that the main causes of migration among women were poor labour conditions and dismal social prospects and dissatisfaction or disagreement with certain aspects of Irish society and morality. Unlike other European nations, it all led to a higher rate of female than male migration in the central decades of the 20th century (Walter 2004). Those women who remained in the island were ideologically, economically and socially pushed to become wives-and-mothers. Contrary to this mandate, many of them found ways to contest the norms, as Inglis has summarized: For most of the last century they had (in comparison with other Western societies) the lowest levels of marriage and, correspondingly, the highest levels of bachelors and spinsters. On the other hand, Ireland had [...] the highest level of marital fertility. This meant that those who did get married tended, in comparison with married women in other Western societies, to have a large number of children (2005: 10). A slow turn in the Irish arena for women would start in 1972 with the publication of the First Commission on the Status of Women. A year later, Ireland joined the European Economic Community allowing new opportunities for change. Contextualisation of the social, political and religious elements that frame the short story "Park-Going Days" is essential in order to interpret Conlon's literary portrayal of Irish women, "an often submerged population group within the public life of the nation" (Ingman 2009: 17). The author's political background will also be considered as a relevant element in the framing of women's agency and their multiple forms of inclusion and exclusion. …