An Illustrated Talk by Dr Mary Pierse, University College Cork.

1810-1930 is not a period often associated with feminists or feminism in Ireland. If feminists existed, could they be anything other than few and insignificant in a century of turmoil?

However, if the era is renamed as ‘From Morgan to Markievicz’, the reality becomes more apparent. Closer examination reveals that Irish feminisms (and they were certainly plural and varied) were intrinsically bound up with identity and nationalism, and that their ambitions found expression in art, literature, drama, music and armed rebellion.

With considerable humour and determination, male and female feminists produced political cartoons, inflammatory doggerel, soulful poetry, fashion statements and unusual language lessons, and they pursued agendas of social and judicial reform.

For too many decades, the rich history of Irish feminists remained unsung. Yet many of their contributions to Irish life and society were highly significant.

This illustrated lecture will examine a selection of relevant remarkable figures and look at some surprising interventions in Ireland’s turbulent times.

MARY PIERSE currently teaches on the M.A. course in Women’s Studies at University College Cork where, since 1999, she has also taught Victorian and fin-de-siècle literature, colonial literature, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry at the English department.

A former Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, and later a Research Fellow at UCC, she compiled and edited Irish Feminisms 1825-1930 (Routledge Major Works series, 2010), a 5-volume set incorporating novels, short stories, poetry, essays and news material, most of which had been difficult for scholars to locate previously.

She is editor of George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds (2006) and co-edited (with Ma Elena Jaime de Pablos) George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature (2014), and (with Benjamin Keatinge) France and Ireland in the Public Imagination (2014).

She has published on Moore, Kate Chopin, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Antonio Fogazzarro, and on Irish poets Dennis O’Driscoll and Cathal Ó Searcaigh.

Ongoing research interests relate to Moore and artistic synaesthesia. Instigator of the George Moore International Conference series, she is a board member at the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies and serves on editorial boards and scientific committees for publications in Ireland, France and Spain.

Entry €10 per person payable at the door.

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