On The Shoulders Of Giants . . . 'Women in Ulster' - Miriam Daly
This month, as part of our On the Shoulders of Giants series, and on the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Miriam Daly, we republish ‘Women in Ulster’, a lecture Daly delivered while on a speaking tour of the United States during March and April 1979.
The text was first published in an essay collection compiled by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in April, 1985.
Miriam Daly was a member of the Irish Republican Socialist Party from August, 1977 until her resignation from the party in March, 1979. From then on she focused mainly on working on behalf of republican prisoners. Two weeks before her assassination Daly was elected to the executive of the Smash H-Block Committee.
On the 26th of June, 1980 a British-backed unionist death squad broke into her Andersonstown home, they then tied Miriam up and waited for her husband and fellow activist, Jim Daly, to arrive home, but when he didn’t the killers short Miriam dead and made their getaway.
As is the case with the numerous other British-backed assassinations of political activists, they have never been brought to justice.
In this lecture, Miriam focuses on the origins of the female labour force in Ulster with the development of linen production towards industrialisation during the nineteenth century and the beginnings of women’s involvement in trade union struggles in the early twentieth century.
Miriam Daly.
Women in Ulster
1979
The history and social role of Irish woman is a new field for inquiry. The liberation of women is the most profoundly revolutionary task civilised society can tackle. This task is fundamentally revolutionary because relations between men and women are embedded in almost every social relationship and institution.
Sylvia Meehan, Chairperson of the Employment Equality Agency which was set up by Dáil Éireann to monitor and advise on the Equal Pay Legislation of 1974 and 1977, expressed this very well in her paper which was read at a seminar in Dublin in November 1978 on ‘Women’s Place in the Irish Economy. Present and Future’:
Human nature will readily acknowledge the interdependence of work and family, production and reproduction, but human memories are so short that we need to be reminded that this interdependence got a new twist when industrialisation separated work places from homes and supported an ideology which ascribed to women the primary responsibility for providing domestic services for all other members of the family, including the young, the old and the sick.
This ideology affects all women, whose availability and commitment is taken for granted. So much so that instead of being rewarded they are penalised. It encompasses those women who are not and never have been mothers, it exploits all women . . .
Greater division of labour in the family and the workplace has affected the character of both and produced situations of divided loyalties and conflicting values.
A conviction of the totality of the human experience of life, of the unity of the goals of liberation, of the inseparability of the individual’s public and private worlds, of the impossibility of women’s liberation in an environment of economic or political repression, underlies the approach taken to the struggle for the liberation of Ulster women in this essay, as it pervades the thinking of Irish women who have been in the leadership of the struggle for women’s liberation, from Anna Wheller to Louie Bennett, first woman President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in 1933, to Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, youngest ever popularly elected MP when she was returned in 1969.
An important factor in shaping the role of Ulster women was their industrial environment. Ireland’s major manufacture, linen, was carried on in Ulster on a domestic basis after 1660. It became increasingly important to the economy up to the outbreak of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in 1793.
In the enforced peace which followed the Cromwellian conquest, Ulster was regarded as the poorest of the provinces. An indicator of this is the relative amounts of land offered to persons who lent money to pay the English army under the terms of the Adventurers’ Act 1642. One acre of land was to be granted in Ulster for every four shillings advanced, one acre of Connacht land for every six shillings, one acre of Munster land for every twelve shillings, and one acre of Dublin land for every pound sterling.
These values could not have reflected the relative productive capacity of the land but reflect rather contemporaries’ views of the relative desirability of residence in the respective provinces and their assessment of the law and order situation.
When the peace of conquest came the people returned to their old settlements or made new ones. The Protestants were in the valleys and on the good land; the Catholics retreated to the hills and bogs, such as the highlands of Donegal, which to the present constitute the most vigorously Irish-speaking and Gaelic of the Irish Gaeltacht areas.
Ulster thrived and prospered and the linen manufacture of cloth produced on the domestic system from the largely home-grown flax was at the heart of this prosperity.
Spinning and weaving were carried out in the home in a pre-industrial process. Women and children, old and young, worked indoors or in the fields in a continuous round of activity. The household was the unit of production and in its operation and management the mother was an essential and equal partner, though the weaving process and attending markets were regarded as the man’s spheres.
There was complete unity between public and private roles. Work and leisure were not separated, and on feast-days or days of funerals the whole household took time off. Woman was not oppressed within the household, though she shared the oppression experienced by her class.
The additional earnings provided by the sale of the webs of cloth led to relative prosperity. Gaiety abounded, there was great interest in clothes and amusements, the people were self-confident and the wife rode pillion behind her husband to chapel or church or meeting on Sundays.
A poem by Thomas Beggs reflects the contrast between domestic work and the lot of women working in factories. It is called ‘The Auld Wife’s Address to her Spinning Wheel’. Two verses are quoted to illustrate this point:
Frae Tibbie Gordon I gat this wheel,
An’ then I was young an’ my face was fair,
An’ since the first day she cam’ into my shiel,
We aye had something to keep and to spare.
On the wintry night by the clear ingle side,
My wee bit lamp hung high in the lum,
An’ I sang my song, an’ my wheel I Plied,
An’ Rorie was pleased wi’ the heartsome hum,
But now upon her I maun spin nae mair,
An’ it makes my heart baith sorry an’ sair.
The mountain lass at her wee bit wheel,
How blythe was her e’e an’ how rosy her cheek;
Her bosom was white, an’ her heart was leal,
Her mein it was modest, her manner was meek;
But now the pert maidens, wha ply in the mill,
How wan is their visage, how dim is their e’e,
For the ban they maun bide is enough to chill
The spring of the heart an’ to deaden their glee:
To toil for men that are hard to please
In a hot-bed rank wi’ vice an’ disease.
The fear of the moral corruption of factory workshops expressed in the last two lines is stated more bluntly by a correspondent to the Belfast Newsletter who wrote ‘Live morality, perish factories’.
The conservatism that was to become such a marked feature of Ulster Unionism and the distaste for public levity were already apparent in some elements of Ulster pre-Famine society. A different view of factories is expressed by the following anonymous ballad from Armagh town which praises a spinning mill.
Mr Jacob Orr’s Spinning Mil
As I silently lay by a large flowing stream
A youth and a maiden did rove by same
He asked her the cause of such noise o’er the hill
And she answered it’s the music from My Orr’s Mill.
Behold yon fine object appears in the air
You’ll find great industry is carried on there;
My master has agents his orders to fill,
Mr. Henry, young Wright, and the Clerk of the Mill
And hundreds beside me who would have been poor,
And forced out to wander from door to door;
Were it not for the coin which is cast by his Mill,
And marked with the beautiful stamp, Laurelhill.
I have only quoted three of the ten stanzas of this ballad but it must have been inspired or printed by sources close to the management, as it is impossible to believe that any member of the Ulster working class at that time would have welcomed payment in token money.
However, the evidence in Betty Messenger’s book Picking Up the Linen Threads indicates that women had a light-hearted approach to work.
The mechanisation of the spinning process of linen manufacture led to the deepening of capitalism and the extension of the putting out process.
The labour force in weaving was expanded to keep up with the output of cheap yarn whilst household earnings of the domestic workers were eroded by the reduction in earnings for the domestic spinning of home-grown flax.
Women and young boys and girls were employed away from home as weavers. In County Down children of non-weaving parents were sent to weavers who taught them the trade in return for food, lodging and the agreement to stay wit them for two or three years.
Higher rates were paid for weaving in factories than could be earned domestically. As happened at Lowell in Massachusetts, a large weaving labour force divorced from the land was concentrated in the towns of County Down and in Belfast. They were mainly between fourteen and twenty years old, boys and girls, and they lived in houses provided by their employers. Working long hours.
In times of high food prices, as during the Great Famine, there were cases of families working around the clock on the loom, men and women, to earn the price of food (Handloom Weavers Committee, 1838). The possibility of such earnings did, however, lessen the number of deaths from hunger in Ulster during the Great Famine.
The mechanisation of the weaving process of linen manufacture was completed during the 1860’s, and this brought the domestic system to an end. The location of the industry shifted east, and Belfast became the dominant centre.
During the nineteenth century Belfast grew from a town of some 20,000 inhabitants in 1801 to one of over 350,000 in 1901, a rare growth that was exceeded only by the fastest growing American cities.
The numbers of small-holdings declined dramatically and the Ulster working class became increasingly a proletariat divorced from ownership or access to the means of production except on the strict terms dictated by their employers.
Hiring fairs where young women sold their labour as farm servants for a season became common throughout the north. Young Donegal girls walked long distances to these fairs, where they were hired for work on the richer, larger farms on the eastern side of the province. Emigration was preferable if the means to emigrate were to hand.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the conditions of women in factories were oppressive. Wages were low, hours long, health poor, life expectancy short, pregnancies frequent and infant mortality rates high.
But because of the long history of manufacture in Ulster, and increased employment in the making-up trades – for example the shirt industry in Derry and the surrounding countryside, or in the sprigging industry in Belfast and its hinterland – Ulster women had work opportunities apart from domestic service, which was the only opening for poor women in other provinces.
This led to a militant determination which has become the hallmark of Belfast women in particular; and Belfast was where the majority of the province’s working women lived by the end of the nineteenth century.
The growing dominance of Belfast was well expressed by J.W. Good, who wrote, in Ulster and Ireland (1919): ‘Belfast is to Ulster what Paris is supposed to be to France. It imposes its will on the community and no movement succeeds to which it denies support . . . . The combativeness of Belfast is equalled only by its self-assertiveness.’
The conditions in the factory were harsh. A striking woman factory worker told James Connolly in Belfast:
. . . . its over forty-five years ago since I started work in the mills. I was
Just turned eight when I began. When you were eight you were old
enough to work. Worked in steam, making your rags all wet, and
sometimes up to your ankles in water. The older you got the more
work you got. If you got married you kept on working. Your man
didn’t get enough for a family. You worked til your baby came,
and went back as soon as you could, and then, God forgive you,
you counted the years till your child could be a half-timer and
started the same hell of a life again.
Messenger’s work underlines the prevalence of child labour in the mills.
Though the woman was a full, sometimes the sole, wage-earner, no special arrangements were made to help her with domestic work or in bringing up the children. James Connolly wrote about this in The Re-Conquest of Ireland:
Driven out to work at the earliest possible age, she remains fettered to her wage earning, a slave for life. Marriage does not mean for her a rest from outside labour, it usually means that to outside labour the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is a slave to that slave. In Ireland that female worker has exhibited in her martyrdom an almost damnable patience.
Whilst the majority of working-class women were becoming more oppressed, new opportunities were opening for the women of the middle class and petty bourgeois families. Most of these were provided by the Churches and all were tinged by the spirit of Evangelicalism which became dominant after the sweeping success of the Great Revival movement of 1859, which became known in Ulster history as ‘The Year of Grace’. On the Roman Catholic side, orders of nuns opened schools, hospitals, orphanages and homes for physically and mentally handicapped all over Ulster.
These gave opportunities to energetic women who were dedicated to the religious life to develop their gifts for administration and to serve wide sections of the community. Protestant women heard the call to foreign mission fields and their energy in evangelising in all the continents has yet to be chronicled.
For example as early as the 1840s Ulster women were active in the missions to China. Philanthropy was the main outlet for the energies of the middle-class women who were totally freed from domestic work by the abundance and low wages of domestic servants.
The only way open to women working in manufactures to improve their conditions was through organisation in trade unions. Recent research has shown that women were involved in all labour movements and trade agitations in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century.
There is every reason to assume that a fortiori they were even more heavily involved in Ireland, where women frequently accepted as the tenant of the farm or small-holding and had to manage all the production when the husbands were away spalpeening (on migratory work).
There is no evidence to indicate that agrarian agitations or factions were male-dominated. J.R. Fox’s work on tenure and kinship on Tory Island shows that women inherited land and that the family was not patrilinear.
The first major industrial conflicts that women were involved on a large scale in Belfast were the linen strikes of 1872 and 1874. These were sparked off by strikes by the male flax dressers for increases in wages. The employers locked out all the workers, including the women and girls who compromised about 70 per cent of the work-force in the industry. They then tried to entice the women to return to work leaving the men locked out.
Editorials in the Newsletter read: The women and girls are blameless . . . They did not strike but because of the strike they were locked out and now they may get bread whatever way they please.’
The speeches which two women made at this time show their militancy and determination to resist attempts to divide them from the male workers:
Miss Brown: Sisters, I believe we are all united here to stand as firm
as a rock, and I hope, as I am informed that the gates are to be
thrown open on Monday, that not one of us will be seen there,
unless they put up a notice to give us our old wages . . . The profits
of the mill owner are too great.
Miss Havelock: . . . the masters have been raised from the dung pit
to the hill. The workers have built them country sites, have
shovelled money into them and there they stood without a friend
. . . Oh ye poor oppressed sins and daughters of Erin: there is no
country so oppressed. It is work or want.
The organisation of women workers in the linen industry was not systematically undertaken, however, until the 1890s when visitors from the Women’s Trade Union Provident League in England came to Belfast. Encouragement was given by the Belfast Trades Council, and an activist, Mary Galway, emerged, who became secretary of the first trade union for female textile workers in Ireland: the Textile Operatives’ Society.
In 1897 she led 8,000 workers in a strike against the enforcement of strict discipline and penalties in the factories and workshops under the provisions of the Truck Act (1896):
Posting up a list of all rules and regulations as to fines and penalties
which they (the employers) wished to enforce in their factories was
accompanied by considerable agitation by the operatives in a large
number of factories in Belfast and District refusing to work under
the conditions formulated. The stoppage of work involving about
8,000 operatives began on January 19th. Negotiations between the
Belfast Trades Council (in the person of Mary Galway) and the
employers resulted ina provisional return to work on January 25th;
the matter in dispute being left for settlement by subsequent
negotiations. These resulted in considerable modifications of the
rules originally posted.
(P. P. Board of Trade, Report on Strikes and Lockouts 1898)
This is the first instance in Ireland of a woman negotiating directly with the employers in a major trade dispute. These instances also show that despite what the literature constantly describes as the notorious difficulty of organising women workers, the Belfast linen operatives were as progressive politically as the cotton spinners in the north-west of England.
Mary Galway enjoyed the support of William Walker and other Belfast socialists in her organisational work, but like them she tended to concentrate her efforts on the better-paid Protestant workers and to be an economist in her approach to Irish workers’ problems. By this | mean that agitation or discussion of the Irish national question was regarded as a diversion from more relevant preoccupations with immediate issues which were of interest to all members of the working class such as rates of wages or conditions of work. This group tried to prevent the affiliation of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union to the Belfast Trades Council in 1907 and of the Irish Women Workers’ Union and the Irish Textile Workers’ Union which was a women’s union organised by James Connolly amongst the most needy section of the mill girls who were untouched by Mary Galway’s organisation.
Connolly came to Belfast as organiser of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1910 and lived with his family on the Falls Road. When new rules were introduced by the employers to tighten discipline in the factories and workshops the women again struck as in 1897 and they turned to James Connolly for leadership. Notices were posted throughout the workshops announcing a system of fines for, among other things, singing, laughing, talking, or ‘adjusting the hair’ during working hours. A girl who brought sweets or knitting needles into the mill could be instantly sacked. At a mass meeting held at St Mary’s Hall in the centre of the city the girls unanimously passed a resolution condemning ‘as a disgrace to civilisation the conditions sought to be imposed on us by the mill owners.’ Connolly described the tactic he used to defeat the inhumanity of the employers:
I’ve advised them not to go back in ones and twos but to gather
outside the mill and go in as a body; to go in singing. If when at
work one girl laughs and is reprimanded, they are all to begin
laughing and if one girl sings and is checked, they are all to sing.
And if a girl is dismissed for breaking the rules they are to all walk
out with her. They have accepted the idea enthusiastically and
before they left tonight they were busy making up a song to sing as
they go back.
The employers gave up and the Belfast women workers had assured for themselves conditions of work which allowed some humanity and gaiety at their work.
Mary Galway resented Connolly’s intrusion as organiser of women workers which she regarded as her sphere: ‘Mr Connolly should confine himself to the operation of his own union and not trespass on the domain of a society that fought and was fighting the women’s battle all along.’ She commented. But other prominent women trade unionists emerged in Ulster.
The women’s movement there took the same course as in the rest of Ireland. That is, there was growing awareness on the part of feminist activists of the unity of the women’s, the economic and the national questions.
For example, Marie Johnson, the wife of Tom Johnson, was the first unpaid secretary of the Irish Textile Workers’ Union and also active in the Belfast Co-operative Society and the Irish Labour Party which her husband led in Dáil Éireann. Winnie Carney who first became his secretary and was the last woman to leave the GPO in 1916. Nelly Gordon who started life as a shawlie in the mills took a job as a full-time trade union offical; she thereby suffered a reduction in wages from seventeen shillings and ninepence a week to seven shillings and sixpence.
It would be wrong to think that the tradition of activism amongst Ulster working-class women was confined to Belfast. When the Congress of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, by far the largest of the Irish trade unions, voted for a resolution in favour of equal pay for equal work in 1948 the case for women’s rights was put by three Derry women: Margaret O’Donnell, Eileen Flynn and Doris Vorran.
This was an important milestone on the way to the historic concession by the Dublin government on equal pay in 1975. But even during the years of retrenchment that followed on the Civil War, women trade unionists both North and South had broader preoccupations than purely women’s rights.
As Sylvia Meehan has expressed it:
Women’s contribution has been a more generous one. They could
have argued simply for equal pay and women’s rights. They did
more than this, bringing with them a humane concern for all of
society’s underprivileged and handicapped sections.
The Miriam Daly mural on Oakman Street, West Belfast, which was unveiled in December, 2016.