The Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 spurred organized political activity among women in Britain, including former suffragists who campaigned against coercion in Ireland and members of the Irish minority in Britain who supported more radical republican efforts to achieve Irish independence. Their efforts are particularly significant because they occurred immediately after the granting of partial suffrage to women in 1918. This article argues that the advent of female suffrage changed the landscape of women's political mobilization in distinct ways that were made visible by advocacy on Ireland, including the regendering of the discourse of citizenship and the creation of new opportunities beyond the vote for women to exercise political power. At the same time, the use of women's auxiliary organizations and special meetings and the strategic blurring of the public and private spheres through the political use of domestic spaces all indicate the strength of continuities with nineteenth-century antecedents. The article further situates women's political advocacy on Ireland in an imperial and transnational context, arguing that it was part of the process of reconceptualizing Britain's postwar global role whether through outright anti-imperialism, in the case of Irish republicans, or through humanitarianism and the new internationalism, in the case of most former suffragists. Finally, the article examines the failure of these two groups of women to forge alliances with each other, underscoring the ways in which both class and nationality challenged a notional common interest based on sex.
Ireland and the Irish in Interwar England To what extent did the Irish disappear from English politics, life, and consciousness following the Anglo-Irish War? Mo Moulton offers a new perspective on this question through an analysis of the process by which Ireland and the Irish were redefi ned in English culture as a feature of personal life and civil society rather than a political threat. Considering the Irish as the fi rst postcolonial minority, she argues that the Irish case demonstrates an English solution to the larger problem of the collapse of multi-ethnic empires in the twentieth century. Drawing on an array of new archival evidence, Moulton discusses the many varieties of Irishness present in England during the 1920s and 1930s, including working-class republicans, relocated southern loyalists, and Irish enthusiasts. The Irish connection was sometimes repressed, but it was never truly forgotten; this book recovers it in settings as diverse as literary societies, sabotage campaigns, drinking clubs, and demonstrations.
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on women in Parliament and in the cabinet, on political corruption, MPs' backgrounds, legislative outcomes, and much else, has stimulated the sharpest historical turn in political science for many years. In 2014, the Harvard scholar Arthur Spirling (now at New York University), set out an ambitious agenda for analyzing "British political development" since the early nineteenth century ("British Political Development: A Research Agenda," Legislative Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 [2014]: 435-37). It is a disappointing feature of this volume that historians do not pay as much attention to current political science, as political scientists are now showing towards history. The constitutional crisis over Brexit and its outcome looks set to encourage a fresh wave of political history. More than one set of hands, and handbooks, will be required for the task.
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