Tag Archives: Irish Society

The Media Landscape of the Irish Free State

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The early years of Irish Independence (especially after the Civil War ended in 1923) coincided with one of the most significant moments in international media history – the arrival of broadcasting.  Radio broadcasts by enthusiastic amateurs rapidly developed into nascent stations all over the world, and by the mid-1920s many countries (Ireland included) regulated these by creating state-regulated stations such as 2RN, which began broadcasting in Ireland in January 1926.  The world’s newest nation-state was therefore partly formed by the structures of the broadcasting era, especially the sense that a country’s radio station was the ‘voice of the nation’ among the international community.

The arrival of radio changed Irish mass media dramatically, bringing it directly into people’s homes in real time, and offering all of the possibilities of sound rather than print.  Nevertheless, printed mass media remained the dominant form in very many respects, not least because of the sheer volume of print choices available to readers who might typically have access to just one Irish radio station (along with the uncertain reception of British and other European programming, depending upon geography and weather conditions).  In Ireland, the first decade or so of the Free State brought some very significant changes to the mass media landscape even aside from the arrival of radio.

The first major change was the demise of the Freeman’s Journal, in publication since 1763 and the dominant platform of mainstream Irish nationalism until the arrival of William Martin Murphy’s Irish Independent in 1905.  The Independent ruthlessly targeted the Freeman’s readers and advertisers over the coming years and this, along with the Independent’s embrace of modern journalism and advertising techniques, resulted in the older paper’s fairly rapid decline until, in 1924, it closed.  This left the Irish Independent in an undisputedly dominant position in the national newspaper market (the Irish Times being well-established but with a much smaller circulation and in any case a little uncertain of its footing in the new state) until the 1931 arrival of the Irish Press.  Established and owned by Eamon de Valera using money obtained under very controversial (and legally complex) circumstances, the Irish Press held very different party political views from those of the Irish Independent, but it was nevertheless competing directly for the Independent’s readers and advertisers, and the 1930s were marked by fierce competition between the two for market share.

The popular press, aside from newspapers, also changed a great deal during the Free State years.  There were of course many existing publications which continued, including for example dozens of local newspapers.  However, the 1920s saw the end of some long-running titles.  Story papers were beginning to fade from view as a significant form of popular media – their target market of young working-class or lower-middle class readers looking for cheap entertainment of romance, thrillers and comedy had been stolen wholesale by the movies, and those which survived at all into the 1920s generally didn’t last long.  The Shamrock and the Emerald (both giants of the late 19thC Irish popular press) merged for survival in 1914 but had folded completely by 1922.  Our Boys, a late arrival on the market in 1914, lasted until 1990, but this was clearly because it was not competing in an open market – published by the Christian Brothers, its financing was opaque but its access to a captive audience of boys attending the many Christian Brothers schools of 20thC Ireland was clear, and obviously helped it to survive.  The exception which proved this rule of failing story papers was of course Ireland’s Own, the story paper which still survives (and apparently thrives) today in the 21stC, although the secret of its success lies not, as it is often argued, in never changing, but in the fact that it did change a great deal.  During the decades after Independence, Ireland’s Own moved from targeting a younger readership with racy stories of excitement and adventure towards targeting an aging readership with cosier and nostalgic stories, a shift which proved very successful.

The other magazine format which faded from commercial success was that of ‘society papers’, which had flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and catered to the small but wealthy segment of Irish society which revolved around Dublin Castle, country houses and debutante balls.  Their claim to be ‘popular’ was always doubtful given how small a percentage of the Irish population they catered to, but they had certainly been commercially successful based on how highly-coveted their wealthy readership was by many upmarket advertisers, and it’s likely they also had an aspirational readership among those fascinated by aristocracy and high society however excluded they were from it.  The founding of the Irish Free State and the ending of Dublin Castle’s political influence also meant the decline of its social power however, and as many of the Anglo-Irish retreated either to their country houses or to England, the press which had reported on their parties, marriages, and social engagements also retreated.  The simply-named Irish Society magazine ceased publication in 1924, for example, and Irish Life, which had always focused on hunting, shooting, fishing and more lately the newer interest of motoring, ended in 1926.  Some of these magazines’ typical stories were transferred to hobbyist publications such as the Irish Cyclist and Motor Cyclist, which had begun before independence and continued into the 1930s, as well as Irish Golf, which began publication in 1927 and was later absorbed by Social and Personal, one of the last attempts at ‘high society’ publishing in Ireland.

If ‘story papers’ were largely ended by the arrival of the movies, and ‘society papers’ were ended by the collapse of high society’s influence in independent Ireland, it was women’s magazines which saw something of a boom during the 1920s and 1930s.  The original Irish women’s magazine was Lady of the House, begun in 1890 and still in existence in the very early years of the Irish Free State.  Although it had been quite innovative in the early 20thC, and certainly in some of its views on ‘the woman question’ of that era, it was not a publication for the Jazz Age, and by 1924 the title ceased – although after it was bought and renamed a couple of times it eventually re-emerged as Irish Tatler, very much a modern version of a ‘society paper’.  Lady of the House had always tried to stay out of party or national politics, but it had primarily addressed the women likely to have been customers of the magazine’s original funders, Findlater’s grocers – urban, middle-class, and mainly if not entirely Protestant.  The founding of the Irish Free State shifted the balance of power not only in politics but in business, culture and everyday life towards the Catholic middle-classes, and this was as evident in publishing as it was in other aspects of Irish life.  Perhaps the most obvious example of this was in the appearance of Dublin Opinion in 1922, a satirical, knowingly humorous monthly magazine of Irish politics and metropolitan life in the new state, and very definitely published for the new elite of the Free State – the middle-class Catholic men of business, politics and the civil service.  Similar changes could be seen in publications for Irish women.  As Lady of the House faded away in the early years of the Free State, it was replaced by a series of new women’s magazines – such as Model Housekeeping, Modern Girl, Woman’s Life, and Irish Women’s Mirror, as well as a new type of ‘home and gardens’ magazine such as Ideal Irish Homes and Irish Home, which catered to the growing numbers of new homeowners in Ireland by adding DIY and decorating sections to the recipes, childcare and household hints of traditional women’s magazines.  As might be expected from the greater number of women’s magazines available during the 1920s and 1930s, they appealed to an increasingly stratified readership, with Modern Girl and Ideal Irish Home assuming their readers owned their own homes, held dinner parties and even travelled abroad, while Irish Women’s Mirror often suggested recipes that would make good use of leftovers, and published advice on how to makeover last season’s clothes to this season’s styles.

As these and other magazines appeared (some remaining for decades, others being replaced after just a few years), Irish radio programming also expanded.  The Dublin-based 2RN (and its Cork counterpart 6CK) became fully national during the 1930s and were eventually renamed Radio Éireann, and although the national broadcaster’s production budgets remained inadequate for the scale of their role as a public broadcaster, by the 1930s they were earning more advertising money and producing more programming – live broadcasts of GAA matches, music performances, plays, sketch shows and magazine shows.  Alongside these schedules, there also flourished a lively array of radio magazines, some aimed at real enthusiasts who built their own sets, some more focused on programming reviews for ordinary listeners.

Future posts will discuss many of the papers and magazines discussed here, as well as the development of radio shows, the selling of radio sets as expensive pieces of media equipment, the development of modern advertising as the financial underpinning of all commercial media, and eventually the arrival of television.

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Mass media, High Society and the invention of Celebrity

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These days a great deal of the popular press is locked into a reciprocal and lucrative relationship with a wide variety of celebrities. The press needs stories (and above all else, photographs) of celebrities in order to sell their publications, while most celebrities need press coverage in order to maintain the public profile without which they would not be celebrities. In recent years this closed loop has reached its logical conclusion, resulting in complaints about celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’, apparently having no public life or career beyond the pages of tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines.

Celebrity is a complex cultural concept (there is for an example, an entire academic journal, Celebrity Studies, dedicated to it), which takes different forms at different moments. However, in all its forms it has a specific history, and one which is inherently tied to the development of mass media. Celebrity in any recognisable form requires a mass media in order to create fame and instant recognition, as there can be no celebrity without an audience. Equally, before mass media and its creation of that audience, there was no real need for celebrities – they were an invention of the popular press and its need to appeal to segmented audiences who must be persuaded to buy each new issue. Celebrities whose star personae were carefully tailored to a particular audience proved to be an exceptionally successful and long-lasting way to attract regular buyers.

Late 19thC mass media – in Ireland and elsewhere – provides an opportunity to watch modern celebrity develop, as publications, advertisers, readers and the proto-celebrities themselves negotiated its form and purpose. The earliest category of famous individuals whose names (and later photographs) could sell newspapers were of course aristocrats. This was entirely logical, as they already possessed many of the characteristics which would later become associated with the celebrity format – they were drawn from a demarcated group whose very names, in the form of their titles, differentiated them from ordinary readers in a parallel fashion to the way that very famous modern celebrities’ very names are also brands. Aristocrats also lived lives of barely imaginable glamour (at least in theory, on the pages of newspapers and magazines), in castles and palaces, with carriages, servants, jewels and other luxuries. Perhaps most appealing of all to those following their lives in the press, they lived a life of permanent leisure. If the earlier Victorian period had struggled with the moral implications of leisure (and how it might be differentiated from idleness, which in the more religious times of the mid-19thC was of course a sin), then the late 19thC had fully resolved that struggle in favour of leisure as something to enjoyed at every opportunity. This could be seen in the rise of music halls, department stores, day-trip tourism and of course the media itself, which were all forms of entertainment which required leisure-time to enjoy. The reality for most people however was that their opportunities for leisure were still extremely limited. The majority of the population left school by 14 at the latest, the working week was typically still 6½ days, paid holidays were unusual, and the old age pension wasn’t introduced until 1909, so even retirement wasn’t a common experience. So fin-de-siècle culture was saturated with leisure activities which most people had a very limited chance to enjoy. The aristocracy’s life of total leisure, only emphasised by the ways they invented to fill it – moving from their country estate to their town-house and then on to the south of France according to the season, and attending court, country house parties, racing meets, grouse shooting or regattas as they went, all the while changing their clothes several times a day – was therefore a source of fascination in itself to over-worked readers of the popular press.

Women’s magazines and society papers, not surprisingly, were the most avid reporters of aristocratic celebrity. In Ireland, these included Lady of the House and Irish Society, among others. The two papers were different from each other in many respects – Lady of the House was more firmly positioned as a women’s magazine, and one which often expressed quite progressive social views, as well as catering to a slightly broader readership. Irish Society’s name probably speaks for itself – it focused entirely upon the activities and interests of the social elite, although it would have been read more broadly too, and that broader readership would have been specifically attracted by the high society lifestyles and individuals it reported on. Both magazines participated in the use of the aristocracy as proto-celebrities however, devoting considerable column inches to news of their lifestyles, fashions and travels. Although the activities of British (and even sometimes continental European) royalty and aristocrats featured fairly regularly, the Irish press tended to give much more attention to Irish aristocrats and the other upper-classes, with much of the narrative centring around the social life of Dublin Castle. In February 1903, for example, Lady of the House reported on the opening of that year’s ‘season’, which always began with the presentation of debutantes at the Castle. Under the headline ‘The First Dublin Drawing Room of the Season’, they printed a double-page photo spread of debutantes in their regulation white ball gowns. In the same issue there were reports of some of the ancillary social events of the season, including the information that ‘Mrs Garrett-Walker gave a ball at her residence, 38 Fitzwilliam Square. She is a daughter of Canon Leeper.’ Often there were minute descriptions of the precise gowns and jewels worn by each of the most important guests at these parties, along with general fashion commentary such as ‘The old-fashioned cut-work, which formed such an important Irish industry during the 1850s, is once more a la mode, and placed more prominently en evidence than of yore’. As the season wore on, and high society marriages were arranged, magazines such as Lady of the House and Irish Society covered those too. In January 1902, Irish Society informed its readers that ‘Miss Kathleen Blake Squires, youngest daughter of Mr WA Squires, of 61 Dartmouth Square, was married on Thursday last, the 2nd, to the Rev FC Day-Lewis, BA, senior curate of Stradbally, Queen’s County…’. As well as these local (and less illustrious) announcements, the magazine concerned itself too with events in the very highest circles, such as its announcement in the same issue that the Marquis of Bute was expected to come into his fortune (estimated at £6m, an immense figure) in that year.

Castle Season

Although publications which gave importance to high society would have actively monitored events such as the presentation of debutantes at the Castle court, it is worth noting that most of the information they published giving details of private parties or engagements and marriages – let alone formal photographs of debutantes and socialites in ball gowns – were supplied to the editors by the subjects themselves. Not that long before the end of the 19thC, the upper echelons of Irish (and British) society would have resisted publicity of this kind, especially for women, and seen it as a severe failing of etiquette and good breeding, but by the start of the 20thC it was becoming increasingly common for members of the upper class to be profiled in magazines, or even to endorse specific products in advertising. In women’s magazines in particular, profiles of and interviews with ‘notable women’ were a regular and popular feature. For example Lady of the House opened the new century with a series of aristocratic profiles under the remarkable title ‘Some Men’s Wives’, and just a few years later in 1904 produced an article on ‘The Ladies of the Guinness Family’, lavishly illustrated with photographs of Lady Gwendoline, Lady Evelyn and the Hon Mrs Ernest Guinness, all of whom frequently appeared in press as a result of their social position and philanthropic activities. Indeed, the increased public profile of many upper-class women by the turn of the 20thC was often predicated on their involvement in heavily-publicised charity events to raise money for good causes – another aspect of contemporary celebrity culture which can be traced to this era. In the 1890s a series of grand-scale ‘charity bazaars’ were held in Dublin in order to raise money for a range of hospitals in the city. These were lavish affairs (mainly held at the RDS) with music, performances, cafes and above all else, stage-set ‘villages’ in which each house was a stall selling souvenirs and goods, all of which were managed and staffed by society girls in full costume. Of these the most famous is the ‘Araby’ bazaar held in 1894 and immortalised in James Joyce’s story of that name. Staged over a week and attended by 80,000 people, ‘Araby’ was a significant popular event in the city from numerous perspectives, but at the time there is no doubt that most of the enormous free publicity it received from magazines such as Lady of the House was a result of its very public display of marriageable young women from the upper-middle-classes and aristocracy. The magazine covered ‘Araby’ obsessively, profiling each stall and its ‘lady stallholders’ in the run-up to the bazaar’s opening, and afterwards published many photographs of them in costume. Given that ‘Araby’ attracted a great many members of the public to buy tickets and attend it, it is not surprising that the press was able to use the bazaar’s proto-celebrity society girls to sell magazine copies.

Interviews with well-known women were also common in both women’s magazines and society papers. In 1902 Irish Society published a series of interviews collectively titled ‘Gentlewomen at Home’, including one with Lady Nixon, who was the wife of Sir Christopher Nixon, then the president of the Royal College of Physicians. Defined primarily by her husband, Lady Nixon was nevertheless interviewed also as the mistress of her grand home at 2 Merrion Square, and praised for her roles as a hostess, mother and philanthropist, the interview mentioning in some detail the charities whose committees she was a member of. An interviewee such as Lady Nixon was beyond reproach as a paragon of upper-class femininity, but many magazine interviews with ‘notable women’ were keen to emphasise their ladylike qualities – all the more so if the women were active beyond the domestic sphere. This tension, between the need to create a public profile for aristocratic women in order to mobilise their celebrity for sales, and the competing concern that publicity and a public life might undermine their respectable femininity, became more and more visible as the years went by and the categories of female celebrity expanded beyond the real aristocracy, whose rank alone provided considerable protection to their reputations.

As a result of this, many interviews with and profiles of famous women worked hard to emphasise their domesticity and traditional femininity. Subjects were typically interviewed in their own homes during ‘afternoon tea’, which prompted the commonly recurring headline for female celebrity interviews, ‘Over the Teacups’, a phrase used for decades by many different magazines to conjure a cosy domestic tone. These highly-staged domestic interviews not only worked to underline their subjects’ femininity, but also allowed readers a pleasing glimpse into their homes. This concern about the effect of a public life upon the private reputation of female celebrities was especially evident in 1892 when Lady of the House included Maude Gonne in a society news column called ‘What Women Are Doing’ and added rather anxiously that, ‘Whatever may be said against Miss Gonne’s politics and methods…no man or woman can otherwise breathe a word against her…she has never been known for a moment to lose or jeopardise her self-respect as a woman’.

As time went on, the categories of women profiled and interviewed in women’s magazines expanded to include more and more non-aristocrats. As women began (very gradually) to enter higher education and the professions, relatively progressive magazines like Lady of the House began to profile some of them, and interviews ‘over the teacups’ appeared with ‘lady graduates’ and ‘lady doctors’. Stage performers such as Lillie Langtry or Nellie Melba also achieved a very modern form of celebrity in the pages of popular magazines, as their glamorous lives were profiled and ever-more photographed. Famed now for their beauty, talent and lifestyles rather than for their birth and breeding, they slowly began to edge out the aristocratic celebrities, a process which was rapidly accelerated by the arrival of film as the dominant leisure culture which would create ‘stars’ of actresses who no longer needed to emphasise their domesticity or traditional femininity. New publications dedicated to film star news, photographs and gossip had begun to emerge by the end of World War One, the forerunners of today’s magazines dedicated to celebrity culture.

Nannie Power O’Donoghue, 1843-1940

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Nannie Power O’Donoghue was one of the first real doyennes of Irish journalism, and over a life so long that it stretched from the Famine to World War Two she wrote books, articles, opinion columns and worked as an editor. Born Ann Stewart Lyster Lambert, but always known as Nannie, she was the daughter of a minor (but wealthy) sprig of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Her family’s primary estate was Castle Ellen in Co. Galway, and Edward Carson was her cousin. She grew up there and in Dublin, part of the elite world of Castle social events in the city and the hunting, shooting and fishing life of the countryside.

nannieodonoghue

Her youthful interests focused on horse-riding and writing, two skills which would she would soon combine to form the basis of her career. Immediately before her marriage at the age of 26 to the composer William Power O’Donoghue (who was from a wealthy Cork business family) she published her first novel, entitled The Knave of Clubs. It appears to have been an entirely predictable mid-Victorian romance novel, and was followed in later years by a book of poetry, also of a generally sentimental variety. It was not until her late thirties however that she achieved any recognition for her writing, and that was for a very different kind of work. In 1881 she published a series of articles in the English magazine Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News offering advice on riding technique and etiquette for women. These were immensely popular and republished in book form as Ladies on Horseback, followed a few years later by another book entitled Riding for Ladies (1887). This was a best-seller, being translated into several languages and reprinted many times, and it established Power O’Donoghue as a writer and an authority on female equestrianism who is still cited today, even if her views on the requirement for ladies to ride side-saddle have disappeared. She continued to write novels (one of which, A Beggar on Horseback, had a Fenian theme), but also began to produce journalism for a variety of newspapers and periodicals.

Clearly Power O’Donoghue had been a committed writer since her youth, but by this time she also had other reasons to write commercially. She and her husband lost a substantial amount of their money in the crash of the Munster Bank in 1885, and it seems clear that from then on, her income from journalism and publishing became important to the family finances. By the 1890s she was a member of the Dublin branch of the Institute for Journalists, and was apparently one of the few women members at that time. It was around the same time that she began working for Irish Society, which described itself as having the ‘guaranteed Largest Circulation in Ireland of any Society paper published in the United Kingdom, and three times that of any Irish weekly journal or periodical.’ They published accounts of high society parties, Castle levées, upper-class ‘at homes’, engagement and wedding announcements and reviews of fashionable concerts, charity events, theatre performances and other activities of the small but wealthy social group which lived between their Dublin townhouses and country estates. This was the world which Power O’Donoghue had been born into, and she wrote for it with obvious ease and authority. Irish Society was owned and published by Ernest Manico from his extremely successful D’Olier Street offices, as discussed in a previous post here. But by 1900 (if not before) Power O’Donoghue was its de facto editor, and was the clear ‘voice’ of the paper each week via her editorial column. Entitled, with very Victorian long-windedness, ‘De Die In Diem. Or, Casual Jottings. By Candid Jane (Mrs Power O’Donoghue)’ it was a weekly catalogue of her views on topical issues for its readership, ranging from the management of charity bazaars to the ‘woman question’.

Power O’Donoghue’s editorial voice echoed very clearly from these columns, with strong (and occasionally controversial) views given with great confidence in her own authority. And the views which emerge were – for the most part – entirely in keeping with her class and background. She was deeply conservative in most matters, including the pressing political issues of the day when they arose. She was opposed to the promotion of the Irish language, for example, dismissing it (and the ‘so-called Gaelic League’) as just ‘gas’. She was also condemnatory of the 1913 Lockout, and of the ever-growing suffragette campaign. On social matters she had obvious sympathies with the social purity movement, expressing support for teetotalism and the condemnation of ‘racy’ novels. She also reported approvingly of the 1914 meeting of the Catholic Truth Society and their campaign against ‘immoral’ reading matter. In this respect – if perhaps no other – her views resembled the Gladstonian Liberalism of the Lord Lieutenant Lord Aberdeen, and his indefatigable wife Lady Aberdeen. Like them, she supported the generally Catholic and nationalist social purity movement despite being a member of the Protestant upper-classes, although unlike them all of her other politics appear to have been Tory and Unionist.

Disapproval was one of the most common tones of her editorials, and it is striking how often this was directed at other (and younger) women. Her coverage of high society (in both London and Dublin) was peppered with censorious remarks about young women’s dress, deportment, behaviour and expectations. Some of these cast a frankly surprising light on high society fashions from the years immediately before World War One, as she castigates women for wearing skirts split to the thigh, bare legs, wigs dyed in primary colours such as blue, green or scarlet, and even body paint. In early 1914 she described the presence of a ‘society lady, having a swallow painted on one cheek and a bee on the other and wearing a rose-coloured wig and skirt split to the waist’ at a recent London party. She also disapproved of a high-society fashion for exotic and eccentric pets, claiming to have met a woman at the famous Hydropathic Hotel in Blarney who kept a giant mulberry-eating caterpillar, which walked along her arms and shoulders as she sat in public. If these aspects of high society life on the very eve of war seem surprisingly modern to us (especially the tattoos and brightly-coloured hair), to Power O’Donoghue they seemed annoyingly so, and she called women who adopted such fashions ‘devoid of sense’. A couple of years earlier she had complained that ‘A few years ago young women were content with womanly occupations and recreations; now such things nauseate and pall. To act like men, dress like them, go in for their amusements, and do just as they do, without any sense of risk or fitness is the seeming aim of the inconsequent girls of today’, and she would go on to criticise suffragettes as well, approvingly citing a sentencing judge who referred to them as ‘demented creatures’.

In this respect, Power O’Donoghue was caught in the trap of other prominent conservative (and especially anti-suffrage) women of the era in that while she was uneasy at best and horrified at worst by ‘modern’ women’s assertiveness and increasing presence in the public sphere, she was herself both assertive and living very prominently in that very same public sphere. The most famous example of this contradiction was the British writer Eliza Lynn Linton, author of the influential 1868 essay ‘The Girl of the Period’, which condemned the modern girl in much the same tone as Power O’Donoghue would a generation later. Linton also condemned women’s suffrage campaigners and any women wishing to enter politics or pursue renown of any kind. And yet she herself was extremely well-known, had supported herself through her journalism and other writing since separating from her husband after only a few years of marriage, and was therefore hardly an example of the modest and retiring ‘angel of the house’ she advocated for other women. She also strongly supported some of the new rights women acquired during the nineteenth century, especially the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, presumably, one is forced to conclude, because as a separated woman it benefited her personally.

The limits of Power O’Donoghue’s own conservatism about women’s behaviour and lifestyles appear similarly self-serving, in the form of her vocal and enthusiastic support for women’s paid work. As a major contributor to her own family’s income after the loss of their money in the Munster Bank crash, this was an aspect of women’s emancipation which touched her personally, and she expressed typically strong views on the subject. She sometimes wrote approvingly of ‘bachelor girls’ who earned their own living and even lived independently, once referring to one who ‘has exactly a hundred a year’ but lived ‘as a lady…even though she does her own housework.’ The theme became more pronounced during World War One however, when more and more young women began replacing men in jobs they’d never been allowed to take before. Writing from London in August 1916, Power O’Donoghue commented that ‘The female carters, letter-carriers, ticket-checkers, and lift controllers, are a pleasure to look at and are nicely mannered to the public and to one another’, and the following month she asked Irish Society readers ‘I wonder whether you love, as I do, seeing women do something for themselves instead of being always dependent upon men, or on other members of their family’. As a woman of increasing independence after the first success of her books in the 1880s, she showed considerable sympathy and even quite boisterous support for other women of all classes who sought a similar life, going so far during World War One as to suggest mass conscription of men so as to ‘leave the field to women who are rapidly proving themselves fit and worthy workers’. If she ever saw the contradiction between her approval of women’s move into the world of work and her disapproval of their fight for the vote, she never showed it. In this respect she was a classic example of the privileged, instinctively conservative nineteenth-century women who were often best-placed to pioneer female access to the public sphere because of their social status and personal contacts, but who did not sympathise with the broader campaign for women’s rights, and indeed were sometimes among the harshest critics of the ‘new woman’.

Still working as Irish Society’s editor in 1916 (at the age of 73), Power O’Donoghue lived through the Easter Rising in the most literal fashion, as by then she was living in the Gresham Hotel and spent the week there, trapped inside the barricades and in considerable danger at times. She wrote about her experiences in an editorial shortly after the end of the Rising, including the occasions when she had tended to dying soldiers in her capacity as a Red Cross volunteer. She never tempered her imperialist Unionism however, condemning expressions of sympathy for the ‘brave boys’ among the rebels even during the week of their executions, sternly commenting that such feelings were ‘very creditable from a sentimental point of view, perhaps, but rather feeble from a logical and moral standpoint’.

Irish Society, with its emphasis upon the social and cultural world of the Castle, the Court and the aristocracy, did not last long after Irish Independence. But Power O’Donoghue did last, and she did so in Ireland, rather than departing for England as many of her class and political views did in the years after 1922. She lived in Dublin throughout the 1920s and 1930s, still pursuing her interests in animal welfare by serving on the committee of the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals when she was into her 90s, and she eventually died in the city in January 1940. Over her long career as a writer, she produced best-selling books, articles and columns for the Daily Express, the Evening Herald, Lady’s Pictorial and the Irish Times, as well as editing Irish Society for more than 20 years, making her one of the most visible women journalists in Ireland for several decades.

References

Dictionary of Irish Biography (Nannie Power O’Donoghue) dib.cambridge.org

Olga E Lockley, Nannie Lambert Power O’Donoghue: a biography (Preston: Bee Press, 2001)

Nannie Power O’Donoghue, A Beggar on Horseback (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1884)

Nannie Power O’Donoghue, Riding for Ladies: with hints on the stable (London: Thacker & Co, 1887).