Female Revolutionaries and Political Violence in India and Ireland 1919-1939

Abstract

Post-Famine Irish family constructs were complex and hinged to a great degree on social class and household means. The term ‘family’ is hard to define since it may be used to describe a range of relationships, from related co-residents, to dispersed relatives, to a wider kin group. The concept of ‘family’ is temporally, culturally and socially informed, so it is important to understand what this signified in Ireland during the period of study, being cognisant that this might be quite different from Irish families in other eras, as well as non-Irish families in this or any other period. The ‘normative family’ in Ireland 1850–1922 was founded in marriage and con- sisted of either a nuclear family (a heterosexual couple with one or more children) or the ‘stem’ family, a form of extended family in which three generations (grand- parents, children and grandchildren) co-habited. Though such units were viewed as the moral and cultural ideal, the reality was that Irish families encompassed a much broader range of typologies.