Is the oppression of women overstated?

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

So are you saying that at 25% today that previously it was much worse ? That would mean that their ideas were less sophisticated and these would be reflected in the decision makers too.

If we take the paper http://www.esr.ie/vol30_3/1_Denny.pdf to be correct then it suggests as natural population replacement takes place then the literacy rate improves. It would also show that literacy rates amongst say 50+ year olds would be lower than 20-30 year olds. I would presume that it was previously worse than 25% based on the improvements in education and education attendance. I dont have the figures to hand but think they areshown in the census figures.

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

In what way do you define class historically in Ireland ?

Patrick Pearse's Dad was a tradesman but their lifestyle was middle class -if not upper middle class a son at Trinity and another at art school in London and on the continent.

I know lots of people who left school with the primary certificate pre 1970 and had trades, became shopkeepers, and a few Senior Garda.

Although the social class system is not as defined in Ireland as in England in history I think it can still be defined. In educational terms working class would be the main losers historically in education with secondry education involving fees until relatively recently. Even since the 1970s leaving school early is more common in Ireland than other countries as part of the previously mentioned legacy. I know my father and uncles all left school at 14-15 in 1960's/ 70's and would have been from a fairly small farmstead, traditional rural working class as I would see it. Because it was so common back then it did not stop them from going on to have decent jobs, etc in the same way as it might nowadays in the same way as your pre 1970 examples. I would think that all the leaders and possibly most if not all of the 1916 participants would have been middle class. This would show that their was a class system in Ireland back then. I have read opinions from leaders of the independence era that said the people chose the wrong enemy. By this it was meant that rather than fighting the British that they should have been fighting the capitalist overlords of dublin who supported the 1913 lockout.

Nhead

CDfm wrote: »

When did these changes occur ?

We inherited the workhouse/asylum system from the British and this is how things were done. As a state we also took on their civil servants to run the show.

Pre workhouse/asylum I have read that people dug holes in their mud huts/cabins to contain/restrain the mentally ill. Bedlam was a significant improvement.

Even today we still have 25% of the adult population functionally illitererate and the concepts that get raised are very middle class ones which society was not.



I wonder what literacy rates were like in the past as even today they dont compare well with Sweden & Germany.

So back to the peasant concept "the power of the limited good" (commodity) there was not enough to go around.




Thanks , I was just trying to list out what my impressions were from the material and what were mens conditions like.

Jeez we may find out that we Irish were not a very likeable and ignorant race. Should we risk it ????

Ha ha maybe we shouldn't risk it. I actually have the literacy rates for most of the 1800s I'll get them up but they all show a growth in literacy (but in ways that is obvious as before the national ed. system and the census they wouldn't have really known/cared about the literacy rates). I'll get a few figures up (they are from the census extracts). When I was talking about social mores I am looking at education as it was this system that the gov used to change Ireland (hence Pearse writing The Murder Machine). Realistically, we inherited a lot of these ideas (for instance the old intermediate cert was est. in the 1870s!!!)

CDfm

johnniebgood1 Thats a bit strong. Ireland was not a normal country.Irelands capitalist overlords is fairly strong language. Did Ireland have any domestic capital at all.

So do you mean William Martin Murphy who was probably Ireland's only real entrepeneur and he actually invested in Ireland but the returns for investors were less from Dublin than for other locations and also revitalised and created what became Indepependent Newspapers.? This was the Catholic Newspaper that rivalled the Irish Times which was really the ascendency paper.

His subsequent vilification may have something to do with his showdown with Larkin during the recession of that era.

What other capitalists were there.The purchase moneys under the Land Acts went to absentees and land annuity repayments were made to the British government and thus not spent in or invested in Ireland. DeValera's subsequent cancelling of the annuity repayments to Britain while collecting the payments from farmers was a contributory factor in the deepening of the recession during the Economic War. A bit of an own goal that.

[SIZE=+1]5. [/SIZE]His friendship with A. M. Sullivan (who succeeded Gavan Duffy as proprietor of The Nation newspaper) exposed him to journalism and the management of newspapers at an early age. He recalled in later life that while still a schoolboy he spent all his spare hours in the old Nation office in Middle Abbey St. After leaving school he became the pupil of a Dublin architect, J. J. Lyons, who owned and edited the Irish Builder. His father's intention was that he should qualify as an architect in order further to develop the building business in Bantry. Murphy learnt more about sub-editing in the offices of the Irish Builder than about architecture. He also attended lectures at the Catholic University, until his studies were terminated by the death of his father in 1863.6


[SIZE=+1]9. [/SIZE]Murphy was involved in the construction of the following railway lines: Wexford and Rosslare, the Clara and Banagher, West and South Clare, Mitchelstown and Fermoy, Tuam and Claremorris, Skibbereen and Baltimore, and the Bantry Extension. He also built the rail bridge across the Liffey and relatively late in life he organised the construction of railways on the Gold Coast in West Africa from his offices in London.15 He also became the director of a number of lines, being elected to the board of the Waterford and Limerick line in 1885, and when this was amalgamated into the Great Southern and Western Railway in 1901, he was subsequently elected to the Board of Ireland's premier railway company in 1903. From small beginnings in 1880 as a contractor for the Bantry rail extension to Drimoleague, Murphy became one of the most formidable figures in the Irish railway business.16
[SIZE=+1]10. [/SIZE]Although Murphy made money in railways, his involvement in tramways was ultimately to be far more significant. Murphy's career in railway promotion began when the main lines had already been built. However, the experience probably contributed to his subsequent success in tramways, a business in which was one of the major entrepreneurs and innovators in the British Isles in the late Victorian era. Murphy built tramways in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, London Southern, Isle of Thanet, Hastings and District, Bournemouth and Poole, Paisley and District and in Buenos Aires, in addition to being one of the pioneers of the use of electricity in Ireland. He is sometimes mistakenly remembered as the father of the Dublin tramways, being a founding director of the Dublin Central Tramway Company, which obtained powers to proceed with the construction of a line in 1876 from College Green to Rathfarnham, with branches to Ranelagh, Rathgar, Rathmines and Clonskeagh. It opened for business in 1879, about seven years after the first Dublin tramway had been opened.17


[SIZE=+1]13. [/SIZE]Although Murphy provided impressive returns for his shareholders, his labour relations' record was somewhat less impressive. Dublin tram men earned about 25% less than those in Belfast and Glasgow.23 No doubt, this contributed to high profits and ultimately to his confrontation with Larkin. Although Murphy had a reasonably good relationship with his work force and took a benevolent attitude to traditional trade union activity amongst skilled workers, he was completely intolerant of any attempts to organise unskilled workers. He had resisted tramway workers' repeated demands from the 1890s for a nine-hour day.24 Following the establishment of Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1908, Murphy resisted the advance of new unionism, in both the Dublin Tramway Company and the Great Southern and Western Railway.

[SIZE=+1]14. [/SIZE]The 1913 Lockout threw into sharp relief the stark divisions within Irish nationalism between labour and capital, which the IPP had managed to conceal for decades. It revealed Murphy at his most militant, and nakedly demonstrated the power he wielded as one of Dublin's leading employers, as President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and leader of the Employers Federation. However at this point, Murphy possessed another type of power, since he had become Ireland's leading newspaper proprietor.
III [SIZE=+1]15. [/SIZE]The genesis of Murphy's investment in newspapers resulted from his support for the anti-Parnellite faction of the IPP following the split.26 Murphy had previously been a great admirer and supporter of Parnell,27 when elected as a member of parliament in 1885 for the ward of St Patrick's in Dublin.28 The IPP candidates for that election were carefully selected by a small group within the party; no doubt Murphy's ability to contribute handsomely to party funds made him an attractive option. His close connections within the Catholic hierarchy may also have influenced his selection. As part of an increasingly formidable and morally conservative west Cork faction within the party, Murphy was among those who brought down Parnell, viewing the split as an `interposition of divine providence'.29


[SIZE=+1]18. [/SIZE]This considerably soured Murphy's feelings towards the Dillonite faction within the IPP. When Dillon became chairman of the party in 1896 (retaining control of the Freeman) Murphy resolved to oppose him through the acquisition of another paper. He took over the struggling Nation in June 1897, which remained stridently anti-Dillonite, pro-clerical and pro-Healyite. By September 1900, he owned all the debenture capital of the Nation Co. Ltd, thereby also acquiring ownership of the loss making Irish Catholic, which had been founded by T. D. Sullivan at the offices of the Nation in 1888. At this stage, the factional conflict and financial strain between the rival Dublin papers ultimately brought the Redmondite Daily Independent to its knees in 1900. Encouraged by Healy and Redmond, Murphy purchased it from the liquidator in August 1900 for £17,000, amalgamating it with the Nation. When the Daily Independent and Nation was launched on 1st September 1900 it continued to turn in losses, but it became the major rival to the Freeman's Journal.33
[SIZE=+1]19. [/SIZE]Murphy's relationship with Redmond seems initially to have been reasonably cordial. He wrote to Redmond at the end of 1900 that `the paper should be conducted on more moderate and prudent lines attacking nobody, avoiding personalities and taking no notice of the Freeman.' To begin with, he envisaged few changes, wishing to `... disturb as little as possible the staff of the paper. A few men to be brought in from the Nation but only with a view to strengthening the library and reporting department. A larger proportion of Linotype men may have to be brought in ...'34 However, this conciliatory phase evaporated in the months following the takeover.35 This conflict was to continue for the rest of their lives, and it was to have a profound impact on Redmond's subsequent political career and indeed that of the IPP.36 Murphy gradually tired of running loss-making political `side shows'. This led him to consider selling off the newspaper in 1904. When a potential buyer had the idea to convert it into a half-penny morning paper along the lines of the Daily Mail in Britain, Murphy's flagging interest was revitalised. He had a number of meetings with Sir Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) who gave him the benefit of his advice on the matter.37 Murphy had the whole paper overhauled and reorganised and he relaunched it in a new and highly successful format, originally pioneered by the Harmsworths in London. This second major innovation in his business career enabled him ultimately to make a profit from newspapers for the first time. As in the tramways, he adopted innovations which had been successfully pioneered elsewhere.
[SIZE=+1]20. [/SIZE]At the end of 1904 he appointed T. R. Harrington (who had been the chief reporter in the Nation, as the chief editor of the Independent.38 New premises were acquired at 111 Middle Abbey St, and in less than three months these were converted for newspaper production. Murphy spared no expense in acquiring the latest printing technology including Linotypes for typesetting and Goss printers. The paper's format and high level of circulation made it more attractive for advertising, so its advertising sales department was highly successful. It was marketed more aggressively outside Dublin compared to its rival nationals, the Irish Times and the Freeman's Journal, which only arrived in Waterford in the late afternoon, whilst the new Independent arrived at 11 am. Three papers were produced; the Irish Independent, the Evening Herald and the Sunday Independent, with the former two achieving a higher circulation than any Irish metropolitan newspaper in the past.39


[SIZE=+1]34. [/SIZE]Murphy was an exemplary businessman of his era who was just as comfortable doing business in Glasgow or London as in Dublin or Bantry. In 1863, his father left a respectable business and effects to the value £4,000.56 Murphy died in 1919 leaving £250,000 in his will.57 He left a range of businesses with a substantial asset value, including Dublin's tramway system (in which over £2,000,000 had been invested), hotels in Dublin and Glengariffe, Cleary's Department store, a range of railway shares and various properties including a builders yard in Bantry (which is still in business). He had also invested heavily in the Dublin newspaper industry, ultimately making handsome profits, and it was in this industry that his impact was most enduring since it ran far beyond the confines of business.
[SIZE=+1]35. [/SIZE]The transformation of the Irish Independent between 1900 and 1916 raised circulation to 120,000 by the latter year,58 making it the most influential newspaper in Ireland in the years that followed. Morrisey's new book on Murphy has at last provided us with a more comprehensive outline of his career. The additional evidence provided by this article suggests that the influence of the Irish Independent and its proprietor on nationalist public opinion between the 1916 Rising and the 1918 General Election requires detailed research and analysis. The relationship between the proprietor and editor, the editorial line of the paper and some assessment of its influence on (and reaction to) nationalist public opinion, deserve much closer attention from historians than they have received to date.


http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/bielfra.htm

Pearse owed £5,000 when he died and his economically active family had emigrated to Britain.

But what of Ireland and its labour force.

Ireland’s post-Famine demographic
experience, however, was anything but normal. The period saw a pattern of
persistent population decline unlike that seen in any other European country.
Population declined a further 21 per cent between 1851 and 1881, reaching
5.175 million; by 1901 it stood at 4.6 million.3 Despite the heavy concentration
of historians and demographers upon post-Famine patterns of marriage and
fertility, emigration was by far the principal cause of this decline. Surveying
evidence on post-Famine demographics, Guinnane (1997) indicates that the Irish
birth rate during this period was unremarkable by European standards. While
this unremarkable birthrate was achieved with the unusual combination of large
families but low marriage rates, this still cannot take away from the primacy of
emigration as the cause of depopulation. The total number of emigrants from
Ireland between 1850 and 1910 was 4.2 million. The US and Britain were by far
the most common destinations, with US emigration outnumbering British by a
factor of roughly 2 to 1.
What was the driving force behind post-Famine emigration? Most historians
have focused directly upon the decline in rural population. The Famine
obliterated 200,000 smallholdings and the number of agricultural workers
declined from 1.84 million in 1841 to 0.78 million in 1911.4 Recent years have
seen some important research on the role the Famine played in this decline.
Certain “revisionist” historians such as Crotty (1966) had suggested that the
post-Famine decline in agricultural development had nothing to do with the
Famine but was rather the result of essentially exogenous price shocks in
commodity markets that moved Irish agriculture away from labour-intensive
tillage and potatoes and towards pasture. O’Rourke (1991a), however, has
constructed a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of Irish agriculture
of this period and concluded that such price shocks cannot have reduced
agricultural employment. He proposes a simpler theory, linked directly to the
Famine, of how labour demand factors could have reduced post-Famine agricultural
employment. The blight that led to the Famine permanently reduced
potato yields. The CGE simulations confirm that, through this mechanism, the
Famine led to substantially reduced demand for agricultural labour.
Of course, to focus on the “push” factor of rural depopulation is to look at only
one-half of the equation driving Irish emigration. Indeed, concentration on the
decline in agricultural employment may tend to paint a picture of an economy
in crisis with declining living standards. In fact, this is not the case. Living
standards of both agricultural and industrial workers in Ireland rose during
this period. However, they did so at a slower rate than was occurring in the
3. Source: Ó Gráda (1989).
4. Sources: Ó Gráda (1989) and O’Rourke (1991b).
ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE 5
United States or Britain. Guinnane (1994) thus argues that it was the “pull”
factor of external (and, by implication, exogenous) economic change which drove
emigration:
Growing demand for labour in Britain and North America meant that Irish
workers would have to be paid more at home or seek their fortunes
elsewhere … Ireland’s population did fall after the famine. In the absence
of industrialization — the paucity of which is another great question in
Irish economic history — one could hardly have expected anything else.
Here Guinnane echoes the point made by O’Rourke, quoted in the introduction,
but views the failure of industrialisation as a separate issue, unconnected with
the Famine or rural depopulation.
Ultimately, then, a full explanation of Irish depopulation must incorporate
an explanation of why Irish industry did not expand to absorb the rural exodus
and why Irish industrial wages were insufficient to keep millions of nonagricultural
workers in Ireland. While there is evidence that Ireland’s industrial
decline pre-dated the Famine, as the expansion of transportation networks and
the onset of the factory system caused cottage industries to become uncompetitive,
the relative decline during the post-Famine period is stark. Bielenberg
(1991) shows that during the period 1840-1910 the growth in Irish industrial
output was very slight and compared very poorly with the four-fold increase in
UK output. Despite the large number of potential suspects (limited resource
endowments, perceived riskiness of investing in Irish capital, poor industrial
financing) there have been few convincing explanations of the relative failure of
Irish industry to develop despite its economic integration with the world’s
industrial leader, Britain. Generally, explanations have centred around the
elusive concept of technological externalities: those regions that industrialise
first obtain a productivity advantage over other regions, which thereby reinforces
their advantage and leads to economic divergence.5
More recently, O’Rourke (1992) has provided a formal analysis of one of the
more common “structural” explanations of Irish industrial decline: that this
decline was a result of the loss of skilled workers due to emigration.6 He presents
a simple two country model with mobile capital and labour. It is assumed that
there are two types of labour, shirkers and non-shirkers, with shirkers having
the lower productivity and only non-shirkers being able to move between regions.
This productivity difference, however, cannot be detected by firm managers and
so each individual receives the average productivity of workers in their firm.
http://www.esr.ie/vol30_1/1_Whelan.pdf

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

johnniebgood1 Thats a bit strong. Ireland was not a normal country.Irelands capitalist overlords is fairly strong language. Did Ireland have any domestic capital at all.

So do you mean William Martin Murphy who was probably Ireland's only real entrepeneur and he actually invested in Ireland but the returns for investors were less from Dublin than for other locations and also revitalised and created what became Indepependent Newspapers.? This was the Catholic Newspaper that rivalled the Irish Times which was really the ascendency paper.

His subsequent vilification may have something to do with his showdown with Larkin during the recession of that era.

What other capitalists were there.

......

But what of Ireland and its labour force.

Maybe overlords is a bit OTT but I'm referring to a class divide that was articulated on republican versus unionist lines but could just of easily been working class versus ruling class- Murphy was the most known capitalist in Dublin (due to lockout) but don't forget Belfast, it was a similar size city at the turn of the century. Admittedly alot of industries were around there but they had the largest shipyard in the world, largest linen industry in the world, largest distilleries, etc. All these had their capitalist owners. Dublin also had industry not owned by Murphy. In saying this I am possibly taking the idea from O'caseys 'the plough and the stars' which has artistic license. Even so I think it is still a subject worth exploring.

We must note on this that there was also quite a few socialists involved in the events of easter 1916 with Connolly being obviously the most prominent. Was Connolly's first preference as a republican or as a socialist?

CDfm

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Maybe overlords is a bit OTT but I'm referring to a class divide that was articulated on republican versus unionist lines but could just of easily been working class versus ruling class- Murphy was the most known capitalist in Dublin (due to lockout) but don't forget Belfast, it was a similar size city at the turn of the century. Admittedly alot of industries were around there but they had the largest shipyard in the world, largest linen industry in the world, largest distilleries, etc. All these had their capitalist owners. Dublin also had industry not owned by Murphy. In saying this I am possibly taking the idea from O'caseys 'the plough and the stars' which has artistic license. Even so I think it is still a subject worth exploring.

But this thread is not really about that is it ?

Implicit in the OP is that women were oppressed by men and you suggested the oppressors were the capitalist overlords so I asked who they were.

We must note on this that there was also quite a few socialists involved in the events of easter 1916 with Connolly being obviously the most prominent. Was Connolly's first preference as a republican or as a socialist?

Some may ask if Connolly was an Irish Nationalist.

There were, socialists like Countess Markievitz, Connolly was a trade unionist and there were plenty of trade unionists that were republicans and some who were not socialist. John Jinks , for example.

So was Connolly a Marxist /Leninist

Connolly was a self-educated man who became a brilliant speaker and writer. He alone in the annals of the British and Irish Labour Movement succeeded in developing the ideas of Marxism. On the basis of a careful study of the writings of Marx and Engels, he developed an independent standpoint and made an original contribution. Even more remarkably, he did this without the benefit of direct contact with the other outstanding Marxist thinkers of the time: Lenin, Trotsky or Luxemburg.


"Establishment of AN IRISH SOCIALIST REPUBLIC based on the public ownership by the Irish people of the land, and instruments of production, distribution and exchange. Agriculture to be administered as a public function, under boards of management elected by the agricultural population and responsible to them and to the nation at large. All other forms of labour necessary to the well-being of the community to be conducted on the same principles.



http://www.marxist.com/History-old/easter_rising401.html

So were his views on the former tenant farmers ?


These were the children and grandchildren of those that died in Europes worst famine.

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Kulaks were former peasants in Russia who owned medium-sized farms as a result of the reforms introduced by Peter Stolypin in 1906. Stolypin's intention was to create a stable group of prosperous farmers who would form a natural conservative political force. By the outbreak of the First World War it was estimated that around 15 per cent of Russian farmers were kulaks. [/FONT]

Patrick Kavanagh perhaps ?

Now we can only define these relatively -so if the Irish who could emigrate did and were at the bottom of the pile in Britain and the USA and were better of than those they left behind then it is confusing.

So we need to establish what the conditions were and whether the ownership of stoney gray soil in Monaghan deemed someone to be a peasant or an oppressor.

CDfm

How do we compare lives.

So what were conditions like for men. The original emigrants from Ireland often had no cash and financed their trips thru indentured servitude by selling themselves for a period of time usually 4 to 7 years to a master.

REDEMPTIONERS and INDENTURED SERVANTS
Links to Further Information

"Irish Emigration to America, 1723-1773" from Journal of American Irish Historical Society, 1927

...Passing over twenty years, during which there was a constant stream of emigration from Ireland to America, I find another interesting document chronicled under date of May, 1751:
“One hundred and fifty Passengers, including 50 Irish Servants (many of them Catholics who were bound as Servants before the Lord Mayor of Dublin) sailed for Philadelphia, on board the Homer, Captain John Slade, Commander.” The list of names is not complete, owing to damp, but I have made out the following as among those who sailed on the Homer from Dublin, in May, 1751: John O’Toole, Thomas Cassidy, James Fennell, James O’Neill, James Hickey, Edward Doran, John Callaghan, Catherine Cullen, Eleanor Cody, John Connery, Catherine Lawler, William Coffey, John Slattery, Philip MacNeill, Giles Power, Anne Connolly.

Redemptioner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A redemptioner is an immigrant, generally from the 18th or 19th century, that gained passage to America by selling themselves as an indentured servant.


Indentured servant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
An Indentured servant is an unfree labourer under contract to work (for a specified amount of time) for another person or a company/corporation, often without any monetary pay, but in exchange for accommodation, food, other essentials, training, or passage to a new country. After working for the term of the contract (traditionally seven years) the servant was then free to farm or take up trade of his own. The term comes from the medieval English "indenture of retainer" — a contract written in duplicate on the same sheet, with the copies separated by cutting along a jagged (toothed, hence the term "indenture) line so that the teeth of the two parts could later be refitted to confirm authenticity.


Roe, Melissa. "Differential Tolerances and Accepted Punishments for Disobedient Indentured Servants and Their Masters in Colonial Courts." Indentured Servants. http://www.eh.net/Clio/Publications/indentured.shtml (30 Aug 2005)
Indentured servitude first appeared in America a little over a decade after the settlement of Jamestown in 1607. Labor was scarce; land was abundant and transportation costs to America were high compared to wages in England. An early economist noted that ...industry is limited by capital; but, through lack of labor, its limit is not always reached in older communities and seldom if ever in newer countries. Capital is an accumulation of labor and, like land, yields most when quickened by human toil. So dependent is capital upon labor that what is taken to new settlements often wastes away through lack of a labor supply. One obstacle to migration was the high cost of transportation. The Virginia Company, attempting to overcome high transportation costs, developed various schemes to increase migration; these schemes resulted in indentured servitude. The indenture system allowed for labor mobility from England to America...which made available the cultivation of vast amounts of new land that would satisfy the demands of the large English market resulting in a marginal productivity of labor in agriculture exceeding that in England. The Virginia Company eventually sold the labor of the servants to individual planters, forcing the planters to incur all costs of supervision and enforcement of contracts, including risks of escape or death of the servant. The indenture system, although initiated by the Virginia Company, was quickly utilized by private planters and merchants. Because this system worked so well in attracting labor to America, it remained in use long after the Virginia Company went out of business in 1624. Market efficiency occurs when the marginal revenue product of labor is equal to the wage. In other words, the price paid for the servant equals the value of the servant contract length. Although the typical servant contract in England was for a period of one to two years, those in America were considerably longer. This was because the transportation costs were high, and the lender needed to recover his investment, forcing servants to enter into longer contracts. Contracts were usually four to seven years long depending on the details. If a servant contracted to be taught a specific trade or skill or an education, the contract length would increase. Economists such as Farley Grubb and David Galenson have examined indentured servitude in colonial America and suggested that the system was efficient and, thus, fair. Historians, however, have looked at various practices of physical coercion and abuse, as well as punishments prescribed by law for criminal and runaway servants, and have claimed the system to be exploitive and cruel.
Novak, George. "Negro Slavery in North America." Negro Slavery in North America. http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1939/oct/x01.htm (30 Aug 2005)
At first the landed proprietors relied upon the importation of white bondsmen from the mother country. England and the continent were combed for servants to be sent to America.
Some of these indentured servants came of their own accord, voluntarily agreeing to serve their masters for a certain term of years, usually four to seven, in return for their passage. Many others, especially German serfs, were sold by their lords to the slave merchants and ship-owners. In addition the overflowing prisons of England were emptied of their inmates and the convicts brought to America to be sold into servitude for terms ranging from four to fourteen years.
The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century made slaves as well as subjects of the Irish people. Over one hundred thousand men, women, and children were seized by the English troops and shipped over to the West Indies where they were sold into slavery upon the tobacco plantations. In The Re-Conquest of Ireland James Connolly quotes the following instance of the methods used.
"Captain John Vernon was employed by the Commissioners for Ireland to England, and contracted in their behalf with Mr. David Sellick and the Leader under his hand to supply them with two hundred and fifty women of the Irish nation, above twelve years and under the age of forty-five, also three hundred men above twelve years and under fifty, to be found in the country within twenty miles of Cork, Youghal and Kinsale, Waterford and Wexford, to transport them into New England.” This British firm alone was responsible for shipping over 6,400 girls and boys. . . .
As a result of the insistent demands of the planters for labor, the servant trade took on most of the horrible features of the slave trade. Gangs of kidnappers roamed the streets of English seaports and combed the highways and byways of Britain and Ireland for raw material. In the rapacious search for redemptioners the homes of the poor were invaded. Where promises could not persuade, compulsion was brought into play. Husbands were torn from their wives, fathers from their families, children from their parents. Boys and girls were sold by parents or guardians; unwanted dependents by their relatives; serfs by their lords—and all this human cargo was shipped to America to be sold to the highest bidder.
Thus the bulk of the white working population of the English colonies was composed of bondsmen and criminals, who had been cajoled or coerced into emigration and had to pass through years of bondage before they could call themselves free. These people and their children became the hunters, trappers, farmers, artisans, mechanics, and even the planters and merchants, who were later to form the ranks of the revolutionary forces against the mother country.
These white bondsmen however provided neither a sufficient nor a satisfactory supply of labor. They could not be kept in a permanent condition of enslavement. Unless they were marked or branded, if they ran away they could not readily be distinguished from their free fellows or their masters. As production expanded, it became increasingly urgent to find new, more abundant, and more dependable sources of labor.
Morris, Richard B. "Emergence of American Labor." US Department of Labor. http://www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/chapter1.htm (30 Aug 2005)
Regardless of the lures offered to working men and women to emigrate to the New World, free labor remained in short supply throughout the colonial period. As a consequence, the English settlers innovated several forms of bound labor for white Europeans and adopted a long-established coercive labor system for black Africans. One form of bound labor, indentured servitude, included all persons bound to labor for periods of years as determined either by a written agreement or by the custom of the respective colony. The bulk of indentured servants comprised contract labor. White immigrants, called redemptioners or "freewillers," in return for their passage to America bound themselves as servants for varying periods, four years being the average length of service. This amounted to a system for underwriting the transportation of prospective emigrants.
It has been estimated that the redemptioners comprised almost eighty per cent of the total British and continental immigration to America down to the coming of the Revolution. Virginia and Maryland planters who assumed transportation charges received a head right or land grant for each immigrant. In the main, though, the business was carried on by merchants specializing in the sale of servants' indentures. Recruiting agents called "Crimps" in England and "Newlanders" on the continent were employed by these merchants. They hired drummers to go through inland towns in England or along the war-devastated Rhineland areas crying the voyage to America; with the help of a piper to draw crowds, they distributed promotional literature at fairs.
On the positive side, it should be said that the redemptioner system provided the bulk of the white labor force in the colonies. On the negative side, it must be acknowledged that it was riddled with fraudulent practices and that prospective servants were lured to detention houses to be held for shipment overseas through coercive procedures which often gave rise to charges of kidnapping. The redemptioners were packed like herring in unsanitary ships; the mortality rate could run in excess of fifty percent for a typical voyage. The survivors, served inadequate rations, generally arrived in a seriously weakened condition. Once, ashore, families might be broken up. Husbands and wives could be sold to different masters, and parents not infrequently were forced to sell their children. The latter could be bound out for longer terms of service than adults, even though they were shipped at half fare. Girls, ostensibly bound out for trades or housework, were at times exploited for immoral purposes.

Durkin, Michael. "Lesson 5: How the Irish Fled" Suite University. Irish Emigration to America. http://www.suite101.com/lesson.cfm/18819/2329/3 (30 Aug 2005)
Redemptioners was a name recognised in Pennsylvania for servants who had signed as bond servants for a period of 5 years. Slavery itself would have been more acceptable than the prevailing conditions in Ireland. Ship’s Masters also were in a position to show smaller numbers of passengers on their manifests than were actually carried which has proved to be another reason for hopelessly inadequate information on the numbers who fled the country. They could also profit from the supply of food which they were obliged to offer their passengers. This often was of the worst available sort and even more frequently portions were inaccurately weighed out.

Stratford Hall Plantation. "Indentured Servants and Transported Convicts." Indentured Servants and Transported Convicts. http://www.stratfordhall.org/ed-servants.html?EDUCATION (30 Aug 2005)
White indentured servants came from all over Great Britain. Men, women, and sometimes children signed a contract with a master to serve a term of 4 to 7 years. In exchange for their service, the indentured servants received their passage paid from England, as well as food, clothing, and shelter once they arrived in the colonies. Some were even paid a salary. When the contract had expired, the servant was paid freedom dues of corn, tools, and clothing, and was allowed to leave the plantation. During the time of his indenture, however, the servant was considered his master's personal property and his contract could be inherited or sold. Prices paid for indentured servants varied depending on skills.
While under contract a person could not marry or have children. A master's permission was needed to leave the plantation, to perform work for anyone else, or to keep money for personal use. An unruly indentured servant was whipped or punished for improper behavior. Due to poor living conditions, hard labor, and difficulties adjusting to new climates and native diseases, many servants did not live to see their freedom. Often servants ran away from their masters. Since they often spoke English and were white, runaway servants were more difficult to recapture than black slaves. If runaway servants were captured, they were punished by increasing their time of service.

O'Malley, Mike. "Runaway from Freedom?" Runaway from Freedom. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/blackboard/OMalley/runaway.html (30 Aug 2005)
Benjamin Franklin estimated that at the time of the American Revolution, roughly one half of Pennsylvania’s labor force was legally unfree—bound to someone else as property, for many years or for a lifetime.

And from boards.ie some bits on the irish as slaves





http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055755192&page=2

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055533740

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

But this thread is not really about that is it ?

Implicit in the OP is that women were oppressed by men and you suggested the oppressors were the capitalist overlords so I asked who they were.
.

The OP is very broad. My point is that rather than women being suppressed by men, that the working class were suppressed by the system at the time. This is evident in life expectancy. It was common for the better off people who we discuss here to live to 70+ yet the mean life expectancy in 1900 was less than 50 http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf (page 9).
To look at the rural role as you suggest may be interesting and the role of women in it.

CDfm

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The OP is very broad. My point is that rather than women being suppressed by men, that the working class were suppressed by the system at the time. This is evident in life expectancy. It was common for the better off people who we discuss here to live to 70+ yet the mean life expectancy in 1900 was less than 50 http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf (page 9).
To look at the rural role as you suggest may be interesting and the role of women in it.

A system suppressing is all very well.

But for the Irishmen -they were not really the system.

I am not seeing evidence of wealthy indigenous Irish Catholics but I am seeing evidence of peasants or slumdwellers that were poor and uneducated and probably poorer than serfs in other European Countries.

jonniebgood1

Regarding the rural role of women at approx 1900 the role seems to have been shifting slightly towards more domesticated. So a dependency was created that would lead to women having a totally different role to men but also a more controlling, more powerful role.

Employment figures bear out this demographic shift: in 1881, 815,000 women were in paid employment; by 1911 the number had declined to 430,000; and the number of female agricultural laborers fell from 27,000 in 1891 to 5,000 twenty years later. (4) Yet this did not mean that women lost power and status--quite the reverse. By moving into the home, women made the domestic sphere their own and used it as a base from which they gained power through their control of the household economy. The Irish Homestead (IH) was well aware of the change in the social and economic status of women and saw the growing power of women as a foundation for a new social order in rural Ireland. An efficient farm depended on women's labor inside the home and men's role in the fields.

This is from an excellent (and long) article about the role of Irish Homestead newsletter/ paper at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKX/is_2001_Fall-Winter/ai_83447252/

The formation of the United Irishwomen in 1910 was a reflection of this growing role. They were a collection of ordinary people working together to further themselves by learning ordinary tasks that would improve their lot.

The United Irishwomen sought to teach cooking, promote temperance, propagate cooperative principles, and promote women's involvement in matters such as dressmaking, horticulture, beekeeping, and poultry rearing, among other things. (60) Lionel Smith-Gordon and Laurence C. Staples commented on the nature of the United Irishwomen: "The branches are composed of farmers' wives and daughters and the women of the smaller country towns, who receive lectures and instruction from organisers of the central body in such useful subjects as home-brightening, poultry-keeping and egg-production, gardening, village industries and so forth." (61) The IH heralded the arrival of the United Irishwomen (UI), welcoming the involvement of women in what the paper perceived as a vital element of its mission to regenerate the Irish countryside. Not only that, but through the United Irishwomen a vision of an ideal Ireland could be engendered: "The fact is that men can only do one-half of the things which have to be done to mark a national life which we can think of with reflection and pride and which will be the true expression of our national characteristics." (62) "Women must not let men have all the credit of building up whatever Ireland we may pass on to our children." http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKX/is_2001_Fall-Winter/ai_83447252/pg_8/?tag=mantle_skin;content

Regarding conditions in rural houses the homestead promoted improvements to the standards around ordinary homes.

The IH therefore set about to create an ideal Irish home and thus the ideal Irish nation. Pigs were no longer to be kept inside, manure heaps were to be expunged from the doorstep, and the Irish woman was to be allowed to go about her domestic duties and create a comfortable, clean, and tidy Irish home. (24) Home industries and domestic instruction were seen as central to the creation of a decent home life in Ireland.

CDfm

I still dont understand the Marxist analysis of it.

So the United Irishwomen promoted women giving up manual work etc on farms etc.

And the family was the social unit.

Can you list what the issues were and how it fits together because I cant see it.

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

I still dont understand the Marxist analysis of it.

So the United Irishwomen promoted women giving up manual work etc on farms etc.

And the family was the social unit.

Can you list what the issues were and how it fits together because I cant see it.

The Marxist view is summarised in one line from the article you linked above where connolly told the ICA a week before the rising

Remember, we are not only for political liberty, but for economic liberty as well

The analysis from the article is taking a very one sided view, understandable given where it is appearing.

I think women had already began to be less involved in manual out in the fields type labour. This is shown in the figures quoted above and here again

Employment figures bear out this demographic shift: in 1881, 815,000 women were in paid employment; by 1911 the number had declined to 430,000; and the number of female agricultural laborers fell from 27,000 in 1891 to 5,000 twenty years later.

The United Irishwomen aimed to help them develop the home from what it was which would presumably improve life for everyone as well as develop home industries. some of that can seem quite condescending (women going back to a domestic role) but it saw women take a more important role than they had when involved in manual labour. Control over domestic matters included expenditure and finance in alot of cases. This line of thinking is taken by Joanna Bourke- http://www.jstor.org/pss/204956

CDfm

Nhead wrote: »

I don't want to be a contrary fecker esp since I don't post that often but this is what I mean about the op's question being vague. I took oppression to mean oppression by anyone, so even though the Laundries were run by women it is still oppression. You're totally right about nuns and running large institutions (still subordinate to the male hierarchy) etc.

I want to get back to this issue because I dont see it that way.

What I see is the Anglo Irish Ascendency & all the poor law stuff and organisations of protestant women doing this stuff. The nun's "peer group" and when they took over the running of the worlhouses/poorhouses.

Most of the orders were autonomous and reported to Rome in the way that the Pope is the Head of the Catholic Church. Its a bit like the Royal Society of Chartered Surveyors getting their charter -that does not mean the Queen runs it.

The different orders of Nuns had been illegal organisations and institutions in their own right. They still are.

We know that Cardinal Cullen (1803-1878) was a tough fceker and no slouch in ascerting Irish rights and "paddy power" where it could be gotten. One of his protegees in New York when asked by the Mayor of New York how he was going to stop Irish Catholic Churches being burnt down responded "and how are you going to protect yours".

My gut feeling is that the nuns took over the running of the institutions and just copied what the others did before them. These were hard peasant women.

I dont see how they reported to a Catholic male hierarchy any more than the Chartered Surveyors report to the Queen.

There is a huge difference between a spirutual leader and an organisational structure. Queen Elizabeth is the Titular Head of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion.

The Church of Ireland is an associate of the Anglican Communion and I cant see a hierarchical structure to the Queen there either.

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The Marxist view is summarised in one line from the article you linked above where connolly told the ICA a week before the rising The analysis from the article is taking a very one sided view, understandable given where it is appearing.

I think women had already began to be less involved in manual out in the fields type labour. This is shown in the figures quoted above and here again The United Irishwomen aimed to help them develop the home from what it was which would presumably improve life for everyone as well as develop home industries. some of that can seem quite condescending (women going back to a domestic role) but it saw women take a more important role than they had when involved in manual labour. Control over domestic matters included expenditure and finance in alot of cases. This line of thinking is taken by Joanna Bourke- http://www.jstor.org/pss/204956

But did he say we are going to nationalise the land etc and be part of an international workers revolution. ?

If the principal unit of society of the family and who had a very hard time being tenants at will under the landlord system , I cant see how they would agree to handing over land that they had bought over to another collective.

This was the little that they had and a farmers son wrote

Stony Grey Soil - Patrick Kavanagh

O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life-conquering plough!
Your mandril strained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of coward's brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food.

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men.
O can I still stroke the monster's back
Or write with unpoisened pen

His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant's prayer.

Mullahinsha, Drummeril, Black Shanco -
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.

Nhead

CDfm I'll be honest with ya the thread is gone a bit all over the place and I'm lost:) We seem to be moving into a discussion about marxism and how poor Ireland was. What I meant about nuns is that they were never going to get to be bishops/archbishops. I know now that you took the op to mean oppression by men I just took it to mean oppression in general.

CDfm

Nhead wrote: »

What I meant about nuns is that they were never going to get to be bishops/archbishops.

It a new area for me historically and I am trying to see

And I am trying to get a handle on the era and its institutions.

It looks like nuns controled schools , colleges,and hospitals -probably more institutionally than their male religious colleagues.

I know now that you took the op to mean oppression by men I just took it to mean oppression in general.

I wasn't expecting the marxist debate but the peasant majority weren't oppressing anybody.

So how can we look at it ?

Nhead

CDfm wrote: »

It a new area for me historically and I am trying to see

And I am trying to get a handle on the era and its institutions.

It looks like nuns controled schools , colleges,and hospitals -probably more institutionally than their male religious colleagues.




I wasn't expecting the marxist debate but the peasant majority weren't oppressing anybody.

So how can we look at it ?

There isn't anything wrong with the Marxist debate just that it seemed to be going a bit off topic. As you say Ireland was pretty poor in the nineteenth and twentieth century so if the peasants and thepoor were pretty much living in the same conditions and the urban poor ditto, the middle classes were living in roughly the same conditions as each other and the upper class likewise we have to look at the attiudes that prevailed in the society with regards gender to see was there repression. Did the government look at men and women as equal, did they have the same rights under law? Did the church look at the genders as equal, did they treat them equally, did the society at large distinguish between the genders with regards opportunity etc. The reason I was looking at the nineteenth century first is because this is when the state begin to impinge on peoples life for example: taking a census regularly, setting up a national school system, ordnance survey maps, creation of a police force etc

Nhead

Women themselves must have felt they weren't being treated equally as the issue of suffrage became a hot-topic (now there were women who were against female suffrage). In America you had the Seneca Falls Convention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Falls_Convention

Now it could be argued, successfully I may add, that the movement for womens suffrage was middle-class led but none the less their eventual success would, with time, benefit all classes.

CDfm

Nhead wrote: »

There isn't anything wrong with the Marxist debate just that it seemed to be going a bit off topic. As you say Ireland was pretty poor in the nineteenth and twentieth century so if the peasants and thepoor were pretty much living in the same conditions and the urban poor ditto,the middle classes were living in roughly the same conditions as each other and the upper class likewise we have to look at the attiudes that prevailed in the society with regards gender to see was there repression.

I think everyone was fairly poor.

Can you compare it internationally ?

The real economy was that way and the "middle classes" educated their children for emigration.

Did the government look at men and women as equal, did they have the same rights under law? ,

Those are good questions and how do you measure them.

I have a feeling that there are a few issues .

The pressing problems of the day put government policy on the back burner. Were they election policy issues or did we follow British laws.

I have a feeling that the issues were decided by the lack of money.

Did the church look at the genders as equal, did they treat them equally

I think the church was split by gender and I dont think you had gender crossover in education.

Women ran the womens areas of education etc.

And you had womens groups such as the ICA etc.

did the society at large distinguish between the genders with regards opportunity etc.

Ahem, what opportunities ?

The reason I was looking at the nineteenth century first is because this is when the state begin to impinge on peoples life for example: taking a census regularly, setting up a national school system, ordnance survey maps, creation of a police force etc

And that gives structure because of the creation and participation in the organs of state.

Nhead wrote: »

Women themselves must have felt they weren't being treated equally as the issue of suffrage became a hot-topic (now there were women who were against female suffrage). In America you had the Seneca Falls Convention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Falls_Convention

Now it could be argued, successfully I may add, that the movement for womens suffrage was middle-class led but none the less their eventual success would, with time, benefit all classes.

In America around 1960 you had songs like this -kids had cars and in ireland you had no cars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4TyR492qSs

Other indicators were emigration

CDfm

I think it is very hard to argue that Ireland had the same conditions of an industrialised nation like Britain or America.

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/ireland/agire.htm

The case for land reform seemed irrefutable when conditions in Ulster were taken into account. Ulster farms were among the smallest in the country (only Connaught in western Ireland possessed a higher proportion of smallholdings), but farming seemed to prosper there. Visitors commented on the neat white-washed houses, the well-fed, well-dressed inhabitants, the absence of agrarian (as opposed to sectarian) violence, and the persistence or even the expansion of local industry, especially around Belfast. This state of affairs was attributed to differences in land tenure, specifically the existence of "Ulster custom", which involved the acceptance and observance of certain unwritten, ill-defined but important tenant rights. Two practices were deemed to be of great significance:

the tenant farmer in Ulster was assumed to have security of tenure. So long as he paid his rent he could not be evicted and he also had first option on the renewal of any lease when it expired
he could sell his 'interest' in the farm to another, incoming tenant without undue interference on the part of the landlord or could expect, on leaving the farm, to receive payment from the landlord for any 'unused' improvements (new roads, buildings, manuring, drainage) which had been undertaken.

The combined effect of these rights was to give effective security to farmers, encouraging them to invest in the knowledge that they would not see their rents raised as a result and that they would enjoy the rewards of their efforts. Ulster's experience seemed to offer a solution for the rest of Ireland and consequently the extension and formalisation of tenant right formed the basis of Gladstone's Land Acts of 1870 and 1881. Other solutions included the abolition of the entire system and its replacement by state ownership or 'peasant' proprietorship where the farmer owned rather than rented the land. All solutions proceeded from a common diagnosis of the inadequacies of the system of Irish land tenure and the backwardness and poverty of rural society. Whether this theory's assumptions were a fair reflection of the reality of Ireland is, therefore of crucial importance. If they were not, then remedial action based upon them was likely to be at best irrelevant and at worst positively counter-productive.
Realities - as opposed to the image portrayed.

If England has had too much town life, Ireland has had too little. (J.L. Hammond)

Nineteenth Century Ireland was predominantly a rural country. Only 20% of the population of 8.1 million in 1841 lived in towns, generously defined a centres of 20 or more houses. Only Belfast, Dublin and Cork could claim the rank of cities and their expansion, based on a combination of textiles, shipbuilding and commerce, was unexceptional in terms of the British experience. Cork fared the least well of the three.
Eighteenth-century industry had not been confined to towns, and rural life was not solely involved with farming. Domestic manufacturing, especially of textiles, was widely dispersed throughout Ireland. There were concentrations of industry in north Leinster and Ulster but spinning and weaving were carried out all over the country. From the 1780s English manufacturers were worried that freer trade between the two countries would lead to an influx of Irish manufactured goods.
Mechanisation and factory based production in Lancashire, the Scottish lowlands and to a lesser extent north-east Ulster, dealt domestic industry in Ireland a blow from which it never recovered. This collapse of domestic industry robbed small farmers and labourers of a valuable source of income.
Ireland's rural problem was a much a consequence of the industrial collapse as it was an agricultural crisis. There was no organised system of poor relief in Ireland until 1838, so the number of beggars increased and the potato became increasingly the means of subsistence.

Eighteenth-century farming was finely tuned to the needs of the English market

Live cattle traditionally comprised the bulk of exports but from the 1760s with corn shortages and rising prices in England farmers increasingly put their pasture under corn. This was accelerated by the French Wars. The switch to arable farming encouraged the reclamation of previously uncultivated waste land and the cultivation of potatoes both as part of a regular crop rotation and as a way of breaking in the newly reclaimed ground. The increased work-force was paid partly in kind in the form of potato plots. The move away from arable farming began possibly in 1815, more probably from the mid-1830s. Grain prices collapsed after 1815, causing deep depression and distress on both sides of the Irish Sea. Prices for livestock dropped less, however, and this encouraged Irish farmers to switch back to pasture.
Live cattle exports

1821-25


47,000 per annum


1835
98,000
1846-48 190,000 per annum (at the height of the famine). Sheep exports doubled over the same period.

Pastoral farming needed fewer labourers, and the decline in demand for labour proved disastrous for the smallholders and labourers. Dependence on the potato increased alarmingly especially in the west where inferior land, poor communications and distance from ports restricted both the development of commercial farming and the prospects of emigrating. Periodic famine was endemic as the potato crops failed or proved inadequate to support families through the winter. Social tension in the countryside escalated with the prospect of clearance and eviction to make way for larger pastoral farms.

For nearly 30 years after the famine, with the exception of the depression between 1859 and 1864, Irish farming prospered. Prices favoured livestock and dairy farming. New breeds were introduced and the average annual value of agricultural output (excluding potatoes) rose by 40%
1851-55 £28.8 million
1871-75 £40.6 million

Farmers' incomes rose, and as a result of increased spending power, shops spread rapidly throughout Ireland, even in the far west where their absence during the famine had proved so disastrous for government attempts to relieve distress through market channels. A more prolonged depression set in from the late 1870s, mainly caused by domestic difficulties. In the west of Ireland the potato crop failed successively for several years after 1877; the opportunities for emigration declined; the decline of seasonal employment in fishing or harvesting pushed smallholders there to the brink of disaster; the outbreak of livestock disease decimated their pig and poultry numbers. Falling prices for butter and flattened grain crops because of bad weather hit farmers all over Ireland. However, it seems that agriculture was neither as backward nor as poverty-stricken as is sometimes imagined. It was commercially orientated and farmers were better able to ride out adverse corn price movements than the southern English farmers.

Connaught and parts of west Munster remained less developed, with a significantly higher percentage of smallholders who continued to rely heavily on a potato diet. Leinster and east Munster were to the forefront of the move to pastoral farming and contained a higher percentage of larger farmers.

http://www.historyhome.co.uk/c-eight/ireland/ire-land.htm

Land-holding in Ireland 1760-1880

Much of this document is taken from Michael Winstanley's excellent exposition, Ireland and the Land Question, 1800-1922 (Lancaster Pamphlets, 2007)

As in many instances of Irish history, there is a myth and a reality.

The myth

In the case of land holding, the myth is that Ireland was under the domination of the English aristocracy and that the country had been divided up into huge estates. These had been handed over to English and Scottish Protestant supporters of the English monarch since Elizabeth I, in the attempt to subdue Ireland and abolish Roman Catholicism in Britain. Most noble landowners were absentees, employing agents in Ireland. The Irish could rent farms - they became "tenants at will": i.e. they had no security of tenure. They could be (and were) evicted as soon as their rents fell into arrears. After 1780 rack-renting became very common because of population growth. Estates were often poorly managed, with much sub-letting of land. Tenants had no incentive to improve their land or houses because then the rent would be raised and if they could not pay or fell into arrears, they would be evicted without compensation for the work they had done.

The reality

Although substantially correct, the view that Irish land was owned exclusively by English Protestants or by families with strong personal and material connections with England also needs to be qualified. At the very least, it must be appreciated that many of the great landed estates owned by Protestant absentees were in Ulster and the east of Ireland and not all of these men were grasping landlords. For example, the Marquis of Rockingham - who owned vast estates in Wicklow - was a caring man who did his best for his Irish tenants.
Landowners

Until about 1900 the greater part of the land in Ireland (97% in 1870) was owned by men who rented it out to tenant farmers rather than cultivating it themselves. As in England, the individual wealth of members of the land-owning class varied considerably, depending on the size, quality and location of properties. Smaller landlords in the east, in Ulster or on the outskirts of towns were more favourably placed than the owners of tracts of infertile bog in the west. There were probably fewer than 10,000 proprietors of 100 or more acres in 1830 but this number included many who owned relatively small estates and a few aristocratic magnates.

In 1870 302 proprietors (1.5% of the total) owned 33.7% of the land, and 50% of the country was in the hands of 750 families. At the other end of the scale, 15,527 (80.5%) owned between them only 19.3% of the land.

Absenteeism is also commonly accepted to have been a universal practice in Ireland and detrimental to the country's progress. Its alleged universality and supposedly unfavourable consequences can be queried. Absenteeism was prevalent in England too: large tracts of the north of England were devoid of resident landowners, and in parts of Lincolnshire in the mid-Nineteenth century only 7% of parishes had permanently resident substantial landowners. If a man owned several estates, by definition if he was living on one of them he was an absentee on all the others. Before 1845 an estimated 33% to 50% of Irish landowners were absentees, and a substantial portion of these were internal absentees (i.e. landlords who lived elsewhere in Ireland). Half the country was owned by men who lived on or near their estates.

Absenteeism did not necessarily bring about inefficient estate management or rack-renting. Most substantial proprietors employed land stewards to manage their lands. When these men's enthusiasm for efficiency, maximisation of rental income or both overcame their caution or humanity, aggrieved tenants could and did turn to the absentee as an appeal judge. Permanent absentees were usually the larger and possibly more financially secure landowners who may have had less reason to raise rents and more funds to improve their estates. Some of the most infamous landlords who experienced the full force of tenant opposition during the Land War crisis of 1879-82 were permanently resident on their estates. The fiercest critics of absentees for much of the century were not farmers but resident landlords who felt that they were unfairly expected to shoulder unpalatable, time-consuming, local, social and political responsibilities for which they received no reward and scant recognition.

During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the British government had confiscated a great deal of land owned by Catholics and enacted penal laws restricting land-ownership to Protestants. Although some of these Acts had been repealed, starting in 1778, few Catholics purchased land before the famine because estates were too expensive. The situation was eased somewhat by the 1849 Encumbered Estates Act. Almost without exception landowners were in debt. During the famine, landlords' incomes collapsed as thousands of small tenants defaulted on their rent, and this was accompanied by a huge rise in outgoings.

The system of poor relief introduced into Ireland in 1838 was financed out of local rates, a tax levied on occupiers of property. The poor were exempted from paying this if the property they inhabited was valued at less than £4 p.a. for rental purposes; the landlords were committed to paying their rates. Consequently the cost of relieving the destitution after 1845 fell on the landlords. In an attempt to reduce the number of paupers in areas for which they were responsible, landlords resorted to eviction.
Tenants

It is commonplace to portray Ireland as a country of peasants, poor subsistence farmers eking out a precarious existence on small patches of land, generally planted with potatoes, and uninvolved in the market economy except in so far as they were obliged to pay rent to landlords and taxes to Church and State. In reality rural society was far more complex than this, with no clear distinctions between classes and significant variations between regions and time.

The majority of the population in pre-famine Ireland had little or no access to land. They lived in appalling conditions. 40% of Irish houses in 1841 were one room mud cabins with natural earth floors, no windows and no chimneys. Furniture and cooking facilities in these hovels were primitive. Their inhabitants' diet was monotonous and increasingly inadequate. Apart from beggars and paupers, virtually landless labourers (cottiers) occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder: there were 596,000 of them in the 1841 Census, and they comprised the largest single occupational/social group in the country. They faced a shrinking demand for their services after the French Wars as domestic industry declined and corn-growing contracted. Before 1838, irregularly employed married men relied on small potato plots for survival. These were often rented on a yearly basis from local farmers and paid for by labour services, a system known as conacre.

Smallholders numbered 408,000 in 1841. Of these 65,000 had holdings of less than 1 acre, and were virtually indistinguishable from the cottiers. Many had to rely on access to income from elsewhere, such as peat-digging or using waste-land for common grazing, domestic industry (which was declining anyway), kelp collecting, fishing (where possible) or seasonal work on large farms. Smallholders with between 6 and 15 acres were classed as small farmers. Whatever the size of their holdings, virtually none had written agreements with their landlords to give them legal security of tenure. The sad plight of these groups dominates contemporary and much historical writing, but they did not constitute the entire population, and their numbers and economic significance declined from the mid-century.

Some 453,000 were returned in the 1841 Census as "Farmers" and ranked as men of some standing and wealth. They had a comfortable standard of living, participated in local and national politics, supported and financed the Catholic Church, arranged beneficial marriages for their children and provided social leadership in the absence of local landowners. Sometimes they were also landlords to the smallholders and cottiers, subletting land which they rented on long leases from the landowner.

Examples of how small the holdings became:

in 1770 a farm was let to one family. By 1845 there were over 300 inhabitants, most of them sub-tenants of the original leaseholder.

in 1843 there were 12,529 tenants on the Trinity College estate, but only 1% of these paid their rent to the college; 45% were sub-tenants of this small number and over 52% were sub-tenants of the sub-tenants.

Throughout the Nineteenth Century, Connaught and Ulster had much higher proportions of smallholders than Munster and Leinster. The land in the west was infertile and had unreliable communications, and conditions there closely matched the popular image of peasant Ireland.

EDIT - So where I am sort of hovering around is where did Ireland fit in terms of the models used.

I am trying to see the parts and usually what we see is republican or national politics but we do not know how people lived.

CDfm

Reading up on the Magdelene Laundries they had their origans in the workhouses and poorhouses of the 19th Century. The religious orders that ran them expanded in the mid to late 19th Century and took over their running we wree all by women.

My impression is that they were run for women by woman. The Orders that ran them used techniques and practices from the mid 19th century

Maria Luddy writes on the treatment of "penitents " with both catholic and protestant histories given

http://books.google.ie/books?id=1Nac...page&q&f=false

Nhead

CDfm wrote: »

Reading up on the Magdelene Laundries they had their origans in the workhouses and poorhouses of the 19th Century. The religious orders that ran them expanded in the mid to late 19th Century and took over their running we wree all by women.

My impression is that they were run for women by woman. The Orders that ran them used techniques and practices from the mid 19th century

Maria Luddy writes on the treatment of "penitents " with both catholic and protestant histories given

http://books.google.ie/books?id=1Nac...page&q&f=false

That was my point in another thread-the laundries had their roots in the 19th century and didn't magically spring up once the free state came into existence. I also didn't take the op point to be that women were only oppressed by men.

CDfm

Nhead wrote: »

That was my point in another thread-the laundries had their roots in the 19th century and didn't magically spring up once the free state came into existence. I also didn't take the op point to be that women were only oppressed by men.

The nuns ran independently of men and you had a huge surge in education convents etc but was the currency was manual labour ??

The nuns sucessfully rode out the penal laws. Did they become an elite.?

Huge increases in numbers of women and nuns as teachers and nurses by 1900 probably made Irish Women more internationally mobile.

The treatment of workhouse/magdelenes seems to date from practices that existed in the 1880's .

So I am left with the impression of brawn vs brains.

Oppression is a nasty word.

What were the barriers ?

Where is pay discrimination- it was real ?

Investment in education and training ?

Stuff existed that may have either reinforced stereotypes in a peasant society ?

Now in my book if Paddy & Mrs Paddy prosperous farmers had money to send one child to be a doctor - it probably would have been the son. I wouldn't call that oppression.

I also knew quite a few women with businesses and shops when I was growing up.

Nhead

I was thinking about this before you posted: What do we mean by oppression in this sense? (If one poster thinks it means x and the other y then we will just be at cross purposes).

CDfm

A very good point and probably why Marchdub is proposing a sub group.

There is a series of video's by the late Richard Feynman, physicist and Nobel Laureate and colleague of Einstein where he discusses science and facts vs say religion and sociology.

This is the first if you are interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XgmrMZ0h54

That was why I posted before on ideoligical arguments.

Say if we take the Nuns and the Magdelene Launderies -we can postulate a theory that men were in charge but does the history support that ?

If we look at the Organisational Theory and Management etc and read the history of Nuns in Education and Nursing etc we may see things in a different light with a professional female clerical elite emerging and powerful organisations run by women.

We could see the institutions as a business model created in the 1850's or so based on a business model similar to any other large organisation following an Organisational Life Cycle. The Mercy Sisters Diaries from the Crimea indicate motivational goals in 1854 and professional skills to achieve them. In Ireland you had the education of women in Convents etc and its expansion from schools & hospitals into workhouses and asylums as being like a business expanding into a new market. Its decline can be for several reasons including not adapting its Model after, say, 1880.

http://www.enotes.com/small-business-encyclopedia/organizational-life-cycle

So in the case of nuns etc they may not fit the theory or ideology being proposed. Also, you cannot avoid other skilled women in other fields that did not conform.

Therefore your method needs to recognise the achievements and capabilities too .

jonniebgood1

The RTE programme 'the way we worked' is focusing on womens role in a series of standard jobs that women filled in the 20th century. The first 3 are on the RTE player at http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1102078 . The one on tonight was interesting and it showed mainly women who were housekeepers from a very young age. They were paid a small wage and their board in the house they were keeping. In all cases there was a very apparent class divide although the people they were serving were all different.

CDfm

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The one on tonight was interesting and it showed mainly women who were housekeepers from a very young age. They were paid a small wage and their board in the house they were keeping. In all cases there was a very apparent class divide although the people they were serving were all different.

I did not see it but was the TV Programme anecdotal or did it provide any stats to back it up.

So if you have a doctors housekeeper then there were very few doctors and also people worked longer hours.

In the 60's and 70's doctors had nightime surgeries and did house visits. I cannot imagine a doctor these days do that. Shops for instance would stay open quite late and unsocial hours and those things changed and would be manned by the owners or family members.

jonniebgood1

CDfm wrote: »

I did not see it but was the TV Programme anecdotal or did it provide any stats to back it up.

So if you have a doctors housekeeper then there were very few doctors and also people worked longer hours.

In the 60's and 70's doctors had nightime surgeries and did house visits. I cannot imagine a doctor these days do that. Shops for instance would stay open quite late and unsocial hours and those things changed and would be manned by the owners or family members.

Shop opening hours would have reflected pub opening hours in many places as they were the same premises in many cases particularly outside of the cities. The programs content was largely anecdotal but the premise behind it was that it was reflective of a common situation.

This week The Way We Worked focuses on domestic service. Many rural women had to leave home in their teens to work as maids, housekeepers or nannies. They often worked long hours with little time off. The pay was meagre but the wages they sent home were vital for the family's income.http://www.rte.ie/tv/programmes/the_way_we_worked.html

Nhead wrote: »

On nuns (and indeed on religious orders in general) yes they are autonomous in how they are run but the ideology of the church, its dogma, its edicts and its rules still comes from Rome (as is my understanding). .......

This was part of his efforts to bring the Catholic Church in Ireland into line with Roman practice'. http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Paul_Cullen

The effect of Cullen cannot be underestimated when looking at how the church shaped peoples' lifes and attitudes The Synod altered the way education was delievered and encyclicals etc were read out at mass: 'An ultramontane, authoritarian, puritanical, and pietistic Catholic Church was created in Ireland and henceforth it had a powerful influence on education, public morality, social life, and national politics, though it professed to be non-political. Irish missions and migrants brought this type of Catholicism to the English-speaking world—to Britain, the British Empire and the United States of America.

So was the harsh treatment in the magdalene asylums attributable to the changes made by Cullen. How was his theory implemented in practice in the laundaries and did it happen in 1850 or after 1920?

CDfm

Nhead wrote: »

I know what you mean about ideological arguments I just don't think that human beings can remove their ideologies and present pure facts when talking about people but that is just my opinion. For example, both you and I did just that in this thread: you took oppression in the op to mean: oppression by men and I took it to mean oppression and then we went answering it according to what we understood the question to mean and brought our biases to it.

I think that the OP was not precise. And I do not thnk we were being biased just establishing a terms of reference.

The difficulty arises when you look at any source for example the census of 1901 or 1911 tells us a persons religion but it doesn't show us the way in which they worshipped, we have to draw on other sources and our knowledge of the era to paint a picture.

A persons religion in Ireland was relevant to their class but if you are fair you also say that Monto was the biggest red light district in europe , you also look at illigitimacy rates versus similar societies etc.

Even today I have met people that are baptised, go to RC mass, define themselves as RC but don't understand transubstantiation but according to census they are RC but to some RC they really aren't.

And all those guys and girls who fought for independence under the threat of excommunication.Some hold.

Another thing about the difficulty of just looking at facts is where does literature fit in? Does the work of Charles Dickens tell us about the society he lived in even though it is wrapped in fiction? To me, it does but someone might say 'sure what has that to do with history??' I don't know if any of that makes sense but there ya go!

Fiction is not history.

Nhead wrote: »

On nuns (and indeed on religious orders in general) yes they are autonomous in how they are run but the ideology of the church, its dogma, its edicts and its rules still comes from Rome (as is my understanding).

What ?

We are borg. You will be assimilated. I dont think so.

No matter how autonomous the laundries were they weren't autonomous of Catholic Dogma. So, what did the church as a whole, not the individual organisations, think of women because surely this affected how women within the church were treated?

Like an autonomous organisation run by women who were an elite and who competed with other organisations that were non catholic religious and non catholic secular run by both men and women and upper class Anglo Irish ascendency women too were not exactly shrinking violets.

You are asking me to believe that nuns kowtowed and having dealt with army generals during wartime and prevailed as both Mother Bridgeman did in the Crimea and Sister Anthony did in the American Civil War suddenly lost all that ambition and drive.

I would have thought such women would be female role models -well are they ?

During the 1850s Archbishop Cullen started to bring the RCC in Ireland into conformity with Rome as part of this 'He established the Irish Ecclesiastical Record in 1864, an official journal for the clergy to communicate papal encyclicals, decisions, and instructions to priests and religious, and to inform them on history, literature, and the Catholic position on current intellectual problems. This was part of his efforts to bring the Catholic Church in Ireland into line with Roman practice'. http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Paul_Cullen

The country did not become independent until 1922 and the British were not catholic.

Read this

THE MONTO AND MAGDALEN LAUNDRIES
As I write this paper, a landmark building in Dublin is quietly been torn down in the “Nighttown District, known to locals as “The Monto” The Monto is the setting for the Circe chapter. “Nighttown was slang among Dublin journalist for the late shift on a newspaper. Monto, named after Montgomery Street, was considered to be one of the worse slums in Europe at the turn of the century, rife with depravation and disease. Many of the brothels were frequented by British soldiers, but those Bloom and Stephen frequented were at the upper end of the area” (1).
The building a former convent and Magdalen Laundry had served the “Monto” area of Dublin since the late 19th Century. It was built by the Sisters of Our lady of Charity of Refuge, which adjoins Railway Street , for former prostitutes to reform and do penance for their sins. The Laundry was first known as the Gloucester Street laundry, renamed Sean McDermott Street laundry. The order came to Dublin in 1853, shortly after the famine broke out. Their first laundry was on the north side of the city in Drumcondra, known as St.Mary’s Magdalen Asylum., High Park. In 1902 in Michael McCarthy’s book “Priests and People in Ireland” he wrote about High Park Laundry the following “The order of Our lady of charity of Refuge owns High Park, Drumcondra, in which there are 65 nuns. That institution is, perhaps, the largest and most lucrative public laundry in the city of Dublin. Its vans are to be seen delivering washing and collecting money in all parts of town. It is a Magdalene Asylum, in which it is stated that there are 210 penitents giving their service free until the “nameless graves in the cemetery” claim their poor bodies. This order works another Magdalene asylum in Lower Gloucester Street, within the Mecklenburg Street area, in which there are 13 nuns who keep 90 fallen women at work at the profitable laundry business”. In 1993 the convent and their laundries had been the subject of much controversy, when they exhumed and cremated 133+ Magdalen women (penitents) and buried them together in a mass grave in Glasnevin Cemetery. The order of nuns had lost a lot of money on the stock market and sold the land where the Magdalene women were buried. In order for the sale of land to go through, the bodies of the Magdalen women former prostitutes had to be exhumed. This was done almost in the dead of night very quietly and the Irish media did not cover it as it should have. “The grave diggers had found an extra 75 bodies of Magdalen women with no death certificate and the Irish Government let this pass and gave permission for reburial without death certificates”.(2) Joyce could not have fictionalized a more ghoulish course of events. The bodies were then cremated, so we will never know who were in those graves, but without a doubt they were all former prostitutes, as original burial dates go back to the 1800’s when these institutions were formed to take prostitutes in who wanted to reform. They spent their days washing the sheets from the hospitals of Dublin, the Prison and from the upper class families and the clergy, without pay, washing away their sins. These were the women who actually inhabited the brothels Joyce wrote about in Circe.
“After the scandal of the Magdalen graves, the public began to feel the immediate relevance of a world which seemed to have no real meaning in recent history, slavery. Extraordinary as it may seem, the inmates of the Magdalen Laundries were in effect, slaves, forced to work without pay for their sins. The remains of the women were interred in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, their names listed on a stark limestone monument notable for the absence of religious symbolism. The dates of their deaths are given and they point to the amazing longevity of these institutions. The earliest is April 1858 the latest December 1994”. (3)
The institutions had an even longer history in Ireland. “The first was established in Dublin in 1766”. (4) “It was only in October 1996” (5) that the last of the laundries closed, this was Sean McDermott Street in the Monto (Nighttown District). “Within these institutions in Ireland around 30,000.00 women were imprisoned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”(6) Initially most were prostitutes.


http://www.jamesjoyceexhibition.com/apps/blog/

Show me a part of catholic dogma that says run a profitable business with no labour costs for your own benefit and have the best of housing and food.

I think your ideas on nuns ignore the obvious.

Now even within feminism today the same competition exists with religious groups on what they both see as their exclusive market

Feminists and Evangelicals compete to rescue fallen women


The British Humanist Association is complaining about a government decision to award a contract to what it describes as a "vital service for trafficked women" to the Salvation Army. Previously, the funding for the Poppy Project worth around £2million per year had gone to Eaves, a feminist group that campaigns against the sex industry.

The BHA describes this as a "shock move" and "deeply concerning." Praising Eaves as a "pioneering women’s charity" which was "motivated solely with regard to the well-being of those women", the statement - attributed to Naomi Phillips - dismisses the Salvationists as homophobic and "a church motivated by a clear mission to evangelise". The BHA fears that the church will "discriminate and proselytise" in the way it provides the service, and calls upon the government to bar religious groups from tendering for contracts such as this one.

This is all a bit rich. Eaves might not disturb the peace and quiet of your local high street by banging tambourines, but their evangelical zeal is, if anything, even greater than the Sally Army's.

Motivated by an ideological opposition to all aspects of the sex industry - on the grounds that it "helps to construct and maintain gender inequality" - Eaves campaigns for tougher anti-prostitution laws (for example, for a Swedish style ban on all purchasing of sex, however consensual) and has been accused of carrying out and publicising misleading research into the prevalence of sex-trafficking and the damaging impact of lap-dancing clubs. The organisation was a favourite of the last government and of the Home Office, whose own "research" and consultation exercises tended to draw heavily and uncritically on Eaves/Poppy papers such as "The Big Brothel" and "Sex in the City".

Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon of Birkbeck is prominent among those who have drawn attention to the apparent conflict of interest involved. Two years ago she wrote:

There are many linked organisations with no interest in questioning ramped-up figures on trafficking. The Poppy project's parent organisation, Eaves Housing, has an income of more than £5m, and a large sum of this comes from the Home Office. Eaves' objectives are threefold: to provide accommodation, advice and support directly to women and children escaping domestic violence and women trafficked into prostitution and domestic servitude; lobbying and responding to government papers on violence against women; and researching and highlighting issues around violence against women, including prostitution, trafficking and domestic violence. The Home Office gives money to the Poppy project, which in turn lobbies the government. If this sounds rather circular, it is.

The 2006 accounts describe the cosy relationship it has enjoyed with government. "In addition to direct service provision Poppy research and development team has been nurturing relationships with both government and non-governmental agencies. Members of the project joined Mr Paul Goggins, the parliamentary under secretary of state at the Home Office, on an official UK presidency visit to Lithuania and following a meeting with Mr Mike O'Brian, the solicitor general, were invited to attend the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Human Trafficking." (Page 8).

As "Eaves plan over the long term is to be recognised as one of the leading agencies on violence against women issues in the country [sic]" (page 2, pdf), one fears this implies corporate domination over the interests of, rather than provision of service to, women. Funding comes from the Home Office (via the Office for Criminal Justice Reform) and also from the former Association of Local Government, London Councils. This is worrying because these same organisations are the ones being lobbied by Poppy, Eaves and Object.

Brooks-Gordon has also described the help offered by the Poppy Project - which has been criticised for making help conditional on women leaving prostitution altogether and turning in their pimps - as "like the worst sort of Victorian philanthropy". Eaves denies any link between its campaigning and its housing provision, but there would certainly seem to be a conflict between providing objective, non-judgemental support to genuine victims of sex-trafficking and other abused women, and the organisation's absolutist opposition to the sex industry as such.

The foreword to The Big Brothel, written by Eaves chief executive Denise Marshall, brackets prostitution together with rape and child sexual abuse as a form of "violence against women". She allows that women (there is no mention of men, that would spoil the intellectual conceit) in the sex industry may be socially excluded and have poor access to housing and health support but rejects the one solution - decriminalisation - that the evidence suggests would most benefit sex workers and protect them from the risk of harm. This is because the report insists that prostitution is itself a form of abuse, that even the suggestion that some sex workers are not coerced "serves to create a notion of genuine victims and non-deserving women" and that any relaxation of the legal regime would "amount to official endorsement of these constructions of gender identity".

Marshall goes on to compare prositition, once again, with child abuse.

For those who say ‘prostitution has always happened and can never be eradicated’, imagine what the reaction would be if solutions to child sexual abuse were presented in this way. If governments were to say “well we can never stop it, so we must make sure that the children suffering it can have care after the event,” there would, rightly so, be universal outrage.

The equation of adults making informed choices (but choices with which feminist activists disagree) with abused children particularly telling. And the repeated reference to "construction of gender identity" shows where her true priorities lie: not with the social circumstances of the particular women they aim to help but with the theoretical framework through which they view the sex industry. The implication is that even if decriminalisation objectively benefited the women involved (as it probably would) Eaves would still oppose it because it "sends the wrong message".

And what of the Salvation Army? Interestingly, a Ministry of Justice spokesperson claimed that awarding them the contract would be "much better for the victims of trafficking" because they offered a wider geographical spread and because, unlike Eaves, they were prepared to extend help to men as well as women. (Their bid was also 60% cheaper, presumably because they are not entirely reliant on public money.) In other respects, however, the Army's agenda would seem to dovetail quite closely with Eaves'. In 2009, Nick Davies noted that they were as eager as the feminist group to exaggerate the scope of the trafficking problem. And it's fair to say that the organisation has been rescuing fallen women for much longer than Eaves has. Here, for example, is Captain William Baugh's appeal for funds to build a refuge for such unfortunates in 1883:

On Sunday night last amongst about a dozen others who came out for salvation, four prostitutes came out and (as far as we can judge from appearances) they are real. They were there on Monday night and testified. But then what hope have we of them while they are at large in their own town? Can nothing be done? Can we not raise a home in which to place them under proper Salvation Army management? We could get others no doubt then, but till then we are spending our strength for naught with such precious souls who cannot call their body or soul their own. We have got to get them away from the dens in which they are living, but are at a loss to know what to do.

More recently, the Army has involved itself with such campaigns as scare-mongering about prostitution and sex-trafficking during previous World Cups and a push to remove prostitutes' business cards from phone-booths. The latter was described "as a very positive signal of the ongoing commitment to anti trafficking policies and policing which determines to put an end to this ‘modern slave trade'." Which is, to say the least, debatable.

At least the Salvationists are up-front about their religious motivation. If anything they tend, as individuals, to be considerably less judgemental than their ideologically-driven counterparts in the feminist movement. As regards their motivation and objectives, there's little to choose between the two groups: they use the same language of degradation and objectification, and they share the same fundamentally conservative view of a woman's "proper" sexual role. When it comes to sexual illiberalism, religious and feminist groups have long been in covert and sometimes overt agreement. Yes, the Salvation Army probably at some level want to convert the women they rescue to Christianity. But Eaves want to convert them to their brand of doctrinaire feminism. Is that really any better?
Posted by The Heresiarch at 6:19 PM


http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/04/feminists-and-evangelicals-compete-to.html

So I wonder if the history we see somehow gets slanted by ideology and biased history.

CDfm

Nhead wrote: »

CDfm, to be honest and no disrespect, you have taken me up wrong on every point I have made!! I don't want to be responding to something I (a) may not have been clear on (B) or is been taken up wrong or else we'll be going around in circles (which is happening here).

It is a difficult issue - no doubt about it.

I like my history to be grounded in facts and having studied economics I will throw more weight on certain things.

I am saying that you are wrong just that I look at things differently.

I am normally great at ferreting out facts even on footnotes in history ,like this guy John Jinks, but what is written in this area is a mass of contradictions. There is not a lot of proper history

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056064820

Now that is not to say that discrimination did not exist -anyone can look at the terms and conditions of female vs male teachers and know it did. So one place we can look at it.