Irish women and the creation of modern Catholicism, 1850–1950 by Cara Delay

Author:Cara Delay [Delay, Cara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Ireland, Religion & Spirituality, Christianity, Denominations, Catholic, Catholicism
ISBN: 9781526136428
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

4

The holy household

In working-class, early twentieth-century Dublin, Elaine Crowley’s mother conserved resources by purchasing used furniture. She did not hesitate, however, to buy a new framed picture of ‘Our Lady of Good Counsel’, placing it on the most prominent spot on the wall.1 Another working-class Dublin woman remembered that her mother blessed the house each evening with holy water, which she applied with a feather.2 ‘Like every Catholic house in Ireland’, wrote Maura Murphy, who was a child in the 1930s,

we had a holy water font by the back door near a picture of the Sacred Heart, which was permanently lit by a glowing red lamp. Our font was made from an old jam jar and a twig of box hedging, and Mammy would sprinkle holy water around the house with the twig every night to protect us from evil spirits.3

As these examples illustrate, women – grandmothers, sisters, daughters, and mothers – oversaw the material culture of the early twentieth-century Irish Catholic household. By creating holy households dominated by a devotional material culture, Irish Catholic women asserted their religious authority within the home. These women established themselves as managers and overseers of household religion and also as the family’s primary protectors, consumers, and managers.

The Irish household was both the principal site of Catholic material culture and consumption and a feminised religious space; it became so in the post-famine decades and remained thus through at least the mid-twentieth century. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that the Catholic household became an adjunct of the new nation; this chapter, therefore, focuses on these key decades as well as the earlier pivotal years of the ‘devotional revolution’. From the 1850s to the 1940s, Irish women supervised home-based rituals and devotions, including family prayer and the recitation of the rosary, as well as the important yet under-studied station-mass. Lay women across Munster, Connacht, and Leinster demonstrated their dominance over the holy household in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although distinct differences occurred in rural and urban areas. The station-mass, for example, was a central ritual of rural parishes. Although the idealised Irish Catholic home from 1850 to 1950 was a rural one, evidence from towns and cities demonstrates that domestic religion was equally important in more populous areas. Devotional material culture, meanwhile, pervaded homes in all areas but was most visible in the early twentieth-century working-class neighbourhoods of cities such as Dublin and Cork. Through their management of the household and the prayers and rituals that occurred within it, lay women made their homes unique devotional spaces. They also moulded their children’s Catholic world-views and instilled in their daughters the skills and confidence they would need to create their own holy households one day. Overall, through their management of the holy household, Irish women carved out a sphere of female power in the midst of growing patriarchy.

Households and materiality

In To School Through the Fields, her prized memoir of a rural Irish childhood in the early 1900s, Alice Taylor described her home as ‘the nest from which we learned to fly’.

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