THE ROLE
OF WOMEN

Women's History Month tends to circle the same handful of names. Constance Markievicz. Maud Gonne. Kathleen Clarke. They deserve their place. But the records hold hundreds more, and the reason most people have never heard of them is not that their work was marginal. It is that their work was invisible by design.

A war fought without uniforms, barracks or supply lines depends entirely on the ordinary. Somebody has to carry the message. Somebody has to keep the safe house. Somebody has to type the document, hide the weapon, feed the column, sit in a tram with a dispatch pinned inside her coat and look bored. Between 1919 and 1921 that somebody was, over and over again, a woman.

Cumann na mBan

Founded in 1914, Cumann na mBan grew into the organisational spine of the campaign. Its members ran first aid and drilled, but far more importantly they moved intelligence, arms and money. They scouted routes. They rented rooms under their own names because a young woman taking lodgings attracted no attention where a young man did. They kept the accounts and the arms dumps, and when the raids came, they were the ones who had to stand in the hall and lie convincingly to armed men.

Intelligence

Michael Collins' intelligence system is usually told as a story about his Squad. It was equally a story about clerks and typists inside the British administration — women with legitimate access to Dublin Castle's paper. Lily Mernin, a typist in the garrison adjutant's office, passed out copies of everything that crossed her desk for years under the codename "The Little Gentleman". Others in the Castle, the post office and the railway network did the same on a smaller scale, and did it week after week knowing precisely what discovery would mean.

The cost

Homes were raided and burned. Women were arrested, held in Mountjoy and Kilmainham, and in some cases beaten or had their hair cut off as a public humiliation. Others carried the quieter cost: a husband or brother dead, a household to hold together, and no pension or standing afterwards to show for any of it.

Written out

The Free State that emerged had little appetite for the women who had helped make it. Many had taken the anti-Treaty side and were on the losing end of the Civil War. The new state legislated them steadily out of public life. When the commemorations began, the photographs were of men in uniform, and a courier in a good coat does not photograph like a soldier.

The correction is available to anyone who wants it. The Bureau of Military History witness statements and the Military Service Pensions Collection are both online and free. Read a handful of the women's statements and the shape of the war changes: less a sequence of ambushes, more a network of households, and in every one of those households a woman deciding whether to open the door.

That is the thread I keep pulling in this research, and it is why the History's Forgotten Heroines pieces exist. Not to add a footnote to the story, but to put back the part of it that was quietly removed.