Commemorating Women's Histories during the Irish Decade of Centenaries

Abstract

In 2016 the Irish state marked the centenary of the Easter Rising with exhibitions, parades, projects, new heritage sites, and readings of the 1916 Proclamation in every primary school in the country. During the same year another commemoration was marked by a multidisciplinary, interinstitutional conference at UCD and NUI Galway. 1916: HOME: 2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of the closing of the last Magdalen laundry in Ireland. Scholars, artists, and activists gathered to consider “the history of the state since 1916 and the ways in which the ideals of the 1916 Rising were betrayed by the realities of the state and in particular by the treatment of, and attitudes to, women’s bodies over the course of the last one hundred years.”1 The event created spaces that enabled reflections on the histories of what remain, even now, largely invisible lives. Marginalized in most histories of the state, the accounts of institutionalized women and their children were central to 1916: HOME: 2016. In her keynote speech memorystudies scholar Marianne Hirsch spoke of her interest in seeing how, on her visit to Dublin, the Irish state would commemorate 1916. She felt that while many exhibitions “interrogating aspects of a foundational, if complex and contested, past [did exist] . . . , [the] official reckoning failed to reach more troubling aspects of the Irish past.”2 This article focuses on the relative success of demands for the inclusion of women’s histories in commemorative events over the