‘Let the girl go home’: Irish republicanism, gender and political imprisonment, 1939-1945

By utilising a wide range of archival sources, including newly released and previously underutilised sources, this thesis offers a detailed examination of the treatment of female political prisoners. It also explores the influence of a shared republican political culture and history on the treatment of those detained in Éire, considering how this shaped the state’s response. Cumann na mBan, and other unaffiliated republican women, maintained agency and ownership of specific areas of republican activism in this period.

Their activities were bolstered by the support of existing networks of feminist activists, forged during Ireland’s revolutionary period. In this sense, the period of the Second World War is re-considered in this dissertation as a significant chapter in the afterlife of the Irish revolution. Furthermore, the thesis addresses women’s contemporary marginalisation within militant republicanism, and their subsequent neglect in both republican and scholarly narratives.<br><i><br>Thesis embargoed until 31 December 2029.</i>