Confining yet Convenient: Using Gender Norms to Defend Oneself in Cases of Rural Spousal Violence in Post-Independence Ireland

Clara Luger

Before divorce was legalized in Ireland in 1995, spouses desperate for freedom from an unhappy marriage sometimes turned to killing their partners. Three cases involving spousal murder between 1925-1931 provide insight into more than just sensationalized violence: they demonstrate the gendered expectations of marriage in rural Irish society, and how those expectations impacted the Irish judicial system.^[1] While the marital standards of the time certainly gave men more power in the relationship, all of the defendants in these cases, regardless of gender, mobilized Irish gender norms to defend themselves. They did so either by portraying themselves as an ideal of those gender standards or by portraying their spouse as a failure of those standards.

The creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 saw the new government propagate conservative, Catholic-rooted ideals surrounding marriage and family, which contrasted starkly with the more progressive, feminist ideals that the Irish independence movement had been founded on.^[2] Women went from being major changemakers for Irish freedom to later seeing the government they fought for confine them to the home.^[3] Although the Catholic Church was not the official state religion of Ireland, it was famously given a “special place” in the 1937 Constitution, demonstrating its widespread influence on the Irish populace. One of the new, prevalent beliefs around marriage and family was the emphasis on non-intervention. In the eyes of the government, a family had the right to deal with its issues with little to no action from the state. Because of the Irish Catholic Church’s influence, a family’s privacy was seen as sacred, which was problematic when domestic violence occurred.^[4] Irish gender standards in the Free State relied on Victorian ideals for men and women, while also drawing inspiration from the Catholic Church. Men were expected to be the breadwinners outside of the home, and their work was financially rewarded. Women’s work, especially domestic work, was unpaid (or underpaid, if done in others’ homes), creating an economic disparity between spouses. A married woman’s identity became concentrated around her duties as a wife and mother, while a man was seen as a more valuable member of society.^[5] Women were to be passive, following whatever their husbands wanted, while men had much more freedom.

This submission could translate to domestic abuse, as wives were often expected to accept violence from their husbands without complaint.^[6] Often, men were able to justify domestic violence if their wives weren’t meeting the societal standards of a “good wife,” and a jury might sympathize with them.^[7] However, women could also use these gender and marital norms for their defense. For example, if a man was economically irresponsible and physically abusive, he was often seen as a failure.^[8] These norms are not unique to Ireland; they were prevalent in much of the Western world at this time. However, there was so much stress on moral purity and the sanctity of the family in Ireland due to the combination of the conservative government and the Catholic Church’s pressure to be perfect. The degree to which the public and the courts enforced these norms was higher in Ireland than in similar countries, such as Great Britain.^[9]

The following cases depict this employment of gender norms to the defendants’ advantage. The defendants were all accused of murdering their spouses and were all eventually acquitted. On March 10, 1925, Elizabeth Reilly from Granard, Co. Longford was accused of murdering her husband Edward Reilly with strychnine poison.^[10] In May of 1931, in Meelin, Co. Cork, Michael Walsh also turned up dead from strychnine poison, and his wife, Bridget, was the main suspect.^[11] The third case was against Robert Deane, who stood trial on the charge of strangling his wife, Mary Anne Deane, in Kilbarry, Co. Cork, on June 27, 1926.^[12] Though they occurred at different times in different parts of Ireland, their defenses all relied on the same premise: showing themselves as conventional spouses and their dead partners as deviating from the gender norms of the time. As one important note, I use three court cases in my argument, one of which is about a man accused of murdering his wife, and two that involve women accused of murdering their husbands. This 1:2 ratio might unintentionally imply that this violence was relatively equal between genders, or that women killed their spouses more often. However, there are significantly more cases in which a man is accused of murder or attempted murder of his wife, meaning women were largely the recipients of spousal violence during this time period.

Both Bridget Walsh and Robert Deane pointed to their spouse’s gendered deficiencies to frame themselves as the “good” (and thereby not guilty) spouse. Bridget worked as a domestic servant, something made necessary by her husband’s desertion. Michael had left town years before, leaving Bridget and their daughter to fend for themselves. Even worse than that, Bridget said in her statement, “he had me going begging through the country.”^[13] From her perspective, Bridget Walsh should have been able to focus on being a good wife and mother to their young daughter; instead, Michael’s deficiency as a husband forced her outside the home. When Michael told Bridget that he was sending money to her, she told him “to send it to the child,” casting herself as a selfless mother whose sole focus was on her family, and Michael as an incapable father and husband. The jury acquitted her on a minor technicality, in part because they viewed Michael as the more villainous partner, having abandoned his wife and child for years on end.^[14] Because Michael’s unreliability forced Bridget to seek support from other men, be it from an employer or a potential lover (more on that later), I maintain that unconsciously or not, the jury sympathized with Bridget.^[15]

Similarly, Robert Deane’s brother and a local neighbor painted Mary Anne Deane as an abusive, unhappy wife who would beat Robert and his two children during their arguments. Robert even reported feeling afraid of his wife. The media reported how Robert often did the housework, a job a proper wife should have done. The jury saw Robert as a suffering young man, and a “respectable young farmer” with two small children who were held hostage by a mean woman who refused to fulfill the duties expected of her, and was even emasculating Robert.^[16] So, when the jury heard a version of the story that said Robert grabbed his wife’s throat in self-defense and accidentally pushed her over, they believed him, and acquitted him.

Elizabeth Reilly built her defense on her self-styling as a model wife and encouraged the suggestions that her (dead) husband Edward was not meeting masculine standards of the day. Elizabeth described cleaning the house and even washing Edward’s feet. She portrayed herself as a dutiful, pious, and obedient wife. Whether that was strictly true is up for debate. In court, a neighbor who had worked for the Reillys recounted how she saw the couple fighting violently. She noted the two coming to physical blows and even drawing blood, suggesting their marriage was not as peaceful as Elizabeth tried to argue.^[17] Elizabeth, of course, didn’t admit to any fighting because that would have made her look like a less-than-ideal wife. Yet, in her favor, the Longford Leader reported that their neighbors saw Edward as a man who had a “queer way with him,” describing possible mental illness.^[18] Elizabeth shored up her defense with evidence that Edward didn’t live up to the day’s standards of masculinity, using his alleged mental health issues against him (which the Longford Leader ran with, seemingly sympathetic to Elizabeth and perhaps proving her gendered defense was working).

Unsurprisingly, though not effectively, the prosecution attempted to win over the jury by casting aspersions on the defendants’ characters. There was, for example, a significant amount of speculation on Elizabeth’s and Bridget’s alleged affairs. Elizabeth Reilly was said to be having an affair with a widower, Matthew Dolan, and people reported seeing Matthew near the Reillys’ home the night of Edward’s death. Bridget Walsh also had a rumored lover, a man named William Frawley. The Walshes had been separated for just about seven years when he suddenly re-entered Bridget’s life. He died several months later, and many saw the timing as suspicious. For these two women defendants, their sexual lives were as much on trial as their alleged acts of violence against their husbands. The prosecution labeled Elizabeth a fallen woman and the “devil incarnate.”^[19] Shockingly, these women were still acquitted, despite their alleged adultery. It’s possible that the jury was convinced that they were good wives, and that their husbands, even in death, were to blame.^[20]

These court cases demonstrate a tension in Irish society between how spouses should act and how they often acted violently, sometimes going so far as to murder their spouses. While gendered marital standards could be restrictive, casting women as homemakers and men as providers, they could also be used as a defense in cases of spousal abuse. This paper makes no claims as to the morality of such argumentation, but rather aims to show a more nuanced picture of how the marital norms of the early Irish Free State operated in trials concerning domestic violence. To these defendants, the standards were not simply oppressive; they also could serve as a tool to appeal to their rural Irish peers.

Featured image caption: Irish countryside, Liscannor, Ireland. (Courtesy Giuseppe Milo)

Clara Luger

Clara Luger is an undergraduate psychology student from St. Olaf College. She wrote this piece for a J-Term class she took titled Love and Sex in Modern Irish History.

This author does not have any more posts.