[Nationalism required that] women’s rights be set aside until Irish freedom [had been] won. (p.5.)

[...] if she moves outside the family - or if she seeks to escape the boundaries society has marked out for her [...] not ony her right to veneration, but also her existence - self-as-symbol - will dissipate. (p.22.)

Ireland in the nineteenth century [...] was a society undergoing profound shifts and threatened by civil unrest. Disturbed within by struggles for land and power, undermined by extremes of poverty and emigration, it was subjected from without to the political and cultural imperialism of the British Empire. Resisting the colonizer, ensuring the viability of the home, and dispensing the codes of the burgeoning Nationalist and Catholic discourses were espoused as means of asserting an Irish identity. In all, the mother’s fundamental role in realizing these goals was emphasized. (p.23.)

[Irish womanhood was] utilised by the Nationalists in their assault against British colonialism, and the Catholic Church in its defence of the moral codes which promoted its own ascendancy.’ (p.23.)

[Irish female identity in Irish national discourse was] theorised as active, powerful, abundant, phallic [and] emblodying a potential for both deial of the social order and rupture in the symbolic fabric [which needed to be suppressed and brught within the strictures of a cultural tradition that privileges the maternal. (p.24.)

[...] suppresed and brought within the strictures of a cultural tradition that privileges the paternal. (p.24.)

The maternal was contained by placing it on a pedestal from which it could not escape: it became bound up in symbolic nets which lauded the mother in terms of her access to love, morality and maternal instincts, but denied her a postion as woman and equal within society. (p.24.)

[The foregoing all quoted in Susan Parlour, MA Diss., UUC 2008]