The Fenian Sisterhood, Ladies Land Leaguers and the Women’s Suffrage Question: The Representation of Women in the Victorian Irish Press

By Emily Smith
Published in The Historian, January 2025.
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Abstract

Through an examination of four newspapers of the nineteenth-century Irish press at home and abroad, this essay investigates the depiction of women within the dichotomy of the archetypes of proper women, who conformed to Victorian ideas of femininity, and reprobate woman, who did not. It argues that each paper characterized the ideal and reprobate woman based upon their overall ideology. All papers ascribed to traditional Victorian notions of femininity, regardless of their stance on nationalism or other issues, but the particulars differed.