Towards a Further Understanding of the Violence Experienced by Women in the Irish revolution (MUSSI Working Paper Series, no.7)

During armed conflicts, women’s bodies become battlefields. Did this apply in the period covering the War of Independence and Civil War or was Ireland’s revolution an exception ? Traumatic events that occurred in this divisive period of Irish history were s ubsequently submerged in the memory of the new State. Peter Burke has stated that anthropologists became aware of the problem of “collective amnesia”: ...in investigating oral traditions, while historians encountered it in the course of studying events such as the Holocaust or civil wars of the twentieth century in Finland, Ireland, Russia, Spain and elsewhere. The problem is not a loss of memory at the individual level but the disappearance from public discourse of certain events...These events are in a sense ‘repressed’ not necessarily because they were traumatic, though many of them were but because it has become politically inconvenient to refer to them