History:The cover of this book shows demure young women in long black dresses and younger children dressed in white sitting on the grass or playing on the tennis court at the Dominican convent of Sion Hill, watched by nuns in flowing robes: a traditional image of Irish convent schooling, and of a world that has disappeared.
Convent schooling has generally been represented as producing conformist women, preparing them for lives in religion or as mothers within a family, indeed as a system that served to reinforce social constraints on women's lives, and these schools are often contrasted unfavourably with leading Protestant schools for women. Marie Kealy's book shows that the story is much more complex. While the educational work of Dominican convents was constrained in many ways, for example, as an enclosed order the nuns were forbidden from attending university until the 1940s, their schools were responsive to parental demands and the opportunities for girls to acquire qualifications and professional training, though the response was strongly influenced by class, gender and religion.
Kealy depicts an education system that in some respects is very different from that available today, and yet is remarkably similar in others. Throughout the 19th century, education was commonly designed to make pupils aware of their position in life - upward social mobility and modern concerns with equality and access are relatively recent. Superior education - the term that would generally describe today's secondary schools - was the preserve of children from privileged backgrounds. Although the Dominican sisters were involved in all aspects of women's education, from poor schools and orphanages to women's university colleges and teacher training institutions, they were primarily interested in educating an Irish Catholic elite. In the early 19th century, Irish Dominican communities recruited students and nuns from the surviving Old English families of the Pale and landed gentry; as the century advanced their profile changed to include the daughters of large farmers and the merchant elite.
UP TO THE 1880s, the education offered by most girls' schools - including the Dominican sisters - placed considerable emphasis on "virtuous emulation", accomplishments, and formalities such as curtseying to mother prioress. This regime was disrupted by the introduction of the Intermediate Certificate examinations, which enabled private secondary schools to earn money from the government on the basis of pupils' results. At around the same time girls' secondary schools came under increasing pressure from parents who wanted their daughters to have an education that might enable them to earn a living as a teacher or in some other respectable feminised profession. This was becoming increasingly important in an Ireland where the proportion of women who did not marry was rising steadily. While many convents were initially reluctant to enter pupils for the intermediate examinations - and Mount Anville remained aloof from competitive examinations until the 1920s - the agricultural depression of the 1880s had a severe impact on the net worth of many substantial farmers and businessmen, leaving them unable to provide daughters with sufficient capital to maintain them in middle-class respectable comfort for life. Additional pressures on school performance came from the publication of School League Tables. The Intermediate Commissioners published the names and schools attended by the scholarship-winners, and the results achieved by every school, with girls' and boys' schools clearly segregated. In the early years, all the top honours went to Protestant girls' schools such as Alexandra College or Belfast's Victoria College. While the Catholic hierarchy had originally opposed admitting women to the intermediate certificate examinations because this would reduce the pot of money available for boys' schools, they soon became anxious about the rankings of convent schools and their pupils in the intermediate certificate examinations. Our Lady of Sion School, Eccles Street was the first convent school to rise to this challenge. Today's parents, who are obsessed with school examination results and the points race, would be amazed by the blatant advertisements that schools posted a hundred years ago. (A quick search through The Irish Times'sdata base soon throws up many of these ads). In 1902, the Dominican Convent in Muckross Park listed the number of scholarships, honours, exhibitions and other distinctions won by their students, and this remained a common practice for Irish secondary schools until the introduction of free secondary education.
The closing decades of the 19th century also brought the beginnings of women's university education in Ireland, and again, the urge to compete with Alexandra or Victoria College - and the need to ensure that Catholic girls were not tempted to enrol in these institutions - helped to foster the development of St Mary's University College, which prepared students for the Royal University examinations. When the British government set out to introduce new legislation governing Irish universities in the first decade of the 20th century, Irish women's colleges, Catholic and Protestant, worked together in the hope of preserving distinct women's colleges, but, in marked contrast to Britain and the United States, where separate women's colleges survived into the late 20th century, the Irish university system became co-educational before 1914.
Over the past 200 years, the Dominican Order has played a pivotal role in the development of women's education in Ireland at primary, secondary and third level. Kealy's book will be attractive to those who feel nostalgic for the rapidly-vanishing life of convent education, and anyone who is interested in the history of Irish women and women's education. It will also help to enlighten those who are coming to terms with the complexities of the Irish education system, because the residual legacies of the vanished world described in these pages survive to the present.
Mary E Daly is Principal of UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies. 1916 in 1966: The Golden Jubilee of the Easter Rising, edited by Mary E Daly and Margaret O'Callaghan is published this month
Dominican Education in Ireland 1820-1930 By Máire M Kealy OP Irish Academic Press, 204pp. €27.50