Amazon, aristocrat or democrat?

The late eighteenth-century ‘age of revolutions’ is widely regarded as a formative moment in the gendering of modern democratic politics—one that opened up debates on the ‘rights of women’ even as it reaffirmed the masculinity of the political citizen. In Ireland, this era witnessed the rise of the radical United Irish movement, unprecedented popular mobilisation, and the violent dénouement of the 1798 rebellion. Catriona Kennedy’s latest book Women, Politics and the Irish Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2025) reconsiders what this revolutionary moment meant for women. Revising a stubborn tendency to present women as satellites of their male relatives’ ideological planets, it stresses instead their distinctive concerns, networks, and initiatives.

This lecture will introduce some of the women who feature in the book and explore how they negotiated the intense ideological conflicts of the 1790s. These include the formidable Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira, who in 1792 invited Theobald Wolfe Tone to dine and discuss politics with her; the democrat Martha McTier, who, while her brother served as President of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, pursued her own female-led organising in Belfast; and the propertied Catholic women who, as their male counterparts moved increasingly toward republican revolution, were engaged in a devotional revolution of their own.