This is the final post about our 21-day kickstarter campaign to see a statue of Maud Gonne in Dublin. Normal transmission will resume next week.
If you've been meaning to back the campaign, now's the time. We are in the final hours.
This is not just a campaign about one long-dead woman. The particular ways in which Maud Gonne has been misunderstood and misrepresented, in her own time and in the historical record, tell us much why there are so few statues (or parks or streets) that honour real-life, women in Dublin…and elsewhere.
I first posted about the campaign on Instagram with a quote from “Bean na h-Eireann”, the journal of the Inghinidhe na h-Eireann (Daughters of Ireland), the women’s group that Maud Gonne founded because it was so difficult for women who wanted to work for Irish independence to get a foothold, being banned from almost all Irish organisations at the time.
“Our desire to have a voice in directing the affairs of Ireland is not based on the failure of men to do so properly… but [on] the inherent right of women as loyal citizens and intelligent human souls.'
Immediately a reply from a man who has followed my account for a long time but never commented before came in:
There are more representative Irish women than Maude, a woman in love with the revolver, an antisemite, and a giver away of her first child in France. Do we really want to honour this tradition?
Oh dear, I thought. Another one. This was the third man to tell me that we were choosing the “wrong” woman to campaign for. And on the basis of mistruth.
Maud Gonne: The “Wrong” Woman
First, some facts.
It is true that Maud Gonne was a firebrand in her youth who stirred many Irish people to rebellion and fomented hatred of the British Empire in general, and Queen Victoria in particular. Some sources indicate that she and John MacBride had plotted to assassinate King Edward VII on their honeymoon–a measure of Maud's lifelong tendency to mix the personal and the political.
But her experience as a volunteer nurse in the Normandy field camps of the First World War changed all that. From then on, for the next four decades, Maud Gonne took a very different line.
She retained her passionate commitment to righting injustice and she supported others who worked for Irish freedom in any capacity but she personally was now a pacifist.
The Mothers
A hundred years ago this month, the new Free State government in Ireland which had begun in such hope, held an election to mandate its actions. The election, the months that preceded it and the years that followed, were travesties of the democratic process.
Maud Gonne had brought the three enduring interests of her life together when, with her friend Charlotte Despard, she co-founded the Women’s Prisoners' Defence League (WPDL) and now the League moved into weekly action.
Each Sunday, led by Maud Gonne, the League organized weekly demonstrations by a group of women activists who became known as “The Mothers”, protesting against the ongoing repression of Irish Republicans and Irish women.
Dressed in her trademark black mourning attire, Gonne would lead the silent procession of women through Dublin onto the main thoroughfare, O'Connell Street. Many of these women had, like herself, been widowed by the executions that followed the Easter Rising of 1916. They would carry pictures of the executed leaders and slogans about the new government's latest atrocity.
This silent, deeply symbolic, act of defiance became a potent symbol of Irish resistance through dark years of increasing repression, censorship and theocratic rule.
Maud Gonne: Single Mother, Working Mother
On the personal front, unlike those who filled the mother-and-baby homes of the time, Maud Gonne never gave away any of her children, whether they were considered “illegitimate” by society or not. She was loving mother and grandmother, as her descendants attest to this day.
She did, however, work–and her work was important to her.
And being a single mother, she used childcare, just as her father had done for her: the jigsaw of nurses, nannies, friends, and family with which many working families are famililar.
Was she a perfect mother? Of course not. Which of us is.
Maud Gonne: Anti-Semite?
It's the same with the anti-semitism.
It is true that Gonne voiced highly prejudiced thoughts about Jews throughout her long life, ideas that were widely held at the time and are shocking to a modern reader.
She bought into the conspiracy theory that Jewish people were behind some grand international financial manipulation, controlling banks, markets, and governments from the shadows to further their own interests. For her “Jew” was shorthand for “money-hungry elites” who oppressed “the people”.
This commonplace, ugly prejudice influenced politics, culture, and popular literature at the time, with Jews scapegoated for economic troubles, wars, and social unrest, and blamed for everything from the Wall Street crash to the rise of communism, and culminated, like other prejudices, in the horrors of the Holocaust.
Maud Gonne's branch of this ignorance and fear has been explored by her biographers, including Margaret Ward, author of xxx, and Kim Bendheim, author of the Gonne biography The Fascination of What's Difficult, who describes herself as “a WASPy Jew”.
Bendheim says: “I suspect that Gonne’s anti-Semitism… was as much a product of her upper-class British background as it was a political philosophy.” I agree and believe Gonne was hugely influenced in this by her longtime lover, Lucien Millevoye, and the Boulangist right-wing circles in which she moved with him.
Gonne bought into their rhetoric and never stopped to question it, though it is incompatible with her active involvement in progressive causes: her work with her friends James Connolly and Charlotte Despard for Dublin's poor and laboring classes; her work for the Amnesty Association of Great Britain on behalf of political prisoners; the many speeches she gave about inequality, poverty and oppression throughout Ireland, England, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium; her support for social credit; her dedication to those she called “the people”;
There is no attempt, either in my books, or in the campaign to see her honored with a statue, to claim that Maud Gonne was a perfect person. She was a complex, flawed, and multi-faceted individual… like us all.
Though I personally find the views she thoughtlessly expressed abhorrent, the holding of them does not cancel out her many social and political achievements. If people had to be perfect to be honoured for their achievements, we'd have to topple every statue in Dublin, and strip away every accolade ever awarded.
It's not okay but it shouldn't be presented as if it's the sum total of who she was.
Honoring Gonne Versus Yeats
On the matter of morality or anti-Semitism compare the different treatments meted out to Gonne and to Yeats. Both were complex personalities and political figures who lived controversial lives. But while Yeats's womanising and lechery, anti-semitism and flirtations with Facism never stood in his way, and have always been downplayed, every aspect of Gonne's personal life, political allegiances, and personality has been cited as a reason to undermine or ignore her achievements.
His flaws worsened with age, hers mellowed. He continues to receive every possible honour, while she has been sidelined. Her work was largely ignored in the Decade of Centenaries, for example.
It's the double-standard–alive and kicking women still.
Maud Gonne Society
And so we need this statue campaign and the Maud Gonne Society which will drive it, so that we can promote Gonne's true legacy of independence, human rights and social justice for all, especially women, children and prisoners.