‘I Hope Now You Will Do Something for Her, as She Is a Great Burden to Me’: The Impact of Economic Dependency on the Afterlives of Cork Single Women Active in the Irish Revolutionary Period

This article examines the later life experiences of women who participated in the revolutionary period in Cork city and county who did not go on to marry. Many within this cohort of Cork female activists experienced poverty, ill health, economic dependency and loneliness in the aftermath of the revolutionary period. Their unmarried status left these women particularly vulnerable in a patriarchal state structured—legally, economically and culturally—on an essentialist view of the married, childbearing woman. The invisibility of adult dependency in Ireland was summed up in the 1926 Census of Population report: ‘no account is taken in this inquiry of adults who may be supported out of the household income’. Mary Daly notes the ‘high proportion of the population working within a family economy which had little reliance on money incomes and waged employment’. This may, as she states, ‘have reduced the numbers exposed to the blunt instrument of unemployment’ in the context of the 1930s depression. However, the emotional and psychological effects of economic dependency have not been considered in any depth. The lack of statutory benefits for lower-class single women who were unable to access paid employment and who did not have the requisite social insurance stamps meant that they faced a vista of poverty and dependency on charity and family members. The latter were often begrudging and indisposed to assume the financial burdens of those who they often deemed economically ‘unproductive’. This article argues that, in so many cases, financial dependency resulted in the loss of agency and autonomy for unmarried women.