Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing

Dear Colleagues,

In the popular imagination, the practice of celibacy in 19th and 20th century Ireland evokes images of male priests, Catholic moral values, and conservative, even reactionary, politics concerning women and sexuality. This Special Issue of Humanities reveals a different history that centres on less familiar feminist, queer, and activist versions of celibacy in Irish women’s movements and literature. Through contributions from leading figures in the fields of Irish studies and sexuality studies, ‘Celibacy in Irish Women's Writing’ explains the historical emergence and disappearance of the female celibate as a political and cultural figure in an Irish context. Its primary goal is to learn more about historical collaborations and the bonds formed between differently celibate Irish women—whether in friendships, romantic relationships, creative collaborations or forms of political and revolutionary organisation—and to explore celibacy’s imbrications with first-wave feminist politics, patterns of queer kinship, and Irish literary modernism.

The essays collected in this Special Issue draw on a range of methodological and theoretical approaches that build on Benjamin Kahan’s pioneering work on modernist celibacies and the debates it has engendered in queer theory, gender studies, and singles studies. Across the issue, this framework is applied to novels, short fiction, plays, poems, essays, and correspondence by Irish women writers, including texts by Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Haslam, L. T. Meade, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Margaret Cousins, Hannah Lynch, Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Teresa Deevy, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Janet McNeill, and Edna O’Brien, among others. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of new literary genres to express feminist political desires, emergent forms of queer kinship, and post-patriarchal ideals, from the all-women ‘celibate utopias’ of first-wave feminist science fiction to the emergence of the ‘celibate plot’ as an alternative to the marriage plot.

These textual close readings are complemented by historical approaches that foreground the legal and political circumstances that made celibacy a desirable, even necessary, form of political expression for women in 19th and 20th century Ireland, including legal doctrine of coverture, the marriage bar, divorce laws, and birth control restrictions. These essays cast new light on the diverse movements that facilitated collaboration and organisation between celibate women, including labour and women’s suffrage political organisations; social purity campaigns; vegetarianism and anti-vivisection animal rights activism; and occultist movements, such as theosophy. This historicising work sets the ground also for new understandings of the reemergence of feminist celibate politics in 21st-century Irish literature and digital culture, from the online influence of international movements such as 4B in Korea to representations of asexuality in YA fiction.

Finally, by historicising the changing meanings of unmarried and nonsexual life, this Special Issue explores celibacy as a non-normative sexual identity and practice between women in 19th and 20th century Ireland that enables a form of queer kinship that centres on non-marital partnerships. In their recent study of ‘Homosexuality and Lesbianism in Irish Newspapers’, Catherine Lawless and Ciara Breathnach note that the documented existence of ‘financially independent female households’ in Ireland between the period 1861–1922 opens up ‘the possibility of situating celibate lives in a queer space, outside the heteronormativity of marital life and reproduction of labour’. Indeed, many of the authors treated in this Special Issue remained unmarried while sharing their lives with other women, while others lived in celibate marriages of convenience in which intimacies with other women were possible. In order to address this gap, these articles explore expressions of queer celibacy in several staples of Irish writing, from nuns, spinsters, and widows to lavender marriages of convenience and so-called ‘Boston marriages’ between cohabiting unmarried women.

We are grateful to Humanities for hosting an open access space for sustained consideration of this largely overlooked aspect of Irish social, sexual, and literary history, and we hope with these essays to lay the ground for further future work on celibate politics, aesthetics, and sexualities in Irish Women’s Writing.

Dr. Paul Fagan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• queer theory
• singles studies
• celibacy
• 19th and 20th century Ireland 
• Irish women’s movements and literature
• feminist politics