Author Biography
Dr Leeann Lane is Head of Irish Studies at Mater Dei Institute of Education (a college of Dublin City University). She has published on the co-operative work of George Russell and on the children's novelist Patricia Lynch.
Description
Born in Waterford in 1888 Rosamond Jacob, of Quaker background, was in many cases a crowd member rather than a leader in the campaigns in which she participated - the turn of the century language revival, the suffrage campaign, the campaigns of the revolutionary period. She adopted an anti-Treaty stance in the 1920s, moving towards a fringe involvement in the activities of socialist republicanism in the early 1930s while continuing to vote Fianna Fail. Her commitment to feminist concerns was life long but at no point did she take or was capable of a leadership role. However, it was Jacob's failure to carve out a strong place in history as an activist which makes her interesting as a subject for biography. Her 'ordinariness' offers an alternative lens on the biographical project. By failing to marry, by her inability to find meaningful paid work, by her countless refusals from publishers, by the limited sales of what work was published, Jacob offers a key into lives more ordinary within the urban middle classes of her time, and suggests a new perspective on female lives.Jacob's life, galvanised at all times by political and feminist debate, offers a means of exploring how the central issues which shaped Irish politics and society in the first half of the twentieth century were experienced and digested by those outside the leadership cadre.
ONE
- Introduction
TWO
- Suffrage and Nationalism, 1904-14
THREE
- Revolutionary years
- Waterford 1915-19
FOUR
- Revolutionary years
- a Dublin focus 1916-21
FIVE
- Single women, sex and the new State
SIX
- Politics1922-36
SEVEN
- Conclusion(s)
- Decline and nostalgia 1937-60
Bibliography
Index.
'While Jacob serves as the topic of this volume, it is also in many ways a study of a frequently-overlooked stratum of Irish society: single, middle-class women. Lane’s work makes an important contribution to the history of women in Ireland and is a welcome addition to the field.'
Madolyn Nichols - University of Warwick
Canadian Journal of Irish Studies
August 2017
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'Political, social, religious and many other forms of movements throw up people who acquire fame. They, frequently, are the exceptions. Little light is cast upon the anonimous multitudes who labour in the cause. Rosamund Jacob was not anonymous but she was not to the fore when the lights were focused. Her obscurity was not her wish.
Jacob carried a number of burdens. She was a woman, a Quaker from birth and outspoken. Women, in her day, might be seen but they should be inaudible and were the truth told; many males wished they were invisible. Jacob was visible and audible, but not sufficiently to rise above the crowd and provide leadership.
This is a wonderfully polychromatic canvas painted in pointillist technique, as absorbing a read as a meticulous Seurat. The detail brings- the subject to life.'
Quaker Magazine
September 2011
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'The interweaving of public and private concerns is well handled by Lane, and her
analysis does, as she suggests, offer ‘an important alternative angle on what it meant to be
a woman, a republican supporter and a human being in Ireland in the period’. While
her ‘ordinariness’ is open to question, this study of Jacob’s life is a timely reminder of the
need to ‘think outside the box’ when considering those who peopled the past.
Myrtle Hill
Irish Studies Review
Oct 2012
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'Life-long diaries are very rare. Those of Rosamond Jacob (1888-1960) are important for that reason, but also because they record her involvement in the many radical movements in Ireland in the first half of the 20th Century.'
Felix Larkin
Irish Catholic
Feb 2011
‘Jacob was atypical in practically every sphere in which she was active … her milieu and her political journey are interesting, and if Jacob was not successful she was certainly not ordinary, as this ambitious biography well shows.’
Irish Times
Saturday Jan. 2011
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