The advent of the First World War forced Irish feminist groups to adjust to new social and political circumstances. Most suffrage organisations participated in the war effort while keeping up suffrage work as much as possible, and many individual members opposed the war on pacifist grounds but became actively involved in humanitarian war work. Only the militant Irish Women’s Franchise League actively opposed the war and refused to participate even in relief work on an institutional level. The war necessarily strained relations between some suffrage groups and placed further demands on all of them, no matter what their stand on the efficacy or otherwise of the conflict. But the war also provided an important context for collective campaigning. During the conflict, Irish feminists were able to unite on a number of social issues much more easily than they had on suffrage questions, especially where the welfare of women and children was concerned. Alcohol, a perennial concern of philanthropic and feminist Irish women, provided a particularly striking example of collective action. In 1915, for example, 29 Irish women’s societies signed a petition endorsing the view that drink was having a highly injurious effect on the nation and asking for its sale to be curbed. Further collective action on social questions included the establishment of a ‘watching the courts’ committee which arranged for suffragist volunteers to attend court as observers and to gather evidence about the position of Irish women within the legal system.

The abnormal social conditions created by the war allowed feminists to pursue other long-held aims, the most important being women’s participation in policing. The Irish Women Patrols (IWP) was launched and trained under a National Union of Women Workers voluntary scheme in late 1914, and this connection to a British body provided some critics within the broader feminist movement with their first reservations about the scheme. Other feminists despaired of the movement’s voluntary nature, arguing that this would allow for middle-class policing of working-class morality while diluting the strength of the demand for professional female police. Some critics were suspicious of its potential association with vigilance and rescue societies which targeted the products rather than causes of crime and deprivation; while still other, mainly Catholic commentators, worried that it would, like the vast majority of women’s philanthropic groups, be Protestant run and lead.

Despite these potential pitfalls, the IWP succeeded by the end of the war in silencing almost all its critics and earning the praise of once suspicious feminists. It managed to do this by being especially mindful of peculiarity Irish circumstances and developing very differently from its British counterpart which had fractured as a result of splits within and between various bodies. Only one service was established in Ireland, thus removing the potential for splits along institutional lines. More importantly, however, the IWP was exceptionally careful to avoid engaging in even the hint of rescue work and in alienating religious opinion. The scheme saw the establishment of a kind of voluntary civic police force composed entirely of women who patrolled the streets, ‘looking after the welfare of girls in the city’. Patrols went out nightly in two hour shifts between 8.30 and 11, each consisting of two women, crucially one a Protestant and one a Catholic. Non-sectarian and non-political, the organisation gained the support of the police and soon operated under the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan police who issued each patrol with a signed card. Patrols were authorised to wear badges and to obtain the help of police if necessary, but their expenses were met entirely out of subscriptions until 1917 when two patrols were taken into paid employment with the Dublin Metropolitan Police. This represented a huge victory for the founders who had advocated the professionalization of women police from the outset.

The work of the IWP was not for the faint-hearted and gritty though it was, the kind of experience the Patrols gained through exposure to Dublin’s most dangerous streets lent their analysis of Ireland’s social and economic problems real authority and depth. The Patrols clearly played an important role in exposing the effect on women of prostitution, rape, poverty and even incest. Certainly the very blunt and non-judgmental account supplied by the patrollers of, for example, one ‘horrible’ Dublin street in particular, ‘more like a ditch’, where rooms could be had for 6d a night and of prostitutes in search of work prowling the docks with their babies in their arms’ must have reassured fellow feminists that the patrollers were not there to highlight ‘war time enthusiasm for the troops’, but were in fact attempting to throw light on the conditions in which Dublin’s most exploited women lived.

Naturally, given the social (and often religious) background of most patrollers, some critics maintained that they were puritanical vigilantes who aimed to interfere with what one described as ‘the love-making of every young couple in whose innocent spooning their evil minds chose to discern signs of immorality’. Some modern commentators have largely endorsed this view, describing the work of the IWP as sexual surveillance. This was likely true of some pious patrollers, but the existing evidence suggests that for most, the IWP followed in the long feminist tradition of exposing and condemning the sexual double standard while also allowing women to prove their ability to undertake traditionally male work in a professional capacity. The convictions secured by the IWP were mainly against men, who were also consistently singled out as the main culprits in cases of vice on the streets of Dublin and Belfast… The Irish Women Patrols in fact very decidedly became a force as much for working-class women as an opportunity for their middle-class sisters.

Senia Paseta is an Irish historian at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She is currently writing a history of women and politics in Ireland, 1900-1918.