Images and icons: female teachers' representations of self and self-control in 1920s Ireland

Abstract

This article addresses a particular episode that occurred in one of the main female training colleges in Ireland in the late 1920s when students founded the Mary Immaculate Modest Dress and Deportment Crusade (MDDC). Regarded by many scholars as the adoption of a prescribed image, a slavish following by institutionalised Catholic females of Catholic mores, the MMDC is cited by historians as an example of how women internalised the control of the Catholic Church and indeed sought to enhance and perpetuate it by their actions. Historians generally have maintained that Irish women were submissive and accepting of Catholic social teaching particularly in relation to sexuality and have highlighted the lack of organised and unified opposition to the erosion of women’s citizenship and employment opportunities during the period 1920-1960. But the education aspect of Irish women’s history is under-researched. Maria Luddy contends that we have ‘still almost no insight into how female national schoolteachers were “formed”’ and suggests examining the ethos of the training colleges and their impact on the cultural life of Ireland. The absence of research in this area leads to an acceptance of an image of female teachers as passive receivers and ultimately transmitters and enforcers of basic moral principles and codes of behaviour which were influenced and regulated by the hierarchical and patriarchal church.