• 1 Jay Winter, “Thinking about Silence”, in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentie (...)
• 2 Anne Dolan, Commemorating the Irish Civil War: History and Memory, 1923-2000, Cambridge, Cambridge (...)
• 3 Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom [1924], Dublin, Anvil Books, 1981; Ernie O’Malley, The Singin (...)
• 4 Laura McAtackney, “Graffiti Revelations and the Changing Meanings of Kilmainham Gaol in (Post)Colon (...)

1In the post Civil-War period women’s experiences were marginalised from the dominant narrative of the Irish revolution. This is arguably an instance of the “essentialist silence” – granting some memories a privileged status – as delineated by Jay Winter.1 Anne Dolan argued that women’s Civil War experiences were eclipsed by selective remembering and a reluctance to include imprisonment under Irish forces in narratives of the period.2 The majority of first-hand testimonies of the conflict were by leading war veterans such as Dan Breen (1924) or Ernie O’Malley (1936).3 Laura McAtackney observed that narratives of prison have focused on the “big men of the Easter Rising” and on “elite individual women”, or those whose fates were “inextricably linked to the men”.4

• 5 See among others: Senia Pašeta, Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918, Cambridge, Cambridge University (...)
• 6 Buckley’s testimony is used in Sineád McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Rev (...)
• 7 It was re-issued with a foreword by Mary-Lou McDonald, current Sinn Féin president: Margaret Buckle (...)
• 8 Sarah Benton, “Women Disarmed: The Militarization of Politics in Ireland, 1913-23”, Feminist Review(...)
• 9 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents [Malaise dans l’esthétique, 2004], Steven Corcoran (...)
• 10 Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Hist (...)

2Despite recent critical interest in women’s activism and military service,5 there is still no comprehensive study of Margaret Buckley’s work.6 Only re-issued by Sinn Féin in 2022 in the context of the Decade of Commemorations,7 her prison memoir, The Jangle of the Keys (1938), goes against the official narrative of the “war of brothers” and the silence imposed on women, deemed deviant for their activism and discredited as opponents to the Treaty.8 This paper will argue that Buckley’s writing of the self enables a passage from voicelessness to making her voice heard, thereby going against the “consensus” as defined by Jacques Rancière: “Consensus is the reduction of the various ‘peoples’ into a single people identical with the count of a population and its parts, of the interests of a global community and its parts”.9 Telling her own story and that of a republican sisterhood, Buckley sheds light on their prison experience, on the psychological and physical violence they were subjected to and how they resisted and challenged the Free State represented by the prison administration. This paper will finally argue that Buckley’s testimony is a call to continued action.10

• 11 Bureau of Military History (BMH), Liam Roche, witness statement nº 1698, p. 96, online: https://bmh (...)
• 12 Kathleen Clarke, Kathleen Clarke: Revolutionary Woman [1991], Helen Litton (ed.), Dublin, O’Brien P (...)
• 13 Ann Matthews, Dissidents…, p. 13-15.
• 14 Ibid., p. 47. See also Buckley’s application for a military pension in 1934 (Military Service Pensi (...)
• 15 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 7, 68.
• 16 Ibid., p. 4.
• 17 Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women…, p. 98; Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, The Making of Inequality: W (...)

3From a Parnellite family, Margaret Buckley (1879-1962) became a founding member of the Cork branch of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland).11 A member of Cumann na mBan, the women’s republican organisation, she played a key role in the Republican Courts during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1921),12 and rejected the Treaty in 1922.13 Active member of the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League, that protested against prison conditions and helped the families of detainees, she was arrested in January 1923.14 Interned in Mountjoy jail, she was later transferred to the North Dublin Union and Kilmainham jails, only to be released in October 1923.15 Her prison experiences provided the material for The Jangle of the Keys,16 a testimony on the imprisonment of republican women at a time when the Free State publicly blamed them for the Civil War.17

• 18 Irish Independent, 6 February 1922.
• 19 Lil Conlon, Cumann na mBan and the Women of Ireland, 1913-25, Kilkenny, Kilkenny People Ltd., 1969, (...)
• 20 Ann Matthews, Dissidents…, p. 22. Máire Comerford, director of propaganda for Cumann na mBan, was a (...)
• 21 John Borgonovo, “Cumann na mBan, Martial Women and the Irish Civil War, 1922-1923”, in Women and th (...)
• 22 Gavin M. Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class and Conflict, Basingstoke, Palgra (...)
• 23 For a thorough analysis, see The Treaty: Debating and Establishing the Irish State, Liam Weeks, Míc (...)

4It is vital to clarify the roles and actions of anti-Treaty or, as they termed themselves, republican women, during the Civil War. Cumann na mBan was one of the first Irish-Ireland organisations to officially reject the Anglo-Irish Treaty at its February 1922 convention.18 The pro-Treaty minority then founded Cumann na Saoirse in March 1922 and proclaimed allegiance to the Free State.19 Cumann na mBan continued to support anti-Treaty forces and performed a range of activities from dispatch and safe house running to fighting.20 They “operated the republican propaganda machine” and became “the public face of militarized republicans” at funerals and processions.21 However, public support for the republicans had almost dried up, and their actions were seen as an annoyance to a population that considered the departure of the British as a success.22 Those in favour of the Treaty argued that it represented “the will of the people” and that it had been endorsed both by the Dáil and the electorate.23

• 24 John Dorney, The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital, 1922-1924, Newbridge, Merrio (...)
• 25 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 13.
• 26 Dáil Éireann Debates, 26 September 1922, online: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1 (...)
• 27 Ann Matthews, Dissidents…, p. 32-34.
• 28 Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women…, p. 63, 98-102.

5Women combatants were initially allowed to go free.24 Buckley wrote that Eithne Coyle had thus begun “to think the Free State authorities did not intend to imprison Republican women”.25 By September 1922 however, the government initiated a Coercion Act to give the army power to restore order, later followed by an Emergency Powers Act (1923).26 Openly active against the Treaty, women could now be arrested and held without charge. They were mostly detained for minor offences connected to their role in anti-Treaty propaganda.27 Once arrested they were told that they could obtain their freedom by signing “the form of undertaking”, a document in which they made a written statement that they would not oppose the Free State after their release.28

• 29 Ann Matthews, Dissidents…, p. 45-64.
• 30 Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women…, appendix 1.
• 31 Sineád McCoole, Guns and Chiffon: Women Revolutionaries and Kilmainham Gaol, 1916-1923, Dublin, Sta (...)
• 32 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland: Politics, Penal-Welfarism and Political Imprisonment, New Yor (...)
• 33 Eve Morrison, “The Bureau of Military History and Female Republican Activism, 1913-23”, in Gender a (...)
• 34 In February 1923, Éire, the anti-Treaty journal, warned that a campaign against republican women wa (...)
• 35 Louise Ryan, “‘Furies’ and ‘Die-Hards’: Women and Irish Republicanism in the Early Twentieth Centur (...)
• 36 Patrick Sarsfield O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Féin: How It Won It, and How It Used It, Dublin, T (...)
• 37 Floya Anthias, Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and (...)

6Mass arrests began in November 1922 and the number of women incarcerated in Dublin and in county prisons or police barracks steadily increased up to spring 1923.29 Women were far more often imprisoned for political reasons in the Civil War than before. Sinéad McCoole provides a list of the eighty-three women imprisoned after the 1916 Rising.30 McCoole and Ward claim that approximately fifty women were held during the War of Independence.31 Given the confusion in the sites of detention, the numbers are difficult to discern for the Civil War and vary between four hundred and six hundred.32 However, the change of scale reveals the bitter nature of the conflict, and an “implicit recognition” of women’s military value in a guerrilla war.33 Ryan suggests that republican women were now specifically targeted by the state, the Church and the mainstream press, to discredit the opponents to the Treaty that were represented as relying on their support.34 A January 1923 Free State declaration, reprinted in the Irish Independent under the title “Neurotic girls”, stigmatised republican women as uncompromising, and denounced their violence as unfeminine.35 Challenging traditional gender roles, they were considered “largely responsible for the bitterness and ferocity of the civil war”.36 Meanwhile, as in many anti-colonial conflicts, the Free State authorities were privileging the male heroes of the revolution, and women deemed respectable were cast as symbolic icons of the nation, regardless of the actual role of female activists within the nationalist struggle.37 In that context, imprisonment was used as a weapon to exclude and discipline women whose activism was seen as transgressive.

• 38 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 14.
• 39 John Durham Peters, “Witnessing”, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 6, November 2001, p. 714.
• 40 Ibid., p. 713.
• 41 Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony…, p. 78.
• 42 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 28.

7In the space of a few pages, Buckley testifies to the mistreatment women political prisoners were subjected to, and tells her story together with that of a gendered republican comradeship.38 John Durham Peters claims that “prison is the house of the witness, a maker of moral authority”.39 Witnesses are “survivors whose experiences are unique” and difficult to describe, so telling is a signifying act.40 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub shed light on the witness’s imperative need to be heard, to survive to tell their story – and / or to tell their story to survive.41 Buckley mentions “diaries and other writings” that changed hands before a search. The female prisoners felt the need to write down their prison experience on paper, maybe to tell their stories later, but still feared that no one might believe them.42

• 43 Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature, New York, Methuen, 1987.
• 44 The Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League did their best to publicise the conditions of the prisoners a (...)
• 45 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 63.
• 46 Louise Ryan, “‘Furies’ and ‘Die-Hards’…”, p. 267.
• 47 Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable, London, SAGE, 2002, p. 3.

8Buckley’s militant self-narration can be seen as a fight against oblivion and indifference in a context where women political prisoners’ experiences were being silenced or ignored, a form of “resistance literature”.43 Women’s treatment in jail was indeed – at least partly – unknown to the public outside and this is shown by the incredulity of new soldiers or doctors about the women’s poor conditions of detention.44 Buckley describes how a new doctor is both “horrified at the insanitary conditions in which we lived, moved and had our being”, and “relieved to find that the wild women had neither horns not tails, were quite civilized in fact”.45 This also highlights the efficacy of the mainstream press representation of republican women as hysterical.46 Beverley Skeggs argues that “respectability embodies moral authority: those who are respectable have it, those who are not do not”.47 The Free State strategy was to attack the respectability and moral judgement of the women who had voted against the Treaty and were still challenging the state.

• 48 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 28. Dorothy Macardle wrote about her transfer from Kil (...)
• 49 Another strategy was to place “defiant” women in solitary confinement, like Sighle Humphreys in Mou (...)
• 50 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 28.

9Buckley narrates how in June 1923 she was forcibly removed from Mountjoy to the North Dublin Union (NDU) that was “being opened up as a sort of concentration camp for women”.48 While on that occasion the whole group of women political prisoners is moved to the NDU, a few weeks later only Buckley and Mrs. Stack are transferred to Kilmainham, before being joined by women from other prisons. There is no evidence as to the reasons for these transfers, but the women believed this was a policy used to break their resistance and disrupt established hierarchies.49 On the day they are to be transferred, Buckley and her comrades are told by “friendly wardresses” that “the authorities had employed a special gang of female searchers to do the job”, as the wardresses had refused to carry out the search.50 The women are locked up while the search is being carried out in the other wings. Tension escalates as they hear the tramp of soldiers in the hall – some under the influence of drink – and other women screaming. In the description below, Buckley accumulates words that relate to eyesight and vision.

• 52 Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents.
• 53 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 29.
• 54 Louise Ryan, “Spendidly Silent: Representing Irish Republican Women, 1919-1923”, in Re-presenting t (...)
• 55 Gavin M. Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society…, p. 37.
• 56 Theresa O’Keefe, “Policing Unruly Women: The State and Sexual Violence during the Northern Irish Tr (...)
• 57 Begoña Aretxaga, Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ire (...)
• 58 Theresa O’Keefe, “Policing Unruly Women…”, p. 74.
• 59 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Chicago, University of C (...)
• 60 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: naissance de (...)
• 61 Laura McAtackney, “Gender, Incarceration, and Power Relations during the Irish Civil War (1922-1923 (...)

10Buckley’s self-narration is made to serve a collective function, to produce and to enable change, to disrupt the consensus defined by Rancière.52 Witnessing violence against her comrades prompts her to fight for her own survival, which later leaves her feeling ashamed of her “primitive impulse” and “unladylike” conduct.53 This suggests her continued concern to be seen as respectable even while there were “anxieties around the [republican] women’s unnatural and unfeminine behaviour”,54 in a context of moral policing by the Free State and the Catholic Church.55 Buckley’s resistance – and that of Humphreys and Comerford – also shows that women political prisoners were “cognisant of the power afforded prison authorities through strip-searching”.56 The forced searching of women not only facilitated the prison officers in confiscating objects and messages but, Begoña Aretxaga argues, it also allowed the violation and “colonialization” of the body of the female prisoner in the name of the state and its security.57 In the context of the modern Irish Troubles, women, Theresa O’Keefe claims, regarded “the practice as an instrument of war – a form of sexual violence weaponised to discipline and punish unruly women”.58 The Free State authorities similarly portrayed republican women as “deviant” for their rejection of the Treaty, their military involvement in the Civil War and their transgression of gender norms. Constructing their activism “as a distorted image of authority”, the state thereby “secured its own position” and “reinforced the dominant ideology”.59 Women political prisoners were subjected to a continuum of violence through intimidation, harassment, interrogation, and strip-searching, their unruly bodies becoming a “major target of penal repression”.60 At a time when violence was often implied, Buckley testifies of experiences of threatened or actual violence and sexual assault, that are corroborated by other historical sources such as diaries, autograph books and graffiti on prison walls.61

• 62 Christina M. Quinlan, Inside: Ireland’s Women’s Prisons, Past and Present, Dublin, Irish Academic P (...)
• 63 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 43.
• 64 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 23.
• 65 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 50.
• 66 Nor Meekly Serve My Time: The H-Block Struggle, 1976-1981, Brian Campbell, Laurence McKeown, Felim (...)
• 67 Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women…, p. 42.

11Like the women imprisoned for civilian offences, women political prisoners lived in terrible conditions. They were isolated from the outside and lacked privacy in often overcrowded and unsanitary prisons.62 Buckley recalls that in the NDU, they “experienced every kind of discomfort, hunger, cold and dirt, and [they] were completely isolated, though only a few yards from one of the most populated districts in Dublin”.63 Upon her transfer to Kilmainham jail with Mrs. Stack, she is appalled by the derelict state of the older B Wing they are conducted to. The prison indeed reopened in July 1922 despite having been found “wholly unsuitable for the reception of prisoners”.64 Buckley writes: “The British would never put men prisoners into it, but it was good enough for Irish Republican women. […] We were it seemed, marked out for special punishment”.65 As in the Troubles, the conditions of detention can be said to have been used as a “means of punishment, both individually and collectively, and were not just unfortunate spin-offs from the pressures of overcrowding”.66 Some women political prisoners had indeed been moved to Kilmainham after protesting at their detention with common convicts.67

• 68 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 18.
• 69 Ibid., p. 64, 61.
• 70 Ibid., p. 44.
• 71 Ibid., p. 20.
• 72 Ibid., p. 19.
• 73 Ibid., p. 20.
• 74 Ibid., p. 16.

12Buckley’s prison memoir documents the effects of imprisonment on physical and mental health. A mother’s health broke down out of worry for her children outside. A couple imprisoned in separate wings sang to each other every morning to cheer up.68 Buckley admits suffering from “bad headaches”, and claims: “Each of us had, some time or another, periods of depression”.69 The climate of fear and violence also had a deep psychological impact. The women were horrified at the Mountjoy executions in December 1922,70 and there were rumours that one of them would be executed “just for an example”.71 Paudeen O’Keeffe, deputy military governor at Mounjoy prison and former secretary of Sinn Féin, “kept soldiers trooping in and out; blank shots were fired to terrorise” the women.72 He organised masquerades to break the women’s nerves, rounding them all up one night, and finally ordering them back to their cells “at the point of the bayonet”.73 The aim of such “terrorism” was to “frighten the girls”, but Buckley claims that it “steeled their nerve” and their determination to resist.74

• 75 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Management, and Release, (...)
• 76 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 25, 27-28.

13Kieran McEvoy conceptualised the activity of the paramilitary prisoner in Northern Ireland in four main ways, centred around the notion of resistance: resistance as political struggle, resistance as a struggle to curtail the power of the prison authorities within the prisons, collective character of prisoner resistance, and the relationship between resistance and control over space within prisons.75 Many political prisoners in the Civil War viewed their imprisonment as a continuation of their struggle against the Free State, and the women were no exception. Their resistance was multifaceted within the prison and “activated channels of publicity and support outside”, with organisations such as the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League that denounced the plight of detainees through posters, sympathetic publications and demonstrations.76

• 77 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 14.
• 78 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 40.
• 79 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 15.
• 80 Ibid., p. 31.
• 81 Ibid., p. 15.

14In Buckley’s memoir, republican women respond to imprisonment with solidarity, protest and collective action, and she portrays them as “a group of valiant women”.77 Their conceptualisation of themselves as belonging to a “prison community” is to be seen as an act of resistance in itself.78 Although there were inevitable clashes and difference of tactics, Buckley claims relations always remained friendly.79 Older women took care of younger ones, reassuring them when needed, or removing “pencilled obscenity” from the walls of the NDU that had remained untouched since British emergency troops occupied the building in the Anglo-Irish war.80 This communality was essential as communication with the “home folk” was difficult, and visits were forbidden all along the Civil War.81 It could also help women protect themselves from inappropriate conditions of detention and lack of privacy.

• 82 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 37.
• 83 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 20.
• 84 Ibid., p. 52-53.
• 85 Ibid., p. 52.
• 86 Ibid.
• 87 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 27.
• 88 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 67.

15While in jail, paramilitary prisoners forge and maintain an organised community that is seen as “the product of their struggle against a malevolent regime”.82 Buckley describes the Free State as an “infernal machine that aimed at grinding small the souls of Irish men and women”, but, like her comrades, she is determined not to surrender.83 She writes: “I had, early in my own imprisonment period, determined that […] neither my mind, my body, my soul, should deteriorate at the hands of slaves”.84 After their transfer to Kilmainham, the women held a prisoners’ council and established a military hierarchy close to that of Cumann na mBan. Buckley was elected officer in command (OC) and tried to enforce a strict discipline – including drills and rules – on her comrades “for their good, for the honour and dignity of the women of Ireland”.85 Together with the older members of Cumann na mBan, Buckley organised daily classes, teaching the 3 Rs – Reading, Writing and Arithmetic – but also Irish language and history, knitting and needlework. As with many other prisons, Kilmainham became a “university centre” and the classes were attended with “considerable success”,86 the prisoners considering themselves as “catalysts for political change”.87 Their amusements and diversions were more overt forms of resistance. A historical pageant featuring heroic Irish men and women, including Fanny Parnell, Theobald Wolfe Tone and Matilda, Emmett and Sarah Curran, helped “break the monotony of prison life”, “cheer up the women and strengthen their faith in the Republic”.88 The choice of the persons featured in the procession is a political statement and a claim for ownership of the nation’s history in the ongoing struggle against the Free State.

• 89 Ibid., p. 55.
• 90 Ibid., p. 57.
• 91 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 49.
• 92 William Murphy, “Narratives of Confinement: Fenians, Prisons and Writing, 1867-1916”, in The Black (...)

16Buckley stresses the women’s agency and courage, with their incessant attempts at escape through tunnelling or breakouts. In Kilmainham, she describes how “the time-honoured idea of digging a tunnel took root” in the younger women’s minds.89 It went unnoticed for weeks, much to Buckley’s amazement at “how those girls with no tools, with bare hands, and strength of purpose, could accomplish so much”.90 Despite the romantic embellishment, attempting to escape can be seen as a clear assertion of their status as political prisoners,91 and an intrinsic feature of Irish Republican ideology.92

• 93 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 40-41.
• 94 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 25.
• 95 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 41.
• 96 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 27.
• 97 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 26.
• 98 Christina M. Quinlan, Inside…, p. 47.

17As politically motivated prisoners, Buckley and her comrades felt they “should be seen as distinct, other and apart from ordinaries”, which led them to avoid work that would “offer the authorities the opportunity to portray them as ordinary criminals”.93 Deputy governor O’Keeffe asks Buckley to arrange for the women to clean the stairs and the corridors, after they have cleaned their cells. She strongly refuses that they be considered “charwomen” and he has to bring women convicts to do the job.94 Beside the reaction against what can be seen as a “strategy of criminalisation”,95 such a reaction is also typical of the “othering engaged by civil war detainees towards the civilian prisoners”.96 Contrary to the “poor derelicts” pitied by Buckley, many of the republican prisoners came from comfortable backgrounds.97 At the time, criminality was considered “a lower-class phenomenon”.98

• 99 Ann Matthews, Dissidents…, p. 62.
• 100 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 19.
• 101 Ibid., p. 32.
• 102 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 42.
• 103 Ibid., p. 42-43.

18As the number of women republican prisoners increased after autumn 1922, there was immense pressure on prison accommodation.99 When Humphreys and Comerford’s solitary confinement ended in March 1923, they decided to renew “militant displays” to protest against increased occupancy, organising “obstructive operations” like throwing the bedding out on the landing and wheeling bedsteads out into the corridors.100 Similar action took place in the NDU as women felt they could not “compromise on the space question”.101 Like other prisoners, republican women were “determined to maximize control over their living space within the prison”.102 Thanks to the “camp regime of free association”, they were also able to establish “homeplaces” – the space of the cells or wings – which acted as “sources of self-dignity, agency and solidarity in which resistance [was] both organised and conceptualised”.103

• 104 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 15.
• 105 Ibid.
• 106 Ibid., p. 19.
• 107 Ibid., p. 20.
• 108 Buckley was relieved no one believed she was “allegating with the enemy” (ibid., p. 17).
• 109 Ibid., p. 20.
• 110 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 34, 37.
• 111 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 20.

19Buckley disagreed with her comrades’ decision to maintain “a state of war” with the prison administration.104 However everyone remained free to “conduct operations in any way which seemed good to them”.105 Constant challenges to the prison administration resulted in the stopping of letters and parcels, and the failed attempt to break the communal spirit by dissociating the women downstairs and upstairs.106 O’Keeffe had a troop of soldiers remove all the furniture from the women’s cells, led by an officer who “rooted out everything, and jeered while he did it”.107 Yet, Buckley believed O’Keeffe to be willing to compromise – she had worked under him when he was secretary of Sinn Féin – so her tactics were less confrontational.108 As OC, she signed a letter demanding the return of the confiscated furniture and the right to receive and send out letters again.109 Such interplay shows the “ongoing dialectic between resistance and the exercise of power”, prisoners being “key players in determining the nature of power relations”.110 However O’Keefe refused to give in, and the women decided to go on hunger strike.111

• 112 Ibid., p. 27, 32.
• 113 Ibid., p. 8, 27.
• 114 Ibid., p. 17, 24.
• 115 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 30-31.
• 116 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern I (...)
• 117 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 72-78.
• 118 Ibid., p. 105.
• 119 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 21.
• 120 Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow, London, Hutchinson, 1993, p. 83.
• 121 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 21.
• 122 Ibid., p. 13, 19, 20, 22, 44, 69.

20Food was already one of the everyday sites of power struggle with the prison administration. Buckley describes it as “extremely poor and coarse” and the women as constantly hungry.112 They had some food sent from the outside whenever possible and some wardresses contributed to the provision of more suitable cutlery – a China cup instead of the tin mug provided to newcomers for instance.113 Buckley once managed to get ingredients for pancakes from O’Keeffe, and even a gas stove later.114 The hunger strike – the self-denial of food as a strategy of resistance – has resonance with Republican protest and imprisonment.115 The body is instrumentalised as a symbolic site of political struggle.116 Used by suffragettes and pacifists too, protests to the death are more associated with political prisoners, as a way of pressurising prison authorities.117 “Influenced by the afterlives of former protests”,118 Buckley and her comrades decide to “put up a fight for the political status which in that very jail Tom Ashe had suffered and died to obtain”,119 drawing inspiration and legitimacy from his death from force-feeding by the British authorities in 1917.120 Buckley also frames the tactics as “the only weapon left to them”, as “women accused of no criminal intent”, “deprived of the common necessities […] accorded to the most depraved criminal prisoners”.121 Several hunger strikes were conducted during her time in jail.122

• 123 Ibid., p. 20.
• 124 Ibid.
• 125 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland…, p. 78.
• 126 Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries…, p. 190. Protests could go as far as sympathetic hunge (...)
• 127 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 52, 63-64.
• 128 Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1920-1962: Pilgrimage of Desolation, London – New York, (...)
• 129 In spring 1923, a bill allowing hunger-strikers to die secured a majority in the Dáil (Kieran McEvo (...)
• 130 Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1920-1962…, p. 251.
• 131 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 28.

21During the strikes, the priest refused to hear their confessions, which led Buckley to condemn the position of the Catholic Church that supported the Treaty and excommunicated the republicans.123 She declared: “I had done my part, and he had refused to do his, as ordained by God”.124 Even though a large majority of the population did not support militant republicanism, there was still “potential for residual sympathy for prisoners”.125 Described as a “decided embarrassment to the Free State government”, groups like the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League organised protests to highlight the plight of detainees.126 The women passed on news of their conditions to the outside that were published in Éire and other anti-Treaty newspapers; it could sometimes accelerate releases, Buckley claimed.127 Seán McConville describes prisons during the Civil War as a “battlefield for popular support and publicity in the press”.128 If the public seemed largely apathetic concerning the plight of men on hunger strike,129 it seems that women caused more unease. The government indeed received letters of intercession on their behalf from TDs, members of the Church hierarchy, and family members.130 There is little evidence that such protest had any effect on prison policy, but the prisoners’ voices were heard and contributed to “putting forward a rival conception of the situation to that propagated by the government”.131

• 132 Margaret Buckley, The Jangle of the Keys, p. 69.
• 133 Gavin M. Foster, The Irish Civil War and Society…, p. 283-285.
• 134 For more on this, see Agnès Maillot, In the Shadow of History: Sinn Féin, 1926-70, Manchester, Manc (...)
• 135 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Steven Corcoran (ed. and trans.), London, (...)
• 136 Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1920-1962…, p. 253-254.

22Buckley’s struggle against the Free State did not end with her arrest, nor did it with her release in October 1923. The last words of her prison memoir, “Long live the Republic”,132 show her attachment to the 1916 Proclamation, even while the need to build a stable state brought a new conservative elite to power.133 A Sinn Féin president from 1937 to 1950 in difficult times for the party – with repression on both sides of the border, mass internment, hunger strikes, prison executions and the Funds Case – she contributed to the perpetuation of an alternative memory to that developed by the state, albeit a marginalised one.134 Her prison memoir offers a subversive narrative of the Civil War and can be seen to conform to Rancière’s theory of the dissensus, being that which renders visible and audible what had previously been silenced.135 Published in 1938, it described institutionalised abuse towards women political prisoners that had been dismissed by the Free State government as propaganda.136 It also contributed to the memorialisation of female militancy and the transmission of a shared feminist culture between generations.

• 137 Maryann Gialanella Valiulis, The Making of Inequality…, p. 45-46.
• 138 Aidan Beatty, Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, 1884-1938, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 20 (...)
• 139 Linda Connolly, The Irish Women’s Movement. From Revolution to Devolution, London, Palgrave Macmill (...)
• 140 For example, see Women & Irish History: Essays in Honour of Margaret MacCurtain, Maryann Gialanella (...)
• 141 Margaret Lee [Buckley], “Are Out State Prisons Worthwhile?”, The Irishman, 19 November 1927. See al (...)
• 142 Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland…, p. 32-33.
• 143 Margaret Buckley quoted in Uinseann MacEoin, The IRA in the Twilight Years: 1923-1948, Dublin, Arge (...)

23The Civil War had a negative effect on men’s perception of women and of their participation in public life, both the opponents and the supporters of the Treaty subscribing to the ideal of domesticity.137 Female military service was pushed into the background of the independence narrative, and republican men reclaimed their respectability, legitimacy and masculinity.138 Moving away from a catastrophist view, Linda Connolly showed that various women’s groups worked together towards the goal of full citizenship after 1922.139 Activism went on in smaller numbers on issues like the jury service, limitations on women’s employment, or opposition to articles of the 1937 Constitution.140 Using her prison experience in a socially conscious journalism,141 Buckley addressed the plight of ordinary detainees, overlooked by the government, both owing to fatigue after a long period of conflict, and the “othering” of ordinaries by political prisoners.142 In 1938, the publication of The Jangle of the Keys provided the readers with a vindication of republican women’s militancy even while the new constitution was treating women “as half-wits”.143