Historically, patriarchy has been as dominant in education in Ireland as elsewhere (Harford, 2008). In the Irish context, it was promoted through the male-dominated Catholic Church, which controlled either directly or indirectly the vast majority of education institutions in the country (O’ Donoghue and Harford, 2011). This dominant hegemony was most powerful during the period post-Independence and up until the 1960s, a period which witnessed a deep social conservatism, shored up by a powerful alliance between the state and the Catholic Church (Harford, 2018). Church control over curriculum development, over the hiring of school personnel and over the training of teachers, the focus of this research, ensured the supremacy of Catholic social teaching (O’Donoghue, Harford and O’ Doherty, 2017). Central to this strategy was the propagation of a gendered ideology which afforded women subordinate status within a deeply hierarchical social fabric and church structure.

Teacher training establishments at this time were single-sex, residential institutions, run by religious orders. The philosophical intent, construction and function of teacher training for women was to equip them to instill within their pupils, future citizens, conservative, nationalistic and ultramontane values forged through a unique symbiotic Catholic Church State compact. Training establishments for women teachers were run by women religious and for the most part the omnipotent, patriarchal ideology driving the governance and raison d’être of these institutions remained unchecked.

By the 1960s, Irish society had begun a process of self-reflection and modernization triggered by exposure to international ideas, the Second Vatican Council, the democratization of education and radical changes in economic policy (Harford and Fleming, 2014). Associated with this was a change in a national philosophy of education from one based on a narrow notion of a 'liberal education' to one based on human capital theory. Five years after the agitation at university level in continental Europe and the USA, a cohort of circa 600 female students agitated at the female religious-run Carysfort Teacher Training College in Dublin, demanding a voice in the nature of the curriculum taught and in the governance of the college.However, these women were protesting not against the male hegemony per se, but against the women religious who perpetrated this hegemony. The focus of this study is thus on patriarchy perpetuated by women on women.

An extensive strike which received widespread and sympathetic coverage in the national media and support from a wide body of students at other colleges resulted in these students gaining significant concessions in the areas of governance and curriculum design. Ironically, the students appear to, at best, have had the sympathy of the representatives of the Catholic hierarchy in the negotiations which took place. The case, while interesting in its own right, is also of value in promoting reflection on simplistic notions of patriarchy in education, and prompts one to cogitate the extent to which women (in this case women religious) were complicit in ensuring the dominance of men over other women. In this sense, what took place in somewhat analogous to the position of those who have argued that colonialism could not have operated successfully without native collaborators (Robinson, 1972).

This paper is based on documentary research which is a suitable method for interrogating the relationship between the past and the present, the public and the private, the individual and the structural. An analysis of the range of sources available from both the private and public worlds of the women involved in this strike attests to the way in which the private and the public often engaged in ‘mutual infiltration’ and reciprocal permeation’ (Habermas, 1992, pp. 145, 151), provides ‘a significant medium through which to understand the way in which our society has developed, and how it continues to develop’ (McCulloch, 2004, p. 5) completing the ‘intellectual journey’ of the intersection of biography and history (Mills, 1959, p. 6). Through an analysis of primary sources, including university records, minutes, newspaper records and personal papers, it will be informed by the following research questions: 1 Why did these women rise up against the dominant hegemony? 2 How did they perceive the women religious who controlled their teacher training? 4 What was the wider social, political and cultural context which led to this strike and what impact, if any, did this strike have on these women’s emerging identities as women and as teachers? 5 What impact, if any, did social and political unrest occurring across Europe and the US at this time have on these women’s attitudes and actions? 6 What was the significance of their contribution to this period in Irish education and what legacy did they leave?

Scholarship on women’s oppression largely ignores the role other women sometimes play in such oppression and the nuances and complexity of subjugation, power and control. This is true not just of the Irish context but internationally. Accordingly, it is time to bring more complexity to the issue acknowledging that there are multiple roles and benefactors across both time and space. In this particular study, what is compelling is that a resolution to the issue was eventually brokered by a male hierarchy keen to restore the status quo. In exchange for this restoration of order, however, these men had to concede significant ground, granting women students a role both in curriculum design and in governance.

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