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In Anne F. Scott’s famous paper ‘On seeing and not seeing: a case of historical invisibility’ she highlighted the fact that in the already neglected history of American Voluntary Associations, the role of women had been almost completely overlooked.
This was not because there were no documentary traces of these women. It was a case of culturally induced selective blindness. Historians seeing only the things they expected to see and overlooking everything else. The minds of these historians were clouded by the culture that at any given time teaches us what to see and what not to see.
According to Keith Jenkins more recently:
We apprehend the past through layers of previous interpretations, through our reading habits, categories, concepts, methodological practices and ideological desires
In other words, the selective blindness described by Scott is nott something we can easily escape. Even Scott couldn’t escape it. In spite of her best efforts to keep her eyes open and her appeal to historians to do likewise, she completely overlooked the role of black women in the organisations she was studying. Significantly, her paper contains a suggestion that the historian can be nudged in the right direction. There are 2 stages in seeing what has been invisible:
1. Someone must begin to notice what has been ignored and questions the conventional wisdom. Often such a person is one whose own experience does not jibe with the history books.
2. The second stage comes when the new area is accepted into the general body of knowledge of the field
In other words, people who have lived the past under scrutiny and who naturally see plenty of meaning in their own actions can challenge the histories that leave them out and negotiate their way in.
In the case of the erly Sinn Féin, what historians are unable to see amounts to about 99% of movement.
The 1% of the movement that historians can see corresponds to the formal Sinn Féin organisation, generally called the Sinn Féin Party. This is the part of the movement that produced lots of the sorts of documents that most interest hoistorians: minutes of meetings, manifestoes, pamphlets, constitutions, resolutions, declarations and lists of members.
3 almost forgotten commentators shed valuable light on what the early Sinn Féin movement was all about. These are:
Aodh de Blacam, a propagandists, utopian, Anti semitic Franco supporter, and speech writer for De Valera;
Sydney Gifford, propagandist, journalist and sister of the more famouse Grace Gifford; and
Brinsley MacNamara, the Irish Novelist famous for the Valley of the Squinting Windows, copies of which were burned in his home village.
According to de Blacam,
Initially Sinn Féin was not a party: it was the amorphous propaganda of the Gaelicised young men and women. The principles of this journalistically-united intelligentsia might be well summed up in Bishop Berkeley’s famous query: “Whether it would not be more pertinent to mend our state than to complain of it; and how far this may be in our power?”.
Gifford also highlights the role of the newspaper in the creation of a Sinn Féin spirit, the spirit of self-help in areas that the party couldn’t reach:
The influence of Griffith’s paper was much greater than that of the Sinn Féin organisation, so that in many places where there was not a single branch of Sinn Féin in the years leading up to 1916, there was a strong Sinn Féin sentiment, which had eminated from some local reader of the paper, Gifford p.27.
One of these local readersz turns up in Brinsley McNamara’s 2nd novel A clanking of chains.
This is the only attempt to reconstruct the lifestyle of a Sinn Féin reader was made by Brindsley MacNamara in his second novel The Clanking of Chains, published in 1920.
subtitle is A Story of Sinn Féin the account
the struggle of an idealistic young man, Michael Dempsey, to apply the moral code promoted by the Sinn Féin newspaper, in a provincial environment hostile to newfangled ideas and challenges to the status quo.
Significantly MacNamara locates the source of Dempsey’s political enlightenment in his personal library, by meditating on the writings of John Mitchell Dempsey’s mind escape the gloom of his surroundings and imagine a brighter future.
It is, however, a newspaper that provides him with the courage to act on his beliefs and the discourse to frame this action. He is the only Sinn Féin reader in the town:
"The little paper formerly known as the United Irishman had changed its name to Sinn Fein, and Michael bought it every week from old Mr Millington, the ex-peeler, who sold notepaper, newspapers and sweets. At first he had found it somewhat difficult to understand. Very soon it seemed to open to his eyes a brighter vision of Ireland in the days to be. It looked forward gladly to hope of the future, rather than sadly backward to the defeat of the past. It suggested many practical means by which Ireland could enter into this future. It endeavoured to adjust its ideas to facts and institutions of the day, language, industry, development of mineral wealth, railways, local government. It often seemed so certain to Michael that one could have this lovely Ireland as an immediate future if all these things were done that Sinn Fein suggested, entreated, almost commanded from Thursday to Thursday".
Dempsey’s struggle is described by McNamara as a battle agaist the tabloidisation of trhe Irish mind. The young men who did read looked out at life through the eyes of The News of the World and The Umpire; the girls coloured all their romantic notions by attempting to apply sentiments from Charles Garvice and to imitate photographs from The Daily Sketch.
He also attempts to convert the individuals around him by suggesting more appropriate raedaing and putting on a nationalist play. His girlfriend his boss, matches
Here, Dempsey seems to be well on the road to becoming the pivotal Sinn Féin reader that Sidney Gifford mentions the individual striving in a district without a single branch of the Sinn Féin organization to creates a Sinn Féin atmosphere by influencing his family, friends and neighbours. His humble efforts are likely to having any impact whatsoever on the condition of Ireland. At this point McNamara expresses what was perhaps the greatest challenge faced by individual Sinn Féiners working in isolation like Michael Dempsey. “His mind was unable to grasp Ballycullen as the microcosm of that macrocosm” . This shows that MacNamara had a profound understanding of what Sinn Féinism meant in the early years of the 20th century.
Only 2 historians Virginia E. Glandon and Michael Laffan have managed to catch a glimpse of something while consulting the minute books of the SFPP. Glandon incidentally is the only historian to mention the SFFP but does not attch any great importance to it.
Both historians cite the circulation figures for Sinn Féin and the Sinn Féin Daily for 1909-1910 but other than conveying the impression that neither the weekly nor the daily publication was particularly successfu they make no attempt to analyse or interpret them. And the readers lurking behind the figures never put in an appearance.
This was not because there were no documentary traces of these women. It was a case of culturally induced selective blindness. Historians seeing only the things they expected to see and overlooking everything else. The minds of these historians were clouded by the culture that at any given time teaches us what to see and what not to see.
According to Keith Jenkins more recently:
We apprehend the past through layers of previous interpretations, through our reading habits, categories, concepts, methodological practices and ideological desires
In other words, the selective blindness described by Scott is nott something we can easily escape. Even Scott couldn’t escape it. In spite of her best efforts to keep her eyes open and her appeal to historians to do likewise, she completely overlooked the role of black women in the organisations she was studying. Significantly, her paper contains a suggestion that the historian can be nudged in the right direction. There are 2 stages in seeing what has been invisible:
1. Someone must begin to notice what has been ignored and questions the conventional wisdom. Often such a person is one whose own experience does not jibe with the history books.
2. The second stage comes when the new area is accepted into the general body of knowledge of the field
In other words, people who have lived the past under scrutiny and who naturally see plenty of meaning in their own actions can challenge the histories that leave them out and negotiate their way in.
In the case of the erly Sinn Féin, what historians are unable to see amounts to about 99% of movement.
The 1% of the movement that historians can see corresponds to the formal Sinn Féin organisation, generally called the Sinn Féin Party. This is the part of the movement that produced lots of the sorts of documents that most interest hoistorians: minutes of meetings, manifestoes, pamphlets, constitutions, resolutions, declarations and lists of members.
3 almost forgotten commentators shed valuable light on what the early Sinn Féin movement was all about. These are:
Aodh de Blacam, a propagandists, utopian, Anti semitic Franco supporter, and speech writer for De Valera;
Sydney Gifford, propagandist, journalist and sister of the more famouse Grace Gifford; and
Brinsley MacNamara, the Irish Novelist famous for the Valley of the Squinting Windows, copies of which were burned in his home village.
According to de Blacam,
Initially Sinn Féin was not a party: it was the amorphous propaganda of the Gaelicised young men and women. The principles of this journalistically-united intelligentsia might be well summed up in Bishop Berkeley’s famous query: “Whether it would not be more pertinent to mend our state than to complain of it; and how far this may be in our power?”.
Gifford also highlights the role of the newspaper in the creation of a Sinn Féin spirit, the spirit of self-help in areas that the party couldn’t reach:
The influence of Griffith’s paper was much greater than that of the Sinn Féin organisation, so that in many places where there was not a single branch of Sinn Féin in the years leading up to 1916, there was a strong Sinn Féin sentiment, which had eminated from some local reader of the paper, Gifford p.27.
One of these local readersz turns up in Brinsley McNamara’s 2nd novel A clanking of chains.
This is the only attempt to reconstruct the lifestyle of a Sinn Féin reader was made by Brindsley MacNamara in his second novel The Clanking of Chains, published in 1920.
subtitle is A Story of Sinn Féin the account
the struggle of an idealistic young man, Michael Dempsey, to apply the moral code promoted by the Sinn Féin newspaper, in a provincial environment hostile to newfangled ideas and challenges to the status quo.
Significantly MacNamara locates the source of Dempsey’s political enlightenment in his personal library, by meditating on the writings of John Mitchell Dempsey’s mind escape the gloom of his surroundings and imagine a brighter future.
It is, however, a newspaper that provides him with the courage to act on his beliefs and the discourse to frame this action. He is the only Sinn Féin reader in the town:
"The little paper formerly known as the United Irishman had changed its name to Sinn Fein, and Michael bought it every week from old Mr Millington, the ex-peeler, who sold notepaper, newspapers and sweets. At first he had found it somewhat difficult to understand. Very soon it seemed to open to his eyes a brighter vision of Ireland in the days to be. It looked forward gladly to hope of the future, rather than sadly backward to the defeat of the past. It suggested many practical means by which Ireland could enter into this future. It endeavoured to adjust its ideas to facts and institutions of the day, language, industry, development of mineral wealth, railways, local government. It often seemed so certain to Michael that one could have this lovely Ireland as an immediate future if all these things were done that Sinn Fein suggested, entreated, almost commanded from Thursday to Thursday".
Dempsey’s struggle is described by McNamara as a battle agaist the tabloidisation of trhe Irish mind. The young men who did read looked out at life through the eyes of The News of the World and The Umpire; the girls coloured all their romantic notions by attempting to apply sentiments from Charles Garvice and to imitate photographs from The Daily Sketch.
He also attempts to convert the individuals around him by suggesting more appropriate raedaing and putting on a nationalist play. His girlfriend his boss, matches
Here, Dempsey seems to be well on the road to becoming the pivotal Sinn Féin reader that Sidney Gifford mentions the individual striving in a district without a single branch of the Sinn Féin organization to creates a Sinn Féin atmosphere by influencing his family, friends and neighbours. His humble efforts are likely to having any impact whatsoever on the condition of Ireland. At this point McNamara expresses what was perhaps the greatest challenge faced by individual Sinn Féiners working in isolation like Michael Dempsey. “His mind was unable to grasp Ballycullen as the microcosm of that macrocosm” . This shows that MacNamara had a profound understanding of what Sinn Féinism meant in the early years of the 20th century.
Only 2 historians Virginia E. Glandon and Michael Laffan have managed to catch a glimpse of something while consulting the minute books of the SFPP. Glandon incidentally is the only historian to mention the SFFP but does not attch any great importance to it.
Both historians cite the circulation figures for Sinn Féin and the Sinn Féin Daily for 1909-1910 but other than conveying the impression that neither the weekly nor the daily publication was particularly successfu they make no attempt to analyse or interpret them. And the readers lurking behind the figures never put in an appearance.
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