Irish Women and the Great War by Fionnuala Walsh

Practioners of Irish history have often been criticized for ignoring or lagging behind wider historiographical trends and developments. Happily, this perception does not apply to Walsh’s new monograph on Irish women’s experience of World War I. Her work engages with international scholarship relating to cultural, comparative, and gender history and challenges the insularity and partisanship that continue to dog the historiography of Ireland’s revolutionary period (1913–1923). Walsh describes her book as focusing “on the nation-state through a transnational framework.” She argues persuasively that public interest in World War I and its impact on Ireland has grown steadily since the 1980s. The once pervasive “amnesia” and “aphasia” in relation to Irish involvement in the British war effort has seriously diminished. In line with increasing numbers of Irish historians, Walsh characterizes World War I as an integral part of the Irish experience in the Edwardian period and a crucial context for understanding...