Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,
Cork Independent, 19 April 2012
Technical Memories (Part 13)
Playing a Piano Badly
“I am glad to be here …to bear testimony to the admirable work carried on under somewhat disadvantageous circumstances in the past and which will, doubtless, in the new circumstances greatly advance both as regards quantity and quality.” (Thomas Wallace Russell, Cork Examiner, Wednesday 17th January 1912)
In his wide ranging speech at the opening of the Crawford Technical Institute on Tuesday, 16 January 1912, Thomas Wallace Russell, Vice President of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction took the opportunity to comment on the needs of industry of the day and gave his opinion on the role of women in the country.
Regarding the strengths of industrial education, Russell commented on all kinds of classes in the Cork institute. He shed light on the classes in mechanical engineering and physics – noting that Haulbowline and other places required students educated in those subjects;
“I have heard a good deal in the last year or two of different classes in Cork. You have a tailoring class for example. It has been difficult to satisfy the Department as to a teacher, but there is no lack of students. In that class men engaged in the tailoring industry receive valuable education, which tends to make them better tailors than they would be without it. There are also classes in bootmaking and printing. These may not be as successful as we could desire but they fulfil at least the primary function of technical education, and they have the strictest relationship to the industries of the district. It is not the function of technical education to make men tailors, bootmakers or printers. It is its function to make a man a better tailor, a better bootmaker and a better printer than he would be otherwise.”
Russell also spoke about the domestic economy classes, which to him affected perhaps more closely the masses of the people than any other part of his department’s work. Much he noted had been said and written on the question of higher education for women. He gave his opinion that he did not have extensive sympathies with what he described as the “good deal of what is going on now in what is called the world of women”. To him the education of women as it was carried on opened up more than one “grave problem”.
In the wider context of his speech, a year earlier in the United Kingdom had witnessed the first act of suffragette arson and two years later Emily Davison died at the Derby as she rushed out to bring down the King’s horse. In Parliament, pressure for change was led by some liberal MPs, who were the leading figures in a suffrage committee. Away from the reasoned debate of Westminster, prisons filled with women prepared to go to jail for the right to vote. The civil disobedience continued behind bars, with many women force-fed to prevent them hunger striking. Their families campaigned for the inmates to be given political status, including the right to wear their own clothes, study and prepare their own food.
Noting his view of women in education in his Cork speech Russell argued:
“I am all for the higher education of women up to the point where that education can be of service to her. If a young woman desires to become a teacher; if she desires to enter on a path of life where higher education is necessary; even if she can afford it – should she desire the wider outlook such an education will give her – I go fully with her aspirations. But when I come to examine a country like Ireland where the great majority of the young women of the day, if they stay at home – and I am glad to know they are not leaving in such numbers – have a clear prospect before them of being the wives of farmers, shopkeepers and of labourers, the case to me is quite clear.
In all such cases a diploma in domestic science will be of far more use than a degree in arts; and for the wife of a farmer, a shopkeeper or a workman, it will be inestimably better for her and better for Ireland, that she would know how to manage a family and to cook a potato well than to play a piano badly. And here comes in the importance of our domestic economy classes in these schools. They are not schools, as some people suppose, for the mere teaching of cooking. They are schools for the making of good housewives. They are schools where in addition to cooking, cleanliness and good order, hygiene, and sanitary science are taught and these are all vital interests of to-day. It is in these directions that women can play a really great part in the present and in the future.”
By 1918, the Peoples Act allowed women over 30 the right to vote. It would take a further 10 years to abolish the age qualification and put men and women on an equal footing. In 1918 Russell retired from politics and died in May 1920, aged 79.
To be continued…
Caption:
637a. Cookery Room, Crawford Municipal Technical Institute, Cork 1912 (source: Souvenir 1912 booklet)