To understand the public debates about reproductive politics, in Ireland and Nicaragua, the politics of motherhood are key.  For most women, the material reality of motherhood was grueling, relentless hard work.  Constantly pregnant or nursing, they also bore the burden of economic responsibilities.  Nevertheless, women and men, radicals and conservatives idolize motherhood. The FSLN’s commitment to democratization did not include freeing women from motherhood.  Neither did the anti-colonialist ideology of the Irish Revolutionary Army. After women gave birth to the new revolutionary nation, the enduring ethic of “sacrifice” dictated their return to physical birthing of new generations and made contraception and abortion unpatriotic.  Traditionally, women’s altruistic sacrifices led them to be seen but not heard as citizens. After women’s militant mobilization made their daily sacrifices a matter of public discussion, they gained honor but no relief from the religious imperative to demonstrate altruism.  Women’s consolation for their sacrifices in the revolution was motherhood, not liberation. 

“Hoodrats, don’t abortion your womb, we need more warriors soon.” – Nas

Women are not full citizens without the service of motherhood. While this is not solely a reflection of either Irish or Nicaraguan social norms – it is compounded because of their deeply committed relationship to Catholicism.  Catholics love God, Jesus, and the holy spirit, but they also really love the Mother of Jesus – Mary.  The mother of Jesus was so pure that God chose her virginity to birth God’s son.  Catholicism simultaneously demonizes women as the originator of sin while revering mothers on a pedestal so high that they are sequestered there.  Women are almost (barely) citizens until they have children – people who live in the shadows of citizens.  

Like most things, this framework is not static. During revolutionary action, women’s roles change. Everyone’s citizenship changes because the demand for popular engagement is paramount. Revolution deconstructs frameworks providing an avenue into a conversation many people were previously excluded from.  I am interested in examining the moments after the revolution ends. The moments after the fighting has stopped and “peace” has begun. When the framework has to be rebuilt. What are the tools? Who gets to plan? In both Ireland and Nicaragua – women’s involvement in the revolutionary struggle placed them in the center of the rubble, but as the dust settled the priests and politicians and “real militant leaders” asked them to go home and check on the children and dinner. At that point for many women, it was too late to go home. The pedestal was destroyed and they would not simply go back to their small box. 

The majority of families in Nicaragua were female-headed throughout the Somoza dynasty and most were poor.   Many fathers and husbands joined the FSLN or deserted their families in search of work, leaving mothers financially responsible.  “The proportion of women wage-earners rose from 14% in 1950 to 28.7% in 1977.  These are extraordinarily high figures for Latin America.” Mothers not only assumed economic responsibilities, but also social and moral responsibilities for their family’s needs. Research on women’s survival strategies prior to the Insurrection notes that women typically performed reproductive tasks that allowed them to combine family responsibilities with working long hours outside the home. For example, women who worked at the market or street vending did not “need” child care because they brought their children with them.  

The Insurrection provoked another economic crisis that hit Nicaraguan women hard, tested their ingenuity, and increased their dependence on wages. Despite these material burdens, the ideological glorification of motherhood remained unchanged.  Religious and educational institutions celebrated motherhood as women’s natural role, a god-given biological imperative.  This doctrine reinforced the structural oppression of women.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in Nicaragua’s unique observance of “La Purisima.”  This holiday celebrates the Virgin Mary’s “lack of original sin and thus her suitability to be Jesus’ mother.” Mary’s great authority rests solely in her “role as the ideal sacrificing mother.”

 In Catholic countries, the church socializes, educates, and often controls or strongly influences the and institutionalization of  gender hierarchies through law and public policy, legitimating unequal relationships as “natural.”  Gustavo Gutíerrez, the founder of Liberation Theology, noted that women’s oppression was so engrained in Latin American culture that “when we point it out we sound a bit like foreigners bent on causing trouble.”  Troublemaker Sofia Montenegro claimed that “’Virginity in the sky… violation on the earth”, was the norm, as evident in the physical and verbal abuse of large numbers of Nicaraguan women. Her comments emphasized, “the neurotic and ambivalent attitude of the Nicaraguan man before the figure of the mother and therefore before women in general.”     

The socialization of young girls prepared them for subservience to their husbands, and dominance over their children.  Women compensate for minimal social power by exerting immense control over their children. In a 1991 article, Luz Maria Torres, director of a women’s clinic wrote, “Nicaraguan culture is … reinforced at home, as women are the ideological torchbearers in this society… reproducing the very system that harms them. This is perhaps most obvious in the socialization of children.” This power that came with motherhood provided an avenue for agency within oppression.  Girls matured into reputable women by becoming mothers.  Motherhood, therefore, became girls’ ideal profession, their means for gaining social power, making the identities “mother” and “woman” interchangeable.  Tellingly, The Historic Program of the FSLN, a document first presented in 1969, then reprinted in1981, highlights the interchangeability of mother and woman in section seven, entitled “Emancipation of Women.” While the introduction promises to “abolish the odious discrimination,” five of the seven points refer to women as mothers, with the very first promising to “pay special attention to mother and child. The Catholic worship of Mary and the lasting effects of what Margaret Randall refers to as the Spanish Catholic tradition, “preached [that] woman [stayed] home, passive, dependent and ‘ornamental’…” Many daughters passed directly from the guardianship of their fathers to the control of their husbands. Girls who learned to be submissive became mothers who “lead lives of service to others, most prominently their men.”  Even liberation theology and radical sectors of the Catholic Church sanctified women as mothers of heroes and martyrs. Christian revolutionaries presented Mary (the Mother of God) as a liberator, rather then submissive, but as Randall notes, “there were limits to the usefulness of a figure whose own sexuality was denied.” Envio, a student newspaper from the University of Central America in Nicaragua, explained in an article written by the Director of a Women’s Center in Nicaragua,  “Mothers were exalted first and foremost as mothers, and praised for giving their greatest gift—their sons—to the cause.”

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There is a direct connection between memorializing social struggles and the education that you receive at home.  The way resistance is remembered and how it is taught to you in your home is why republican motherhood became a tool for the colonists in the United States. The colonists knew that political consciousness began in the home. Sara Mamani’s article “What are the Iranian Wishing For? Queer Transnational Solidarity in Revolutionary Iran” explains that “to educate…is to transform dreaming into willing and to shape aspirations into possibilities.” She further explains that education is an open-minded process that aims to above all teach to desire in a different way.  This form of education is never a moral alignment to social norms. It is the “production of alterity and of subjects who desire differently.”  There is no revolution without re-education of consciousness. There is no institution greater for educating than the quiet moments of bedtime stories.

The history of women’s participation in social movements and resistance is solely confined to the storytelling of women.  When women participate in social struggles and revolutionary movements there is strength and efficiency in the way the legacy is remembered.  The political involvement of women has purposefully been denied outside of the home in order to allow gendered symbols to sustain patriarchal practices.  Women acted in diverse ways to fight for Independence and they earned their equality.  They are more likely to join revolutionary armies than a traditional army because revolutionary armies promise to remake society. Women’s participation is for the betterment of their own lives. This was not a practice of austerity it was a struggle for freedom. As Mairead Farrell said “I am oppressed as a woman, and I’m oppressed as an Irish person. We can only end our oppression as women if we end the oppression of our nation as a whole.”

Many of the books detailing revolutionary struggle had gaping holes where women’s resistance held space. A multitude of books on the Irish Republican Army are filled with the same men’s names and photographs without a single mention of women. Pages after pages dedicated to the prison hunger strikes in male prisons, but very little to the hunger strikes at women’s prisons, some of the most notable being the Price sisters who starved themselves in the women’s prison (Armagh) for 203 days.   Mairead Farrell, whose quote I mentioned earlier, notoriously painted the walls of her prison cell with her menstrual blood protesting the violent and violating searches of their bodies and cells.  She was ultimately shot while unarmed in Gibraltar.   The infamous Rose Dugdale is a story made for retelling but wasn’t told until 2020. She stole 19 old masters (worth 8 million Euros) which she planned to use as a bargaining chip to advance the republican cause. She also hijacked a helicopter and dropped bombs in milk churns on a police station in Northern Ireland. She has been cast as the dupe of her socialist boyfriend which disrespectfully ignores her Oxford degree and her doctorate in economics. This narrative silenced her political convictions by valuing her relationship to a man over her expertise and knowledge as a citizen.

Women’s participation in revolutionary militancy has often been reduced to the symptoms of a lovesick doe-eyed innocent – just following the footsteps of a bad man or the result of the psychological trauma of un-named passive violence. This un-named force is almost always caused by the state. Women describe their involvement as the result of injustice. They were radicalized by state violence, internment, detention without trial abuse of prisoners, and Bloody Sunday in 1972.  Militant women occupied an ambiguous space in Irish Republicanism. Newspapers often described militant women as “girls” and as passive victims of their social context. This eliminated the agency of the militant women.  The public narrative of women who became radicalized as “drawn to her doom by a man promising adventure and purpose” is a dishonest portrayal of women who fought for themselves and their country.

When men mobilized into battle, the war opened up a wider range of social roles for women. Women have been part of the IRA from the start.  Yes, initially as the fabric of support, but as men were arrested or killed – women filled the military ranks.  Irish men were being killed arrested and detained under the policy of internment by the hundreds during the 1970s and with this came the responsibility for Irish women to step up as head of households.  (Bird 2021) Militancy in women and women’s deviation from feminine norms was described as psychological damage.  This continues the trend seen by the retelling of Rose Dugdale. Rather than her agency being the protagonist of her own story – some man was placed at the head. In this case, women’s agency is usurped by “damage” done to them.

The majority of families in Nicaragua were female-headed throughout the Somoza dynasty and most were poor.    Many fathers and husbands joined the FSLN or deserted their families in search of work, leaving mothers financially responsible.   “The proportion of women wage-earners rose from 14% in 1950 to 28.7% in 1977.  These are extraordinarily high figures for Latin America.”  Mothers not only assumed economic responsibilities, but also social and moral responsibilities for their family’s needs. Research on women’s survival strategies prior to the Insurrection notes that women typically performed reproductive tasks that allowed them to combine family responsibilities with working long hours outside the home.   For example, women who worked at the market or street vending did not “need” child care because they brought their children with them.  The Insurrection provoked another economic crisis that hit Nicaraguan women hard, tested their ingenuity, and increased their dependence on wages.

Bird, Martha. 2021. Women and War: Challenging the Archetype of Passive Women Throughout

the Troubles . March 8. Accessed November 2021.

Begona, Aretxaga. 1995. “Ruffling a Few Patriarchal Hairs: Women’s Experience of War in Northern Ireland.” Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, March.

Garfield, Richard, and Glen Williams. 1992. Health Care in Nicaragua Primary Care Under Changing Regimes . New York, New York: Oxford University Press.

Randall, Margaret. Introduction to Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, ed. Lynda Yanz (Toronto: New Star Books, 1981).

Margaret Randall, introduction to Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, xiv. 

Luz Maria Torres, “Women in Nicaragua: Revolution on Hold,” 

Luz Maria Torres, “Women in Nicaragua: Revolution on Hold,” Envio, 119 (1991) accessed on April 12, 2014, http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/2912.

Tomás Borge, Carlos Fonseca, Daniel Ortega, Humberto Ortega, and Jaime Wheelock, Sandinistas Speak, intro. Bruce Marcus (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982), 1

 Ana Maria Pizarro –Jimenez, “Comportamineto del problema del aborto inducido ilegalmente en el Hospital Bertha Calderón, 1 de Julio, 1985 al 31 de Agusto, 1988.” (Managua: Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Nicaragua, 1988), 2.

Stephanie Linkogle, “The Revolution and the Virgin Mary: Popular Religion and Social Change in Nicaragua,” Sociological Research Online, no. 2 (1988) accessed on April 13, 2014, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/2/8.html.

Gustavo Guitíerrez, A Theology of Liberation (New York:  Maryknoll, 1973), xxi. 

Sofia Montenegro, “La Gritería: La Otro Cara del Culto a la Inmaculada Concepción,” Gente, December 4, 1992. 

Glenda Monterrey, Amanda Pineda, and Dr. Mayra Lourdes Bolanos, “Women in the Revolution,” in Nicaragua a New Kind of Revolution:  Forty-five key Spokespeople, interview by Philip Swerling and Connie Martin (Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1985), 100.

Margaret Randall, introduction to Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, ed. Lynda Yanz (Toronto: New Star Books, 1981), xiii. 

 Envio Team, “Becoming Visible Women in Nicaragua,” Envio 78 (1987) accessed April 5, 2014, http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3183.