Books/Leabhair by Mary Hatfield
Happiness in Nineteenth Century Ireland, 2021
The history of emotions has become a central preoccupation across the humanities and this volume ... more The history of emotions has become a central preoccupation across the humanities and this volume considers the rich possibility of writing a history of happiness in Ireland. Featuring new work from established and emerging scholars, this collection considers how the idea of happiness shaped cultural, literary and individual aspirations across nineteenth-century Ireland.
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to the idea and expression of happiness in nineteenth-century Ireland using broad range of sources gathered from Irish literature, song traditions, familial correspondence, autobiography and newspapers.
• Opens up new avenues for scholars of Irish cultural history and considers how emotions shaped identities and actions at the individual, communal and national level.
FORTHCOMING OCTOBER 2019
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/growing-up-in-nineteenth-century... more FORTHCOMING OCTOBER 2019
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/growing-up-in-nineteenth-century-ireland-9780198843429?q=hatfield&lang=en&cc=gb#
Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood.
This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.
ISBN 9780198843429
The essays in this collection focus on aspects of parenthood and childhood in Ireland from the 17... more The essays in this collection focus on aspects of parenthood and childhood in Ireland from the 1700s to the 1950s. They provide new insights into parent-child relations in the past and pursue new areas of research, including the family life of Theobald Wolfe Tone; childhood in the Country House in Munster; the treatment of Irish mothers sent to the State Inebriate Reformatory, Ennis; elite and gentry female education; the role of dress and gender in childhood; boys’ brigade and scouting organisations; child burials in post-medieval times; the health of poor children in Dublin; the decline of breastfeeding in the early twentieth century; and a detailed study of the BCG vaccination campaign to combat childhood tuberculosis in the twentieth century. These essays exemplify the most recent research strands in the history of Irish childhood and they highlight the often complex role played by parents and other adults in the emotional, educational, cultural, social, spiritual and physical wellbeing of children.
Articles & Book Chapters by Mary Hatfield
History of Education, 2022
This article focuses on an underexplored aspect of the Catholic convent school experience, namely... more This article focuses on an underexplored aspect of the Catholic convent school experience, namely the kinds of socialisation and regulation of emotion maintained within the convent community. Drawing on the emerging history of emotions and the concept of emotional communities first posited by Barbara H. Rosenwein, it considers how historians might better account for the emotional component of education in Ireland, using the Irish convent boarding school as a case study. Analysing records of disciplinary techniques, teacher-training manuals and personal memoirs, it considers how Irish girls were taught to channel, restrain and develop a mature emotional life. This examination of ‘emotional’ education suggests an alternative historical reading of the female ‘accomplishments’ or politesse considered so emblematic of the lampooned convent school girl. Historical analysis of the emotional component of education provides new insight into the socialisation of class and gender in the religious milieu of an Irish boarding school.
This article traces the educational mission of three Catholic convent boarding schools from the l... more This article traces the educational mission of three Catholic convent boarding schools from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s, highlighting striking similarities in Catholic female education across different temporal and geographical contexts. Using institutional records, community annals and student roll books, this article considers how the priorities and structure of female education can shed light on implicit assumptions held by Catholic woman about the nature of girlhood and the purpose of education. It aims at a fuller understanding of the pedagogical model shared by these boarding schools and provides evidence of a strong cultural continuity in the ideals of Catholic girlhood across time. In doing so, it contributes to a perennial debate within the history of childhood on the historical narrativisation of continuity.
Historical perspectives on parenthood and childhood in Ireland , 2018
This chapter addresses the underexplored area of dress code and gender. For middle- and upper-cla... more This chapter addresses the underexplored area of dress code and gender. For middle- and upper-class parents, the public appearance of their children was a source of distinction, pride, and anxiety. Using parenting manuals, newspapers, and personal diaries, this essay examined how children’s clothing functioned as a public symbol of social status, an expression of cultural capital, and a way of socializing children into their appropriate social roles. Dress and appearance constituted an elaborate code of symbolic meaning identifying age, class, and gender gradations.
Irish urban spaces in the nineteenth-century, 2018
‘The school and the home: constructing childhood and space in nineteenth-century Dublin boarding ... more ‘The school and the home: constructing childhood and space in nineteenth-century Dublin boarding schools.’ In Irish urban spaces in the nineteenth-century, eds. Georgina Laragy, Olwen Purdue and Johnathan Wright, eds. (Liverpool University Press, 2018) 84-105.
This chapter considers the construction of space within two Irish boarding schools as a vantage point for exploring actual, imagined, and ideal childhoods in Ireland from 1800-1860.In the early nineteenth-century constructions of bourgeois childhood were increasingly centred on the removal of children from public spaces and their enshrinement within the home. Medical practitioners argued that the urban environment posed a threat to children’s physical and moral health. However, the urban boarding school was a feature of many middle- and upper-class childhoods.
Ireland and Masculinities in History, 2019
This chapter proposes that games for Irish boys in the 1930s are a significant avenue for explori... more This chapter proposes that games for Irish boys in the 1930s are a significant avenue for exploring what forms of masculinity were valued most in the Irish Free State. Hatfield questions how young boys in the Irish Free State used, challenged, and transgressed dominant notions of masculinity within their daily lives through their chosen elements of ‘play’. The format of informal games on the streets, in the home, and on playgrounds reflected boys’ lived realities just as much or even more than the fantastical expressions one might expect from childhood imaginations. Underscoring these forms of play were concerns about childhood health and the Irish Free State’s interest in bolstering the mental and physical health of a vulnerable group on their journey to full manhood.
Traditional studies of elites, both sociological and historical, have focused on male elite schoo... more Traditional studies of elites, both sociological and historical, have focused on male elite schooling to the exclusion or elision of female elite schooling. This leaves us with subtly different literatures on female and male lines of both contemporary elites and their forebears, and this represents a challenge for those working on elite education. Judith Okely noted back in 1978 that even if the education of boys and girls can be separate and asymmetrical, they are nevertheless ‘ideologically interdependent’. Likewise, Claire Maxwell and Peter Agglestone advocate the study of reproduction and privilege in contemporary British elite education for girls within a holistic framework that seeks to understand the complex relations between each student’s home, social milieu and school. Taking the idea of ideological interdependence as a starting point, this paper seeks to explore the history of nineteenth-century Catholic female education in Ireland,drawing on feminist critiques of power theory, to move beyond current narrowly defined debates on the utility and purpose of elite female education. An exclusive focus on the disempowering effects of official curricula obscures other socialising aspects of the schooling experience, especially those that enabled or empowered. This article takes the concept of cosmopolitanism as a way of understanding the benefits accompanying an education at a Catholic convent boarding school in Ireland. The graduates of these schools could lay claim to an associational culture maintained in adulthood through intermarriage, alumna clubs and charitable associations. The evidence of cosmopolitanism, real or imagined, within conventual schools manifested itself in curricular choices, public exhibitions and the cultivation of refined dress,accent and manners.
Organized Conferences and Events by Mary Hatfield
This conference seeks to raise the topic of the history of emotions in nineteenth-century Ireland... more This conference seeks to raise the topic of the history of emotions in nineteenth-century Ireland. It is looking for papers that address how emotion is conceptualised and understood in different cultural settings, how happiness (and unhappiness) is represented in literary, visual, and documentary forms, and the role of emotion in human action and processes of change. The conference will focus on the personal, communal, and societal meaning of happiness in nineteenth-century Ireland. How was happiness represented? In what ways did happiness affect relationships between individuals, families, and political parties? Were pleasure and happiness expressed differently based on gender, class, religion, and ethnicity? How do visual, fictional, theatrical, and musical representations of happiness differ? Centrally, how might the history of emotion alter traditional understandings of political movements, cultural production, and public performance? Topics which might usefully be explored, but are by no means limited to, include: • Cultural prescriptions for happiness • Religious and philanthropic views of happiness and causes of unhappiness • Consumerism, material culture, and happiness • Emotional expression and relationships (familial, romantic, business etc…) • Visual and literary depictions of happiness & unhappiness
Please send 200-word abstracts or panel descriptions and a brief CV by 8 January 2018 to Mary Hatfield, hatfielm@tcd.ie.
Conference Papers by Mary Hatfield
The professionalization of the medical profession during the nineteenth-century had a range of im... more The professionalization of the medical profession during the nineteenth-century had a range of impacts on the social organisation of care, particularly for the bourgeois child. Scholars have noted the ways in which male medical practitioners began to encroach on traditionally female areas of care at the start of the century. In Ireland, as elsewhere, staking out the field of paediatrics required the establishment of childhood as part of the life course requiring specialised medical attention. The denigration of maternal care and the necessity of ‘professionals’ in monitoring childhood signals wider processes of modernisation in the bourgeois family. This paper explores the question of what particular genealogical, educational, or cultural credentials were necessary for an Irish doctor to achieve status as an ‘authority figure’.
Presented at Discover Research Night, Trinity College Dublin and Royal Irish Academy.
This is ... more Presented at Discover Research Night, Trinity College Dublin and Royal Irish Academy.
This is an introductory talk designed to introduce the theme of childhood and youth studies into traditional understandings of social life in nineteenth-century Ireland for a general audience. It surveys some of the major themes in the construction of childhood, children's experiences, and educational provisions during the period.
Examines the medical construction of infancy and childhood in Ireland and connections between hea... more Examines the medical construction of infancy and childhood in Ireland and connections between health, recreation and play in institutional settings
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Books/Leabhair by Mary Hatfield
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to the idea and expression of happiness in nineteenth-century Ireland using broad range of sources gathered from Irish literature, song traditions, familial correspondence, autobiography and newspapers.
• Opens up new avenues for scholars of Irish cultural history and considers how emotions shaped identities and actions at the individual, communal and national level.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/growing-up-in-nineteenth-century-ireland-9780198843429?q=hatfield&lang=en&cc=gb#
Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood.
This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.
ISBN 9780198843429
Articles & Book Chapters by Mary Hatfield
This chapter considers the construction of space within two Irish boarding schools as a vantage point for exploring actual, imagined, and ideal childhoods in Ireland from 1800-1860.In the early nineteenth-century constructions of bourgeois childhood were increasingly centred on the removal of children from public spaces and their enshrinement within the home. Medical practitioners argued that the urban environment posed a threat to children’s physical and moral health. However, the urban boarding school was a feature of many middle- and upper-class childhoods.
Organized Conferences and Events by Mary Hatfield
Please send 200-word abstracts or panel descriptions and a brief CV by 8 January 2018 to Mary Hatfield, hatfielm@tcd.ie.
Conference Papers by Mary Hatfield
This is an introductory talk designed to introduce the theme of childhood and youth studies into traditional understandings of social life in nineteenth-century Ireland for a general audience. It surveys some of the major themes in the construction of childhood, children's experiences, and educational provisions during the period.
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to the idea and expression of happiness in nineteenth-century Ireland using broad range of sources gathered from Irish literature, song traditions, familial correspondence, autobiography and newspapers.
• Opens up new avenues for scholars of Irish cultural history and considers how emotions shaped identities and actions at the individual, communal and national level.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/growing-up-in-nineteenth-century-ireland-9780198843429?q=hatfield&lang=en&cc=gb#
Why do we send children to school? Who should take responsibility for children's health and education? Should girls and boys be educated separately or together? These questions provoke much contemporary debate, but also have a longer, often-overlooked history. Mary Hatfield explores these questions and more in this comprehensive cultural history of childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland. Many modern ideas about Irish childhood have their roots in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, when an emerging middle-class took a disproportionate role in shaping the definition of a 'good' childhood.
This study deconstructs several key changes in medical care, educational provision, and ideals of parental care. It takes an innovative holistic approach to the middle-class child's social world, by synthesising a broad base of documentary, visual, and material sources, including clothes, books, medical treatises, religious tracts, photographs, illustrations, and autobiographies. It offers invaluable new insights into Irish boarding schools, the material culture of childhood, and the experience of boys and girls in education.
ISBN 9780198843429
This chapter considers the construction of space within two Irish boarding schools as a vantage point for exploring actual, imagined, and ideal childhoods in Ireland from 1800-1860.In the early nineteenth-century constructions of bourgeois childhood were increasingly centred on the removal of children from public spaces and their enshrinement within the home. Medical practitioners argued that the urban environment posed a threat to children’s physical and moral health. However, the urban boarding school was a feature of many middle- and upper-class childhoods.
Please send 200-word abstracts or panel descriptions and a brief CV by 8 January 2018 to Mary Hatfield, hatfielm@tcd.ie.
This is an introductory talk designed to introduce the theme of childhood and youth studies into traditional understandings of social life in nineteenth-century Ireland for a general audience. It surveys some of the major themes in the construction of childhood, children's experiences, and educational provisions during the period.