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Alice Stopford Green, 1847–1929.

Alice Stopford Green Collection (R29, 742), National Library of Ireland.
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Gender Difference, National Identity

and Professing History:
the Case of Alice Stopford Green
by Sandra Holton

The past few decades have seen an ongoing debate about the participation
of women in the history profession. Two conclusions are frequently reached:
firstly, over the last two centuries and more, women historians often
pioneered new fields of historical study; and, secondly, the process of pro-
fessionalization that followed the introduction of history into the university
curriculum brought the growing exclusion of women from its practice. The
increasing separation of history from the field of letters saw women
restricted to roles that were largely auxiliary to the work of the male pro-
fessoriate, at least until the 1970s. Even now they remain a clear minority
among academic historians. The sociology of professions would suggest that
central to this process was the elaboration of new techniques of research
and analysis, alongside the creation of an increasingly arcane body of
historical knowledge. By the late nineteenth century dichotomous
categories like ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ began to distinguish the work
of academic and non-academic historians, alongside a shift often character-
ized in terms of the rejection of ‘narrative’ or ‘epic’ history for the ‘scien-
tific’ history pursued by the academic historian. These categories were
largely gendered, as women historians continued to work mostly outside the
academy and held to approaches and genres increasingly uncommon
amongst, if not illegitimate for, an almost entirely male professoriate.
As a consequence of such processes, Joan Thirsk suggests, history as an
academic discipline has become androcentric in content, form and
approach. Conversely, women may bring innovation to the practice of the
profession through their own distinctly-gendered perspectives. This is not
to posit any essentialist, biologically-determined differences between male
and female intellects. Rather, the different social position of women may
lead them to shape fresh questions when they engage with historical
research. Their potential to become innovators springs in some part from
the very gender differentiation that continues to form our culture and our
social, political and economic structures. Joan Thirsk points to the pioneer-
ing work of women in the history of consumption, of the family, of manners
and morals to illustrate her argument. It follows, of course, that women can
learn how to do androcentric history: history that, from generalities and
abstractions derived from the experience and outlook of men, builds nar-
ratives that may incorporate women but do not recognize the many ways

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120 History Workshop Journal

their lives may diverge from those of men. Joan Thirsk goes on to note,
however, that a concern with persons and particularities often characterizes
women’s interest in and approaches to historical topics, even within the
academy. Much of the value of this potential for an alternative perspective
lies, she suggests, in its tendency to complicate, where it does not subvert,
the narratives of mainstream academic history.1 An interest in what is some-
times termed personal history is evident in the work of nineteenth-century
women historians, especially in their use of a range of biographical genres.
Equally, microhistory, history that derives from the study of particular
persons, has provided a significant contribution to the feminist history of
recent decades. Such a methodology both satisfies a desire to recover lost
lives and reflects the new freedom arising from recent challenges to some
of the old certainties of scientific history.
In thinking further about gender difference and the work of history in
the period when the field was beginning to professionalize, I shall focus on
a case history, that of the Irish historian Alice Stopford Green, who lived
from 1847 to 1929. She was born into the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, as daugh-
ter of a high-ranking and influential cleric within the Church of Ireland.
Through kinship networks, Alice Stopford Green had access to circles of
the radical-liberal intelligentsia in London. Within such circles she met John
Richard Green, a man of letters, not an academic, and one of the pioneers
of social history. He was also an invalid, and in their short marriage she
became his research assistant and amanuensis. In the initial years of her
widowhood, after his death in 1883, she searched for a fresh calling, even as
she stewarded his literary and historical legacy. Subsequently she went on
to publish in her own right a considerable body of work. A few years into
this independent stage of her career her interests shifted from English to
Irish history, and she made a significant contribution to what has been called
the high nationalism of the Gaelic revival in Ireland. Though she herself
remained committed to the constitutional pursuit of Irish freedom, she was
also to the fore in efforts to save her friend, Sir Roger Casement, from
execution by the British in the wake of the 1916 rebellion in Ireland.2 After
independence, she served as an Irish senator, while continuing her work on
her nation’s history. She maintained a particular interest in how that history
was presented within Irish schools.
I selected her in part because her case has figured frequently in the
ongoing debate on women and the work of history. Alice Stopford Green
has come to exemplify a number of lines of analysis, albeit in divergent and
sometimes contradictory interpretations of her work. Thus for Rosemary
Mitchell she illustrates the importance of kinship relations and male
mentors in the careers of nineteenth-century women historians: she was
provided with a good education, had free access to her father’s library, and
taught herself Greek in order to assist him in his theological studies.3
Equally, through her marriage she formed lasting friendships with many of
the leading male historians of her day, including Stubbs, Creighton, Morley
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Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History 121

and Freeman. Similarly, her husband’s publisher, Alexander Macmillan,

encouraged her in her widowhood to continue to research, write and publish
independently on historical topics. Certainly, the privileges and accidents of
birth and marriage played a significant part in Alice Stopford Green’s
capacity to embark on a career as a writer of history. But this should not
lead us to underestimate the intellectual autonomy and independence she
achieved during her widowhood, a widowhood that lasted far, far longer
than her young womanhood and marriage combined.4
During the mid 1890s it is possible to trace within her correspondence a
shift in her sense of national identity, from one that joined her to her dead
husband as English, and possibly as British, to one that was distinctly Irish.5
Moreover, this new sense of an Irish identity was one that less and less might
be contained within that of a Briton, let alone of an Englishwoman. It was
from this time that she shifted her research and writing from overviews of
English-British history to work on a reinterpretation of Irish history with
the express political intent of demonstrating the cultural basis for an inde-
pendent Irish state. She published The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing,
1200–1600 in 1908, a work that had taken her far beyond the research inter-
ests of her dead husband. For the up-and-coming academic historian G. M.
Trevelyan, it marked a new epoch in the historiography of Ireland.6 This
shift of focus allowed her to continue to honour her husband as an exem-
plar of the historian by extending the project that had been central to his
own work, the historical exploration of the cultural basis of national
identity. More significantly, though, it also allowed her to break free of his
shadow by turning to a quite different, if parallel, field. In exploring the
history of Ireland as a separate cultural and political entity, with a basis for
a distinct national identity in the specificities of its own past, she found her
own territory as a historian. Her friendships in Ireland were undoubtedly
important in putting her in touch with others working on the history of Irish
culture, and made her aware of the growing sense this new body of know-
ledge was creating of the distinctiveness of Ireland. So this shift has some-
times been explained in terms of her friendship with the fervent Irish
nationalist, John Frances Taylor. (She had considered and rejected him as
a second husband in 1894, but they remained close).7 However, as a
Radical-Liberal she had long been a Home Ruler, and her correspondence
suggests a somewhat more complicated account of why she began to explore
the possibility of publishing a history of Ireland in the mid-1890s.8 It reveals
a previously-neglected factor in the fostering of that project, her interest in
the market for general histories of Britain in the United States.
Alice Stopford Green enjoyed a considerable income from her
husband’s books, especially his A Short History of the English People,
which remained in print for many decades after his death. In the early 1890s
Macmillan suggested to her that she consider undertaking her own, still
more concise, history along similar lines (some editions of A Short History
had run to four volumes). Harper Brothers, who published her husband’s
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122 History Workshop Journal

work in the United States, took a slightly different approach, and pressed
for an abridged version of A Short History for use in high schools there.
The Chicago school board had adopted it as a textbook for its grammar
schools, but was doubtful of its suitability for any wider use. Alice Stop-
ford Green considered these proposals and responded positively to the
advice given by Macmillan’s agent in Chicago and by local schoolteachers
there. This emphasized the need directly to address Irish and Scottish
history in exploring the English national story, and not simply to subsume
them within it. It also advised the need not to offend Catholic sensibilities
in the treatment of religious issues. She acknowledged the validity of such
concerns and expressed a clear intention to address them in her prep-
aration of an entirely new textbook for schools, the proposal she had come
to favour. John Frances Taylor wrote, in his usual bantering tone: ‘Dearest,
I think you ought to do the Shorter History and I shall lay on Popery and
Fenianism for you’.9 Within a few months she was ready to send the first
forty pages to Macmillan, reporting: ‘I have dealt largely with Ireland &
Scotland’.10
Thereafter, however, she evidently found it impossible to satisfy this
brief within any single-volume history. The bibliographic record and the
Macmillan archives suggest that neither an abridged version of A Short
History nor her own version of such a textbook found their way into print.11
But from this time on she devoted her energies to a revisionist history of
Ireland, as she herself grew increasingly convinced that such a project could
not and should not be contained within a narrative of English nationhood.
Thus she wrote in her Irish Nationality (1911):

It is commonly supposed that the fortune of the island [that is, Ireland]
and its civilization must by nature hang on those of England. Neither
history nor geography allows this theory. The life of the two countries
was widely separated.12

Her increasing involvement in the Gaelic revival brought with it a new

appreciation of the history and culture of the land of her birth, an appreci-
ation that she found herself unable properly to represent within the
history of the English people. Equally, her commitment to the peaceable
creation of an independent Irish state made such an enterprise politically
questionable.
Alice Stopford Green had learnt from the enormous success of her
husband’s work the role that the historian might play in the creation of a
sense of national identity rooted in the ancient past. She adopted that role
now for Ireland and clearly articulated the political intent with which she
turned to the task. She only ever wrote again on English history when
updating her husband’s A Short History for a fresh edition during the First
World War. One reviewer condemned the Epilogue she provided there pre-
cisely because of the emphasis she put on nationalism as the motor of
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Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History 123

modern history. Others, in contrast, praised this focus, and the separate and
distinct thread of Irish history that she had woven through her treatment of
the past century of English history.13 So it was her shifting sense of national
identity, I would argue, that allowed Alice Stopford Green to find an agenda
as a historian that freed her from her husband’s legacy, even while she
sought to emulate his work in creating a new basis for understanding the
Irish past.
At the same time as she began to redirect her focus to Ireland, Alice
Stopford Green also began to articulate far more definitely than ever before
the significance of gender in the field of letters. This is an aspect of her work
that has previously been noted by Joan Thirsk, who draws on an article by
Alice Stopford Green in 1897 when discussing the distinctive perspective
that women may bring to history. It is the least lucid of Green’s writings and
perhaps I should have been warned by the advice of Joan Thirsk that it
‘deserves careful reading’.14 The problems of interpreting this essay suggest
also, perhaps, how difficult a subject it had been for Green to think about
and write upon. Even so, despite its curious metaphysics and high-flown
expression, the main lines of her argument are quite clear: in reviewing
women’s contribution to the field of letters over the previous century, she
identified problems of diffidence and self-distrust among women writers,
and found among her sex generally an alienation from the life of the intel-
lect. She argued that women writers had often resorted to a protective
mimicry of men. ‘Woman sails under any colour but her own’, she declared,
and by ‘such busy contrivances’ tended to mask important differences in the
sensibilities of the two sexes. The consequence to her mind was ‘to rob their
work of both the eccentricity which they fear and the originality they dis-
trust’. So with a few exceptions she believed the work of women writers
lacked ‘self-revelation’, ‘frank expression’ and hence ‘sincerity’. Here again
Green suggests the alienation of her sex, ‘no better than a stranger in the
visible, established order of the world’.15
Only at one point does she make reference here to the subordination of
her sex, noting the restrictions arising from ‘the bewildering civil strife of
Nature’. Her analysis works with the category ‘woman’ and argues that with
regard to history: ‘For her the world has practically no past – it begins here
and now where she stands’, exhibiting ‘the strange indifference, at times
indeed these spasms of hostility, to the Past and to all Law that the Past has
revealed’. Yet she also argued strongly that the perspective of ‘woman’
might provide ‘the astonishing and miraculous manifestation of a new Force
that has never reigned here as Law, the force of redeeming Love’. Such a
force, she believed, might prove ‘hostile to the visible order of Nature’ and
intent on ‘retrieving the waste of the World’. So, Green argued: ‘It is in this
capacity as a stranger that woman is so interesting in her observation of life’.
She was besides ‘the very personification of the modern in both thought and
literature’, especially in terms ‘of the importance now attached to each
separate being’. Green suggested that for ‘woman’ to realize her potential
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124 History Workshop Journal

to alter intellectual life entirely, she must overcome her alienation from it
in its current state. ‘The history and philosophy of man must be the very
alphabet of her studies, not as a barbarian or foreigner, but as a skilled and
fine interpreter.’ The ‘realm of Reason’, she wrote, ‘must be honourably
reckoned with by woman so as to give stability to the shadows projected by
her instinct’.16
Given such statements, I am cautious about following Billie Melman in
claiming Alice Stopford Green for any ‘feminist’ assault on the ‘scientific
history’ so dominated by men at this time.17 Certainly, as her work on Irish
history progressed, so her observations on women within that past became
more numerous. She was, after all, attempting to argue the continuance of
a distinct Irish culture and polity rooted in an ancient tribal civilization, and
women might appear there as the bearers of aspects of that culture. But she
was never interested in the history of women as such, and there is little in
her historical work to foster an alternative collective women’s memory.
Equally, however, her stance on women’s rights shifted noticeably over this
period. She was, for example, one of the signatories of the notorious 1889
‘Appeal against Female Suffrage’, alongside her close friends Mary
Humphry Ward, Louise Creighton and Beatrice Potter.18 Like these last
two, she appears subsequently to have changed her mind. Certainly, the
Epilogue that she provided for the 1915 edition of her husband’s Short
History focused on the advance of women’s suffrage as a sign of recent
progress in British society. This account suggests that she sympathized with
the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and also with the con-
stitutionalist-suffragist alliance with the Labour Party.19
I would agree with Billie Melman, however, so far as to suggest that she
saw her own contribution to the writing of history as one distinct from that
of the supposedly ‘scientific’ history of the professional male historian.
She valued their technical accomplishments and the creation of new
knowledge that flowed from these. But like her husband she was im-
patient with the foibles of academic historians, especially the contentious
and sometimes grudging spirit she sometimes observed among them. She
also believed ‘scientific’ history to be severely limited by its reliance on
the document. She had learnt from J. R. Green also to study landscapes,
and the remains of material culture and of ritual and celebration, along-
side the literary inheritance of a people in poetry and song. In her corre-
spondence with Beatrice Webb she expressed a clear sense of mission to
write accessible history addressed to the citizenry, history, especially, that
would be accessible to the working classes. She placed considerable
emphasis, therefore, on powers of expression as well as of research – the
quality of the writing mattered as much to her as its accuracy. She fre-
quently used the term ‘picturesque’ when advocating a popular approach
to history. So she chided her good friend Mandell Creighton for failing in
these respects in his history of the popes. For his part he could only
confess:
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Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History 125

At present all that can be said of me is that I left a dull period of history
as dull as I found it. As I go on it will be said that I have carried my own
dullness into what was interesting before.

Life in his vicarage fastness may well, he wrote, have ‘caused me to lose
touch with the popular taste; and I must stagger on in my benighted con-
dition . . . I want you to lecture me on this point. I am sure I must be wrong
somewhere’. This was something of a backhanded compliment, of course.
He wrote:

I could be picturesque if I tried I daresay. But I don’t think that my

subject admits of it. To be picturesque you must have a decided opinion:
you must deal with a subject where your sympathies are on one side.

In his own researches, he had found, ‘every step leads me to controverted

matter’. His fear was that if he ‘let go my grip on the general aspects of
things in Europe, and descend into personalities, I am lost’.20
The gendering of history as a profession, I would suggest, underlay this
debate between Alice Stopford Green and Mandell Creighton. His am-
bitions remained at this time set on a senior history post within the academy.
His sense of professionalism required of him a studied balance and the sup-
posed ‘objectivity’ of the new ‘scientific’ history. When Alice Stopford
Green looked at existing accounts of the history of Ireland, however, includ-
ing those of an old friend, the university historian William Lecky, she found
a ‘political myth’ that had been promulgated ‘to justify aggression and con-
fiscation’. She fully acknowledged that her own values shaped the history
that she wrote, and believed it simply impossible to write impartial history.
She valued historical method but rejected any positivist claims based on that
method: ‘A historian must be scrupulous in investigating the facts’, she
wrote, but facts alone could not make history. This required ‘the quality of
affection, that divine clue given us to penetrate the mystery of human
affairs’.21 Hence Alice Stopford Green remained an epic historian of the
school that ‘scientific’ history sought to challenge, and derived her sense of
professionalism from the field of letters, not the academy. Her commitment
to writing ‘picturesque’ history showed clear political intent, but there is
little evidence that it was formed by a feminist agenda. Rather, from this
position she was able to realize her sense of being ‘called’ to the field of
letters, while yet holding on to a particular feminine sense of self and an
appreciation of the gendered contribution that women might make in this
arena to creating understandings of the past. Her work speaks of what is
sometimes termed a ‘female consciousness’, one that valued the particular
perspectives that women might bring to intellectual life. Shifting national
and gender identities together shaped the new directions that she took in
searching out and interpreting the past. What enabled her to become an
autonomous and successful historian in her own right, I would suggest, was
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126 History Workshop Journal

her changing sense of herself as a woman, but more particularly, as an Irish

woman.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Joan Thirsk, ‘The History Women’, Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in
Church, State and Society, ed. Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert, Institute of Irish Studies,
Belfast, 1995, pp. 1–11.
2 This paragraph is based on R. B. McDowell, Alice Stopford Green: a Passionate
Historian, Allen Figgis, Dublin, 1967, an otherwise sympathetic biography that, however,
devotes only half a dozen pages to her work in history, see esp. pp. 82–7. Casement had been
trying to win Germany’s support for Irish republicanism.
3 Rosemary Ann Mitchell, ‘ “The Busy Daughters of Clio”: Women Writers of History
from 1820 to 1880’, Women’s History Review 7, 1998, pp. 107–34, and compare with Billie
Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory: the Invention of Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and
early Twentieth Centuries’, History and Memory 5, 1993, p. 541.
4 John Kenyon, The History Men. The History Profession in England since the Renais-
sance, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1983, pp. 163–4, for example, notes in passing that
Alice Stopford Green became a skilled historian in her own right, and acknowledges the
importance of her work on Irish history.
5 So she still thought of herself as an Englishwoman in her correspondence with Mandell
Creighton some time after her husband’s death, and was still being thought of as such by her
friend, Beatrice Webb in the 1890s: see, for example A. S. Green to M. Creighton, 30 July [1884];
Beatrice Potter to A. S. Green, n.d. [c. 1890], MS 15117 (2), 15112, Alice Stopford Green Papers
(henceforth ASGP), National Archives of Ireland. My thanks to the Council of Trustees of the
National Archives of Ireland for permitting me to quote from these papers, and to the staff of
the Manuscript Reading Room for their help during the research for this article.
6 G. M. Trevelyan to Alice Stopford Green, 12 July 1908, MS 10457, ASGP.
7 McDowell, Alice Stopford Green, p. 76. Indeed, in the mid 1890s the position was
somewhat the reverse with Alice Stopford Green assisting in John Frances Taylor’s own
writing of history: see John Frances Taylor to Alice Stopford Green, 19 January, 2 February
1896, NCF 56, ASGP.
8 Yorke Powell to Alice Stopford Green, 23 January 1895.
9 John Frances Taylor to Alice Stopford Green, n.d. [9 May 1896], NCF 56, ASGP.
10 A. S. Green to Macmillan’s, n.d. [1896], Macmillan Archives, Add 55059, f.104, British
Library.
11 See the correspondence in MS 15,124, ASGP, especially Harper Bros to Mrs J. R.
Green, 5 December 1895; George P. Brett (Macmillan’s agent in the United States) to
Frederick Macmillan, 31 March 1896. The project may have foundered because of the commer-
cial hostility between the two publishers over the publication of A Short History in the United
States (Harpers’ had originally pirated this work), and Alice Stopford Green’s resistance to
what she saw as the coercive nature of Harper Bros’s attitude to her in this matter.
12 Alice Stopford Green, Irish Nationality, Williams and Norgate, London, c. 1911, p. 7.
For a discussion of the creation of contesting senses of Irish ‘peoplehood’ that examines the
importance of geographical constructs, see Jim Mac Laughlin, Reimagining the Nation-State.
The Contested Terrains of Nation-Building, Pluto, London, 2001, esp. chaps 7–9.
13 Compare, for example, the cutting from Contemporary Review, September 1916 with
that from the Montrose Standard, 18 August 1916, both MS 15124, ASGP.
14 Alice Stopford Green, ‘Woman’s Place in the World of Letters’, Nineteenth Century 41,
1897, pp. 964–74, republished in pamphlet form by Macmillan in 1913; Thirsk, ‘History
Women’, p. 11.
15 Green, ‘Woman’s Place’, pp. 965, 971.
16 Green, ‘Woman’s Place’, pp. 966, 969–70.
17 Melman, ‘Gender, History and Memory’, esp. pp. 28–9, 32, 33.
18 ‘An Appeal against Female Suffrage’, Nineteenth Century 148, June 1889, pp. 781–8.
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Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History 127

19 J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People, Revised and Enlarged with Epilogue
by Alice Stopford Green, Macmillan, London, 1916, esp. p. 896.
20 Mandell Creighton to Alice Stopford Green, esp. 31 December 1883, MS 15117 (1),
ASGP.
21 Alice Stopford Green to Irish Times, 4 May 1910, quoted in McDowell, Alice Stopford
Green, p. 84.