6 - Conclusions

Summary

Over the course of this work, it has become clear that femininity – women viewed as a single, homogeneous entity, according purely to their biological sex – was a concept of varying importance to early Irish authors and compilers. Firstly, and most importantly, there was no single form of femininity: it was not expected that every woman, of every class, religious or secular, married or unmarried, old or young, would and should behave, and be treated, in the same way. In this sense, there was no monolithic image of femininity as a concept which overrode all others. Early Irish society was, according to the extant sources, highly stratified, with people distinguished according to their property and profession, their social and legal status, their dependence or independence. This was true of women and girls just as much as for men and boys. Sex was a further significant distinction, but it cannot be wholly isolated. A woman of high status and notable landed and moveable property was represented as having very different abilities and protection in society than her low-status, property-poor counterpart. Then again, a woman who brought more property to a marriage than her husband could take on the legal roles usually carried out by him: an individual's femininity was not represented as immoveable, but could alter according to circumstances. There was, therefore, no single perception of femininity in the early Irish sources, but rather a series of types of femininity, with close connections to many other types of social division. In this sense, a study of plural ‘femininities’ would be a more accurate reflection of the representations of the sources.

Sex could have varying levels of significance in representations of men and women, depending on their other qualifications. In certain instances it would appear that sex was a woman's primary distinguishing factor: in Tecosca Cormaic, for example, all women are grouped together with no distinction, as a set of people to be treated with great caution. Likewise, in those legal texts which describe those perceived as báeth, the presence of particular types of men – those who were viewed as dependent on others, such as sons of living fathers, slaves, monks living under the rule of an abbot – but women as an undifferentiated group, suggest that women were being distinguished by their sex (which was in turn distinguished by dependence on a man).