Paper Short Abstract:

Overlooked for nearly a century, the magnitude and scope of the uncovered contributions of the exceptional, female, Irish folklore collector, Kathleen Hurley, are considered alongside the potential of her contributions to substantially broaden knowledge of the absent voices and lost lore of Ireland’s women within the National Folklore Collection.

Paper Abstract:

In 1935, the Irish Folklore Commission (IFC), tasked with saving Ireland’s folklore, failed to consider gender in its design, structures, or administration. The IFC’s disinterest in women’s lore, and ignorance of the fundamental importance of female collectors and informants, left Ireland with a prodigious archive of folklore, the National Folklore Collection (NFC), that is undermined by the cavernous holes never filled with the lives, lore, and traditions of women. This paper considers the implications of the preliminary findings of the first substantive, comprehensive study of a female IFC collector, Kathleen Hurley. Hurley’s contribution of approximately 3,000 pages of correspondence, questionnaire replies, and folklore languished in the archive for nearly a century. In the period of Hurley’s collecting (1937-1952), Irish women were often excluded from spaces and circumstances where men shared folktales, and were restricted by social codes from discussing gynocentric matters in mixed-sex spaces. Despite this, Hurley collected versions of common folktales with unique aspects distinctly focused on female perspectives and experiences, including those that expressed motherly love, women’s desires, grief, domestic violence, and other harsh realities of Irish womanhood. Defiant in adhering to her own collection methodologies, Hurley recorded inestimable contextual details, including: observations, descriptions, opinions, and emotions. Although there is no remedy for the voids within the NFC where the voices of Irish women should be, unearthing and resuscitating the contributions of Kathleen Hurley has the potential to provide invaluable insight into the lost lore of Ireland’s women.