ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tensions between the ideal of equality for all citizens and the persisting practices of gender and class-based inequalities in the newly independent democratic Irish Free State as they unfolded in local courts over which Justice Dermot Gleeson presided. With respect to the Irish Free State in particular, social historians have drawn analytic attention to the ways that citizenship in the new democracy was unequal for men and women despite universal suffrage. The chapter shows some of the ways that courtroom discourse became a key site for disciplining women’s language use and for socializing cultural notions of gendered cultural citizenship during the first decade of independent Irish democratic rule in one particular rural western county. Certainly petty charges against women and men, like abusive language and theft, were common in the colonial era in Ireland as they continued to be in the post-colonial era.
