Maud Gonne - Yeats’s Caitlin ni Houlihan

By Joe Gannon (for thewildgeese.com)

Born during an age when women were expected to be nothing more than handsome window-dressing for their husbands, when women were expected to leave the rough and tumble world of politics to men, Maud Gonne rose above that prejudice to leave her mark on Ireland’s history. Gonne refused to accept the assignment that society ascribed to women -- she wanted to be more than a helpless cork bobbing on the stream of history. Gonne was determined to be one of those people who helped to direct that current, and she succeeded.

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