Margaret Stokes made an outstanding contribution to the history of early Irish art and craft in the nineteenth century as did Helen Roe and French woman Françoise Henry in the mid twentieth century. Eleanor Hull and Eleanor Knott devoted their considerable talents to the study of early Irish literature.
Máire McNeill's classic study The Festival of Lughnasa is recognised as a landmark in the study of Irish folklore.
Helen Waddell was an internationally recognised expert on medieval European history in the 1920s and Constantia Maxwell and Mary Hayden both Professors of History in Dublin in the first half of the twentieth century made valuable contributions to the study of Irish history. In The Irish Republic, her account of the Anglo-Irish War and the Civil War, Dorothy Macardle might have been uncritical of de Valera, but she later opposed Fianna Fáil legislation concerning women. Cecil Woodham-Smith's The great hunger was a best seller in the 1960s and drew world-wide attention to the Irish famine.
A momentous event in the historiography of Irish women was the publication in 1978 of Women in Irish society: the historical dimension edited by Margaret Mac Curtain and Donncha Ó'Corráin. Containing ten historical essays, it ranged over Irish history from early Irish society to the 1970s and discussed the interaction of women with Brehon and English law, with the Catholic church, the new Irish state, work, trade unionism and politics. Inevitably it told the story of how women got the vote.
A large body of research on women in Irish history has been amassed since the 1970s and the names of subsequent publications will be found in the bibliographies. This work is ongoing as more and more students and scholars realise the importance and the rewards of knowing more about how women led their lives and the contribution they made to society in the past.
A major landmark in the year 2000 was the compilation of A directory of sources for women's history in Ireland which is available in CD ROM and on the Internet. It contains information about over 14,000 collections and sources of interest to anyone researching women in Irish history.
The Field Day anthology of Irish writing, Vols. IV & V: Irish women's writing and traditions is a comprehensive collection of texts written and spoken by and about women from the very earliest manuscripts down to the present day. It contains a wealth of primary sources together with scholarly introductions.