Irish Convents were an Experiment in Manlessness

Now that the Frankenstein tendency has created human sperm in a laboratory, the great prediction is that men will soon be redundant. So there’ll be no one left to set up a sat-nav or to understand the technical instructions in a computer manual. But there were generations upon generations of Irishwomen who had a simulated experience of what a world without men was like: because they were boarded away in convent schools.

An Irish convent was – the phenomenon is fast fading – a futuristic experiment of a virtually manless world. Oh, all right, a priest came to say Mass daily: but he was a consecrated celibate, not a Man as we know them.

This manless world of convent life wasn’t all bad. Since the early Middle Ages, women in convents had shown themselves to be capable at running vast estates and managing far-flung organisations – something they were not usually permitted to do in the secular world. We got the impression, and it wasn’t entirely wrong, that the Irish nuns somehow ran India. As it turned out, Mother Teresa was their creature and her brand was indeed global.

And some of the best historic material about Irishwomen’s lives lie in convent archives, in which everything was neatly documented: most particularly the letters from mothers agitating about their daughters’ education. A world without men might be one that was sharply keen on education, contrary to some of the airhead impressions given by celeb magazines raving about Coleen Rooney’s shopping habits.

Manless convent life specialised in imposing order on chaos, keeping parlours spotless and teaching young women how to speak properly. I still thank convent life when I hear the air flight attendants on Aer Lingus aircraft: I am not entirely thrilled that Aer Lingus have swapped their fabulous old Boeings for the French Airbus, which specimen has twice fallen out of the sky this year, but I am consoled by that little touch of Mount Anville in the hostess’s voice,  in which diction and clarity have dominion over gabble and elision.

The manlessness in a traditional Irish convent was quite a useful social experiment. Paradoxically, it made us fascinated with men, so that even the part-time gardener became the focus of wild attention. This seems to indicate that getting rid of men, and using laboratory-constructed sperm in their place, would place such a scarcity-value on males that men would by idolised by their absence.

A manless world would also be a more snobbish one. Women are much more sensitive to the degrees of rank and social class than men, since women are keener on respectability. Convent life were hotbeds of social discrimination, in which the tiniest nuance of class distinction was noted and monitored.

An earlier experiment on these lines was also carried out in the aforementioned colonial India. When men (from the British Empire, whose administration was one-third composed of Irishmen) first settled in India, they got along with one another cordially in their rough masculine way. But when the memsahibs appeared, class distinction became codified: the women decided who was marriageable and who was not: who could be invited to Tiffin and who could not: and whose general conduct was too proletarian to be admitted to polite society.

Convent life could have its restful side: many a grande chatelaine (or even a grande courtesan) of yore retired to a convent in her senior years. Should the convent have a pretty garden and be located in Tuscany, such an all-female world would not be altogether unpleasant.

I think, though, what I would find irksome about a manless world is the endless, endless communication about feelings.  I have female friends who keep me up until one in the morning talking about their feelings.  I like the way men don’t speak about their feelings. I like their silent robustness and the way they will deflect an oncoming conversation about feelings  by making some gruff joke, or pouring masculine contempt on the tsunami of sentimentality which is the dominant note of contemporary culture. I’ve seen grown men cry but I’m glad they don’t do it too often.

A world without men would be a world without Jeremy Clarkson and his derring-do laddishness. And I think we’d all miss that a lot.