seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Bordentown (New Jersey)


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Fanny Parnell Launches the Ladies’ Land League in New York

Fanny Parnell, the Irish American poet and nationalist, launches the Ladies’ Land League in New York on October 24, 1880. She is a sister of Charles Stewart Parnell and a vocal supporter of the Irish National Land League’s campaign against “rack-rents” and for tenant ownership.

In 1880, while living in Bordentown, New Jersey, Parnell becomes active in fundraising for the Land League in the United States. Her 1880 pamphlet The Hovels of Ireland explains the Irish land crisis to American audiences, and she also works for the Famine Relief Fund in New York.

By October 1880, Parnell has taken the initiative to launch a Ladies’ Land League in New York. This is an auxiliary group aimed at supporting the Irish National Land League’s work, especially after its leaders become at risk of imprisonment. The New York committee she sets up is part of a broader plan by Michael Davitt to ensure the movement can continue if male leaders are jailed. Davitt and the League’s treasurer, Patrick Egan, later persuade the Central Committee to formally establish the Ladies’ Land League in Dublin on January 31, 1881, with Anna Parnell as its first president.

The Ladies’ Land League quickly becomes the first political association of Irish women, organizing branches in Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They maintain a detailed “Book of Kells” register of estates, tenants, and evictions, and provide financial and material aid to evicted tenants, including erecting prefabricated huts when possible. Their work is both political and humanitarian, challenging gender norms while maintaining a public image of respectability.

Fanny Parnell’s October 1880 launch in New York is thus a key early step in mobilizing Irish American women for the Land War, laying the groundwork for the League’s transnational activism and its role in sustaining the movement during its most turbulent years.


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Birth of Fanny Parnell, Poet & Nationalist

Fanny Parnell, Irish poet and Nationalist, is born Frances Isabelle Parnell in Avondale, County Wicklow on September 4, 1848. She is the sister of Charles Stewart Parnell, an important figure in nineteenth century Ireland.

Parnell is the eighth child out of eleven and fourth daughter born to John Henry Parnell, a landowner and the grandson of the last Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland, and Delia Tudor Stewart Parnell, an Irish American and the daughter of Admiral Charles Stewart (1778–1869) of the United States Navy. Her mother hates British rule in Ireland, a view presented through her children’s works. She is an intelligent girl and before she is through her teen years, she has studied mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy, and she can speak and write fluently in almost all the major European languages. She also has talents in music and painting and drawing in oil and water colours. Her parents separate when she is young. Soon afterwards, in July 1859, her father dies at the age of forty-eight and she and her mother move to Dalkey. A year later they move to Dublin, and in 1865 they move to Paris where Fanny studies art and writes poetry. In 1874 they move to Bordentown, New Jersey in the United States.

Parnell is known as the Patriot Poet. She shows interest in Irish politics and much of her poetry is about Irish nationalism. While she is living in Dublin in 1864, she begins publishing her poetry under the pseudonym “Aleria” in The Irish People, the newspaper of the Fenian Brotherhood. Most of her later work is published in The Pilot in Boston, the best-known Irish newspaper in America during the nineteenth century. Two of her most widely published works are The Hovels of Ireland, a pamphlet, and Land League Songs, a collection of poems. Her best-known poem is “Hold the Harvest,” which Michael Davitt refers to as the “Marseillaise of the Irish peasant.”

Parnell’s brother, Charles, becomes active in the Irish National Land League, an organisation that fights for poor tenant farmers, in 1879 and she strongly supports him. She and her younger sister, Anna Parnell (1852–1911), co-found the Ladies’ Land League in 1880 to raise money in America for the Land League. In 1881 the Ladies’ Land League continues the work of the men in the Land League while they are being imprisoned by the British government. In Ireland Anna becomes the president of the Ladies’ Land League, and the women hold many protests and quickly become more radical than the men, to the resentment of the male leaders. Fanny stays in America and works to raise money for the organisation. Most of the Land League’s financial support comes from America because of the campaigning done by Fanny Parnell.

Fanny Parnell dies on July 20, 1882, at the young age of 33, of a heart attack at the family mansion in Bordentown, New Jersey. She is buried at the Tudor family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.