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Tag Archives: Irish Women’s Franchise League


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Death of Muriel Gifford MacDonagh

Muriel MacDonagh (née Gifford), Irish nationalist and member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, dies in Skerries, Dublin, on July 9, 1917. Her husband, Thomas MacDonagh, is one of the signees of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which leads to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Muriel Enid Gifford is born at 12 Cowper Road, Rathmines, on December 18, 1884. She is the fourth daughter and eighth child of twelve of Frederick and Isabella Gifford. As a child, she suffers at different times from rheumatic fever and phlebitis. She attends Alexandra College and spends a brief time in England training to as a poultry instructor. Returning to Ireland, she trains at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, Dublin, as a student nurse, but her health suffers from the work.

Along with her sisters, MacDonagh is active in the Irish Women’s Franchise League and Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a nationalist organisation. She is involved in the school meals programme of 1910 to 1911, takes part in a 1914 Women’s Franchise League fundraiser, appearing in a tableau vivant as Maeve, the Warrior Queen. Less ardently feminist than her sisters, she takes delight in inviting home activists and artists for a “proper meal.” In an outgoing family, she is shy and reserved, known for her gentle manner. In 1908, she is introduced to Thomas MacDonagh by suffragette journalist Nannie Dryhurst along with her sisters, Grace and Sidney, on a visit to St. Enda’s School. Dryhurst advises Thomas to “fall in love with one of these girls and marry her,” to which he replies laughingly, “That would be easy; the only difficulty would be to decide which one.” The Gifford sisters remain acquaintances with Thomas until the autumn of 1911, when the couple has a short and intense courtship. They meet secretly in galleries and museums and have copious correspondence. When he is appointed assistant lecturer to University College Dublin (UCD) in December 1911, they marry on January 3, 1912. They have one son, Donagh MacDonagh, and one daughter, Barbara MacDonagh Redmond. The family lives first at 32 Baggot Street, and later at 29 Oakley Road, Rathmines.

MacDonagh suffers with poor health and depression, which leads to periods of convalescence and confinement. When her husband is arrested after the Easter Rising, she is unable to see him before his execution on May 3, 1916, which heightens the intensity of her bereavement. Devastated by his death and estranged from her parents due to their disapproval of his involvement in the Rising, she briefly lives with the Plunketts at Larkfield, Kimmage, and then with relatives of her husband in Thurles, County Tipperary. She later returns to Dublin to rent rooms in a Plunkett family property, 50 Marlborough Road. With two young children to support, she is nearly destitute, but like the other widows and orphans of the executed leaders of the Rising, they are aided by the Irish Volunteers Dependents’ Fund, in her case with £250. She also serves as an officer and committee member on this aid association. Her husband had named her as his literary executor, and she prepares a collected edition of his poetry that is published in October 1916. The success of this volume, and his bestselling Literature in Ireland, published at the time he is executed, ease her financial difficulties somewhat.

MacDonagh converts to Catholicism on May 3, 1917.

MacDonagh dies while swimming in the sea during a holiday with other 1916 widows and orphans in Skerries, County Dublin, on July 9, 1917. She almost does not attend the holiday, as her son is in hospital having been injured in a fall. It is believed that she is attempting to swim to Shenick Island from Skerries, possibly to place a tricolour flag on the island’s Martello tower. Her body is found near Loughshinny Beach and, as there is no water in her lungs, it is concluded that she died of heart failure and not drowning. As there is great interest in the 1916 widows and their families, her funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery attracts a large crowd of mourners estimated at 5,000 in the funeral procession.

Following MacDonagh’s death, there is a legal custody battle between the Giffords and the MacDonaghs over Donagh and Barbara. Their aunt Mary MacDonagh, a nun known as Sister Francesca and with whom MacDonagh had grown close, wins custody. Even though several of her siblings offer to take the children, she places them in a foster home.

On the centenary of MacDonagh’s death, a festival takes place in Skerries in her memory.


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Death of Mary Hayden, Campaigner for Women’s Causes

Mary Teresa Hayden, Irish historian, Irish language activist and campaigner for women’s causes, dies at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin, on July 12, 1942.

Hayden is born on May 19, 1862, in Merrion Square, Dublin, the only daughter of Thomas Hayden, physician and later vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and Mary Anne Hayden (née Ryan). Mary Hayden is educated initially at the Dominican College, Eccles Street, Dublin, and then at Alexandra College at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin. She attends the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) where she graduates with a BA in 1885 and an MA in 1887 in Modern Languages.

She meets the Robertson commission in 1901 on behalf of St. Mary’s Dominican convent, Eccles Street, Dublin, where, as well as presenting the results of a questionnaire survey of women graduates, compiles in conjunction with Agnes O’Farrelly and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, she argues for the right of women to receive education on the same terms as men and in the same colleges, and to be employed by the universities on identical conditions (which is not realised until the Irish Universities Act of 1908). Along with Sheehy-Skeffington, she is a key figure in the formation of the Irish Association of Women Graduates in 1902, which concerns itself with various questions regarding women graduates’ employment in government departments, hospitals, and schools, as well as attempting to influence public policy in relation to sex discrimination.

A campaigner for gender equality and noted as a public speaker, Hayden is a prominent member of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association. She is a member of the Gaelic League and friends with Patrick Pearse. However, she opposes violence and disapproves of the 1916 Easter Rising.

After the passage of the Irish Universities Act in 1908, Hayden is appointed a member of both the senate of the National University of Ireland (NUI) and the governing body of the new University College Dublin (UCD), the first woman to hold such positions. In November 1909 she is appointed a lecturer in history, and in July 1911 first professor of modern Irish history at UCD, a position she holds until her retirement in 1938.

In 1915, along with Mary Louise Gwynn, Hayden founds the Irish Catholic Women’s Suffrage Association, and is also active in the Irish Women’s Franchise League, which mix campaigning for the vote with a variety of intellectual pursuits. She also becomes involved in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She is more moderate a nationalist than contemporary feminists such as Constance Markievicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and supports the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) rather than Sinn Féin.

Hayden’s last major public campaign, at the age of 75, is in the lead-up to the referendum on the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, in opposition to articles 40, 41, and 45 concerning the status of women. Reversing her lifelong non-party-political stance, she helps to form the Women’s Social and Progressive League as a political party committed to opposing the constitution and any regressive consequences it would entail.

Hayden receives an honorary doctorate from the NUI in 1935, three years before her retirement. A dedicated cyclist and swimmer, she is fluent in Irish, Greek, and Hindustani, and after retirement devotes her efforts to improving the welfare of Dublin children through her newly formed social club. She dies on July 12, 1942, at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin. Her unpublished diaries are deposited in the NLI.

A biography of Hayden, Mary Hayden: Irish Historian and Feminist, by Joyce Padbury is published by Arlen House in 2020.


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Death of Suzanne R. Day, Feminist, Novelist & Playwright

Suzanne Rouviere Day, Irish feminist, novelist and playwright, dies in London on May 26, 1964. She founds the Munster Women’s Franchise League, is one of Cork‘s first women poor law guardians and serves a support role in both World Wars.

Day is born in Cork, County Cork, on April 24, 1876 to Robert and Rebecca Day. Her father runs a saddler and ironmonger business and is a well known antiquarian and photographer.

In 1910 Day forms the local Irish Women’s Franchise League branch in Cork as an activist group for women’s suffrage. The following year she leaves that group and founds the non-militant Munster Women’s Franchise League. Her new interest in politics leads to her winning the election of poor law guardians the same year. Her later writings reveal that she sees the Cork workhouses as an expensive self-perpetuating evil run by amateurs. This leads to her first novel, The Amazing Philanthropists (1916). From 1913 to 1917 she writes three plays for the Abbey Theatre in collaboration with Geraldine Cummins, Broken Faith (1913), The Way of the World (1914), and Fox and Geese (1917), which is the most successful of the three.

The Battle of Verdun lasts most of 1916 and during that time Day is amongst a group from the Society of Friends who cares for the wounded. She is in France for fifteen months and uses the experience to create her 1918 book Round about Bar-le-Duc. Where the Mistral Blows is published in 1933 and describes her time in Provence in France.

Day works as a member of the fire service in London during World War II. She lives in Cork, France and London. At the time of her death she is living at 47 Argyle Road, Kensington, London. She dies in the Cromer and District Hospital on May 26, 1964.

The work of Suzanne Rouviere Day and Geraldine Cummins has been described as a mixture of paganism and melodrama and has been suggested as a precursor to John B. Keane.

(Pictured: Suzanne R. Day in the cast of the 1901 production of The Mikado, Cork, County Cork)


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Death of Jennie Wyse Power, Activist & Feminist

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Jennie Wyse Power, Irish activist, feminist, politician, and businesswoman, dies at her home in Dublin on January 5, 1922. She is a founder member of Sinn Féin and also of Inghinidhe na hÉireann.

Power is born Jane O’Toole in Baltinglass, County Wicklow on May 1, 1858. In the 1880s she joins the Ladies’ Land League and finds herself immersed in their activities during the Land War. She compiles lists of those evicted from their homes and also organises the Land League in Wicklow and Carlow. In 1883 she marries John Wyse Power, a journalist who shares her political beliefs and is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). They have four children together, a fact that does not interfere with her political work.

Power helps set up the Irish Women’s Franchise League and is also a founding member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann and Sinn Féin becoming Vice-President of both organisations. She is later on the Provisional Committee that sets up Cumann na mBan. She rises in the ranks to become one of the most important women of the revolution. In October 1914, she is elected the first President of Cumann na mBan. She is a successful businesswoman owning four branches of her Irish Farm Produce Company. The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic is written in her home at 21 Henry Street, and she always maintains that the Military Council signed the proclamation in no particular order; they just signed as it was passed to each of the signatories, though, with James Connolly being eager to be the first to sign. Even the identity of the head of the Provisional Government was not altogether clear.

During the 1916 Easter Rising she supplies food to the Irish Volunteers. After the Rising she and her daughter, Nancy, help re-organise Cumann na mBan and distribute funds to families suffering hardships, as well as the Prisoners Dependants Fund. These funds had been sent by Clan na Gael in the United States. She is subsequently elected as one of five women members onto Dublin Corporation in 1920 for the Inns Quay – Rotunda District.

Power supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and by the end of 1921, she is convinced that in doing so, will mean the need to leave Cumann na mBan to form a separate organisation. She helps set up Cumann na Saoirse (The League for Freedom), the pro-Treaty women’s organisation and becomes its Vice-President. She is a Free State Senator from 1922 until 1936 and is also a member of Cumann na nGaedheal.

Jennie Wyse Power dies on January 5, 1941, aged 82, at her home in Dublin. She is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery with her husband and daughter, Máire (who predeceased her). Her funeral is attended by many from both sides of the Dáil and the former revolutionary movement.


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Founding of the Irish Women’s Franchise League

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The Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), an organisation for women’s suffrage, is established in Dublin on November 4, 1908. Its founder members include Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and James H. Cousins. Thomas MacDonagh is also a member. The IWFL has 1,000 members by 1912 but only about fifty of these are active.

In the early 20th century, the Irish Parliamentary Party under John Redmond and his deputy John Dillon is opposed to votes for women, as is the British prime minister, H. H. Asquith.

In June 1912, after a meeting of a number of women’s organisations, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Margaret Cousins with six other members of the IWFL smash government windows in the General Post Office (GPO) and other government buildings. They are arrested, charged, and jailed. The following month Asquith makes a visit to Dublin to address a meeting in the Theatre Royal. Frank Sheehy-Skeffington manages to gain entrance and demands votes for women before being thrown out. Meanwhile Asquith’s carriage is attacked by British suffragists Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans. In that attack John Redmond is injured. Leigh and Evans go on hunger strike in Mountjoy Gaol, and are joined by the imprisoned Irish IWFL members in solidarity.

In March 1913 a bust of John Redmond in the Royal Hibernian Academy is defaced by a suffragist protesting against the failure of the Irish Parliamentary Party to support a Women’s Franchise Bill in the House of Commons. In contrast, as a mark of solidarity with the women, James Connolly travels from Belfast to Dublin to speak at one of the IWFL’s weekly meetings which is held in the Phoenix Park, and members of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) provide protection and offer escorts to women as they leave the meetings.

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington loses her teaching job in 1913 when she is arrested and put in prison for three months after throwing stones at Dublin Castle. While in jail she starts a hunger strike but is released under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge of Ill Health) Act 1913 and is soon rearrested.

The league keeps a neutral stance on Home Rule, but is opposed to World War I. After the killing of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington by a British officer in 1916, it supports Sinn Féin.

The Irish Women’s Franchise League publishes a paper, The Irish Citizen, from 1912 to 1920. The paper is edited originally by James H. Cousins.


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Birth of James Henry Cousins, Playwright & Actor

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James Henry Cousins, Irish writer, playwright, actor, critic, editor, teacher and poet, is born in Belfast on July 22, 1873, a descendant of Huguenot refugees. He uses several pseudonyms including Mac Oisín and the Hindu name Jayaram.

Largely self-educated at night schools, Cousins works some time as a clerk and becomes private secretary and speechwriter to Sir Daniel Dixon, 1st Baronet, the Lord Mayor of Belfast. In 1897 he moves to Dublin where he becomes part of a literary circle which includes William Butler Yeats, George William Russell and James Joyce. It is believed that he serves as a model for the Little Chandler character in Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners.

Cousins is significantly influenced by Russell’s ability to reconcile mysticism with a pragmatic approach to social reforms and by the teachings of Helena Blavatsky. He has a lifelong interest in the paranormal and acts as reporter in several experiments carried out by William Fletcher Barrett, Professor of physics at the University of Dublin and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research.

Cousins produces several books of poetry while in Ireland as well as acting in the first production of Cathleen ní Houlihan, under the stage name of H. Sproule, with the famous Irish revolutionary and beauty Maud Gonne in the title role. His plays are produced in the first years of the twentieth century in the Abbey Theatre, the most famous being “the Racing Lug”. After a dispute with W.B. Yeats, who objects to “too much Cousins,” the Irish National Theatre movement splits with two-thirds of the actors and writers siding with Cousins against Yeats.

Cousins also writes widely on the subject of Theosophy and in 1915 travels to India with the voyage fees paid for by Annie Besant, the President of the Theosophical Society. He spends most of the rest of his life in the sub-continent, apart from a year as Professor of English Literature at Keio University in Tokyo and another lecturing in New York. Toward the end of his life, he converts to Hinduism. At the core of Cousins’s engagement with Indian culture is a firm belief in the “shared sensibilities between Celtic and Oriental peoples.”

While in India he becomes friendly with many key Indian personalities including poet Rabindranath Tagore, Indian classical dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale, painter Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Mahatma Gandhi. He is the person who brings change into the life of poetry of the great renowned Kannada poet and writer Kuvempu. He writes a joint autobiography with his wife Margaret Elizabeth Cousins, a suffragette and one of the co-founders of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and All India Women’s Conference (AIWC).

In his The Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo acclaims Cousins’ New Ways in English Literature as “literary criticism, which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think.” He also acknowledges that he learned to intuit deeper being alerted by Cousins’ criticisms of his poems. In 1920 Cousins comes to Pondicherry to meet the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

James Cousins dies on February 20, 1956, in Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh, India at the age of 82.


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Birth of Margaret “Gretta” Cousins, Educationist & Suffragist

Margaret Elizabeth Cousins (née Gillespie), also known as Gretta Cousins, Irish Indian educationist, suffragist and Theosophist, is born into an Irish Protestant family in Boyle, County Roscommon, on October 7, 1878.

Gillespie is educated locally and in Derry. She studies music at the Royal University of Ireland in Dublin, graduating in 1902, and becomes a teacher. As a student she meets the poet and literary critic James Cousins. They are married in 1903. The pair explore socialism, vegetarianism, and parapsychology together. In 1906, after attending a National Conference of Women (NCW) meeting in Manchester, Cousins joins the Irish branch of the NCW. In 1907 she and her husband attend the London convention of the Theosophical Society, and she makes contact with suffragettes, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, and occultists in London.

Cousins co-founds the Irish Women’s Franchise League with Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington in 1908, serving as its first treasurer. In 1910 she is one of six Dublin women attending the Parliament of Women, which attempt to march to the House of Commons to hand a resolution to the Prime Minister. After 119 women marching to the House of Commons have been arrested, fifty requiring medical treatment, the women decide to break the windows of the houses of Cabinet Ministers. Cousins is arrested and sentenced to a month in Holloway Prison.

Vacationing with William Butler Yeats in 1912, Cousins and her husband hear Yeats read translations of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. In 1913, breaking the windows of Dublin Castle on the reading of the Second Home Rule Bill, Cousins and other suffragists are arrested and sentenced to one month in Tullamore Jail. The women demand to be treated as political prisoners and go on hunger strike to achieve release.

In 1913, she and her husband move to Liverpool, where James Cousins works in a vegetarian food factory. In 1915 they move to India. James Cousins initially works for New India, the newspaper founded by Annie Besant. After Besant is forced to dismiss him for an article praising the 1916 Easter Rising, she appoints him Vice-Principal of the new Besant Theosophical College, where Margaret teaches English.

In 1916, Cousins becomes the first non-Indian member of the SNDT Women’s University at Poona. In 1917, Cousins co-founds the Women’s Indian Association (WIA) with Annie Besant and Dorothy Jinarajadasa. She edits the WIA’s journal, Stri Dharma. In 1919 Cousins becomes the first Head of the National Girls’ School at Mangalore. She is credited with composing the tune for the Indian national anthem Jana Gana Mana in February 1919, during Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to Besant Theosophical College. In 1922, she becomes the first woman magistrate in India. In 1927, she co-founds the All India Women’s Conference, serving as its President in 1936.

In 1932, she is arrested and jailed for speaking against the Emergency Measures. By the late 1930s she feels conscious of the need to give way to indigenous Indian feminists:

“I longed to be in the struggle, but I had the feeling that direct participation by me was no longer required, or even desired by the leaders of India womanhood who were now coming to the front.”

A stroke leaves Cousins paralysed from 1944 onwards. She receives financial support from the Madras government, and later Jawaharlal Nehru, in recognition of her services to India. She dies on March 11, 1954. Her manuscripts are dispersed in various collections across the world.


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Birth of Activist & Feminist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington

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Johanna Mary “Hanna” Sheehy-Skeffington, Republican activist and feminist, is born in Kanturk, County Cork, on May 24, 1877.

Sheehy is the eldest daughter of Elizabeth McCoy and David Sheehy, an ex-Fenian and Member of Parliament (MP) for the Irish Parliamentary Party, representing South Galway. One of her uncles, Father Eugene Sheehy, is known as the Land League Priest, and his activities land him in prison. He is also one of Éamon de Valera‘s teachers in Limerick. When Hanna’s father becomes an MP in 1887, the family moves to Drumcondra, Dublin.

Sheehy is educated at the Dominican Convent on Eccles Street, where she is a prize-winning pupil. She then enrolls at St. Mary’s University College, a third level college for women established by the Dominicans in 1893, to study modern French and German. She sits for examinations at Royal University of Ireland and receives a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1899, and a Master of Arts Degree with first-class honours in 1902. This leads to a career as a teacher in Eccles Street and an examiner in the Intermediate Certificate examination.

Sheehy marries Francis Skeffington in 1903, and they both take the surname Sheehy Skeffington, which they do not hyphenate but use as a double name. In 1908, they found the Irish Women’s Franchise League, a group aiming for women’s voting rights.

Sheehy-Skeffington gets into numerous scuffles with the law. She is jailed in 1912 for breaking windows of government buildings in support of suffrage as part of an IWFL campaign. That same year she also throws a hatchet at visiting British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. She loses her teaching job in 1913 when she is arrested and imprisoned for three months after throwing stones at Dublin Castle and assaulting a police officer in a feminist action. While in jail she goes on hunger strike and is released under the Prisoner’s Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act but is soon rearrested.

Being free from her teaching job enables Sheehy-Skeffington to devote more time to the fight for suffrage. She is influenced by James Connolly and during the 1913 lock-out works with other suffragists in Liberty Hall, providing food for the families of the strikers.

She strongly opposes participation in World War I which breaks out in August 1914 and is prevented by the British government from attending the International Congress of Women held in The Hague in April 1915. The following June her husband is imprisoned for anti-recruiting activities. He is later shot dead during the 1916 Easter Rising after having been arrested by British soldiers.

Sheehy-Skeffington refuses compensation for her husband’s death, which is offered on condition of her ceasing to speak and write about the murder. Rather, she travels to the United States to publicise the political situation in Ireland. In October 1917, she is the sole Irish representative to League for Small and Subject Nationalities where, along with several other contributors, she is accused of pro-German sympathies. She publishes British Militarism as I Have Known It, which is banned in the United Kingdom until after the World War I. Upon her return to Britain she is once again imprisoned, this time in Holloway prison. After release, Sheehy-Skeffington attends the 1918 Irish Race Convention in New York City and later supports the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War.

In 1926, Sheehy-Skeffington becomes a founding member of Fianna Fáil and is elected to the party’s Ard Comhairle. During the 1930s, she is assistant editor of An Phoblacht. In January 1933, she is arrested in Newry for breaching an exclusion order banning her from Northern Ireland. At her trial she says, “I recognize no partition. I recognize it as no crime to be in my own country. I would be ashamed of my own name and my murdered husband’s name if I did…Long live the Republic!” She is sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.

Sheehy-Skeffington is a founding member of the Irish Women Workers’ Union and an author whose works deeply oppose British imperialism in Ireland. Her son, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, becomes a politician and Irish Senator.

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington dies in Dublin on April 20, 1946, at the age of 68 and is buried with her husband in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.