Shannon is the eldest child of solicitor George William Shannon and Emily Shannon (née Goodman). She has two sisters and two brothers. She attends Alexandra College, and later lectures for women at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). On July 27, 1875, she marries Maurice Dockrell, eldest son of Thomas Dockrell, a well known Dublin merchant, and Anne Morgan Dockrell (née Brooks). The couple has seven children, one daughter and six sons. She goes on to become a director and member of the board of her husband’s family company: Messrs Thomas Dockrell & Sons & Co. Ltd.[1]
Dockrell is an active member of the committee of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association, later known as the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA), founded in 1876 to promote women’s suffrage by democratic methods. She attends international women’s suffrage conferences in Stockholm in 1911 and Budapest in 1913. She is also a committee member of the London Women’s Suffrage Society, speaking on the role of women in local government at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899. The Irish Citizen lists her as a suitable woman candidate to run for the senate seat proposed by the Home rule bill in 1912.
Dockell is a member of the National Union of Women Workers, sitting as a member of its public services committee. Like many of her contemporaries, she believes that women are best placed to address issues around health, societal moral well-being, and housing. From 1898, the Local Government (Ireland) Act, allows women to be candidates for local government elections. Dockrell first runs as a candidate in the Urban District Council (UDC) of the Monkstown ward of Blackrock, Dublin in the 1898 local elections, where she is returned as the third of nine elected, becoming one of only four women councillors elected in Ireland.
Dockrell describes herself as a unionist and a Protestant, sitting as a council on the Blackrock UDC until her death. She is the only woman councillor on that UDC until 1925 and the election of Ellen O’Neill. She is also the first woman chair of a UDC when she is elected to the position in 1906.
Despite the political and societal turmoil of the early 20th century in Ireland and the establishment of the Irish Free State, Dockrell continues in her commitment to local politics. This includes being the first woman to be elected to a Dublin county council in 1920. Despite remaining a committed unionist, she works with the Free State government. Following her husband’s knighthood, she is also known as Lady Dockrell.
Louisa (Louie) Bennett, suffragette, trade unionist, and peace activist, is born on January 7, 1870, in Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest daughter of James Cavendish Bennett, a prosperous auctioneer, and his wife Susan (née Bolger). She is brought up at Temple Hill, Blackrock, and educated at Alexandra College, and at an academy for young ladies in London, where she and her sisters form an Irish League. She goes on to study singing in Bonn, Germany. Already as a teenager she shows an interest in writing, her first literary effort being Memoirs of the Temple Road in the 80s. Afterward she publishes two unsuccessful romantic novels, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (1908), the latter set in County Down in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
Bennett turns her attention to women’s issues and by 1910 has become involved in the suffrage movement, initially through her reading of the suffrage monthly TheIrish Citizen. In 1911, she co-founds, with her life-long friend and colleague Helen Chenevix, the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, an umbrella organisation, which by 1913 has connected fifteen Irish suffrage societies and has established links with Europe and the United States. She and Chenevix are the organisation’s first honorary secretaries. She is also associated with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, for which she runs public speaking classes. However, as the divide between militants and opponents of the use of violence become more pronounced, Bennett, as a confirmed pacifist, who endorses what she calls “constructive, rather than destructive action,” distances herself from the league, and through her involvement in the production of TheIrish Citizen seeks to sideline the militants.
Bennett’s concerns are not limited to the question of women’s franchise. As founder of the Irish Women’s Reform League, she not only addressea the suffrage question, but examines many social issues concerning women. The league focuses on working conditions, monitors court cases involving women, and demands school meals and better education. She is among those who assist in the relief effort at Liberty Hall during the 1913 strike and lockout in Dublin, and she appeals for funds for strikers’ families through TheIrish Citizen. In the period that follows she maintains her links with the labour movement. She often opposes the direct, uncompromising approach of both James Connolly and Helena Molony, and argues that labour and women’s issues can only be hampered by any affiliation with nationalist politics. The aftermath of the Easter Rising, and in particular, the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, causes her to revise some of her views on nationalism. In late 1916 she accepts an invitation to reorganise the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), on the understanding that she would have complete independence from Liberty Hall. Assisted by Chenevix and Father John Flanagan, she re-creates the union along professional lines, and by 1918 its membership has risen dramatically from a few hundred to 5,300. She consistently defends its separatist stance, arguing that women’s concerns in a male-dominated union will always be of secondary importance.
Throughout World War I Bennett campaigns for peace, and she is selected as the Irish representative to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She leads the IWWU in its opposition to the attempted introduction of conscription in 1918, and in 1920 she travels to the United States to highlight Black and Tan atrocities (she later meets David Lloyd George and demands the removal of the Black and Tans from Ireland). As a member of the Women’s Peace Committee, she acts as a mediator during the Irish Civil War.
In 1925, Bennett is appointed to an Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) committee to promote a scheme of working class education with the assistance of the labour movement. Her interest in adult education later leads to her involvement with The People’s College. A member of the national executive of the ITUC (1927–32, 1944–50), she becomes the first female president of the congress in 1932. She serves a second presidential term in 1947. Her knowledge of labour issues is officially acknowledged by the Irish government in 1932, when she is sent as a representative to Geneva to put forward the case of Irish women workers. In 1938 she delivers a paper entitled Industrialism in an Agrarian Country to the International Relations Institute in the Netherlands.
Despite the depth of Bennett’s involvement with the union movement, she has ambitions outside trade unionism, and in 1938 she lets her name be put forward by the IWWU as a congress candidate for election to the senate, but this comes to nothing. In that year she is appointed to the government commission on vocational organisation (1938–43). In 1943, she is elected as a Labour Party member of the Dún Laoghaire borough council. As a councillor she consistently lobbies for improved housing and is instrumental in the establishment of Dún Laoghaire’s housing council in 1949. She had refused a labour nomination in the 1918 general election, but she stands for Dublin County Council and Dáil Éireann in 1944, in both cases unsuccessfully. She is the only Labour Party member to criticise the party’s support for the Fianna Fáil minority government of 1932, arguing that it is “never right or wise to co-operate with another party with fundamentally different principles.” As an elected member of the Labour Party executive, she represents Ireland at the International Labour Organization in Europe. She is also a representative at the League of Nations.
Throughout her public career Bennett consistently condemns colonialism, fascism, and armaments expenditure. She is possibly best remembered for her leadership in the laundry workers’ strike of 1945, during which IWWU members successfully fight for a fortnight‘s paid holiday. Her management of the IWWU, which lasts until 1955, is marked by determination and diplomacy, though she often uses threatened resignations as a means of controlling her colleagues. She died, unmarried, on November 25, 1956, in Killiney, County Dublin.
(From: “Bennett, Louisa (‘Louie’)” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009)
Dryhurst is born to Alexander Robinson and Emily Egan. Her father is a dyer. She is known as Nannie to her sisters and she decides to change her name to Nannie Florence in honour of a young friend who had died. As a result she is known variously (and following her marriage) as N.F. Dryhurst, Nannie, Nora and Florence Dryhurst.
After the death of her father, Dryhurst takes a position as a governess as she speaks fluent French, German and Irish, as well as having considerable skill as an artist. She works first in Ireland and then in London. She looks after a doctor’s daughter, Nellie Tenison, and through them she meets the Dryhurst family. In 1882, she becomes engaged to British Museum official Alfred Robert Dryhurst and marries him in August 1884. Their first daughter, Norah, is born in 1885 and the second, Sylvia, in 1888.
Dryhurst soon gets involved with an anarchist group and writes regularly for the Freedom newspaper. She is friends with Charlotte Wilson and acts as editor when Wilson is away. In the early 1890s she takes over as editor completely for a period of time. She also works as a translator for Peter Kropotkin‘s works. She spends time teaching with Wilson, Agnes Henry, and Cyril Bell at the International Anarchist School set up in Fitzroy Square in London by Louise Michel. She gives active support to Spanish refugees fleeing repression and gives money to support the colony at Clousden Hill from 1895 to 1902.
Dryhurst supports a number of different countries attempting to gain independence. She becomes secretary of the Nationalities and Subject Races Committee and uses her writing in working toward Irish independence. She writes for various Irish newspapers and assists with the creation of The Irish Citizen. A friend of W. B. Yeats, she appears in his play The Land of Heart’s Desire in June 1904. She speaks Georgian, having learned it from Varlam Cherkezishvili, a close associate of Kropotkin. In 1906, she is a member of the Georgian Relief Committee and travels to the country. She speaks at an international conference at The Hague in support of Georgia. She is also a supporter of Indian independence.
It was through Dryhurst that the Gifford sisters get their connection to the Irish independence movement. She introduces Muriel Gifford to Thomas McDonagh and Grace Gifford to James Plunkett. After the executions of fifteen leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin, she spends her time campaigning unsuccessfully for the reprieve of Roger Casement. Not all her activities are purely political. She is a neighbour of Martin Shaw and on her suggestion he founds the Purcell Operatic Society in 1899. She becomes the Society’s secretary. He rents accommodation near her and through her friends they find talented amateurs to put on their productions.
Dryhurst has a long affair with Henry Nevinson, a journalist she meets in 1892. The affair ends in 1912. She dies in 1930. Her papers are kept in the National Library of Ireland.
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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