Irish Women's Franchise League

History

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

In November 1908, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and Margaret Cousins, along with their husbands Francis and James, founded the Irish Women's Franchise League.

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 smashed government windows in the GPO and other government buildings. They were arrested, charged, and jailed. The following month Asquith came on a visit to Dublin to address a meeting in the Theatre Royal. Frank Sheehy-Skeffington managed to gain entrance and demanded votes for women before being thrown out, while Asquith's carriage was attacked by British suffragists Mary Leigh and Gladys Evans. In that attack John Redmond was injured. The British women went on hunger-strike in Mountjoy Prison, and were joined by the imprisoned Irish IWFL members in solidarity. In March 1913 a bust of John Redmond in the Royal Hibernian Academy was 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 travelled from Belfast to Dublin to speak at one of the IWFL's weekly meetings which was held in the Phoenix Park, and members of the ITGWU provided protection and offered escorts to women as they left the meetings.

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington lost her teaching job in 1913 when she was arrested and put in prison for three months after throwing stones at Dublin Castle. Whilst in jail she started a hunger strike but was released under the Prisoner's Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act and was soon rearrested.

The league kept a neutral stance on Home Rule, but was opposed to the World War. After the execution of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington by the British during the Easter Rising of 1916, it supported Sinn Féin.

IWFL never succeeded in establishing a significant presence in the north. Refusing Christabel Pankhurst's directive in August 1914, disband and cease agitation for the duration of the war, militant members of the Women Social and Political Union in Belfast, Elizabeth McCracken and Margaret McCoubrey had looked to the League. In The Irish Citizen, McCracken asked "Shall Suffrage Cease?" Men who had subjected militant suffragists to a campaign of "vituperation and invective", were now asking women to defer to "the most aggravated form of militancy—war". But McCoubrey's efforts to established a branch of the League in Belfast were bedevilled by sectarian-political differences and, with "dreams of united womanhood", were abandoned in the spring of 1915.

Following the introduction of women's suffrage in Ireland at the 1918 general election (for women over the age of 30), and the dramatic political events in Ireland that followed it, the organisation lost momentum and purpose, and was shortly defunct thereafter.

Notable members

• Mrs Charles Oldham was the first president
• Mrs Hannah Sheehy Skeffington was the first secretary
• Margaret Cousins was the first treasurer
• Jenny Wyse Power joined about 1916
• Cissie Cahalan served thrice as president, and was one of the few working-class women in the movement
• Rosamund Jacob
• Marguerite Palmer, honorary secretary
• Marjorie Hasler joined in 1910, sentenced to jail for breaking windows, many consider her early death as a direct result of her imprisonment and is considered "the first Irish martyr for the suffragette cause"
• Edith Young active in the Galway branch
• Lillian Metge active in the Lisburn branch, and reporter for the Irish Citizen, was given Hunger Strike Medal after imprisonment for explosion at Lisburn Cathedral, but released without sentence as the World War One was imminent
• Patricia Hoey, the first president of the London branch of the IWFL
• Alice Litster, Irish suffragist interviewed by Brian Harrison as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews.

References

References

1. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish women's writing. Volume 5. Page 92
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3. Kennedy, Maev. (29 September 2006). "Government feared suffragette plot to kill Asquith". The guardian.
4. Gráinséir, Seosamh. "Irish Legal Heritage: Irish Women's Franchise League and the Irish Citizen".
5. (25 August 1912). "Starving Suffragist Ill". New York Times.
6. "Suffragette convicted of defacing sculpture of John Redmond". RTÉ.
7. Luddy, Maria. (1995). "Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington". Historical Association of Ireland.
8. Priestley, L.A.M.. (29 August 1914). "Must Suffrage Cease?". The Irish Citizen.
9. Margaret Ward, "[https://www.jstor.org/stable/1395496 Conflicting Interests: The British and Irish Suffrage Movements]", ''Feminist Review'', No. 50 (Summer 1995), pp. (127–147), 143-145
10. We Two Together p. 164 Biography of Margaret & James Cousins
11. O'Neill, Marie, (1991), ''From Parnell to de Valera: A Biography of Jennie Wyse Power 1858–1941.'' Dublin, Blackwater Press. p. 92
12. Therese Moriarty. (2012-10-17). "Cissie Cahalan (1876-1948)". Irishtimes.com.
13. Yeates, Pádraig. (2011). "A City in Wartime – Dublin 1914–1918: The Easter Rising 1916". Gill & Macmillan.
14. (2002). "Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia". Yorkin.
15. (2014). "Ireland's Suffragettes : the Women Who Fought for the Vote.". The History Press.
16. "Remembering Marjorie Hasler, a Window-Breaking Suffragette".
17. (2009). "Dictionary of Irish Biography". Cambridge University Press.
18. (2014-10-31). "'The brutes': Mrs Metge and the Lisburn Cathedral bomb, 1914".
19. (2019). "[[Dictionary of Irish Biography]]". Cambridge University Press.
20. London School of Economics and Political Science. "The Suffrage Interviews".