Women, prison and civil disobedience in Irish history: two pages from the history books

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis

Monday March 08, 2004 23:45

by Fintan Lane - Cork Anti-War Campaign

On International Women's Day, it is worth reminding ourselves of the dedication of those Irish women who struggled for the women's right to vote in the early 20th century. Sometimes one gets the impression that the vote was gained through nothing more than polite lobbying. Not the case, as the following excerpt from Maria Luddy's short biography of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (1995) shows.

These women went to jail while fighting for a basic right, and today a number of women (Deirdre Clancy, Nuin Dunlop, Karen Fallon and Mary Kelly) are facing jail sentences for similar actions, taken while protesting against an immoral and unjust war. These women stand in a proud tradition of civil disobedience against injustice.

From Maria Luddy, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington (Dundalk, 1995), pp 23-4.

On 13 June 1912 a number of women of the Irish Women's Franchise League (IWFL) broke some windows of government buildings. The police, according to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, were taken completely be surprise: "Educated, articulate rowdyism (as they would call it) from the comfortable classes, from respectably dressed women, stupefied them...We got excellent publicity from an enraged press and mixed feelings from the general public, but on the whole naturally condemnation."

The eight women arrested in this militant foray received prison sentences of between two and six months. Hanna, who was accused of breaking nineteen panes of glass in Ship Street Barracks, the property of the War Office, was among those imprisoned in Mountjoy Jail. At her trial she conducted her own defence, and she used the court case, which was widely reported, to make political capital in favour of suffrage. The women were quite prepared to go to prison. Once in prison they petitioned for and were granted political status after six days' imprisonment. Hanna was later to note that their prison experiences left an indelible impression on some of the suffragettes. "When prison followed," she wrote, "and later hunger strike, a deeper note was struck; many hitherto protected comfortable women got glimpses of the lives of those less fortunate, and became social rebels".

From 1912 to 1914 there were 35 convictions for women engaged in militant activity in Ireland. Hanna described her prison term and the enforced solitude as "harsh and spirit subduing; it finds out the weak points in one's armour and brings into play all one's philosophy and resourcefulness." But there were also pleasant memories: "I have many happy memories of Mountjoy - of pleasant companionship through hours of exercise and associated labour with my fellow suffragists, of kindness from friends who paid us daily pilgrimages, of studious hours far from the maddening, mobbing crowd."

Frank [her husband] visited her almost every day, and sometimes her son Owen also visited. The treatment meted out to the English suffragettes Leigh and Evans provoked Hanna and a number of other suffragettes to go on hunger strike. Hanna left the prison after 30 days, having spent a week on hunger strike. This tactic was one she was to employ in all her prison episodes.

Hanna was sacked from her teaching post at the Rathmines School of Commerce in 1913 for her feminist militancy.

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