ALEEN ISABEL CUST / First woman veterinary surgeon in Britain & Ireland

Aleen Isabel Cust, 1868–1937

First woman veterinary surgeon in Britain and Ireland

Aleen Cust was the daughter of a baronet, but a life of ease was not for her. When her father died in 1878, her new guardians–also aristocrats–encouraged her independent streak, and supported her decision to become a veterinary surgeon, despite her mother’s disapproval.

In 1894, enabled by a modest private income, she enrolled in the New Veterinary College, Edinburgh aged 26. She was an excellent student, coming top of her class in her first year. She completed her training in 1900, but was barred by gender from using the title ‘veterinary surgeon’. The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) maintained that in their regulations, the word ‘student’ implied male student. She had excellent references, however, and was offered a position as assistant to William Byrne’s veterinary practice in Athleague, Co. Roscommon.

As Byrne’s assistant, Cust gained the respect of the people of Roscommon and east Galway. In 1905,when a vacancy arose for the position of veterinary inspector for Mountbellew District, she was elected by 14 council votes to 10, against two male candidates. Her appointment was contested by the Department of Agriculture on the basis that a woman could not be a member of the RCVS and therefore, she did not meet the requirements of the position. Galway County Council argued that no other trained and experienced veterinarian lived in the region, and in June 1906, her appointment was finally sanctioned by the Department.

Cust was hardworking and determined, but still needed the support of male allies who fought on her behalf. On the evening of her selection, Councillor J.C. McDonnell said, in response to the question of her qualifications, that the RCVS ‘would have to change their opinion and adopt later day ideas (hear hear).’ Despite these noble sentiments on the injustice of Cust’s disbarment from the RCVS, the irony went unremarked that they were 24 men voting on the professional fate of a woman. Not everyone agreed on ‘later day ideas’. The Western News editorialised: ‘The county council have made an appointment in the horse and brute kingdom which appears to us at least disgusting, if not absolutely indecent ... We can understand women educating themselves to tend women–but horses! Heavens!’

William Byrne died in 1910, and Cust took over his practice. In 1915, she took a leave of absence from her Galway County Council and drove her own car to Abbeville, France, to volunteer as veterinary to the tens of thousands of horses on the Western Front. The passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919 forbade the exclusion of women from professions, and meant that the RCVS were now obliged to consider Cust’s membership. She was finally awarded her diploma in December 1922. From the 1920s, Cust found the Irish Free State no longer congenial, stating: ‘things became so unsettled that I had to leave. When one has the house raided and half a dozen revolvers are pointed at one’s head, it seems time to come home. But they were rather polite.’ She retired to the New Forest, England, where she devoted herself to breeding spaniels, but continued to attend Veterinary Medical Society meetings.

She died on 29 January 1937 while visiting friends in Jamaica, and was buried there. She left a fortune of almost £30,000, from which £5,000 was endowed for a scholarship in veterinary research (with a preference for female candidates), and £100 for a kennel at the RCVS in memory of her spaniels. An obituary published in The Times stated that Cust was ‘as much a pioneer in her particular sphere as, for example, Mrs Pankhurst, of women’s suffrage fame, was in hers, and the opposition encountered was as great in the one as it was in the other.’

Sources:Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition; Belfast News-Letter, 3 Feb. 1937;Western People, 23 June 1906;Western News, 4 Nov. 1905;Irish Times, 5 Feb. 2018;Skibbereen Eagle, 27 Feb. 1915;Freeman’s Journal, 22 Dec. 1922;The Times, 8 Feb. 1937;will of Aleen Cust, quoted in Irish Examiner, 19 Apr. 1937.

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

MARY AGNES LEE / Women's suffrage campaigner

Mary Agnes Lee, 1821–1909

Women’s suffrage campaigner

Born in Co. Monaghan in February 1821, she is now remembered as one of the most prominent Australian suffragists, but she also advocated on behalf of women workers and asylum residents.Following the death of her church-organist husband, Lee and one of her daughters emigrated to Australia in 1879 to care for her terminally-ill son.After his death,Lee remained in Australia,because she could not afford to return to Ireland and had grown fond of ‘dear Adelaide’.

Freshly liberated from domestic obligations at almost 60 years of age, Lee threw herself into politics.She first became secretary to the Social Purity Society, lobbying for the Criminal Law Consolidation Amendment Act (1885) that raised the legal age of consent to sixteen.Historian Audrey Oldfield described how a‘large and enthusiastic’ public meeting convened to institute the South Australian Women’s Suffrage League on 21 July 1888, rejecting any limitation of age or property on women’s suffrage. Lee was elected co-secretary to the committee of 13 women and 15 men, quickly proving herself a fiery orator and becoming the best-known champion of South Australian women’s suffrage. Lee herself stated, ‘If I die before it is achieved, “Women’s enfranchisement” shall be found engraved upon my heart.’

Lee was a suffragist, meaning she preferred constitutional means to secure equality of franchise. She seems to have been less concerned about enabling women to run for elected office;she declined an invitation to run for election in 1895. Nevertheless, her emphasis on social justice and her concerns for working women posed a threat to the establishment. She supported the foundation of women’s trade unions, and was secretary to the newly-formed Working Women's Trades Union in 1891–3. She visited the clothing factories in which women workers ‘sweated’, convincing employers (with varying degrees of success) to set union wages. She also distributed food and clothing to the impoverished.Lee corresponded with New Zealand suffragists, who had achieved their aims in 1892. She organised a petition of 11,600 signatures from across the colony of South Australia in 1894. The 122-metre-long document was presented to the House of Assembly in August 1894, while women swamped MPs with telegrams, and filled the galleries of the House.In December 1894, South Australian women became the first in Australia to gain a parliamentary vote on the same terms as men. This was a landmark moment in international suffrage and was achieved with both middle-and working-class support. It is important to remember, however, that neither male nor female Indigenous Australians would have equality of franchise until the 1960s. In 1896, she became the first woman appointed as an official visitor to asylums, a role she conducted for twelve years with great compassion for the patients.

Lee’s activism was recognised in her lifetime. On her 75th birthday, Adelaide town hall presented her with 50 sovereigns from public donations; a public address praised her leading role in the suffrage campaign. However, her later years were marked by financial difficulties, and her pleas for further public aid fell on deaf ears, despite the great personal sacrifices she had made during decades of activism. One biographer suggests that her ‘sharp tongue and uncompromising attitude’ left her with few friends–evidence that, while women had secured voting rights, they were still expected to conform to certain behavioural norms.She died at her home in Adelaide in September 1909 and her tombstone bears the words: ‘Secretary of the Women's Suffrage League’. Its understatement forms a sharp contrast with the passionate campaigning that consumed the last 20 years of her life.

Sources:Australian Dictionary of Biography online edition; Audrey Oldfield,Woman Suffrage in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1992);Dictionary of Irish Biography online edition; James Keating, ‘Piecing Together Suffrage Internationalism: Place, Space, and Connected Histories of Australasian Women’s Activism’,History Compass, 16, no. 8(2018).

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

EVA GORE-BOOTH / Suffragist, Trade Unionist, Poet, Mystic

Eva Gore-Booth, 1870–1926

Suffragist, trade unionist, poet, mystic

Eva Gore-Booth led a rich and active life beyond what might have been expected of her–not because of her gender,or her aristocratic background, but because of her physical frailty and susceptibility to illness. She collected 30,000 signatures for a suffrage petition in 1901, campaigned for the rights of women to work as barmaids and acrobats, was a member of the executive committee of the North of England Society for Women's Suffrage, and was a vegetarian and animal rights advocate. She has long been overshadowed by her more famous sister, Constance Markievicz; even in childhood,her governess recalled, Eva was ‘always so delicate ... rather in the background’.

Eva met her lifelong partner, Esther Roper in 1896 in an Italian olive grove; wordlessly, a lifelong connection was made. Roper was a Manchester suffragist and trade unionist; inspired, Gore-Booth established the Sligo branch of the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association. In 1897,Gore-Booth left Lissadell to join Roper in Manchester, where Constance Gore-Booth got her ‘first taste of political campaigning’ when she went to help Eva and Roper in Manchester in the 1908 by-election. She also helped with Eva’s campaign in support of barmaids. In the same year, Gore-Booth published her first book of poems. Gore-Booth and Roper were a team, both believing in the need to marry trade unionism and suffrage, not least because in Lancashire, cotton factory work–and therefore union membership–was dominated by women. They were joint secretaries of the Women’s Textile and Other Workers’Representation Committee, and jointly ran the The Women’s Labour News. Together, they campaigned for pit-brow workers, florists, and barmaids, bringing large numbers of working-class women into the suffrage movement–a radical, unprecedented move.

In 1914, Gore-Booth threw herself into pacifism and the Committee for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. Despite her enduring ill-health, she travelled all over Britain with the Women’s Peace Crusade and attended the courts-martial of conscientious objectors.Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington recalled how, in the aftermath of Easter 1916, Gore-Booth travelled to Dublin to plead for leniency for the Rising’s leaders.

The historian Sonja Tiernan has done much to restore the commitment of Roper and Gore-Booth’s partnership, in every respect, to the historical record. Roper and Gore-Booth’s loving written tributes to one another bear every mark of devotion and tenderness. Roper wrote that ‘Even simple everyday pleasures when shared with her became touched with magic’. Eva, for her part, dedicated her poem ‘The Travellers’ to Roper :‘You whose Love’s melody makes glad the gloom’. In addition to their tireless work for women’s suffrage and trade unionism, Gore-Booth and Roper publicised gay and trans issues. In 1916, together with trans woman Irene Clyde, they founded the periodical Urania, publishing articles on transvestitism and advocating for a genderless society. Gore-Booth died of cancer in January 1926, in the home that she and Roper shared. In a final testament to their partnership, they are buried in the same grave.

Sources:Poems of Eva Gore Booth, ed. Esther Roper (Longmans, Green and Co., 1929);Sonja Tiernan, ed.,The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth(Manchester University Press, 2015);Anne Marreco,The Rebel Countess([1967] Phoenix Press, 2000);Sonja Tiernan, ‘Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality: Eva Gore-Booth, A Biographical Case Study’,Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 37, issue 2 (2011); ‘LGBT History Month’,https://wearewarpandweft.wordpress.com/stature-project/lgbt-history-month/

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

NELLIE MC CLUNG / Suffragist, writer

Nellie McClung, 1873–1951

Suffragist, writer

A girl raised in the wheat belt of frontier Manitoba became Canada’s leading suffragist, the first woman to sit in the Alberta legislature, and author of sixteen volumes of fiction and non-fiction. She remains controversial, but her role in the achievement of women’s suffrage in Canada is unquestionable.

She was born in Ontario in 1873, the youngest of seven children of Irish Methodist farmer John Mooney and Scottish Presbyterian Letitia McCurdy. From an early age, she was passionate about women’s rights, objecting to male privilege, domestic abuse, and alcohol. As a teacher, she became a leader in local affairs and a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the leading women’s organization of the day.

In 1896, she was obliged to retire from teaching when she married pharmacist and fellow WCTU member, Robert Wesley McClung. Robert shared Nellie’s views, but it was only thanks to hired domestic servants that she managed to juggle a busy activist life with domestic responsibilities and the care of four children; that help is acknowledged in her autobiography, The Stream Runs Fast (1945).

When the family moved to Winnipeg in 1911, Nellie found herself at the forefront of Manitoba’s suffrage and temperance movements. She founded the Political Equality League, ‘barnstormed’ Canada and the USA as one of the most popular suffrage speakers, and hosted British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst at her home in 1911.

In January 1914, McClung and other Winnipeg suffragists attracted much publicity by holding a ‘Women’s Parliament’ in a city theatre. Women held the seats, and men had to petition for the vote.

McClung played an important role in the achievement, in 1916, of provincial suffrage in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is important to note that when Ottawa completed the process of federal franchise in 1919, First Nations, Inuit and other ethnic minorities were excluded.

In 1921, McClung became the first woman MLA in Alberta, campaigning for a minimum wage for women, mothers’ pensions, and equality in divorce. However, she also supported the Alberta Sexual Sterilisation Act, that permitted the forced sterilisation of some 2,800 so-called ‘mental defectives’ up to 1972. First Nations and métis people, who made up a large proportion of the province’s population, suffered the greatest degree of harm under this law.

When McClung moved to Calgary in 1926, she lost her seat in the Alberta legislature. She remained active, however, and was part of a successful ten-year campaign for women to be recognised as ‘persons’ for the purpose of eligibility for the Canadian Senate. In 1936, she was appointed to the board of governors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and in 1938, joined the Canadian delegation to the League of Nations.

McClung left a complex legacy. She did not tolerate fascism, National Socialism or xenophobia. This, and her lifelong support for women’s rights – including day-care, contraception, and equal wages – sits in sharp contrast to her willingness to overlook the rights of First Nations, Inuit, and métis women, and women with disabilities.

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition; Nellie L. McClung, In Times Like These, ed. Veronica Strong-Boag (University of Toronto Press, 1992); Nellie L. McClung, The Next of Kin (Thomas Allen, 1917); Joan Sangster, ‘Mobilising Women for War’, in Canada and the First World War, ed. David MacKenzie (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 157–93; Yvonne Boyer, ‘First Nations Women’s Contributions to Culture and Community through Canadian Law’ in Restoring the Balance, ed. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Madeleine Dion Stout and Eric Guimond (University of Manitoba Press), 69–96.

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  

Dr Isabel ‘Ida’ Deane Mitchell / Presbyterian missionary

DR ISABEL ‘IDA’ DEANE MITCHELL, 1879–1917

Presbyterian missionary

Isabel ‘Ida’ Mitchell typifies the emergence of a new group of Irish women, particularly from Ulster, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – the female Presbyterian missionary. Often the daughters of churchmen, they were usually middle-class and educated.

Mitchell devoted eleven years of her life to Chinese women, even while back in Belfast on sick leave in 1910–12. When she first arrived, the Irish Presbyterian mission was a small operation, staffed by Sara MacWilliams and Reverend F.W.S. O’Neill. The mission district covered 5,000 square miles and a population of 500,000, including 1,300 Chinese Christians. By the time of Mitchell’s death, the region had a new hospital and dispensary, and six Chinese women had been trained as dispensary assistants.

In 1893, Ida decided to study medicine, having heard that the China missions were badly in need of women doctors. Four years later, she entered Queen Margaret College, Glasgow University, where she was supported by donations from her father’s parish until her graduation in 1903. The Russo-Japanese War postponed her departure until October 1905. In the interim, she worked as House-Surgeon in a Manchester dispensary, taught Sunday School, helped in a Girls’ Club, and corresponded with missionaries in China.

Mitchell was an outstanding student, winning four medals and two prizes while at Glasgow, but her application to her studies was the result of missionary zeal. Her intolerance of non-Christian religions is evident in her remarks on Buddhism: ‘It gives me a terrible hopeless feeling sometimes just to see it all, and to think what a tiny, tiny speck the Christians are in the midst of the millions who are so busy worshipping the idols.’ On arrival in Fakumen in November 1905, she immediately began learning Mandarin, with which she struggled greatly.

Illustration by Szabolcs Kariko

Mitchell travelled to China alone, but ended up surrounded by friends and family. Her sister and brother-in-law, Janie and Reverend James McWhirter later joined the mission. She was also comforted in no small way by the presence of Sara MacWilliams, who she referred to as her ‘husband’. In her last months, a college friend, May McKerrow visited her. They travelled in Japan and Korea together, and Mitchell remarked to her mother, ‘It is quite nice to have a wife!’

Despite these close, comforting relationships, she described herself as medically quite alone and bore her responsibilities heavily. Her letters describe various cases, treatments and surgeries, such as the removal of malignant tumours from a 16-year-old who died the night following the surgery, and the amputation of the foot of a girl who had not walked for 8 months.

Her greatest legacy was the opening, in October 1909, of a new women’s hospital supported by generous donations; it reopened several years after her death. After her return from sick leave in 1912, her next big project was to be the establishment of a fund to train Chinese women in western medicine – a dream that she did not live to realise. Her second legacy was the training of six Chinese dispensary assistants.

Her letters to her mother convey her conviction that her work could improve lives. She vowed in 1915, ‘I want to fight tuberculosis. It killed two millions in China last year, and I want the girls to help me to fight it.’ She complained bitterly of the poverty surrounding her, and the cramped, windowless homes in which disease spread so easily.

Her own health had been poor for a number of years, but deteriorated suddenly and she died in March 1917 of diphtheria, one of the infectious diseases that plagued the region. She was buried in the Russian cemetery in Jilin, where her sister lived.

Her letters were published in 1917 by her former colleague, Reverend O’Neill, went through three editions in 18 months, and remain an invaluable record of women’s experiences of missionary work.

Sources: F. W. S. O'Neill (ed.), Dr Isabel Mitchell of Manchuria ([1917] 3rd ed., James Clarke and Co., 1918); Myrtle Hill, ‘Saving the Empire? The Role of Irishwomen in Protestant Female Missions, 1870–1914’ in Religion and Greater Ireland, ed. Colin Barr and Hilary M. Carey (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 229–50; Rosemary Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands: British Missionary Women in China (Praeger, 2013).

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  

ANNIE BESANT / Secularist, politician, theosophist

Annie Besant, 1847–1933

Secularist, politician, theosophist

Annie Wood was born in London in 1847 to Irish parents. At nineteen, she married, more out of duty than attraction, Reverend Frank Besant. He was seven years her senior, and she later admitted that they were ‘an ill-matched pair’. She took up writing in 1868 and was dismayed to learn that as a married woman, her earnings were not her own. The couple had two children in eighteen months, and the prospect of a third horrified Annie, not least for financial reasons.

Besant’s struggle with her faith began in 1871, when her daughter almost died of whooping cough. Discovering that she had turned to freethought, her husband gave her an ultimatum: take communion regularly in his parish, or leave. ‘Hypocrisy or expulsion,’ she later recalled – ‘I chose the latter.’ She obtained a legal separation and a small allowance, and moved to London with her daughter, becoming at first a women’s rights activist. ‘Red Annie’ was born.

From 1874, she became one of the National Secular Society’s most effective public speakers, filling halls across Britain. She also worked as a journalist for the National Reformer.

In March 1877, the Freethought Publishing Company was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for issuing a treatise on contraception. At the trial, Annie became the first woman to publicly endorse birth control; part of her argument was the alleviation of poverty. However, her estranged husband argued that this made her an unfit guardian, and reclaimed custody of their daughter, much to Annie’s distress.

Illustration by Szabolcs Kariko

Illustration by Szabolcs Kariko

By the late 1880s, Annie was a leading socialist: a member of the executive of the Fabian Society, editor and contributor for an array of socialist publications, and author of Why I am a Socialist and Modern Socialism. On ‘bloody Sunday’, 13 November 1887, she led a procession on Trafalgar Square by East End workers. In 1888, she was instrumental in the establishment of the Matchmakers’ Union, the first union to exclusively represent women workers. In 1889, she was elected to Tower Hamlets’ school board.

Suddenly, in 1889, she turned to theosophy, having been convinced by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Russian co-founder of the Theosophical Society. Her beliefs changed completely and she reversed her position on birth control. Like other Victorian converts, she may have been attracted by Theosophy’s female leadership and its rejection of Judaeo-Christian patriarchy.

In 1891, Blavatsky died, leaving Besant head of the Society. She arrived at their Madras headquarters on 16 November 1893. She dedicated herself to Indian education, founding, in 1897, the Central Hindu College in Benares. She adopted Indian dress, attempted to follow Indian social customs, and published her own translation of the Bhagavad Ghita from the original Sanskrit (1895).

From 1907, she was active in the campaign for Indian self-government. In 1913, she joined the Indian National Congress, becoming its first woman president in 1917. She was interned for her Indian nationalism in May–August 1917.

After 1917, her influence in Indian politics diminished, not least due to her opposition to Ghandian passive resistance. Her last official appointment was in 1928, as a member of the Nehru committee to draft an Indian constitution. In the 1920s, her position as president of the Theosophical Society took her all over the world. She died at Adyar on 20 September 1933 and was cremated there. On her death, many tributes were paid by Indian feminists.

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition; Annie Wood Besant, Annie Besant: An Autobiography (T. Fisher Unwin, 1893); Nancy Fix Anderson, ‘Bridging Cross-Cultural Feminisms: Annie Besant and Women’s Rights in England and India, 1874–1933’ in Women’s History Review, 3 (1994), 563–80; Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in Labour History (Continuum, 2009).

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  

SARAH ‘FANNY’ DURACK / Olympic swimmer and world-record holder

Sarah ‘Fanny’ Durack, 1889–1956

Olympic swimmer and world-record holder

In July 1912, four Irish suffragettes went on trial for breaking windows of Dublin’s public buildings. In the same week, the daughter of Irish immigrants to Australia won the first gold medal in women’s Olympic swimming, creating a scandal of her own when she rejected a thick, modest woollen swimsuit with ‘as much drag as a sea-anchor’ in favour of a close-fitting suit in which she won the 100m freestyle.

Votes for women had been won state-by-state in Australia, thanks to the efforts of women like Monaghan-born Mary Lee (also featured in this exhibition). However, the advances in women’s participation in political life did not translate into other areas of Australian life.

Sarah ‘Fanny’ Durack won her first State swimming title in 1906, aged 17. At that time, the New South Wales Amateur Swimming Association banned women from competitions where men were present. However, Fanny’s many successes inspired the public, who demanded that she be allowed to compete in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. The Barrier Miner editorialised, ‘if there is any athlete in Australasia who should go to the great contests it is this young Sydney swimmer,’ and, listing her constellation of 56 medals and 100 trophies, noted, ‘If this formidable array is not a record that Australia should be proud of in one of her daughters, then there is no such thing, as national pride.’ The ban was lifted, and a public appeal raised the funds necessary for her to make the journey.

In Stockholm, Durack broke the record for the 100 metres free-style with a time of 19.8 seconds. She also won gold for the 100 metres, the only individual event for women, setting a new record time for the event. She made a triumphant return to Sydney. When she stepped onto the platform at a Ladies’ Swimming Carnival in February 1913, draped in an ‘Australasian cloak of green’, spectators burst into applause; on this occasion she broke the world record for the 100 yard crawl. She now held the world record for all distances in women’s swimming. In March 1914, she broke the record for swimming a crawl in a mile of open water, 52 seconds better than the existing New South Wales’ men’s record.

In 1912–18, Durack broke 12 world records. This success took her on tours of Europe and the USA, accompanied by fellow Irish-Australian swimmer Mina Wylie. However, they were dogged by controversy. Arriving in the USA in 1918 without official sanction, they were then banned by the Amateur Swimming Union of Australia. In 1919, the pair refused to swim until their manager’s expenses were paid – in response, the USA Amateur Athletic Union threatened to suspend their amateur status. Other athletes protested their treatment.

A week before the Australian team were to travel to the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, Durack underwent an appendectomy. Her recovery was marred by typhoid fever and pneumonia, forcing her to withdraw from the competition.

In January 1921, Durack retired from competitive swimming due to long-term ill-health. Shortly afterwards, she married Bernard Martin Gately, a horse-trainer, and thereafter dedicated herself to coaching children. She died of cancer at her home in March 1956.

A self-taught swimmer, she pursued the sport despite an enduring nervousness about the dangers of deep water. Nevertheless, together, she and Mina Wylie blazed a trail in the early days of women’s international competitive swimming.

Sources: Irish Times, 13 July 1912; The Times, 15 July 1996; Australian Dictionary of Biography online edition; Barrier Miner, 4 Mar. 1912; The Times, 10 July 1912; Sydney Morning Herald, 24 Feb. 1913; Cairns Post, 10 Mar. 1914; Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1919; Sydney Morning Herald, 8 Jan. 1921; Argus, 28 Nov. 1956; Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Mar. 1914.

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. 

EILEEN GRAY / Modernist Furniture Designer & Architect

Eileen Gray, 1878–1976

Lacquer master, modernist furniture designer, modernist architect

Eileen Gray lived in Paris for most of her life. She moved there in 1907, when the city was a hot-spot for writers and artists, but she was too modest, and perhaps even shy, to break into those bohemian circles. She deservedly gained a reputation as the finest Western exponent of the Japanese lacquer technique and, later, was internationally acclaimed as a pioneering furniture designer and self-taught architect.

Gray was born into comfortable circumstances in Co. Wexford and, as a child, adored her artist father. She was raised between Wexford and Kensington. In 1905, she enrolled in London’s fashionable Slade School –where Eva Gore-Booth also studied – and dedicated herself to Japanese lacquer technique. The laborious process of applying 20 layers of lacquer, one-by-one, in a humid room over the course of three days, demands extraordinary patience, and the toxic substance can cause a painful skin rash. In 1972 her lacquer screen ‘le destin’ attracted a record price for 20th-century furniture, catapulting the reticent modernist back into the international limelight after decades in the shadows. Her response to the sale was characteristically self-effacing – ‘c’est absurde.’

While she did not break into Paris’s dazzling Anglophone literary and artistic circles, she did find flamboyant company; her friend Jessie Gavin regularly donned men’s clothing so that the two of them could go ‘to places where you can’t go without a man.’

Illustration by Szabolcs Kariko

Illustration by Szabolcs Kariko

Her Parisian life was turned upside-down with the outbreak of war in 1914. She packed her Japanese lacquer master, Seizo Sugawara and their unfinished pieces into her car – but wartime London was no place to sell expensive furniture, and her work was not to British taste. She returned to Paris, and in 1923, the Salon des Artistes exhibited an entire room of her work. This was a major turning-point. It was her first full-scale exhibition, and was acclaimed in the press. The publicity led friends to encourage her to take up architecture.

Her love of the Mediterranean coast seems to have developed when she convalesced from typhoid there in the early 1900s, and it was there that she chose to build her celebrated white cubist home, E.1027, in 1926–9.

The house’s name is testament to the help Gray received from young Romanian architect Jean Badovici: E for Eileen; 10 for the letter ‘J’; 2 for the letter ‘B’; 7 for the letter ‘G’. Each room of the house has its own external space because, in Gray’s words, ‘There must be still the impression of being alone, and if desired, entirely alone.’

This concern for solitude is revealing. Gray was extremely private, and before her death burned most of her personal papers. Peter Adam, author of her most reliable and complete biography, states that she had a series of affairs with men and women, and never settled with any one long-term partner. She was unafraid to be considered ‘improper’ or ‘eccentric’ for her desire to live independently.

One of her closest friends was Louise Dany, who worked as her maid from 1927 until Gray’s death. During World War II, resident aliens were forbidden to live on the coast, so Dany accompanied Gray to her new, temporary, inland residence. They returned to E.1027 to find it looted and stripped bare. Gray slowly rebuilt the house, completing it in 1953.

Sources: Stefan Hecker and Christian F. Muller, Eileen Gray: Obras y Projectos / Works and Projects (Editorial Gustavo Gili SA, 1993); Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Architect / Designer: A Biography ([1987] revised ed., Harry N. Abrahams, 2000).

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  

MARY ELMES / ‘The Irish Oskar Schindler’

MARY ELMES

Scholar, linguist and heroine of two wars

‘The Irish Oskar Schindler’

MARY Elmes, a Corkwoman and Trinity scholar, turned her back on a brilliant academic career to volunteer in two of the 20th century’s worst conflicts. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), she set up and ran children’s hospitals, moving from site to site as Franco’s troops advanced. When it was no longer safe to stay, she followed the Spanish refugees over the border into France and found herself in another war – World War II. She continued to help refugees and later risked her life to save Jewish children from deportation.

In a sense, Marie Elisabeth Jean Elmes experienced the turbulence of war from a very young age. She was born on 5 May 1908 into a prosperous – and progressive – home in Ballintemple, Cork city. Her father Edward Elmes was a pharmacist and her mother Elisabeth Elmes campaigned for the vote for women as treasurer of the Munster Women’s Franchise League.

Mary (as she was later called) and her younger brother John both attended La Rochelle, a modern and well-equipped school in Blackrock, Cork. The school imposed a “rigid curtain of censorship” in an attempt to keep the political upheaval of the early 20th century out, but without success.

A very young Mary was aware of World War I and, aged seven, knitted socks for soldiers fighting on the front line. The war came much closer to home in May 1915 when the Cunard ocean liner the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Cork. She and her family joined the thousands who flocked to Cobh to help the survivors. She would tell her children that the heartrending scenes she saw on the quayside that day stayed with her for life.

She also had reason to remember the Irish War of Independence. In 1920, the family business on Winthrop Street was burned out by British forces. Despite the turmoil, Mary Elmes was encouraged to travel and to study. When she finished school, she spent a year in France and came home with near-perfect French. She went on to study Modern Languages (French and Spanish) at Trinity College Dublin where she excelled. In 1931, she won a Gold Medal for academic excellence and, after graduating, a scholarship to the London School of Economics (LSE).

A former professor at Trinity, T.B. Rudmose-Brown, enthused about her “unusual intelligence” and her “exceptionally brilliant academic career”. In London, the accolades continued to come. In 1936, she won another scholarship, this time to study international relations in Geneva.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the same year, Mary would have been keenly aware of the political background but nothing could have prepared her for the suffering she witnessed when she volunteered to join Sir George Young’s University Ambulance Unit. She arrived in Spain in February 1937 and was assigned to a feeding station in Almeria.

She soon gained a reputation as a shrewd and able administrator who was clear-headed and unsentimental in the chaos of war. As the fascist army advanced, Mary moved eastwards, from Murcia to Alicante and then into the mountains at Polop, setting up and running children’s hospitals as she went. When her father died unexpectedly in Cork at the end of 1937, she missed the funeral because she refused to abandon her post when a replacement couldn’t be found.

She left Spain only when it became impossible for aid workers to stay and then she followed her beloved Spanish refugees over the border into France. Using the skills she had acquired, Mary set up workshops, canteens, schools and hospitals in the hastily erected camp-villages in southwest France.

‘I liked to make people do things,’ she explained many years later during a rare interview. ‘But I didn’t just give orders. I did things myself. I got things done. I had a fixed point of view and I went on with it. I was not emotional but rather clinical, like a doctor, or a soldier, I suppose.  Luckily, I became hardened. It allowed me to work constantly.’

She was single-minded in her work as head of the Quaker delegation in Perpignan. Hundreds of her surviving letters reveal a determined and resourceful woman, but also a very diplomatic one.

Those traits would prove vital when Jews in southwest France were rounded up to be deported from Rivesaltes camp where Mary Elmes spent most of her time.

Surviving documents describe how she ‘spirited away’ nine Jewish children from the first convoy bound for Auschwitz on 11 August 1942. She bundled them into the boot of her car and drove them to the children’s homes she had set up in the foothills of the Pyrenees and along the coast earlier in the war.

Between August and October 1942, Mary Elmes and her colleagues saved an estimated 427 children from Rivesaltes camp.

Her efforts brought her to the attention of the Gestapo and in early 1943 she was arrested and jailed for six months. When asked about it afterwards, she simply said: “Well, we all experienced inconveniences in those days, didn't we?”

When the war was over, she married Frenchman Roger Danjou in Perpignan and they had two children, Caroline and Patrick. She spoke little of the war or what she had done, refusing all accolades in her lifetime.

In 2011, nine years after her death at the age 93, one of the children she saved, Professor Ronald Friend, nominated her for Israel’s highest award; two years later she was named Righteous Among the Nations. She is the only Irish person to hold the honour, which is given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II.

Picture courtesy of Caroline and Patrick Danjou, Mary Elmes’s children.

Herstory from Clodagh Finn, author of Mary Elmes’s biography, 'A Time to Risk All' published by Gill Books, €16.99.

https://www.gillbooks.ie/biography/biography/a-time-to-risk-all

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Risk-All-Clodagh-Finn/dp/0717175618

SHEELAGH MURNAGHAN / Politician / Lawyer / Sportswoman / Civil Rights Activist

 SHEELAGH MURNAGHAN

 Politician / Lawyer / Sportswoman / Civil Rights Activist

NATIONALITY:  BRITISH

BORN MAY 26TH, 1924. DIED SEPTEMBER 14TH, 1993.

 "In Northern Ireland politics, I don't know which is the greatest obstacle, to be a woman, a Catholic, or a Liberal. I am all three."

                   - Sheelagh Murnaghan


Sheelagh Murnaghan was born in Omagh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland on May 26th 1924. She was the eldest of eight children and came from a family immersed in politics and the law. Sheelagh was educated at Loreto schools in Omagh and Dublin before attending Queen's University Belfast where she read Law and served as the first female President of the university's Literary and Scientific Society (The Literific). Called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1948, she was the first practising female barrister in Northern Ireland. She was a member of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for Northern Ireland and in1953, compiled a table of all cases and a consolidated index of every court case heard in Northern Ireland since 1925.
           

A keen sportswoman, Sheelagh played hockey for Instonians, Ulster and Ireland. She captained the Ireland Team in 1955-56 and 1957-58, and toured South Africa and the United States with the team. Reporters described her as "A diminutive but ferocious fullback." On one occasion she played at Wembley Stadium before nearly 50,000 cheering schoolgirls and television cameras. She continued to referee matches into the 1970s.

In 1959 she joined the Ulster Liberal Party-a cross-community organization with links to the UK Liberal Party. In November 1961 she was elected to the Northern Ireland House of Commons to represent Queen's University. She was one of just eleven women to serve in the Northern Ireland Parliament during its 51-year existence. Throughout her parliamentary career she was a voice of moderation and reason in a deeply divided society and a passionate defender of all those denied equality. She brought forward a bill seeking the abolition of the death penalty in Northern Ireland and she campaigned for the rights of Travellers. In 1967, she helped set up a school for Traveller children in Belfast. On one occasion she gave a tramp a room in her attic.

     In June 1964, Sheelagh put forward the first Human Rights Bill ever presented in a British or Irish parliament. Modeled on the United States Civil Rights Act and on Canadian Human Rights legislation, the Bill proposed the outlawing of discrimination on grounds of creed, colour or political belief. The Bill was rejected by the Northern Ireland Government. Sheelagh brought forward new versions of the Bill in 1966,1967 and 1968. She sought to end the discrimination in housing allocation, employment and voting rights, which existed in Northern Ireland then. She told the Commons: "There are degrees of citizenship in this country. In my opinion discrimination is not something, which should be lamented and forgotten about. It is something to be angry about. While there is one case of discrimination people should be concerned."
     

In her Human Rights Bills, Sheelagh also sought to end pay discrimination against women in the workplace. "This is something which cannot possibly be justified. I cannot conceive of any just argument in the case of a job, which is clearly the same job with exactly the same conditions and everything else, for paying someone less merely by reason of the accident of sex."

   Four times the Human Rights Bills presented by Sheelagh were rejected by the Northern Irish government. Many people from across the political spectrum have voiced the belief that if Sheelagh's proposals had been accepted the whole history of late 20th century Northern Ireland could have been very different. Sheelagh's parliamentary career ended at the 1969 Northern Ireland General Election when the Queen's seat was abolished. She served as a member of the Community Relations Commission from 1969 to 1972. Following the introduction of Direct Rule from London in 1972, she was appointed by Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw to serve on his Advisory Committee. From 1970, she chaired Industrial Tribunals. She was outspoken in her condemnation of the violence, which erupted in Northern Ireland from 1969. In February 1970, her Belfast house was bomber by Loyalist paramilitaries. She refused to be intimidated. She told reporters that she was not afraid, cleaned up the wreckage and carried on with her work.

     In 1983, Sheelagh chaired a Tribunal which heard the very first case of sexual harassment brought before a court in the UK or Ireland. The case involved a female apprentice mechanic who had been subjected to harassment by male colleagues. In her ruling, Sheelagh found that "the main reason for the harassment was the fact that she was a female in a man's world, and that it amounted to Sex Discrimination." The barrister who appeared for the plaintiff, Noelle McGrena QC, has stated that:

   "In making such a finding, Sheelagh Murnaghan paved the way for others in sexual harassment cases within these islands, earning herself a place among the pioneers who have properly influenced society's attitude to women in the workplace generally."

   Sheelagh's ruling helped pave the way for sexual harassment to be made a criminal offence in the UK and influenced employment law in the Republic of Ireland as well. The American feminist historian, Constance Rynder credits Sheelagh with demonstrating "the potential for utilizing existing mechanisms to incorporate sexual harassment into the general ban on sex discrimination."

    Sheelagh was seen as a slightly eccentric figure, who smoked cigars and drank brandy. She loved dogs and would arrive for Tribunal hearings with a pile of papers under one arm and a dog under the other. The dog would sit under the table while Sheelagh fed him treats. The Traveller women affectionately called her "the cigar lady. "She never married and was sometimes lonely, but she was "the linchpin" of her large family of siblings, nieces and nephews.

   Sheelagh Murnaghan did not live to see the Peace Process or the Good Friday /Belfast Agreement. She died on September 14th 1993 from cancer at the age of just 69. She once told a colleague that"Nobody could have a greater sense of failure than I have." She was too harsh on herself. While she could nor persuade the government of the day to accept her Human Rights Bills much of what she campaigned for did become law within a few years. Brilliantly described by the Queen's University scholar, Dr Charinda Weerahardhana as: "the wise doctor of Ulster's ills", Sheelagh Murnaghan deserves to be remembered and honoured.

Thanks to herstorian Ruth Illingworth for this week’s herstory.

Rerferences for further reading:

RYNDER CONSTANCE: "Sheelagh Murnaghan and the Struggle for Human Rights in Northern Ireland."   (IRISH STUDIES REVIEW  VOL 14.2006 ISSUE 4.)

RYNDER CONSTANCE :  "Sheelagh Murnaghan and the Ulster Liberal Party". (JOURNAL OF LIBERAL HISTORY: ISSUE 71,SUMMER 2011.)

NEWMANN KATE:  "Sheelagh Murnaghan" (DICTIONARY OF ULSTER BOIGRAPHY)
www.newulsterbiography.co.uk.

WOODS C.J    "Sheelagh Murnaghan" (DICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHY: VOL 6) (Royal Irish Academy 2009).

Winifred Letts / Playwright, poet, novelist

Winifred M. Letts

Playwright/ Poet/ Novelist/ Nurse/ Wartime Masseuse

Manchester & Dublin

1882 - 1972

“There are two things you did as Miss Letts which are no longer appropriate, now that you are Mrs Verschoyle – attend the Arts Club on Fitzwilliam Street and swim at Seapoint Tower” the words of 67 year old William H. Foster Verschoyle,  to his new wife, Winifred Letts. At the time, Winifred (Win) was 44 years of age - a published poet, novelist, playwright and a qualified masseuse who had seen, and been through, the horrors of WWI.  And Win was a lady who knew her own mind.

At 16, she persuaded her parents to allow her to move from boarding school in the English midlands to Alexandra College, Dublin, because she had loved so much the holidays she had spent in Ireland, at her mother’s home in Knockmaroon, on the edge of the Phoenix Park. At 25, she challenged what she described as her ‘Unionist, Protestant’ upbringing by attending the Abbey Theatre and, after experiencing a performance of Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’, she felt inspired to start writing.

What followed were two plays that were both accepted by The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre.  She was only the second woman – the theatre’s co-founder, Lady Gregory having been the first - to have her work staged at the Abbey.  She went on to publish nine novels and a book of poetry throughout the following nine years. And then the first world war started.

‘The Spires of Oxford and Other Poems’, published in 1917, dealt not with the glory of war, but with the gore – Win wrote about the individuals affected by wartime horrors; the boy who gave his precious wits, the young man lying helpless in a hospital bed, the deserter shot at dawn. Win saw this reality through her work as a VAD (voluntary aid detachment nurse) and later, through her work as a masseuse, treating military personnel who had lost limbs. Her poetry predates the protest poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.   

After her marriage to William in 1926, Win moved into one of his Dublin properties, 19 Fitzwilliam Square. Win survived the gloom of town life by befriending children who lived on the lane at the back of the houses, and by spending weekends in Kildare, on William’s country estate, immersed in the beauty of nature. She was active with the Fresh Air Fund, Wild Flower Society, Irish Women Writers’ Club and many charitable organisations.

In a 1957 interview in The Irish Times, Win described herself as “a period piece, a has-been, totally unknown to this generation.” In 1969, she told Maeve Binchy that the only reason she was interesting was because she knew so many of the people Ireland then cared about. For seventy years, Win’s life and works slowly disappeared from view. Until now.

Our thanks to Bairbre O'Hogan for researching and writing up this fantastic piece.

Sources:

Portrait Gallery The Irish Times 30 Nov 1957: 10.

The Irish Times 22 April 1969.

Letts, W M Knockmaroon 1933.

Ireland of the Welcomes, July-August 1952.

https://vad.redcross.org.uk/Card?sname=letts&id=133419&last=true (accessed 01-06-2019).

MARY PEARSE / Musician, teacher, actress, author

MARY BRIGID PEARSE

Musician, teacher, actress, author

1884-1947

Dublin

Mary Bridget (later changed to Mary Brigid) was born in Dublin on 26th April, 1884 and was the youngest of four children born to James and Margaret Pearse; her siblings were Margaret, Patrick and Willie. She was a musician, teacher, actress and author of short stories, children’s stories, and plays.

From an early age, she showed considerable aptitude for music, particularly the piano. Through her membership of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), she met Owen Lloyd who became her harp teacher. Under Lloyd’s guidance, Mary Brigid progressed quickly on the Irish and concert harps and performed at concerts of An t-Oireachtas with Lloyd's band of harps. She also won several prizes at harp competitions organised by An t-Oireachtas and performed regularly at branch meetings of the Gaelic League in Dublin. In 1910, Mary Brigid succeeded Owen Lloyd as harp teacher at St Enda’s (Scoil Éanna) in Rathfarnham, the bilingual school founded by her brother Patrick.  She also provided piano and voice lessons as part of the extra-curricular activities offered at the school.

Between 1910 and 1912, her literary works, which comprised largely of one-act plays or adaptations of novellas by Charles Dickens, were performed by the Leinster Stage Society at the Abbey Theatre. After the execution of her brothers Patrick and Willie in 1916, Mary Brigid chose to remain out of public and political life. As her mother and sister were increasingly burdened with the legacy of Patrick and Willie, she focused on teaching music and writing at her home in Dublin. Her first novel, The Murphys of Ballystack, was published in 1917.  Although the book was well received, this literary success was short-lived and she struggled to have her work published in the following decades.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Mary Brigid spent much of her time writing short stories, plays, children’s stories and articles. She wrote over twenty short stories and commenced two other novels, Curly and the Persian and The Romance of Castle Bawn. Her best-known literary work is The Home-Life of Pádraig Pearse, published in 1934. The book is essentially a collation of a series of articles which she contributed to the Christian Brothers’ magazine, Our Boys, in 1926 to mark the tenth anniversary of the 1916 Rising. The publication of the book should have been a personal and professional triumph for Mary Brigid, but it coincided with a particularly turbulent period in her life which was marked by the death of her mother in 1932 and a bitter dispute with her sister Margaret over the terms of their mother’s will and Margaret’s appointment as executrix. 

Mary Brigid continued to write and teach harp, piano, cello and mandolin throughout the 1930s and 1940s and participated in several broadcasts about her brother Patrick. She suffered from high blood pressure and neurosis and died, aged sixty-three, on 12 November 1947. The Home-Life was later republished in 1979 to mark the centenary of Patrick Pearse’s birth, but to date her other literary works have not been published.

Many thanks to Teresa and Mary Louise O’Donnell for this herstory. Their book Sisters of the Revolutionaries: The Story of Margaret and Mary Brigid Pearse is available at Irish Academic Press.

MARGARET PEARSE / Educator, politician, Irish language activist

Margaret Mary Pearse

Educator, politician, Irish language activist

1878-1868

Dublin

Margaret Pearse was the older sister of Irish patriots Patrick and Willie. She was an educator, politician and Irish language activist.

Margaret was born on 4 August 1878 at 27 Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street), Dublin. She and Patrick were enrolled at a private school at 28 Wentworth Place, Dublin in 1886/7 and in 1891, she attended the Sisters of the Holy Faith School, Clarendon Street. She excelled at school, receiving first place in all subjects and, like all her siblings, she loved reading and recitation. After completing her studies, Margaret studied Domestic Economy at the Rathmines Technical Institute (College of Commerce) and received a certificate of competency from the Leinster College of Irish.

In 1905 Margaret accompanied Patrick on a trip to Belgium to observe methods of teaching languages and approaches to bilingualism. This encouraged Margaret to establish a small preparatory school for girls and boys at their home in Leeson Park, Donnybrook in 1907. Her school was a success and it became the preparatory school of what would later become one of the most radical educational projects in Irish history, namely, Scoil Éanna/St. Enda’s, Ranelagh and later Rathfarnham. She was assistant mistress, taught French and religion, and ran the school until its closure in 1935.

Although Margaret took no part in the 1916 Rising, she was aware of ammunitions made and stored at St. Enda’s School in the lead up to Easter 1916. She described the Rising as 'tragic but glorious' and opined that despite the great loss experienced by her and her family, they took comfort in the fact that Patrick and Willie would spend eternity together.

From 1916 until her death, Margaret attended State and public ceremonies in honour of her brothers. From 1933 to 1937, she served as a Fianna Fáil TD for County Dublin and, in 1938 was elected to Seanad Éireann where she served for three decades. Margaret rarely spoke in the Dáil or Seanad. In contrast, she was more outspoken on contemporary political, social and cultural issues in her public addresses. Her politics were simple and transparent; she believed in a 32 county republic with Irish as its first language. She regarded partition as “the greatest evil at present in this country”. Outside politics and cultural activism, Margaret spent much of her time responding to queries relating to Patrick’s literary works, requests to visit St. Enda's and posting photographs, books and other memorabilia of her brothers. She was elected honorary life President of the Holy Faith Past Pupils’ Union and was a devout Catholic.

From the 1960s onwards, Margaret spent extended periods at the Linden Convalescent Home, Blackrock and was regularly visited by political and public figures. Unfortunately, she was unable to attend the official Fiftieth Anniversary Commemoration of the Rising, but was brought on a stretcher to Dublin Castle to receive her honorary Doctorate of Laws. Margaret died on 7 November, 1968 and received a State funeral.

Many thanks to Teresa and Mary Louise O’Donnell for this herstory. Their book Sisters of the Revolutionaries: The Story of Margaret and Mary Brigid Pearse is available at Irish Academic Press.

COUNTESS MARKIEVICZ / Politician, revolutionary & suffragette

COUNTESS MARKIEVICZ

Politician, revolutionary, suffragette

1868 - 1927

Sligo / Dublin

In her native Sligo and in Dublin, government office blocks, playing fields, housing estates and even a swimming centre are named after Countess Markievicz, born Constance Gore Booth – probably the most celebrated Irishwoman after Queen Meabh.

Credit: irishcentral.com

Markievicz is known first and foremost for her role in the 1916 Rising. During Easter Week, she joined the Irish Citizen Army group that took over St Stephen’s Green and subsequently retreated into the Royal College of Surgeons. Her tall figure in full uniform topped with her favourite hat caused much comment, and a rumour later spread that she had shot dead a policeman at St Stephen’s Green on the opening morning of the Rising. Since she hadn’t yet arrived at the Green at the time, the story - which has taken a firm hold in 1916 folklore - should be treated with deep scepticism.  

Credit: Glasnevin Trust

When Markievicz surrendered at the RCSI, she famously kissed her gun before handing it over to Captain Charles de Courcy Wheeler, who was a distant relative.

Markievicz was a member of the tight-knit Anglo Irish ruling class, so it was little wonder that she was related to Wheeler. Born in 1868, she was the first of five children born to Sir Henry Gore Booth and his wife Georgina. An outgoing and happy child, she became well known locally for her skill as a horsewoman.

As a young adult, she studied art in London and later Paris, where she met her husband Casimir Markievicz. With their only child Maeve and Casimir's son Stanislaus, the couple decided to settle in Dublin in 1903, earning a living first as artists and later in the theatre.

Credit: lissadellhouse.com

Although a lively city, Dublin at the time had the worst slums in Europe and the highest rate of infant deaths. By 1908, Markievicz, with her social conscience awoken, had joined both Maud Gonne's Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a republican women's group, and Sinn Fein. A year later, with the help of Bulmer Hobson, she founded Na Fianna Éireann – a paramilitary version of the boy scouts. Without the Fianna, Padraig Pearse would say, 1916 would not have happened.

By the time of the great Lock-Out of 1913, Markievicz was a committed follower of James Connolly. Always a woman of action, she organised a soup kitchen at Liberty Hall for the thousands of families who were struggling to survive during this blackest of periods in Irish history. The ordinary people of Dublin would never forget her kindness.

After the shattering failure of the Easter Rebellion, Markievicz's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She would spend several months in Aylesbury women's prison in England where she was treated as a common criminal, no better or worse than the thieves, murderers and prostitutes making up most of the prison population. It was the first of five terms of imprisonment.

Credit: Irish Examiner

In 1918, while back in jail at Holloway, Markievicz was elected to the House of Commons, creating history as the first woman to be elected a British MP. Like the other Sinn Féin members, she did not take up her seat, and in 1919 helped establish the illegal Dáil Éireann in Dublin. With her background in labour relations, she was the obvious choice for Minister for Labour. That made her only the second woman in the world after the Bolshevik revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai to hold a cabinet position in government.

After the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1922, Markievicz left government along with de Valera and others who opposed it. The "hardliners", as they were called, would spend the next few years on the run when a brutal civil war erupted between those who supported the Treaty and those who saw it as a tainted compromise. Sinn Féin had refused to sit in the new Dáil but, as time went by, it was clear that a compromise was needed if the "hardliners" were to have any influence on Irish politics.

In May 1926, the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil at the La Scala theatre in Dublin was chaired by Markievicz, with de Valera as party leader. She was duly elected as a Fianna Fáil TD at the elections of June 1927, but already ill, was never to take her seat.

On 15 July 1927, Constance Markievicz died, aged 59. The funeral that followed was one of the largest ever seen in Dublin, with ordinary citizens turning out in their thousands to pay tribute to their "Madame" – a woman who had always fought their corner and whom they had taken to their hearts. A true patriot.

Thanks to author Lindie Naughton for this herstory. Lindie's book Markievicz: A most outrageous rebel is available through Irish Academic Press.

KATHERINE JONES / Viscountess Ranelagh

KATHERINE JONES - LADY RANELAGH

Intellectual / Patroness of science & education

1615 - 1691

Youghal / London

Katherine Jones (née Boyle), Viscountess Ranelagh was born in Youghal on 22 March 1615. She was the fifth daughter and seventh child of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork (1566-1643) and his second wife Catherine Fenton (c.1588 - c.1630). Not much is known about Ranelagh’s educational background, as her father didn’t provide formal education for any of his daughters. In September 1624, when she was 9½ years old, Katherine left her family as she was contracted to marry Sapcott Beaumont, and thus moved to live with his family in Leicestershire. The marriage alliance broke down after Thomas Beaumont’s death when the family asked for an extra £2000 on top of the £4000 dowry already agreed. Thus, Katherine returned home for two years until at age 15 she married Arthur Jones, heir to the first Viscount Ranelagh.

Over the first ten years of their marriage, Katherine and Arthur had four children, Catherine (b. December 1633), Elizabeth (b. 1635), Frances (b. 17 August 1639), and only son Richard (b. 8 February 1641). However, the pair’s marriage was not a happy one, with there even being suggestions of infidelity on Arthur’s part. In 1641, Ranelagh and her four children were besieged in Athlone Castle for many months after the outbreak of the Irish uprising. In a letter to her father, Katherine recounts her experiences of this time, and states that the rebel leader James Dillon, not only offered, but also ensured her safe passage from Athlone to Dublin. After escaping the siege, Katherine moved to London and lived apart from her husband, forging a space for herself to become involved in many intellectual, religious and political activities.

Katherine made the most of her location and connections in London and very quickly became integrated into parliamentarian politics. In 1644, she urged Sir Edward Hyde to try to reconcile the king and parliament. In 1647, she was paid an allowance of 6s. by the House of Lords, and was later granted a pension of £4 by the House of Commons. However, by this time she was disappointed in Charles I’s actions, and expressed this disappointment in a letter to his sister (Queen of Bohemia) dated 7 August 1646. By 1648 she had no faith left in the king and now believed that he should be stripped of most of his powers and that the governance should lie with the parliament.

From 1643, Katherine was closely acquainted with the international correspondence network known as the Hartlib circle. It is believed that it was her aunt Dorothy Moore who persuaded Katherine to support Samuel Hartlib’s endeavours. Ranelagh shared his interest in education and new scientific investigations and was regarded by his circle as a patroness and was often described as the ‘incomparable’ Lady Ranelagh. Between the 1640s and 50s she was involved in Hartlib’s projects for educational reform, chemical and medical investigation and political reform in Ireland. In September 1656, Katherine left England to spend two and a half years in Ireland in order to help in the reclaiming of Boyle family estates in Ireland while also trying to pursue a settlement from her husband. Throughout this time Katherine continued to discourse with Hartlib and his associates, and struck up friendships with Irish based members of the network including William Petty, Miles Symner, and Robert Wood. Katherine returned to England on 15 February 1659 with two of her daughters and upon her arrival in London she continued to pursue her complaints against her husband, and was almost successful until parliament was brought to a premature end.

After the Restoration, Katherine moved to the Pall Mall where she was assigned two houses on the south side by her brother-in-law Charles Rich. In 1668, her youngest brother Robert Boyle (the famous physicist) moved into Katherine’s Pall Mall home, where the pair would live together for the last 23 years of their lives. During Robert’s formative years as a scholar, his sister is said to have guided him in many ways. Arguably her most important intervention was her convincing him not to join Charles I’s Royalist army, but she also guided his academic career by reading drafts of his manuscripts and offering constructive criticism. Thus, it is no surprise that after his move to London, they continued to collaborate on various projects, and her importance to her brother is evidenced by the fact the he appointed her one of the executors of his will, bequeathing her a ring for her to wear in memory of him.  He also intended to give to her his collection of medical recipes in order to ensure that they did not enter the hands of those whom he would not want to have them. However, she predeceased him by one week on 23 December 1691, and both are buried in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.

Throughout her life, various people celebrated Ranelagh’s actions, but none more than Gilbert Burnet, who was the Bishop of Salisbury from 1689 until his death in 1715, was able to encapsulate the impact she had on those she was connected to. While giving the sermon at Robert’s funeral, Burnet took the time to also lament Lady Ranelagh’s recent passing. While Burnet celebrated the pair’s connection by stating that, ‘such a sister became such a brother,’ he also elaborated on Ranelagh’s reputation separate to her brother. He stated that Ranelagh had ‘lived the longest on the publickest Scene, she made the greatest Figure in all the Revolutions of these Kingdoms for above fifty Years, of any Woman of our Age’.  He celebrated her charitable nature and asserted that she went about her endeavours ‘with the greatest Zeal and most Success that [he had] ever known.’ It is clear from his oration that he agreed with those who had described Ranelagh as ‘incomparable.’

Many thanks to Evan Bourke for this herstory.

Image credit: Michelle DiMeo

Primary Sources:

Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Honorable Robert Boyle (London, 1692).

Letter, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh to her father Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, 26 December 1642, National Library of Ireland, Ms 43266/20.

Letter, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh to Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, 3 March 1644, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Clarendon State Papers MSS 23 fol.114.

Letter, Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, 7 August 1647, National Archives London, TS/21/1/43.

The Hartlib Papers Online: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/context

Secondary Sources:

Evan Bourke, “A Godly Sybilla, an Erudite Wife and a Burdensome Sister: The Formation and Representation of Women’s Reputations within the Hartlib Circle 1641-1661” (doctoral thesis, National University of Ireland, Galway, 2018).

Evan Bourke, “Female Involvement, Membership and Centrality: A Social Network Analysis of the Hartlib Circle,” Literature Compass 14:4 (2017): 1-17.

Ruth Connolly, “‘A Wise and Godly Sybilla’: Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of International Protestantism”, in Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe , ed. by Sylvia Brown (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 285-306.

Ruth Connolly, “A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh”, The Seventeenth Century 23 (2008): 244-64.

13 Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Honorable Robert Boyle (London, 1692).

Ruth Connolly, ‘Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women’s Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle,’ in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, ed.

Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010): 150-61.

Ruth Connolly, “The Politics of Honor in Lady Ranelagh’s Ireland”, in Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland, ed. Julie A. Eckerle and Naomi McAreavey (Lincoln: Nebraska, 2019), 137-158.

Michelle DiMeo, “Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh (1615-91): Science and Medicine in a Seventeenth-Century Englishwoman’s Writing” (doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2009).

Michelle DiMeo, “Openness vs. Secrecy in the Hartlib Circle: Revisiting ‘Democratic Baconianism’ in Interregnum England”, in Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce 1500-1800, ed. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 105-24.

Michelle DiMeo, “‘Such a Sister Became Such a Brother’: Lady Ranelagh’s Influence on Robert Boyle”, Intellectual History Review 25 (2015): 21-36.

Sarah Hutton, “Jones [née Boyle], Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh (1615–1691), noblewoman associated with the Hartlib circle.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

CONSTANCE WILDE (HOLLAND) / Campaigner for suffrage & rational dress

CONSTANCE WILDE (HOLLAND)

Campaigner for suffrage and rational dress, and wife of Oscar Wilde

London

1859 – 1898

In Oscar Wilde: a Summing Up, Lord Alfred Douglas, the love of Wilde’s later life, wrote about Wilde’s marriage to Constance Lloyd. He characterised it as ‘a marriage of deep love and affection on both sides’. Oscar described Constance as ‘quite young, very grave, and mystical, with wonderful eyes, and dark brown coils of hair’. His mother thought her: ‘A very nice pretty sensible girl-well-connected and well brought up’. Yet Constance, who had a troubled adolescence, could appear shy and lacking in confidence.

A recent upsurge in interest – exemplified by Franny Moyle’s excellent biography Constance: the Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde and my own Wilde’s Women - reveals a bright, progressive and politically active woman who was as loyal and true to her errant husband as her name suggests. Newspaper accounts of the time pay tribute to her beauty but also cover her campaigns for the greater participation of women in public life, and praise her aptitude as a public speaker.

Constance spoke excellent French and Italian. She was also a remarkable accomplished pianist. Her strong views on dress reform led her to join the committee of the Rational Dress Society in order to campaign for an end to the ridiculous, restrictive fashions that prevented women from leading fulfilling lives. In ‘Clothed in Our Right Minds’, a lecture she addressed to the Rational Dress Society in 1888, she advocated the wearing of divided skirts, insisting that, as God had given women two legs, they should have the freedom to use them. She broadened her argument to suggest that women deserved a wider role in all aspects of life. 

A member of the Chelsea Women’s Liberal Association, Constance campaigned to have Lady Margaret Sandhurst elected to the London County Council. Addressing a conference sponsored by the Women’s Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association on the theme ‘By what methods can Women Best Promote the Cause of International Concorde’; she stressed the importance of encouraging pacifist ideals at an early age and insisted: ‘Children should be taught in their nursery to be against war’. Her speech ‘Home Rule for Ireland’, delivered at the Women’s Liberal Federation annual conference of 1889 was praised in the Pall Mall Gazette.

Yet, Constance’s world fell apart when her husband was arrested and imprisoned for gross indecency. Obliged to flee abroad with her young children and to change her family name to Holland, she did everything she could to help Oscar. Tentative attempts to effect reconciliation were brought to an end when she died as a result of a botched operation performed in an Italian clinic in April 1898. She was thirty-nine years old. Regrettably, Constance is often portrayed as a figure of pity. In reality, she was strong and courageous, warm and true, and she met the many challenges she faced, including debilitating health problems, with steely determination.

Thanks to herstorian Eleanor Fitzsimons for this herstory.

Sources:

Eleanor Fitzsimons. Wilde's Women. (London: Duckworth, 2015)

Franny Moyle. Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray, 2012)

JOSEPHINE HART / NOVELIST, POETRY EVANGELIST & THEATRE PRODUCER

JOSEPHINE HART

Novelist, poetry evangelist & theatre producer

1942 - 2011

Mullingar / London

“Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility gives voice to experience in the way that no other form can.” Josephine Hart, born and raised in Mullingar, Ireland was an extraordinary and gifted woman; poetry aficionado, captivating wordsmith and artistic Director – and that’s just grazing the surface of her remarkable life.  

Born 1 March 1942, Josephine spent her early years attending a convent school at Carrickmacross, County Monagahan, where she was encouraged by the nuns to recite verse at Irish Festivals. It is here, that she admitted to discovering a great love of poetry: “I was a word child. Poets were not only my heroes, they were indeed the gods of language.” 

Josephine had a particularly tragic childhood that gave her an overt and unpleasant familiarity with death. At the age of 6, she lost her 18 month old brother, Charles. Then, when Hart was 17, her younger sister Sheila, who had been brain damaged as a result of meningitis and paralysed from the age of 2, passed away. Six months after Sheila’s death, her brother Owen was killed whilst experimenting with chemicals – leaving Josephine and her brother Diarmuid as the only remaining siblings of the Hart clan. Leading Josephine to remark, “It sounds a very strange thing to say, but when I was really young, when I was 17, I had to look at life really hard and say, ok, I will continue to live.” Josephine then stayed at the family home in Mullingar for four years, immersing herself in reading as a replacement for University, which was her original dream.

Josephine moved to London in 1964, working in telesales and studying drama at evening classes. Fantastically, much to Josephine’s delight, just like her favourite poet, T.S. Eliot, she worked in a bank for a short while. Josephine eventually moved to Haymarket Press and became the firm’s only woman director. She married her colleague Paul Buckley, and had a son, Adam. The marriage lasted 7 years, however when Maurice Saatchi came to work in the firm, he romanced Josephine. The pair had an affair and married in 1984. Maurice and Josephine had a son, Edward. 

Josephine, who became Baroness Saatchi when her husband’s Baron status was initiated in 1996, was madly in love with Maurice, and he, her. They had a private relationship that was a meeting of minds as well as passions. Ed Victor (Josephine’s literary agent and friend) commented on their relationship, “I have never seen a couple more intertwined than Maurice and Josephine.”

It was Maurice who encouraged Josephine’s creative career. Having listened to his wife complaining of the lack of poetry events in London, he suggested she started one herself – and thus, the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour was born! From 1987 onwards, Josephine organized incredible poetry readings at the British Library, occasionally visiting the National Theatre or the New York Public Library. Josephine would read about the life and work of the poet, with high-profile actors reading the verse. The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour library now celebrates 16 great poets, with actors ranging from Ralph Fiennes, to Charles Dance, to Bob Geldof to Juliet Stevenson – and beyond. Most recently, her Poetry Hour took to the Abbey Theatre in Ireland with Bob Geldof, Lisa Dwan, Sinead Cusack and Peter Campion reading W.B. Yeats to a standing ovation. All of the readings from the incredible Josephine Hart Poetry Hours can be found at thepoetryhour.com.

Josephine’s poetry collections, Catching Life By the Throat (2006) and Words That Burn (2009) were sent free of charge to all secondary schools in England. Her first two novels, Damage and Sin, were re-published as Virago Modern Classics in 2011, with Damage being adapted for film by Louis Malle, and Sin adapted by Theatre Blu.  Her other novels include, Oblivion, The Stillest Day and The Reconstructionist, which was later filmed by Roberto Ando. Her last publication was The Truth about Love, which was published in 2009. 

The award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca saw Josephine’s West End theatre production debut. She also directed, Noel Coward’s The Vortex, Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince and Let Us Go Then You and I at the Lyric Theatre. Josephine staged the first ever West End production of T.S. Eliot poetry. 

In 2011, Josephine was to put on a weeklong poetry event at the Donmar theatre. Without her friends having known her fight against illness, to everyone’s shock, she was absent at the opening night. She passed away on 2 June from primary peritoneal cancer, two days into the Donmar run. She died in her prime from a horrific and rare disease, all whilst remaining secretly strong – she was truly, truly remarkable and the Donmar performances will be remembered forever. Her death was a blow to literature, to her friends, but chiefly of course to her family. Her husband, Maurice Saatchi does not bother to hide or deny his grief. Five years on, he still sets a place at the table for Josephine every day ("Queen Victoria did it for Prince Albert for 42 years" he points out)

Her legacy lives through her husband’s devotion. The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation is having great success amongst education and with their website, whilst Maurice’s Medical Innovation Bill has just been passed through government. Josephine will be remembered eternally, as will her passion, flare for life and gratification of verse. “Poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility, gives voice to experience in the way that no other art form can”.

A special thanks to Eleanor Carter, Former Director of the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, for this wonderful biography.

ADA REHAN / COMIC ACTRESS

ADA REHAN

Comic actress

Limerick / New York / Rest of the World

1860 – 1916

Ada Rehan was once one of Ireland’s most celebrated actresses, yet she is barely remembered by us today. Born Delia Crehan in Shannon Street, Limerick on April 1860 22nd (or possibly, 1857 according to varying sources), Rehan moved to Brooklyn with her family when she was still a child. A mistake made early in her career by the manager of Arch Street Theater, Philadelphia who billed her as Ada C. Rehan inspired her stage name. She adopted the new name and earned an international reputation as an excellent Shakespearean actress, lauded particularly for her roles in his comedies.

Statuesque, with striking grey-blue eyes and rich brown hair, Rehan’s appeal was much celebrated. According to theatre critic William Winter: “Her physical beauty was of the kind that appears in portraits of women by Romney and Gainsborough—ample, opulent, and bewitching—and it was enriched by the enchantment of superb animal spirits.”

Of course, there was far more to Ada than her looks. Oscar Wilde described her as “that brilliant and fascinating genius.” In 1879, Rehan joined impresario Augustin Daly’s New York based theatre company where she enjoyed leading lady status for twenty years, enjoying enormous success on the stages of America and Europe. For a time, she was considered a worthy rival to the great actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt.

In 1891, when Wilde was assembling his cast for the first production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, he wrote to Daly requesting that he consider the part of Mrs. Erlynne for Ada, insisting that: “‘I would sooner see her play the part of Mrs. Erlynne than any English-speaking actress we have, or French actress for that matter.” Daly turned him down.

Years later, Wilde, recently released from prison, was negotiating with Daly to write a new play for Rehan. Sadly, Daly died unexpectedly during these negotiations. For Rehan this was as much a personal tragedy as a professional one and she was touched by Wilde’s kindness afterward.

Rehan took over negotiations and agreed to pay Wilde an advance of £100 with the promise of £200 on acceptance in return for ‘a new and original comedy, in three or four acts’. Once he realised that the deadline agreed was wildly optimistic, he offered to return the £100, which he had spent, but he was dead before raising the required sum.

Rehan retired from the stage in 1906, and lived in New York City until her death in 1916. Obituaries were published in the New York Times and the Limerick Chronicle, and she was commemorated two decades later when a US Navy cargo ship was named the USS Ada Rehan.

Thanks to Eleanor Fitzsimons, author of Wilde's Women, for this fabulous biography.

Sources:

Letter to Augustin Daly, August 1897 in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart Davis (Eds) (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p.489

W. Graham Robertson. Time Was, the reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), p.231

Russell Jackson, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Contract for a New Play 1900’ in Theatre Notebook, Volume 50, Number 2 contained in Volumes 50-52 (Society for Theatre Research, 1996), p.113

DORIS FLEESON / JOURNALIST

DORIS FLEESON

Journalist

United States

1901-1970

Known as "the tiger in white gloves," Doris Fleeson, whose father was from County Westmeath, was regarded by politicians and fellow journalists as one of the finest reporters of the age. For more than thirty years and through five presidencies she probed the workings of political power and shared her findings in clear, concise language with readers across the United States. She began her career with the New York Daily News in 1927, where, as she put it "I belonged to the "who the hell reads the second paragraph school of journalism". In 1930, Fleeson married New York Daily News colleague, John O'Donnell, with whom she had a daughter, Doris O'Donnell. In 1933, she moved to Washington to cover the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. She had a great rapport with the First Ladies and Eleanor Roosevelt deeply admired Doris. In 1936 Doris became the first woman journalist to cover a Presidential election campaign. In the hitherto all male world of political journalism, she experienced chauvanism and was often patronised but she would never let the system get her down.

In 1942, her marriage to John O’ Donnell ended in divorce when she disagreed with his conservative politics. During World War 2, she worked as a war correspondent in Italy and France. On her return to America, she began writing a political column for the New York Daily News, which was syndicated to 120 local papers across the U.S.A.

In 1958, Fleeson married Dan A. Kimball who was a US naval secretary from 1951 – 1953. He absolutely adored her and they enjoyed a very happy marriage together.

From Truman in 1945 to Johnston in 1967, Doris Fleeson" scolded presidents' and tried to hold the political elite to account. She won numerous Press awards and was seen by many as " incomparably the best political journalist of her time." Politicians respected her and feared being "fleesonised." A lifelong political liberal, Doris despised McCarthyism, describing it as "a flower of evil." She hated racism and sponsored the admission of a black reporter to the National Press Guild. A feminist, she supported young women journalists and set up the Womens' National Press Club.

Doris retired in 1967, having penned 5,500 columns for the Daily News. She died on August 1, 1970, aged 69, only 2 days after the death of her beloved husband.

Thanks to herstorian Ruth Illingworth for Doris’ biography. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
SAYLER CAROLYN; "DORIS FLEESON; INCOMPARABLY THE BEST POLITICAL JOURNALIST OF HER TIME."  2010 (University of Kansas Press)

LADY MARY HEATH / AVIATOR & ATHLETE

LADY MARY HEATH

Record-breaking aviator and athlete / Campaigner for women’s rights

Limerick / London

1896 - 1939

This pioneering aviator’s early life was marked by tragic circumstances that, in all likelihood, shaped her character as a person who always resisted gender inequality.

Sophie Peirce-Evans was born in Limerick to violent alcoholic John Peirce-Evans, and his housekeeper, Teresa Dooling. When Sophie was 13 months old, Evans brutally murdered Dooling. He spent the rest of his life in Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital, while Sophie was raised by her grandparents.

In 1914, Sophie enrolled in Dublin’s Royal College of Science. She was an excellent student, active in the hockey club and the Agricultural Debating Club, and edited the school magazine, The Torch.

In 1916, she met and married Captain William Davies Eliott-Lynn. She postponed her studies to become a motor dispatch rider in France in 1917–19, while her husband recovered from malaria contracted on service in South Africa.

In 1919, she returned to Dublin to complete her studies while her husband established a farm in east Africa. He ordered her to find paid employment, so she worked briefly as a zoology demonstrator in Aberdeen before moving to London. She visited east Africa for several months in 1922–3 and 1924.

In London, she became involved in athletics and by 1921 was ranked 2nd in Britain and Ireland in the high jump. In 1922, she became a founding member of the British Women’s Amateur Athletic Association; by 1924, it had 23,000 members, and Sophie was its president. She represented Britain in the Women’s Modern Olympic Games in Paris in 1922, competing in front of over 30,000 spectators.

By late 1923, Sophie shared the women’s world record for high jump (1.485m) with American Elizabeth Stine. She published articles on athletics and, in 1925, read the preface to her book, Athletics for Girls and Women in a BBC radio broadcast. She presented papers on women’s sport at the 8th Olympic Congress in Prague, citing childbearing as evidence of the capabilities of women’s bodies.

A turning-point came in August 1925, when she became one of the first members of the London Aeroplane Club. She persisted with flying lessons despite financial difficulties, and received her private pilot’s licence on 4 November.

Lady Mary Heath by Séan Branigan of Storyboard Workshop

However, in April 1924 the International Commission for Air Navigation had passed a resolution banning women from operating commercial aircraft, treating menstruation as a disability. Sophie joined forces with journalist Stella Wolfe Murray to win a difficult campaign against the resolution, detailed in their book, Women and Flying (1929). Sophie thereby became Britain’s first officially recognised female commercial pilot, paving the way for other women to follow and performing public flight demonstrations and stunts. She was elected a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society, but as a woman was not permitted to attend meetings. The Society brushed off her letters of complaint.

After the death of her first husband, she married 75-year-old Sir James Heath, a wealthy collier owner and MP. She was henceforth known as Lady Mary Heath.

In autumn 1927, the pair set off by steam liner for Cape Town with her brand new Avro Avian safely stowed in the hold. She launched her famous south–north flyover of Africa on 5 Jan 1928, landing in Croydon on 18 May. For this feat she was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, an honour reserved for the most intrepid explorers.

Thereafter, her star went into decline. In 1931, she divorced Sir James and married her Jamaican lover Reginald ‘Jack’ Williams, who she met in America; the marriage lasted only four years.

In August 1929, Lady Mary was seriously injured when her plane crashed through a factory roof in Ohio. She never fully recovered, and it was probably as a result of long-term head injury that she died after falling from a London tram in May 1939. The tenacity of her early victories for women in athletics and aviation remain, however, to secure her pioneering legacy.

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online edition; Lindie Naughton, Lady Icarus: The Life of Irish Aviator Lady Mary Heath (Ashfield Press, 2004).

The Queen of the Skies will be celebrated in a new play entitled ‘I see you’, written and performed by Amy De Bhrún as part of the Herstory programme. 

Research by Dr Angela Byrne, DFAT Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. Featured in the exhibition 'Blazing a Trail: Lives and Legacies of Irish Diaspora Women', a collaboration between Herstory, EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.