Hanna Sheehy Skeffington: A Life by Margaret Ward Attic Press/Cork University Press 368pp, £45/£14.95
It takes a book like this to remind us how women have been written out of mainstream Irish history. In F.S.L. Lyons's Ireland Since the Famine, and Lee's Ireland 1912-1985, there is not a single word about the significant political activity of Irish feminists; Roy Foster gives Hanna Sheehy Skeffington a brief footnote. Their involvement in the Home Rule lobby between 1912 and 1914 in their struggle for the vote, and against the legal encumbrance of being "classed among criminals, infants and lunatics", might never have happened.
Margaret Ward set out to fill these glaring gaps in historiography. In Unmanageable Revo- lutionaries and her other previous books, she restored women to their imprescriptible place in Irish nationalism. In this biography of Hanna Sheehy Skeffington she draws out of oblivion the history of Irish feminism in the first decades of this century, a chronicle inextricably bound to the campaign for Home Rule and the nationalist aspirations of the time.
A campaigner, writer and activist, Hanna is not far removed from our times. She died in 1946 and is the wellremembered aunt of Conor Cruise O'Brien, like her a trenchant commentator on Irish affairs, but whose politics are closer to those of his Sheehy grandfather, an Irish Party MP. David Sheehy disapproved of his daughter's politics, and in the British parliament voted against the legislation for which Hanna went on hunger strike in prison.
She belonged to the Irish middle but not moneyed-class of the early decades of the century, those who might have expected to be the ruling class with the advent of Home Rule. Of her sisters, Mary was married to the Irish MP Tom Kettle, Kathleen to Francis Cruise O'Brien and Margaret to Frank Culhane, both members of the Young Ireland branch of the Irish Party. In the event, the Irish Party declined and it was the militant republicans who took power.
Hanna, one of Ireland's first women university graduates, dated her political consciousness from 1902 when she signed one of the many petitions to the House of Commons to grant votes to women. Her interest in feminism was stimulated by a fellow student, Frank Skeffington, already a declared feminist.
They married, exchanged names as a symbol of equality and made equal opportunity for women in university education their first campaign. Although both came from a strong, Catholic background, they had "thought themselves out of" religion and became convinced rationalists and humanists, an approach from which neither wavered despite painful relations with their families.
In 1908 Hanna co-founded the Irish Women's Franchise League, a more militant organisation than the existing suffrage association, with the immediate priority of persuading the Irish MPs to vote for women's suffrage in the House of Commons.
Irish women's campaign for the vote was enmeshed in the nationalist aspiration for freedom, and more immediately in the Irish Party's pressure for Home Rule. Looking for suffrage from an English parliament was anathema to Irish republicanism; time enough to seek votes for women when they had won an Irish parliament. On the other hand, the Irish MPs were opposed to women's suffrage and invariably voted against it. John Redmond told Hanna that they feared clerical domination if women got the vote.
When Redmond refused to allow a clause in the Home Rule Bill of 1912 granting votes to women, the IWFL were left with no other option but aggressive militancy. With more than a thousand members, the activists embarked on two years of protest meetings, leafleting, heckling, door-stepping politicians and windowbreaking that landed them repeatedly in jail, activities which had a significant effect on the public life of the time. When one reads Margaret Ward's account of that period it is astounding that such consistent political action was omitted from Irish history.
After the murder of her husband in 1916, Hanna fought for and got an inquiry and the conviction of the murderer, refusing the £10,000 bribe that Asquith personally offered her. She joined Sinn Fein in 1918 and took the anti-Treaty side after Independence, but re signed from Fianna Fail when it entered the Dail. She continued to fight for women's emancipation through protest and writing when government after government sought to row back on women's freedom. Sean Lemass remarked that he would like to see woman suffrage repealed, as women should vote with their menfolk and their vote was unnecessary duplication.
When Lemass's Conditions of Employment Act (1935) limited the right of women to work she strongly opposed it, as she did also the articles in the 1937 Constitution that defined women's place as the home. Throughout her life Hanna remained a prominent, controversial and significant Irish feminist, a foremother whose story and memory should be cherished.
Ethna Viney is a writer and critic