Introduction

In 1870, the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage Journal reported that ‘Dublin led the way’ in presenting the first women’s suffrage petitions to Parliament and at the last general election ‘there was a greater proportion of avowed adherents of women’s suffrage returned among the Irish members than in any other of the three kingdoms’.¹ Such claims might be surprising as the work of early suffragists in Ireland, as in other places, has been eclipsed in popular narratives by their later counterparts, the suffragettes.² This chapter argues for the importance of early suffrage campaigners in Ireland. This includes campaigners such as the Robertson sisters, whose contribution has become somewhat lost in the literature, and organizations like the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association (later the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association), founded in 1876 by Anna and Thomas Haslam.³ This chapter questions the historiographical assumption that suffrage only occupied the minds of a small minority in Ireland in the long nineteenth century. It demonstrates that Irish MPs worked across party lines with likeminded politicians in different constituencies throughout the UK and could be persistent in their pursuit of legislation and submission of petitions.

The scant primary sources make tracing activities of early suffragists difficult, but this is not unusual in the realm of women’s history. Carmel Quinlan and Elizabeth Crawford pioneered scholarship on the early suffragists in Ireland and identified many facts about the key individuals involved at regional and national level.⁴ Scholarship has firmly established that a small number of dedicated, articulate activists in Ireland organized petitions with high numbers of signatories, liaised with leading campaigners in Britain and successfully garnered the interest of several Irish MPs to advance their cause. This will be explored in much greater detail in this chapter, examining their frequency, where they came from and who sent them, where it is possible to identify this. The historiography to date has not focused much on the contributions of Irish MPs to the women’s suffrage cause, but a detailed examination of the parliamentary record reveals more activity than previously recorded. Broadly speaking, Irish MPs did not make emphatic speeches in Parliament on women’s suffrage rights, but they did produce numerous bills, form strategic alliances with likeminded MPs from different constituencies and parties and were active in forwarding petitions.

The suffragists’ goal was to revolutionize their world and women’s place in it, primarily through securing women’s right to the franchise and expanding the societal roles they could undertake. To do so, they had to engage with both the public and their representatives at Westminster. One of their primary vehicles of protest was the petition. This ‘softer’ tactic has less immediacy than the militancy of the twentieth century, but was essential in building public awareness of the need for women’s suffrage and was, alongside other ‘soft power’ techniques such as leaving literature in reading rooms and public meetings, essential to the acceptance of women’s right to vote on a broader scale by the time militancy became the primary currency of activists in the twentieth century.⁵ For women of the period, publicly demanding to be taken seriously as citizens was a bold act. Alongside letters to newspapers and publication of pamphlets, petitioning was an important part of political vocabulary. Hawkins has highlighted how dozens of petitions between the 1830s and 1850s ‘voided or changed the outcome of constituency contests’.⁶ Petitions had enormous potential as a political act and the later suffragette perception of them as useless should not colour our understanding of their meaning and weight at this time. Petitioning on suffrage coincided with the heyday of petitioning overall in the late Victorian period as a ‘vehicle for popular politics’⁷ because ‘petitions were a crucial site of representation between people and parliament’ and ‘a key component of the shifting ecosystem of popular participation and representation during the long nineteenth century’.⁸ Petitions also ‘enabled local activity to be co-ordinated as part of national campaigns’, particularly important for Irish-based activists.⁹ The decline in petitioning came at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Richardson traces the failure of the 1896 ‘Special Appeal’ suffrage petition, which gathered 257,796 signatures, to an abandonment of petitioning as a strategy and the beginning of a move by some suffragists to militant tactics.¹¹

Petitions from Irish activists have been noted in previous work but not thoroughly analysed.¹² This chapter will analyse Irish petitions more systematically, shedding new light on this tool of political campaigning. Petitions were vital to the campaign for women’s rights more broadly, particularly as they were ‘borderline citizens’ in Gleadle’s analysis, unable to access other forms of protest and decision making.¹³ In the context of the time, it could also be seen as a radical act to raise a petition, as one anecdote attests. W. T. Stead, pioneer investigative journalist, observed of Anna Haslam when he heard her say she was not a militant: ‘“Not a militant!” he exclaimed. “Mrs Haslam, I’ve known you for the last forty years, and I never knew you to be anything but militant!”’.¹⁴ Haslam never picketed or served jail time, nor did she ever heckle a politician. She was instead an activist who used the ‘constitutional triptych’, as Gladstone termed it, of the ‘press, platform, and petition’ to decry the injustices she saw for women in Victorian society.¹⁵

Rendall argued in 2002 that there ‘is much which still remains to be recovered of the first 30 years of the campaign for women’s suffrage’. This is the case when it comes to the Irish part of this story, for, as Rendall also recognized, Ireland featured regularly in contemporary political debates.

The ‘question of the time’ as it involved both women’s place and Ireland’s politics was complex and has been poorly understood by many historians of the wider movement. Pašeta has called for more attention to the confluence of both issues, for while women’s suffrage was to the political fore, ‘the main political question’ was Ireland,¹⁷ an argument also highlighted by Urquhart in her treatment of Ulster women’s political experiences in this period.¹⁸

While histories of the era have sketched a broad narrative of the main actors and their methods, there is little in-depth research on the complex interaction between activist groups in mainland Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century.¹⁹ Nor have there been detailed studies of the MPs from Irish constituencies who allied themselves with pioneers such as John Stuart Mill. However, letters between Mill and Thomas Haslam and the minutes and reports of the IWSLGA reveal there were activists in Ireland who attempted to push forward the agenda for women’s rights, with the right to vote in national elections being their highest aspiration. There also appear to have been more supportive MPs than previously described in the literature. As they worked towards a wider public realm for women, the IWSLGA and its peers utilized the civic means available to them, and their engagement with politicians was crucial to advancing the cause.

The ‘particular’ case of Ireland

A note here is necessary on the wider political context and terminology deployed in this chapter. As in the rest of the United Kingdom, Members of Parliament representing Irish boroughs were not paid and were drawn from the middle and upper classes of society.²⁰ Additionally, before the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, all MPs were Protestant and commonly referred to as Anglo-Irish, many having deep roots in both countries, and Ireland had been governed directly from Westminster since the Act of Union in 1801.²¹ There is a rather charged semantic difference, however, between using the term ‘Irish MPs’ and the more correct designation, ‘MPs that represented Irish constituencies’.²² For brevity, I have used the former, but the complexity of politics in Ireland means it is important to acknowledge that many of those I refer to under this term may have seen themselves as British, or as Irish Unionists, or as distinctly Irish with British affiliations, or simply as Irish. This issue of identity politics in Ireland also has geographic dimensions as Urquhart has highlighted.²³ The elision between the terms ‘British’ and ‘Anglo-Irish’ is problematic, but perhaps also emblematic of the complex identities and loyalties of those of mixed descent. Irish MPs largely represented the two major British parties until 1870 with the founding of the Home Government Association, an alliance of pro-Home Rule MPs created by Isaac Butt that would develop into the Irish Parliamentary Party under Charles Stuart Parnell.

Many Liberals in Ireland were Unionists but committed to improving Irish laws to create better conditions for the populace. Many suffragists were also Liberals, some of whom became Liberal Unionists as Irish nationalism grew more powerful. They founded and became members of women’s loyalist associations while also pursuing suffrage activities.²⁴ They were not too niche to be ignored in political debates; the Women’s Liberal Unionist Association, for example, was mentioned by Gladstone in a Commons debate in April 1892 as an active organization that harnessed women’s energies for politics.²⁵

Women in Ireland in the late nineteenth century felt keenly the dual obstacles they faced in gaining attention for an issue that at best seemed farcical, and at worst a dangerous threat to wider political ambitions of men and their vision for an independent legislature for Ireland. The political clashes that defined the suffrage movement in Ireland are not unique and, as Beaumont, Clancy and Ryan have argued, ‘the Irish case, therefore, bears many of the hallmarks of similar clashes elsewhere in countries which experienced the consequences of colonial rule’, although many scholars debate Ireland’s designation as a colony.²⁶ Unionist leaders seemed broadly uninterested in promoting the cause of women’s suffrage, even though the Ulster Women’s Unionist Council had an estimated membership of 115,000 to 200,000 organized, potential voters.²⁷ Unionists may also have benefited from the property qualifications, as many Irish suffragists who would have met this threshold were avowed Liberal Unionists. Whether these women overtly agitated for the vote or not, any change in voting rights for women would have primarily benefitted this key group.

Irish women ‘shared the same general disabilities under English law’²⁸ as others in the United Kingdom and demonstrated solidarity with British counterparts by supporting women’s franchise bills that did not include Ireland, such as Mill’s intervention in 1867. As such, Irish campaigners had a strategic vision that covered both UK-wide ambitions and specific, local rights for women in Ireland. Despite this, and notwithstanding being well networked with the main campaigners, they fail to feature in many classic accounts purporting to deal with the suffrage movement in the United Kingdom.²⁹ For example, the IWSLGA was among the founding members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1896. In one of the earliest accounts of the women’s suffrage movement written, Ray Strachey notes the book deliberately ignored the ‘Home Rule Agitation’ of the period in an effort to have ‘boundary lines’ in the writing of this history.³⁰ As Pašeta argues, however, the ‘Irish Question’ was central to both an Irish and British perspective.³¹

The IWSLGA was keenly aware of the effect the ‘Irish Question’ was having on Irish society and made the decision ‘owing to the present condition of political controversy in Ireland’ not to have any public meetings between 1886 and 1895.³² The ‘political controversy’ referred to was the introduction of the first and second Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, which saw a split in the Liberal Party and an intensification of political debate on Ireland inside and outside the House of Commons. Thus, any history of the suffrage movement in Ireland must make the Irish political context abundantly clear to account for the competing political allegiances of suffrage supporters. As Pašeta has observed: ‘There was no single body of feminist thought in late nineteenth – and early twentieth-century Ireland’ and all were affected by the question of Irish nationalism.³³

The early years of suffrage activity in Ireland

Existing accounts of the early suffrage movement in Ireland have pinpointed Anne Robertson as a trailblazer. She organized public meetings in Ireland from the late 1850s and later organized petitions.³⁴ Some literature only names her, but the evidence suggests she worked alongside her sister Catherine.³⁵ They both attended the first meeting of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage on 14 April 1868, where Anne spoke.³⁶ Anne and Lydia Becker, editor of The Women’s Suffrage Journal, became friends. Along with Helen Blackburn and Frances Power Cobbe, Robertson’s work attests there was an Irish presence at the beginning of the UK suffrage movement.³⁷

Anne Robertson organized a visit from Millicent Fawcett to Dublin in April 1870. Fawcett argued that the ‘exclusion of women from political life is a gross and unjustifiable tyranny’ and Robertson offered ‘spirited support’, being identified in the Cork Examiner as a leader in Ireland of the movement for women’s rights.³⁸ But the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage Journal noted the attendance of ‘Misses Robertson’, indicating both women were known within suffrage circles.³⁹ This suggests the existence of a wider circle of supporters before the IWSLGA was established. The impression that Robertson was a solo activist may have come from Anna Haslam herself. Reflecting on Fawcett’s 1870 visit, she stated it ‘was got up by Miss Robertson who worked alone in the suffrage cause for some years’.⁴⁰ Undoubtedly an error in perception or recollection on Haslam’s behalf, it demonstrates how easily women’s contribution can be erased from history.

Newspaper reports also recorded the attendance of leading male politicians, academics and members of the upper classes, men who were key to the financial support and political advancement of women’s rights.⁴¹ The chairman, Sir Robert Kane, raised a petition afterwards, a key suffrage tactic, as will be expanded upon later.⁴² A private talk by Fawcett on ‘female liberty’ was held separately at the house of Lord and Lady Wilde, parents of the infamous Oscar, but it is not clear if Robertson had any part in this.⁴³ Anne Robertson appears to have organized other meetings, in public halls and private houses, but there is little evidence of their content. Crawford notes her in 1871 as being the secretary of the Dublin Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, although its records do not appear to have survived.⁴⁴ The difficulty in tracing her history has left Robertson as a marginal figure, but piecing together her archival traces indicates she may have been a more significant activist than previously thought.

Fawcett’s speech seems to have been the first major public event on women’s suffrage addressed by a speaker from outside of Ireland and it reveals much about the context of the movement for women’s rights. She was politely introduced to the audience by Kane as ‘the earnest and eloquent advocate of the social and political rights of the sex to which she belongs, and of which she is a distinguished ornament’.⁴⁵ The word ‘ornament’ appears to modern eyes a rather strange designation to give a keynote speaker addressing women’s fundamental political rights. Even when men supported women’s suffrage, patriarchal attitudes towards women persisted.

The early activists set the tone for suffrage groups as non-party, willing to work with any politician who would help to advance their cause, and this was true throughout the United Kingdom. This sentiment is echoed in the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage Journal in its discussion of the Women’s Disabilities Bill then before the House of Commons.

This may have seemed the most strategic decision, but, in Miller’s analysis, suffragists may not have been quick enough to realize the increasing strength of party discipline as the nineteenth century wore on, which made the non-party strategy ‘increasingly outmoded’.⁴⁷ The importance of collaboration across party lines as outlined above calls into question this assumption for Ireland.

Irish politicians at Westminster

On 20 May 1867, Mill momentously tried to amend the Second Reform Bill to replace the word ‘man’ with ‘person’ to achieve women’s suffrage. The 1867 Reform Bill did not include Ireland (only England and Wales), so any involvement by Irish activists and MPs was symbolic, a gesture reflecting ambitions to be included in future reform.⁴⁸ Almost 40% of MPs representing Ireland cast a vote on Mill’s proposed amendment, as Table 1.1 illustrates, a fact that has rarely been reflected on in the historiography.⁴⁹

From this analysis we can see that only one Conservative member, McKenna, voted with Mill, and he was later to become a Liberal.⁵⁰ Although the early suffragists never tied themselves to a political party, it seems in the early days this was largely a Liberal cause, both in Ireland and the wider United Kingdom. Indeed, the Cork Examiner (owned by Mill supporter John Maguire) uttered extreme scepticism in 1884 at apparent Conservative support for women’s suffrage, accusing Conservative politicians of trying to ‘overload the Franchise Bill with so many amendments as to render its carriage impossible’.⁵¹

Bowyer was the only one of the ‘Irish group’ to contribute to the debate.⁵² He had the distinction of being interrupted by Gladstone (‘No, no!’) upon declaring ‘as a principle that everybody was entitled, in the absence of some special disqualification, to exercise the franchise’, as Gladstone himself had previously claimed.⁵³ Bowyer asserted women’s right to vote on the same basis as men, drawing attention to the distinguished role women played in public life as monarchs, although tempering his pro-woman stance with the qualification that he ‘was no advocate for strong-minded women; but he believed they might exercise the suffrage without abrogating those qualities which specially adorned their sex’.⁵⁴ He also thought voting papers, rather than a trip to the hustings, were more appropriate for women, but supported the measure on the principle that many women paid tax and thus should be able to vote.

Representatives from three of the four provinces of Ireland, and a variety of political perspectives, supported Mill. They were a small minority (14%) at this vote, but still more than double those representing Scottish seats (at just five MPs).⁵⁵ These MPs articulated a range of other concerns in their parliamentary work, and they did not all demonstrate a sustained interest in women’s rights. William Pollard⁵⁶ and Benjamin Whitworth seem to have had very limited involvement with women’s suffrage (though Whitworth did present eight petitions in its favour) and inevitably others left the House.⁵⁷ John Blake (Liberal) is recorded as making 367 speeches at Westminster, although he does not seem to have championed women’s suffrage in any.⁵⁸ Blake, along with Bowyer, The O’Donoghue of the Glens (Daniel O’Donoghue) and Sir Joseph McKenna, are described in Dod’s as in favour of Home Rule, indicating that nationalism and suffrage could be harmonious.

Some MPs demonstrated an ambiguous approach to women’s rights. John Maguire represented Dungarvan and Cork during his career and was proprietor and editor of the Cork Examiner newspaper, established in 1841.⁵⁹ Upon his death in 1872 he was acknowledged at a meeting of the Edinburgh Society for Women’s Suffrage in appreciation ‘of the valuable services rendered’ by him on the question of women’s enfranchisement, suggesting his efforts were acknowledged UK-wide.⁶⁰ This was perhaps due not just to his parliamentary work but also to his ‘three-volume novel The next generation, which postulated what would happen if women were given basic rights’.⁶¹ While Maguire’s newspaper covered suffrage extensively, only a few articles reveal his personal beliefs. In an editorial in April 1867, Maguire chided those who derided Mill, pointing out that he had been proven correct in his thinking on many other matters. Maguire was not quite the feminist champion, however. He did not ‘believe the average mental capacity of women is equal to that of men’ and made clear that he did not support a radical ‘woman’s rights’ agenda whereby the woman could become the ‘father of the house’ and a ‘promiscuous mixing of the sexes in the House of Commons’ would occur, but he could not see why unmarried women should not have the ‘privilege of voting at elections’.⁶²

There is, however, some evidence of sustained support from some Irish MPs. In a letter from Mill to Thomas Haslam on 17 August 1867, a number of Irish politicians are named as supportive of the cause: Maguire, Blake and Pollard-Urquhart and one other who was absent from the vote in May, Sir John Gray, who attended the 1870 suffrage meeting in Dublin.⁶³ In September 1867, Mill wrote that a ‘good many Irish liberal members of Parliament both Catholic and Protestant have already joined the Committee’, suggesting there were more than I have been able to identify who offered support.⁶⁴ It is difficult to draw conclusions on why these MPs voted with Mill, but it is evidence of a small cohort of Irish MPs open to the idea of women’s suffrage.

Monacelli’s list of MPs who brought forward suffrage legislation in the House of Commons contains no Irish representatives.⁶⁵ This may be because they did not suggest bills solely named as suffrage bills, or bills that addressed legislation for all women in the United Kingdom. However, closer examination of a broader range of bills reveals that they did, in fact, attempt to secure both local and national voting rights. It is also true that Irish MPs often did not contribute to debates on franchise bills that left Irish women out. But if any of the bills proposed for Irish women had succeeded, they could have set a precedent for all women in the UK and thus are noteworthy.⁶⁶

Campaigners knew that the pressure on politicians must be maintained, and as such their efforts to change the law had to focus on constituents as well as MPs. The issue of women’s suffrage was not debated in the Commons between 1886 and 1892, so activists had to find other ways to keep the issue alive, and petitions, along with pamphlets and drawing room meetings, were a key political tool.⁶⁷

The founding of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association

It is not clear what happened to Anne or Catherine Robertson after the 1870s, but their early efforts were followed by the founding of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association (DWSA; the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association, IWSLGA, after 1898) by Anna and Thomas Haslam in 1876, attendees at the Fawcett meeting in 1870.⁶⁸ This was the second and longest-surviving suffrage group to be initiated in Ireland.⁶⁹ Membership cost 1 shilling and though subscriber numbers remained relatively low in comparison to the later militant group, the Irish Women’s Franchise League, it was well networked with British suffragists.⁷⁰ Quakers, or those connected to the community, were a large proportion of the early committee, allowing them to draw support from MPs also of the Society of Friends, such as Jonathan Pim, Liberal MP and businessman.⁷¹ It had MPs on its committee from the beginning, and ‘regular attenders’ included T. W. Russell (Liberal), Maurice Brooks (Liberal), Colonel Taylor (Conservative) and William Johnston (Conservative).⁷² Such men were progressive thinkers operating in an elite milieu in Ireland involved in multiple organizations interested in contemporary social problems. For example, MPs, academics, philanthropists and businessmen were members of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland (Pim was its sixth president); thus there were crossovers in membership of various scholarly, religious and activist groups.⁷³ In the case of Russell and Brooks, their wives were also involved as IWSLGA committee members, suggesting a deep connection to the cause. MPs interested in suffrage who worked with the committee and outside of it played a key role in highlighting suffrage in this early period but have not received as much scholarly attention as those who supported or blocked suffrage bills in the twentieth century.

Although the Haslams had been officially excluded from the Society of Friends because of Thomas’s religious beliefs, this did not stop positive relations between the Haslams and other Friends interested in social reform.⁷⁴ This included Alfred Webb, a Quaker publisher used by the IWSLGA, and the Haslams – and this was to prove key in the fight for suffrage. Living from 1858 in a largely Protestant Dublin suburb, Rathmines, Anna became the breadwinner in 1866 when Thomas experienced poor health. Together, they fought for women’s rights and outlined their ideas for a more egalitarian society in three issues of a periodical, The Women’s Advocate. Thomas Haslam ‘identified pressure on the individual MP as being the best method of proceeding’ in the May 1874 issue.⁷⁵ He believed personal entreaties to politicians from their constituents demonstrated that ‘there is reality in a cause which inspires so much enthusiasm’.⁷⁶ Haslam urged for an abundance of letters from constituents to prove serious intent and the IWSLGA later pursued this as a key tactic. Haslam believed the conversion of MPs one by one would ultimately win the suffrage battle. As well as letters, he saw petitions with high numbers of signatures as crucial. To have effect, they should be forwarded consistently and persistently because while petitions ‘do not wield the magical powers with which they are sometimes credited’ they could still ‘have their weight’ and ‘when the numbers swell to an aggregate of several hundred thousand, they exercise a potent influence on the public mind’.⁷⁷

The IWSLGA held 213 committee meetings under thirty-four chairs between 1876 and 1913, figures that demonstrate persistence and a wide variety of people involved, despite the overall small numbers of official subscribers to the organization.⁷⁸ It appealed to MPs across the political spectrum, engaging them as speakers and chairs for meetings and, crucially, asking them to organize and forward suffrage petitions from Irish constituencies. The IWSLGA was the most visible suffrage organization in Ireland in the late nineteenth century and was not joined by significant numbers of other groups until the early twentieth century, most notably the Irish Women’s Franchise League.⁷⁹ The IWSLGA chose not to join the later Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, an umbrella body for organizations in Ireland initiated in 1911, preferring to forge its own path.⁸⁰

The IWSLGA focused its actions in four main areas: securing support for women’s suffrage from Irish politicians; conducting meetings, and occasionally larger events with key speakers addressing issues of women’s rights; attempting to influence public opinion through letters to the press and the circulation of The Women’s Suffrage Journal in reading rooms; and the collection of signatures and forwarding of petitions to Parliament. The focus here is on the lesser-researched history of its petitions and its engagement with the politicians who presented it, including a broader analysis of the activities of Irish politicians at Westminster from the 1860s until the 1890s.

Petitions

As Miller and Stuart observed, the ‘suffrage campaign was, itself, founded by a petition’ in 1866,⁸¹ although thus far there have been only ‘scattered references to specific petitions within the vast historiography of suffrage’.⁸² Between 1866 and 1890 over 13,000 petitions were sent to Westminster in favour of women’s suffrage. These were free to post and had to be handwritten and signed. They were a public form of agitation and, given the numbers of signatures, were signed by far more people than attended suffrage meetings.⁸³ This section seeks to expand our knowledge of this key tactic in the pre-1900 period as it was a major focus of campaigners inside and outside the IWSLGA.⁸⁴

Petitions were perceived to be efficient forms of public protest and their popularity increased rapidly throughout the nineteenth century.⁸⁵ Even before the formal organization of suffragists into associations in Ireland, petitions were initiated by individuals interested in advancing the cause. Thus suffragists in Ireland were part of the widespread interest in ‘petition drives’ that developed ‘broad popular coalitions on public issues that cut across geographical boundaries’.⁸⁶ The usual course was to forward petitions by post or through politicians, and they could be directed towards either or both houses of Parliament, the monarch or the site of local government.⁸⁷

It has long been known that some Irish women signed the 1866 petition – including Anna Haslam – but so far little attention has been given to the petitions which were generated by Irish women themselves.⁸⁸ In addition, Alfred Webb, the prominent Dublin Quaker and printer, mentioned a petition from Dublin at the time of Mill’s proposed amendment that ‘was so poorly signed that I am ashamed to mention the number of signatures’, thus suggesting a separate document, albeit a tiny show of support for Mill.⁸⁹ Mill was to observe more optimistically that ‘Mr Webb is not sanguine about gaining much support in Ireland at present, but it will come in time’.⁹⁰ In 1868, petitions under the heading ‘Representation of the People for the extension of the electoral franchise for women’ were forwarded on behalf of the Robertsons – one by Conservative MP for Dublin County Ion Hamilton⁹¹ on behalf of Anne and others, totalling 528 signatures (1.2% of the total 42,555 petition signatures), and one of a total of fifteen forwarded by Jonathan Pim, Liberal MP (Dublin County)⁹² on behalf of Catherine and others, totalling 2,046 signatures (4.8% of the total petition signatures).⁹³ The record of such petitions is laconic – they were not preserved, but merely noted in printed parliamentary reports under formal titles. They made explicit demands for parliamentary franchise for women, usually based on their property qualifications.

Pim and Hamilton presented women’s suffrage petitions in June 1869. Hamilton offered petitions from Dalkey (106 signatures), Booterstown (56 signatures) and Williamstown (124 signatures), while Pim presented petitions from Ballyroan (20 signatures), Cork (24 signatures), Bruree (21 signatures) and Dublin (3,164 signatures).⁹⁴ These were part of a total of 167 petitions presented on women’s suffrage with 29,320 signatures, meaning the Irish proportion of signatories (3,515) was just under 12% of the total. This suggests lively support for the issue in the earliest phase of the movement.⁹⁵ In 1870, a similar petition was presented by Pim from residents of Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire, 13 signatures), Blackrock (3 signatures), Williamstown (3 signatures), Booterstown (5 signatures) and Dublin city (129 signatures), as well as from County Longford (2 signatures) in support of women’s suffrage. In total, Pim collected 155 signatures in February of that year, constituting 11% of the signatures forwarded in fifteen petitions presented in that session.⁹⁶ Unfortunately, as the petitions themselves were not kept, we cannot recover any demographic detail on the signatories of this, or any, petition unless specific names of petitioners are recorded in its title. However, the Dublin suburbs referred to are the more affluent areas of the south side, so one can speculate that they were, perhaps, of the middle and upper classes.

Early activists also rallied in support for the Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill between 1870 and 1873. For example, Pim presented 106 petitions in favour of this bill, three on behalf of the Robertsons,⁹⁷ but other women’s names emerge that have not come to light before: Margaret Forde of 10 Brunswick Street Dublin;⁹⁸ Mary Hatton of 17 Henry Street Dublin;⁹⁹ Lucy Fegan, Ellen Brennan, Anna Anderson, Elizabeth Whelan and Christina Coyle.¹⁰⁰ In the case of these individuals, it appears they forwarded petitions just with their own signature, exercising their right to an opinion, along with those who signed the 6,406 public petitions the bill attracted. Hamilton presented fifty-eight petitions between 1870 and 1882 (most in the early 1870s) on the Women’s Disabilities proposal, including one from Anne Robertson.¹⁰¹ Again, other individual women living in Dublin city centre and southern suburbs appear: Emily M’Nally, Catherine M’Loughlin, Catherine Brereton, Susan Jackson and Elizabeth Ward all had city-centre addresses,¹⁰² while Elizabeth Debitt, Eliza Langan, Mary Weston, Anne Kavanagh, Eliza Kelly, Catherine Andrews, Elizabeth Mason and Mary Keely lived in wealthy suburban areas.¹⁰³ The same date appears on many of the petitions, suggesting someone (Hamilton, Pim or perhaps one of the Robertsons, who lived near many) coordinated their creation. None are signatories of the 1866 petition. Further research is needed on these clusters of women, but their petitioning hints at an invested population of civic-minded individuals in Dublin, aware of petitioning as a legitimate form of protest for the unenfranchised. How many of these women became IWSLGA subscribers is unknown, nor can we discern if they joined other organizations, such is the fragmentary nature of the evidence. Crawford has analysed some petitions from 1870 and managed to trace names that suggest that ‘women who were certainly of the “trade” class, and were possibly Catholics, were already aware of the suffrage campaign’.¹⁰⁴ This palimpsestic history suggests a broader and more mixed base of suffrage supporters, in Dublin at least, than the IWSLGA membership record generally indicates.

Signatories to IWSLGA petitions throw its small subscriber numbers into stark relief, for while membership was small (at a maximum it had between 700 and 800 members in 1912 after thirty-six years in existence), it regularly managed to obtain hundreds of unique signatures.¹⁰⁵ One of its first actions was to petition in support of the Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill. At its second meeting in April 1876 it had 138 signatures, but the total finally amounted to 3,741.¹⁰⁶ It paid for signatures to be collected, at 5 shillings per 100 signatures, a regular expense noted by the committee, although who it paid and what networks it used is sadly not recorded.¹⁰⁷ It is noteworthy that the committee did not undertake this activity itself. This contrasts with Anne Robertson, who claimed she spoke to ‘thousands of the inhabitants of Dublin separately and individually in their own homes’.¹⁰⁸ However, other groups employed canvassers, a fact Pugh highlights as reflecting not just public sentiments but the resources groups had.¹⁰⁹

The IWSLGA minutes do not reveal its strategy for selecting MPs to present its petitions. There is little discussion of petitions at all, suggesting their efficacy and need was accepted by all and did not require in-depth discussion. Thomas Haslam had already forcefully outlined his (and Anna’s) ideas in The Women’s Advocate two years before the establishment of the committee, arguing that ‘Unless we are prepared to sign our names a hundred times within the year, should any righteous purpose seem to call for it; unless we are prepared to spend both time and money in the cause; we are not the stuff of which Reformers are made’.¹¹⁰ Haslam also took for granted that MPs would help any interested citizen: ‘They are bound, as honourable men, to do their duty by their constituents irrespectively of party considerations; and, unless their ears are open to such appeals, the House of Commons is not their rightful place’.¹¹¹

Petitions from Ireland in 1866–7 in favour of the Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill came from several Irish politicians as part of the 5,356 petitions forwarded with 1,650,408 total signatures.¹¹² A decade later, a continued commitment to petitions by Irish MPs is evident; Benjamin Whitworth, as noted above, forwarded eight petitions between March 1876 and June 1877 from Ulster constituents. Clearly this was thought to be an important issue in Ireland, despite the slow start of an organized committee outside of Belfast. The July 1877 IWSLGA meeting recorded several petitions sent in that month and the range of politicians forwarding them is noteworthy.

Taylor is noted as presenting petitions and joining the committee, but had voted against Mill’s 1867 amendment, denoting a change of mind in the decade before the DWSA’s establishment. Taylor continued to forward IWSLGA petitions in 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1882.¹¹³ William Johnston, although noted by Quinlan as attending regular committee meetings, is not recorded as forwarding any women’s suffrage petitions, although he did introduce legislation, as noted below.¹¹⁴

Newer MPs or those absent from the momentous Mill amendment vote were nevertheless IWSLGA collaborators. O’Shaughnessy forwarded fifteen separate petitions to Parliament on the Women’s Disabilities Bill (as well as six in favour of the repeal of the CDAs). Gray forwarded three petitions related to the Disabilities Bill, as well as another under the title of Parliamentary Franchise (Extension of Women) Bill. In 1879, the IWSLGA minuted that 3,191 signatures had been gathered in support of the Disabilities Bill, drawing on the same range of MPs as well as the addition of Parnell (Home Rule), Kenelm Digby (Liberal/Home Rule) and The O’Conor Don (Denis O’Connor), a Liberal who forwarded twenty-four petitions (and one protesting the CDAs).¹¹⁵ Thus, despite its Unionist leanings, the IWSLGA continued to lobby and utilize politicians from across the political spectrum. For example, Parnell is not generally associated with the suffrage movement and is often regarded as a conservative force when it came to women in the public sphere due to his role in stifling the work of the Ladies’ Land League. This group, including his two sisters, Anna and Fanny, invigorated the League while the male leadership were in prison and are regarded by many as feminist activists. However, records of the IWSLGA reveal that he raised two petitions for it in 1877: one with 465 signatures¹¹⁶ and another with 28 signatures.¹¹⁷ As Cliona Murphy observed, while Parnell could not ‘be described as an ardent woman suffragist’ he ‘did not actively resist’ the movement and recognized its ‘growing significance’.¹¹⁸ There is other evidence to suggest that Parnell may have been a suffragist – Ward notes that his great-aunt was an executive member of the American Women’s Suffrage Association.¹¹⁹ While this is speculative, it further suggests that in the nineteenth century campaigners could reasonably expect to be championed by politicians who stood on different sides of the Irish Question.¹²⁰

There were other MPs, such as Thomas Russell, a Liberal/Liberal Unionist representing Tyrone who was also a committee member and forwarded ten petitions in favour of women’s suffrage between 1887 and 1889, one of which specifically named the DWSA.¹²¹ Maurice Brooks was also used by the IWSLGA until his retirement in 1885; he forwarded eleven petitions on the extension of the franchise to women, including two that specifically named the DWSA.¹²² His wife, however, remained active in the suffrage cause; the 1896 report noted that Mrs M. Brooks was a committee member. MPs could also be asked to forward petitions from those not in their constituency, but perhaps known for their sympathies. Thus, Brooks forwarded women’s suffrage petitions on behalf of constituents in the borough of Hyde. Similarly, the IWSLGA had petitions presented for it by politicians outside Irish boroughs, such as Jacob Bright, who is noted in the 1882 minutes as having done so.¹²³ Further examination of Bright’s record reveals several examples of petitions from Irish constituencies, even before the founding of the DWSA. This exemplifies how activists utilized existing networks and structures to press forward its demands and indicates a connection possibly initiated by the Robertsons’ links to Becker and the Manchester-based activists. The use of politicians from different boroughs throughout Britain and Ireland by constituents in each country indicates the importance of viewing the suffrage movement as a network across UK and Ireland rather than as two separate movements.

One petition from Dublin includes a rare exposition of the petition text: ‘the exclusion of women, otherwise legally qualified, from voting in the election of Members of Parliament, is unjust to those excluded, contrary to the principle of true representation, and morally injurious to the whole community’.¹²⁴ Signed by 155 people, the main signatories were James Haughton, J.P., Anne Barbara Corbett (most likely Corlett) and C. M. B. Stoker.¹²⁵ Corlett was a member of the IWSLGA but used her position with the Queen’s Institute to forward petitions in her own right too. In June 1880, Dr Robert Lyons, Liberal MP for Dublin, forwarded a petition on her behalf that used similar language.¹²⁶ This suggests a strategy of using the name of the IWSLGA and the names of prominent members to lend credibility to petitions.

In 1884 and 1885, Hamilton forwarded thirty-five petitions (out of a total of 1,543) for the Extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to women, including one from ‘Members of the Irish Society For Women’s Suffrage’, with its president noted as Anne Robertson.¹²⁷ Hamilton is also minuted as forwarding petitions on behalf of the IWSLGA in 1884. This raises several questions which cannot be answered using extant sources. Why did Robertson not join the IWSLGA? Who were the members of this other society? Presumably, it was the existing Dublin Committee of the early 1870s, but why did it still exist on its own? Was there a crossover in membership between the two groups? I cannot trace any personal relationship between Robertson and the IWSLGA, but it is unlikely that in such a small circle of progressive reformers they did not know each other, and, as recorded earlier, Haslam attended a talk organized by Robertson in 1858. It appears in 1884 the two groups were duplicating their efforts and targeting the same politicians for help. This suggests either a rift between individuals in these groups, or, more positively, a buoyant cohort of interested citizens with enough members to require more than one group in Dublin.

The Reform Bill of 1884 excited much agitation from Ireland. The IWSLGA minutes of 12 March 1884 record a petition signed by the meeting on behalf of the chair, Henry Wigham, and plans to send a ‘memorial to Mr Gladstone begging him to include women householders in the proposed Franchise Bill’.¹²⁸ Unfortunately, the IWSLGA’s following two meetings do not mention how many petitions it raised, but do record its intention to send a petition to the House of Lords.¹²⁹ It also sent letters to fifty-four newspapers in Leinster, Munster and Connaught and at least thirty published them. It entreated support from readers for its claim, which was a ‘peculiarly moderate, reasonable and seasonable one’.¹³⁰ This tactical line of pressure on both the public and politicians continued throughout the year. By October it had sent sixteen petitions to the House of Lords and twelve to the House of Commons as well as ‘numerous letters’ to ‘various members’; this was recorded at a meeting attended by Helen Blackburn, who provided them with a ‘very interesting account of the present aspect of the question in England’.¹³¹ This phrasing denotes a certain distance between the ‘present aspect’ in both countries, despite their petitioning of the same Parliament. Unfortunately, 1884 was not to be the year for women’s suffrage, but its activities continued and in the absence of any public meetings, petitioning and canvassing public support through letters to the newspapers were the main methods used. Fifty-eight Irish politicians are named alongside others in the ‘List of parliamentary friends of women’s suffrage, April, 1889’ which appeared in the Publications of the Central Committee National Society of Women’s Suffrage 1889–1893. It detailed a range of supports, from public statements, election promises by letter and signed memorandums.¹³² The list included the nationalist leaders Charles Stewart Parnell and, surprisingly, John Redmond.¹³³ Such a guide allowed activists to identify which politicians could be counted on to highlight women’s suffrage. The fact that it was presented alphabetically, rather than regionally, suggests all on the list were understood to be potential allies, no matter what constituency activists were based in. Given that Irish MPs had to travel to Westminster, they could be of use in furthering the cause in London as well as in Ireland. For example, Justin McCarthy, Irish Parliamentary Party MP, presided over a pro-suffrage meeting in Kensington in 1886 from which a petition was raised.¹³⁴

Suffrage petitions peaked in the 1870s, declined in numbers in the 1880s but became popular again in the 1890s, and the Irish experience replicates this wider UK trend.¹³⁵ Evidence on petitions is not systematically recorded in the IWSLGA minutes after 1889, which perhaps suggests a concurrence with Miller and Huzzey’s findings that the 1890s saw an overall reduction in that strategy. However, petitions proposing local and national voting rights still occurred. Sir Horace Plunkett, for example, an Irish Unionist Alliance MP for South County Dublin, forwarded two petitions in June (263 signatures) and July (17 signatures) 1897 in favour of the Parliamentary Franchise (Extension of Women) Bill. The June petition emanated from a meeting presided over by Lady Margaret Dockrell, a member of the IWSLGA executive committee and an elected local government councillor from 1898, demonstrating the continued connection to Irish politicians through petitions and meetings.¹³⁶

Irish MPs were sporadic in their support for women’s suffrage in Britain, but they do seem to have been energetic at times in specifically enfranchising Irish women. For example, although Blennerhassett (Liberal) had voted against Mill’s amendment, in 1880 he moved in committee a clause to the Irish Borough Franchise Bill that would extend the franchise to women, suggesting a change of mind or an acceptance of local, rather than national, voting rights for women. Suffrage bills were presented ‘almost every year’ after 1866, but, according to Monacelli, ‘the question did not significantly reappear in the parliamentary debates until the 1884 Reform Act’.¹³⁷ Nevertheless the bills forwarded by MPs are worthy of notice for their frequency and, in the Irish case, for the commitment to keeping women’s suffrage away from party lines and outside of increasing tensions about the ‘Irish Question’.

The 1884 debates had some noteworthy Irish participants. Edward King Harman, Conservative MP for Dublin, drew attention to the 400,000 potentially qualified women voters in comparison to the 2 million men the bill proposed to enfranchise. He also highlighted a specifically Irish dimension to the legislation.

These arguments drew on the ‘moral respectability’ of qualified women, in comparison to the alleged ‘abusers’ within the lower classes who were about to be enfranchised, as well as the specific consequences of enfranchising a large proportion of Irish men. King Harman did not need to point out the majority nationalist persuasion of Irish voters in this context, but the imbrication of the Irish Question with votes for women is an element lacking in analysis in most accounts of the suffrage movement. King Harman’s speech, although loaded with class bias, does highlight a key point in the debates: enfranchising new populations always contained an element of risk, so why not enfranchise respectable women who simply wanted their say?

William Johnston, the Conservative MP who founded the Belfast suffrage organization with Isabella Tod, and attended IWSLGA meetings, proved to be one of the more active MPs from Ireland, despite not forwarding any suffrage petitions. For example, Johnston introduced a bill to extend the parliamentary and municipal franchise for women in Ireland in February 1895. This bill, which had different provisions for England, Scotland and Ireland (due to the different ways women’s voting rights developed), specifically stated that any person in Ireland, regardless of sex or marital status, who was a ratepayer, or who was entitled to vote at an election for guardians of the poor should receive both local and national franchise rights. This bill was drafted by MPs from different parties and parts of the United Kingdom, a collaboration which further strengthens the argument, made most strenuously by Pašeta, that any analysis of the ‘British’ suffrage movement must take into account the collaboration between activists inside and outside Parliament across the UK.¹³⁸ Most notably, at the same time as this bill was being proposed, Johnston and Justin McCarthy (and other nationalist politicians) vehemently disagreed on the erection of a statue of Oliver Cromwell in the grounds of Westminster. While the suffrage issue was broadly non-party, this kind of alliance by politicians divided so bitterly on the Irish Question is commendable.

In February 1897, twenty-six Irish MPs voted in favour of the Parliamentary Suffrage Bill and seventeen against. This disappointed the IWSLGA, which thought it had at least thirty guaranteed proponents of women’s suffrage among Irish MPs, with more yet to declare their sentiments. It was confident, however, that ‘our Parliamentary leaders will lose no available opportunity of pushing’ the bill ‘if practicable, to a successful issue’. This hope was fostered again by Johnston who proposed a Dublin Corporation Bill that requested qualified women receive the municipal franchise in Dublin. This carried by 91 votes in favour to 63 against, suggesting greater political support for local voting rights for Irish women, undoubtedly less controversial than tackling national-level suffrage.

Conclusion

In May 1870, Lydia Becker appeared exasperated that in Parliament: ‘The men get attended to first, as a matter of course and of right. If there is anything left after their wants are fully satisfied, a little of the superfluity is, as a matter of favour, bestowed on the other sex.’¹³⁹ Becker’s bitter words about women as an afterthought in political life take on a more potent resonance when considered in the context of Irish women, fighting not just patriarchal notions of women’s place but for attention amid the clamour for Home Rule.

Primary sources reveal a dedicated, politically savvy, well-networked bloc of middle- and upper-class activists in Ireland who attempted to push forward the agenda for women’s rights, with the right to vote in national elections being their highest aspiration. While the arrival of the DWSA is a landmark in the history of suffrage activism in Ireland, it is clear from petition records there were activists long before their establishment in 1876. The existence of more than one group in Dublin suggests a larger pool of active, interested citizens than has been written about before. Nevertheless, the IWSLGA was the most visible and coordinated group and, although it had few official members, they were able to gather thousands of signatures for their cause in Ireland and consistently engaged with MPs in forwarding them to Parliament, as well as sending some directly themselves. Petitions were a consistent feature of IWSLGA endeavours, following the edict of The Women’s Advocate that ‘petitioning should be a steady, not an intermitting effort’ and that ‘persistent steadiness of action from one year to another is the thing most wanted’.¹⁴⁰ This attitude to petitioning confirms Huzzey and Miller’s contention that the ‘time, money and energy that campaigners invested in petitioning is testament to its central importance within nineteenth-century repertoires of collective action’.¹⁴¹ Unlike other groups Huzzey and Miller refer to, where petitions were married with public meetings to maximize impact, the political situation in Ireland meant the IWSLGA used them instead of physical meetings at times. The IWSLGA also seems to have differed from British peer petitioners in the early twentieth century as the latter moved to a focus on the ‘visual spectacle’ of petitions, such as posting canvassers at polling stations in a drive to gain signatures from actual rather than aspiring voters.¹⁴²

Suffragists in Ireland enjoyed varied support from Irish MPs, an experience in common with women in the rest of the UK as members gained and lost seats, resigned or died. While this meant a core bloc of support was always lacking, it also might have sustained hope that the cause could be won as different politicians in different years offered support. There can be a tendency to downplay the achievements of early suffrage activists because they did not win the national vote in their decades of campaigning, or, as Liddington has phrased it, ‘it is easy to lose sight of the quieter suffragist story’.¹⁴³ But as early scholarship on the period by Margaret MacCurtain argued, it was the ‘persistent, non-militant penetration of Irish public opinion’ engaged in by the IWSLGA that resulted in steady franchise gains for women.¹⁴⁴

More than 16,000 petitions were presented to the Houses of Parliament asking for votes for women between 1866 and 1918. Thus, the decision to grant women the vote in 1918 did not come solely because of militant tactics of the previous decade, and Irish suffrage activists and politicians played their part in shifting public opinion. In doing so they instilled a feminist consciousness in many women as Ireland commenced its political independence which unfortunately saw a backlash against the egalitarian values aspired to by these persistent protestors.