Passion on both sides
“Personally I am dead against forcible feeding, which always ends with the release of the prisoner long before her time. I want to keep these ladies under lock and key for five years and I am quite happy to feed them with priests’ champagne and Michaelmas geese all the time, if it can be done . . . but these wretched hags . . . are obdurate to the point of death.”
- Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell to John Dillon, August 1912
“They are not men, they are not women. Woman: the idea comprises dignity, self-respect, refinement, reserve. I don’t find any of these qualities amongst the suffragettes.”
- Monsignor Keller, Youghal, Co Cork, 1912
“Women speakers who could hold their own, who could lift their voices in the Fifteen Acres [in Phoenix Park] , meeting heckling on their own ground, being good-humoured and capable of keeping their temper under bombardments of rotten eggs, over-ripe tomatoes, bags of flour, stinking chemicals, gradually earned respect and due attention: suffs were good sports.”
- Hanna Sheehy Skeffington quoted in Reminiscences of an Irish Suffragette, 1975
“Damn your war! Votes for women now!
- Francis Sheehy Skeffington, 1914
“I suppose when the necessity of knitting socks is over – the order will be – bear sons. And those of us who can’t will feel we had better get out of the way as quickly as we can.”
- Pacifist Louie Bennett to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, October 1914
“The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave. In Ireland the woman’s cause is felt by Labour men and women as their cause; the Labour cause has no more earnest and whole-hearted supporters than the militant women.”
- James Connolly, The Reconquest of Ireland, 1915
“We were as keen as men on the freedom of Ireland, but we saw the men clamouring for amendments which suited their own interests, and made no recognition of the existence of women as fellow citizens.”
- Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (with JH Cousins), 1950
“Under the new dispensation the majority sex in Ireland has secured one representative. This is the measure of our boasted sex equality. The lesson the election teaches is that reaction has not died out with the Irish Party – and the IWFL, which has been so faithful to feminist ideals, must continue to fight and to expose reaction in the future as in the past.”
- IWFL report, 1918, reflecting on the 1918 election, which produced only one woman victor, Constance Marcievicz
