Since the award was inaugurated in 1876, just four of the 83 people given the Freedom of Dublin city have been women. Last month, a further three women were added to the Roll of Honour – Ailbhe Smyth, Prof Mary Aiken and Kellie Harrington – but that still leaves a yawning gap. Seven women to 79 men.
In an attempt to address that historic imbalance, we asked the general public earlier this year to nominate the women they believed deserved to be honoured posthumously. A person must be alive to receive the capital city’s highest civic award but in featuring them in a book, we hope 80 accomplished women will receive a symbolic acknowledgement of their claim to the keys of the city.
Here is a selection of some of those in Her Keys to the City, a book that honours 80 under-celebrated women who made Dublin:
Anna Maria Haslam (1829-1922), co-founder of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association
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Best-known as a women’s rights campaigner, Anna Maria Haslam was also a true Renaissance woman interested in all aspects of the world around her. She was involved in temperance, anti-slavery and pacifist societies. She was a unionist, believing that social reform had a better chance within the union, a member of the Rathmines Literary Society and a supporter of the Fresh Air Society, which brought poor city children on trips to enjoy the cleaner air of the countryside.
When, in 1918, women over 30 were granted the vote, an 89-year-old Anna Maria was paraded to the polling booth by elated members of radical and moderate suffrage groups, demonstrating her key role in the long struggle to get the vote.
Margaret Lindsay Huggins (née Murray) (1848-1915), pioneering astronomer
After Margaret Murray’s mother died when she was just 11, her grandfather encouraged her fascination with the stars and taught her to recognise the constellations at her childhood home in Monkstown, Co Dublin.
Her interest in astronomy deepened and, by 1873, she was already an admirer of William Huggins’s work in the new field of astronomical spectroscopy when she was introduced to him by Dublin telescope-maker Howard Grubb.
They married two years later and Margaret, aged 27, and William, 51, moved to London where they began a decades-long collaboration that led to many discoveries in spectroscopy (the study of matter through its interaction with light fields). Fellow astronomer JB Hearnshaw later described them as “one of the most successful husband-and-wife partnerships in the whole of astronomy”.
Prof Mary Hayden (1862-1942), first female professor of Irish history
Mary Hayden was one of the first woman to study for a degree when the Royal University (now University College Dublin) was set up. She graduated with a BA in modern languages in 1885, a year after the first degrees were conferred on women.
She went on to get an MA and campaigned for the admission of women to teaching in universities. In 1911, she became the first holder of the professorship of modern Irish history at University College of Dublin. Her most famous work, A Short History of the Irish People, co-authored with George Moonan in 1921, was still being used in teaching two decades after her death.
She was a gifted linguist and spoke Irish, Greek and Hindi fluently. She travelled extensively and spent a lot of time in Greece and India where she learned Sanskrit. In her spare time, she cycled and swam and even learned to dive at 70.
Louisa ‘Louie’ Bennett (1870-1956) and Helen Chenevix (1886-1963), trade union activists, women’s rights campaigners and partners in life and work
When Louisa, or Louie as she was known, Bennett was asked to help reorganise the trade union moment in 1916, she said she had no idea how to go about it. But, as she told the Irish Press several decades later, “I was burning with enthusiasm. I had no money. No office. No furniture. Nothing. But I went out and I got one member to start me off. I put her name down in a twopenny jotter and hoped fervently for more.”
By 1918, the Irish Women Workers’ Union had more than 5,000 members and the union would go on to win several improvements in the lives of women, most notably two weeks’ paid holidays for all workers after the laundry strike of 1945.
Louie and Helen were partners in work but also in life. They lived together in Killiney and, together, campaigned for women’s rights and social reform. As a Dublin Corporation councillor, Helen campaigned for better housing, State-sponsored school meals and community playgrounds in the inner city.
The couple’s dedication to lifelong social and political reform is commemorated on a bench in the centre of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin.
Agnes (A.V.) Ryan (1890-1971), founder of the Monument Creamery chain of grocery shops
Agnes (A.V.) Ryan was left a widow at 43 with eight young children, yet she built a thriving business – a chain of some 30 grocery shops in Dublin – and raised an independent and enterprising family.
One of 14 children born in 1890 to farming couple Patrick and Katie Harding in Solohead, Tipperary, as a young woman she ran away to Glasgow to work in her sister’s grocery shop rather than follow her mother’s wish and become a teacher. That experience paid off because, with her soon-to-be husband, creamery manager Seamus Ryan, she leased a premises and set up the Monument Creamery in 1918.
The shop, just off O’Connell Street, was an instant hit with its fresh farm produce. Soon the couple had several outlets. When Seamus died suddenly in 1933, a rumour went around that the couple was bankrupt. Agnes responded to it by buying a Daimler car, one of the first in Dublin, and the 30-room Burton Hall in Sandyford. She went on to run a successful business for many years which, at its peak, employed some 500 people.
Deirdre Kelly (1938-2001), conservationist and founder of the Living City Group
Deirdre Kelly was truly a woman ahead of her time. She was a conservationist and environmental campaigner decades before it was fashionable, fighting against a wave of so-called progress that tore down historic buildings and replaced them with brutalist, statement architecture.
She argued that a city was about the people who lived in it. She wanted to transform central Dublin into “the living heart of a capital city”, a point she made eloquently in her book Hands off Dublin (The O’Brien Press, 1976).
She had been part of the protests against the demolition of Georgian buildings off St Stephen’s Green in what became known as “the Battle for Hume Street” in the 1970s and later marched with tens of thousands of others to protest against the building of civic offices on the Viking settlement at Wood Quay in Dublin.
When she died in 2001, her publisher Michael O’Brien said that she would have been pleased to see that people had moved back into the city centre and that some areas had been pedestrianised. “She would have felt that some of her battles paid off.”
Mary Raftery (1957-2012), groundbreaking journalist who exposed child abuse
Fintan O’Toole, a former colleague at the Irish Times, described Mary Raftery not only as the most important journalist of the last 30 years but one who changed Ireland significantly and for the better.
In 1999, her three-part television series States of Fear exposed the litany of abuses suffered by thousands of children in religious-run institutions. Three years later, her documentary Cardinal Secrets investigated clerical child sex abuse in Dublin.
The groundbreaking programmes, both shown on RTE, led to two commissions of enquiry, a State apology and a transformation in Irish society.
When she died, aged just 54, the then Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin paid tribute to her and said, due to her work, the Church was now a better place for children.
Her Keys to the City, published by Dublin City Council, is out now in hardback. €19.99. Ten per cent off online from fourcourtspress.ie
