In December 1918, Constance Markievicz became the first women ever elected to the British Parliament. An ardent Irish nationalist who had taken part in the Easter Rising in 1916, Markievicz had run as a member of Sinn Féin and so refused to take her seat in Westminster, serving instead in the revolutionary Dáil Éireann in Dublin.Footnote ¹ Women were not represented in the British Parliament until Lady Astor took her seat in December 1919.Footnote ² The fact that an Irish separatist was the only woman elected in the first election held in which women over thirty could vote was described by Cheryl Law as a “cruel irony for the women's movement's election hopes,” and indeed, Markievicz's election is often ignored or treated as a bizarre footnote in accounts of the British suffrage movement.Footnote ³ Yet it is an authentic reflection of the rich intersection between British feminism and Irish nationalism. Markievicz was not the only Irish nationalist female candidate to run in 1918: Charlotte Despard ran for the Labour Party with the backing of the Women's International League (WIL).Footnote ⁴ Markievicz was exceptional, but she was also one of many women whose work for peace, suffrage, and Irish self-determination drew them into public politics.

This article takes up a lesser-known aspect of women's political participation at this time: the efforts made by women in Britain in support of Irish self-determination during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21. It examines the work, sometimes disparate and sometimes intersecting, of two particular groups of women: middle-class British women, nearly all former suffragists, who campaigned against coercion in Ireland, and working-class Irish women, members of a minority culture in Britain, who supported more radical republican efforts to achieve Irish independence. This article argues that the advent of female suffrage changed the landscape of women's political mobilization in distinct ways. In the case of the Anglo-Irish War, women were, for the first time, putting pressure on a government that they had helped to elect. James Epstein, writing about nineteenth-century radical politics, has argued that “the constitutionalist notion of citizenship was predominantly male.”Footnote ⁵ The Irish War therefore occurred at a moment of discursive transition in which citizenship was being regendered and women were being addressed in their new status as voters. Moreover, middle-class women made use of new access to positions of power and influence within the political parties to further their views on the Anglo-Irish War. At the same time, women's patterns of advocacy over the Irish War were recognizably derived from earlier forms of women's political activity. The use of women's auxiliary organizations and special meetings and the strategic blurring of the public and private spheres through the political use of domestic spaces all indicate the strength of continuities with nineteenth-century antecedents.

The women who worked for Irish self-determination were part of a larger process of reconceptualizing Britain's global role after World War I. For Irish republicans, the British Empire was the enemy of rightful national self-determination. Midde-class former suffragists, however, situated their Irish advocacy in the context of debates over pacifism and the new internationalism. For many of them, Britain's moral claim to a global role rested on its commitments to humanitarianism and justice, a stance that opened the door to a critique of imperialism while also maintaining an implicit connection to the idea of a British civilizing mission. These women, while working closely with their former Irish suffragist colleagues, were unable to forge alliances with the immigrant and minority community of the working-class Irish republican women in their midst, underscoring the ways in which both class and nationality challenged a notional common interest based on sex. Virginia Woolf famously said that “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”Footnote ⁶ Yet the women examined here claimed emphatically national citizenships, whether of a future free Ireland in the case of republican women or of a better Britain in the case of middle-class activists. That citizenship was symbolized by suffrage, but it manifested itself through a variety of activities, ranging from public advocacy to clandestine gunrunning, and in a variety of spaces, from the public stage to politicized private drawing rooms.Footnote ⁷ Ultimately, women's claims to these new forms of citizenship were shaped by political beliefs about the ethical status of empire and the future of the international order.

The state of women's politics after the granting of partial suffrage in 1918 has been the subject of much debate and revision. With full suffrage equality delayed until 1928, the decade following the war has defied easy interpretation. Some scholars have interpreted the period as a trough for British feminism in which women, like society in general, were trapped once more in a discourse of naturalized gender roles and domesticity.Footnote ⁸ More recently, though, scholars such as Pat Thane have reinterpreted the period as one in which women gained influence not reflected by the relatively small numbers of female MPs.Footnote ⁹ These more optimistic scholars tend to see not a splintered women's movement but rather a diverse organizational network enjoying considerable continuity and tackling, in Cheryl Law's words, a “vast catalogue of legislative reform” in 1918–22 that advanced women's rights in multiple areas.Footnote ¹⁰ The Irish episode is therefore an important element in the history of British women in the interwar years, contributing to a growing body of scholarship emphasizing the vibrant and multifaceted nature of women's political activities at that time.

Decades of nationalist agitation had resulted in a Home Rule Bill for Ireland, passed in 1914 but immediately suspended for the duration of the war in Europe. Over the course of World War I, views on Irish autonomy polarized, with physical-force separatism in particular gaining strength after the brutal suppression of the Easter Rising. In the election of 1918, the nationalist party Sinn Féin performed well, and Markievicz joined her fellow party members in a new provisional government headed by the Dáil Éireann.Footnote ¹¹ Within a year, a guerrilla war had developed, pitting the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against Crown Forces made up of regular soldiers, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and its two British-recruited units, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans.Footnote ¹² All of these forces, but especially the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans, soon became notorious for their role in the cycle of ambushes, violent reprisals, and counterreprisals against property, combatants, and civilians that came to characterize the conflict.Footnote ¹³ Reprisals carried out by Crown Forces have been the source of enduring bitterness; they ranged from small-scale personal intimidation to large-scale arson and destruction of property, but they shared the aim of deterring IRA attacks and undermining civilian support for militants.Footnote ¹⁴ In December 1920, the British regime declared martial law in parts of southwestern Ireland, sanctioning, among other things, internment and the use of selective reprisals against civilians suspected of harboring IRA members.Footnote ¹⁵

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The conduct of the Anglo-Irish War, and in particular the specter of violent reprisals against civilians and their property, whether officially sanctioned or not, spurred the creation of a protest movement in Britain. The war was deeply unpopular in Britain, and its opponents were far more outspoken than its proponents. Whereas the military justified reprisals as a method of effectively striking back at the elusive IRA and of eroding its local popularity, many people in Britain found them brutal, unjust, and corrosive to the goodwill and order that held Britain and its empire together.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, the British government's use of harsh tactics to keep Ireland within the union seemed out of tune with the moment: the rights of small nations to self-determination had been a central element in the justification for participating in World War I, and it was a touchstone of the Wilsonian ideals that underpinned the new League of Nations.Footnote ¹⁷ In response to the policy of reprisals and repression, a small but serious antiwar campaign developed in Britain. The Peace with Ireland Council was staffed mainly by dissident Liberals and a few dissident Conservatives; allied with it were the London office of the Irish Dominion League (IDL) and the noncoalition Liberal Party under H. H. Asquith.Footnote ¹⁸ The Labour Party also launched an investigation into conditions in Ireland and, subsequently, its own propaganda campaign.Footnote ¹⁹ These efforts, which reached their height in the winter of 1920–21, broadly supported Irish self-determination, usually in the form of a dominion, and scathingly denounced reprisals and repression by the Crown Forces in Ireland. Historians have generally concluded that the antireprisals campaign helped to push Prime Minister David Lloyd George to the negotiating table.Footnote ²⁰ Women played important roles in all aspects of these efforts. They were prominent actors in all of the campaigns against reprisals, and the WIL in particular made Ireland one of its first postwar issues.

The issue of pacifism had splintered the suffrage movement during World War I.Footnote ²¹ The “peace women” helped to found an international women's peace movement that endured into the interwar decades and agitated on Ireland and other issues.Footnote ²² The International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (later the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) had developed out of a congress of women representing twelve countries at The Hague in April 1915, and its British branch, the WIL, was founded in October 1915.Footnote ²³ Immediately after the war, the WIL had about 4,200 members in fifty-one branches.Footnote ²⁴ Both membership and the numbers of local branches fell in the first several years of the peace, however, until the WIL compensated by allowing local groups, such as Labour Women's Sections and Women's Co-operative Guild branches, to affiliate with it in 1924.Footnote ²⁵

The WIL invested considerable energy in advocating for Irish self-determination in the fall of 1920: as K. E. Royds wrote to Catherine Marshall in November, “We are occupying ourselves mainly about Ireland.”Footnote ²⁶ The WIL directed some of its attention at the state, protesting against the government's policy on Irish hunger strikers, a policy which ultimately led to the widely publicized death of Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, in Brixton.Footnote ²⁷ More often, however, its efforts were turned toward the public, broadly conceived to include both the British and the larger world community. Members of the WIL wished “to mould public opinion” in support of a policy of withdrawing troops from Ireland and allowing self-determination.Footnote ²⁸ The Manchester branch, which represented 750 members, sent a delegation to Ireland to investigate the conduct of the war there. Marshall was very much in favor of the WIL's delegation to Ireland, which she hoped would bring back not only information but also “some representative Irish women” to fuel a propaganda campaign in Britain.Footnote ²⁹ With regard to Ulster, members of the delegation concluded, “[D]ifferences between the Irish people there would be much more readily settled if Great Britain ceased interference.”Footnote ³⁰ They argued that the government should withdraw its armed forces, release political prisoners, and transfer power to locally elected bodies.Footnote ³¹ The delegation's findings were publicized through a series of “large and enthusiastic meetings” in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Bristol, and elsewhere in autumn 1920.Footnote ³² At a London meeting at Kingsway Hall in mid-November, there were lantern slides and speakers, including Despard, Helen Chenevix of the Irishwomen's International League (IIL), Annot Robinson, and Helena Swanwick, all of whom had been involved with the suffrage movement in some fashion.Footnote ³³

Members of the WIL coordinated their efforts with other British organizations working on Ireland. Marshall drew on her family connection to the IDL to generate suitable language for a WIL resolution on Ireland, while Swanwick, the chair of the WIL, corresponded with the Peace with Ireland Council's George Berkeley.Footnote ³⁴ Other women organized their own gender-specific efforts on the Irish question, sometimes in cooperation with mixed-sex groups. On 18 March 1921, there was a special women's meeting against reprisals held at the Central Hall, Westminster. Organized jointly by a committee headed by Lady Bryce and the Peace with Ireland Council, this was one of the largest antireprisals meetings the movement held.Footnote ³⁵ The roster of speakers reflected a rising generation of female political leadership, including Lady Violet Bonham Carter and Margaret Bondfield. Lady Byles recalled that the Central Hall was “[p]acked to suffocation” and that the audience included “some dressy women” who thought the criticism ought to be directed at Sinn Féin instead.Footnote ³⁶ Edith Stopford called this meeting the “most interesting” of the movement, as well as one of the most lucrative. The issue of pacifism still had the power to divide women's political organizations, as it had divided the suffragists during World War I. Stopford remembered that the meeting was nearly called off because of a quarrel over whether to include a peace demand in the resolution that the meeting would pass; the demand was ultimately included.Footnote ³⁷ The success and prominence of this meeting, as well as its joint sponsorship with a mixed-sex organization, the Peace with Ireland Council, is indicative of the brand of women's politics that thrived in the context of this agitation: well heeled, well connected, and well poised to make an immediate impact on the political discourse of the moment.

At a meeting on the Irish question, Swanwick had “called on English people to insist on going to Ireland to see for themselves,” a plea that one observer wrote caused “intensity of emotion throughout the audience.”Footnote ³⁸ In a similar vein, a Labour Party pamphlet directed at British women expressed the wish that every British woman should go to Ireland “and see for herself the abomination of British rule there.”Footnote ³⁹ A number of British women did travel independently to Ireland, outside of official delegations such as that organized by the WIL. Evelyn Sharp, a former suffragist and dedicated peace worker, took a series of photographs, mostly of destroyed buildings with smashed windows and burned roofs, that captured the destruction wrought by reprisals carried out by Crown Forces.Footnote ⁴⁰ Joice Nankivell traveled to Ireland with her husband, and the two jointly wrote a compelling, novelistic account of war-torn Dublin.Footnote ⁴¹ In February 1921, Barbara Hammond and her husband, J. L. Hammond, toured Ireland with Margaret Buckmaster and Desmond MacCarthy. She visited prominent nationalists, toured Dublin and Cork, and attended a trial in Mallow before the group returned to antireprisals campaigning in Britain.Footnote ⁴² The call to investigate in person echoed a long tradition of women working as social investigators and caseworkers who could testify about the horrors they witnessed. The descriptions produced by such visits provided important ammunition in a campaign that relied upon the word of respectable observers to challenge the government's account.

Middle-class British women who opposed coercion in Ireland, and the men who sought to influence them, built on a legacy of female activism that had simultaneously addressed issues of international and, especially, imperial justice and had sought to assert the right of British women to full enfranchisement.Footnote ⁴³ The irrelevance of women's experience to foreign policy and war had been a major plank in the antisuffrage platform.Footnote ⁴⁴ In response, Antoinette Burton has argued, “liberal bourgeois feminists involved in various aspects of the women's movement conceived of empire as a legitimate place for exhibiting their fitness for participation in the imperial nation-state,” working to rescue the degraded native woman through campaigns against sati, for example.Footnote ⁴⁵ Imperial paternalism could be found in the Anglo-Irish relationship, too: for instance, in the efforts of aristocratic British women to relieve hunger during the Irish famine in ways that treated the Irish “as children, wilful and foolish perhaps, but above all else, in need of nurturing and protection,” as K. D. Reynolds puts it.Footnote ⁴⁶ During W. E. Gladstone's campaign for Irish Home Rule, Liberal women successfully described the Irish question as a social and humanitarian issue and hence one that should properly concern women, drawing on domestic metaphors of marriage and divorce to argue for the Home Rule solution.Footnote ⁴⁷

In 1919–21, too, activists argued that the suffering of Irish women and children should make the conflict particularly poignant to women. This rhetoric was altered, however, to reflect the fact that women were concerned about such problems as citizens rather than only as empathetic mothers or sisters. Such appeals made sense in the context of women's ongoing involvement with relief work, especially in connection with the Fight the Famine Council and its later iteration, the Save the Children Fund.Footnote ⁴⁸ Erskine Childers, an English Liberal who joined the republican forces in Ireland, produced a considerable body of propaganda detailing the misuse of force by the British in Ireland. Many of the articles he published in the Daily News used the hardships faced by women as an emotional focal point. Describing the horrors of late-night house raids, many of which turned out to be futile, Childers focused on the experiences of “women and terrified children,” arguing that disregard for women's status bred immorality and brutality: “Imagine the moral effect of such a procedure on the young officers and men told off for this duty! Is it any wonder that gross abuses occur: looting, wanton destruction, brutal severity to women?”Footnote ⁴⁹ That “brutal severity” formed the heart of another article by Childers, titled “What It Means to Women,” published on 7 April 1920. This article presented a series of anecdotes, nearly all featuring pregnant women or young mothers who were mistreated by raiding soldiers or police entering their bedrooms at night while their husbands were under arrest or absent. Childers did not explicitly accuse Crown Forces of rape, and indeed scholars still debate whether rape was used in this conflict. Louise Ryan has argued that British forces systematically targeted Irish women for sexual violence in their campaign of intimidation.Footnote ⁵⁰ Sarah Benton, however, contends that while there is no doubt that “forces of the crown” subjected women to “acts of sexual humiliation,” there is no evidence of mass rape being carried out by British troops.Footnote ⁵¹ David Leeson challenges gendered assumptions about sexual violence by suggesting that Crown Forces might have used sexual humiliation more systematically against Irish men.Footnote ⁵² For Childers, however, the metaphorical implication of rape provided the emotional buildup to his conclusion that British women, in their new status as voting citizens, were directly responsible for the sufferings of Irish women: “[A]nd once more the officer gains entry to the sick room, in spite of vehement protests; for the lady's nerves are now utterly unstrung. As a concession, he enters alone, leaving the fixed bayonets outside. But this is the climax: there are pitiful screams at every movement—the flash of his torch, the opening of a wardrobe door…. Women of England, you have votes and power; this is your responsibility.”Footnote ⁵³ Other activists suggested that British women could feel a sense of sympathy for Irish demands in general, not only through the mechanism of a shared sisterhood with Irish women. One, probably Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, suggested using “the idea of identification of English women and the Irish people” as a motivating concept.Footnote ⁵⁴ She did not elaborate on the exact meaning of such an identification, but it seems likely that it would have been based in the perception that the Irish were as disenfranchised and disempowered in a national sense as English women had been on the basis of their sex.

As Childers's conclusion suggests, however, British women could now be addressed as people with “votes and power” and hence with “responsibility” as well as moral duty. Such rhetoric appeared frequently in the campaign against Irish coercion. In a letter announcing the women's meeting on Ireland at the Central Hall in London in March 1921, the organizing committee explained that they were protesting reprisals as “women citizens, to whom the principles of humanity and of national morality should be peculiarly important.” Women citizens thus had a special obligation to act: “[I]f we permit this policy of reprisals to continue unchallenged, we shall be neglecting a grave duty which as women citizens we owe the State.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The Labour Party, too, issued a pamphlet warning British women that unless they spoke out “for justice and humanity in Ireland,” they “will be branded before the world, and in the long memories of the Irish people, as callous and cruel, deaf to the call of liberty, narrow-minded and slothful.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The Labour Party's pamphlet drew on negative stereotypes of women—“narrow-minded and slothful”—to make its point, and its suggested action of speaking out was less emphatically political than the women's meeting committee's reference to the “grave duty” owed by “women citizens” to the state. Yet both the party and the committee asserted that women had a rightful and indeed necessary place in the debate over the Irish question.

The WIL explicitly asserted the right of women to be heard in international relations, and in so doing, they contributed to the ongoing debate over Britain's role in the postwar world.Footnote ⁵⁷ Often overlooked in histories of the WIL, which emphasize its work on European causes and global issues such as disarmament, the Irish campaign sheds important light on the WIL's understanding of its role as an internationalist body of British women working for peace. Marshall argued that the task of publicizing the truth about what was happening in Ireland should be part of a more general program to combat violence. She compared Ireland to “any other country in Europe where ‘Terror’ is in force, & pogroms & military occupation.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Swanwick, writing in the WIL newsletter in December 1920, used the first-person plural to suggest that British women were an integral part of their nation and so were to be held accountable for its misdeeds.Footnote ⁵⁹ Why, she asked, was the British government waging war against the Irish people?

Swanwick offered explanations for conflict—the love of domination and the superstitious fear of “bogey-tales” about the enemy—that fit into a larger argument about the higher nature and desirability of peaceful international cooperation. Addressing her remarks to an organization of women dedicated to world peace, she insisted that the Anglo-Irish relationship was not an exception to a world that must be governed by self-determination rather than “militarist domination.” Her argument did not rest on a particular vision of women's contribution; instead, it presumed that British women were now faced with crucial choices about national policy upon which the nation's security, welfare, and “good name in all the world” depended.Footnote ⁶¹ Marshall, her colleague in the suffrage movement as well as in the WIL, wrote from a similar perspective, telling her cousin, Lord Monteagle: “It is too ghastly our sitting helplessly looking on at such iniquities being perpetrated in our name.”Footnote ⁶² The alternation in these calls to action between a gendered assumption of women's pacifism and a universal duty to promote justice is instructive. The language of sexual difference and the invocation of nongendered citizenship were not mutually exclusive. Women deployed both in the service of the more immediate aims of their political activity—in this case, Irish self-determination.

The vision of international justice promulgated by the WIL fit into a larger discourse that Frank Trentmann has described as the new internationalism, which “simultaneously sought to civilise global relations by inserting new transnational institutions and to overcome a democracy gap between state and citizen at home.”Footnote ⁶³ As Daniel Gorman has demonstrated in his work on antitrafficking campaigns, women were able to deploy the new internationalism as they sought greater influence in transnational and imperial affairs.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the Irish case, the WIL functioned as an international information network and maintained contact, in particular, with the IIL.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jane Addams, an American cofounder of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, was in touch with the Manchester branch as well as the Irish branch of the league regarding her own participation in an American Commission on Ireland.Footnote ⁶⁶ Two members of the WIL delegation also traveled to the United States to publicize their findings.Footnote ⁶⁷ Although Swanwick was clear that British women were accountable for their nation's policies, the WIL nonetheless imagined the international community as an alternate resource of power to which it could appeal in order to rein in the British government's excesses in Ireland. By taking up the Irish question, campaigners felt, the League of Nations would seize an excellent opportunity for international governance to prove its worth. The WIL's International Sub-Committee “mooted the question as to whether we English women could by any means appeal to the League of Nations against our own Government on this matter.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Marshall took action on that sentiment while in Geneva in November 1920. As she explained to Swanwick, she lobbied numerous people, looked into obtaining formal statements by “various representative bodies in Ireland and England,” and wondered whether it would be possible to get “British Colonies to plead for recognition of Ireland as a self-governing Dominion qualified to be admitted to the League of Nations.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The work of those interested in international issues is not always accounted for in histories of women's political activity, perhaps because the activists themselves sought to distance their work from a constraining narrative based on gender.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, Sharp ultimately left the WIL, “because she no longer saw any necessity for separatist women's organisations,” moving closer to the Labour Party and the left-wing press instead.Footnote ⁷¹ However, the WIL's work on Ireland demonstrates the existence, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, of an avowed women's organization that nonetheless imagined its remit to include the most pressing international questions of the moment.

The Irish campaign offered women multiple opportunities to hone new skills and consolidate new channels of power. Here, too, there are several late nineteenth-century antecedents. Women had gained direct political power through the Municipal Franchise Act of 1869, which gave married women the vote as compound householders and meant that women began to serve in local government service, elected, in John Belchem's words, “on the basis of their gendered aptitude for ‘caring’ social policy.”Footnote ⁷² Women had attracted the attention of political parties after the passage of the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883, because of the need for volunteer work in electioneering.Footnote ⁷³ Advocacy efforts for Irish Home Rule had also expanded the boundaries of what was permissible female political activism, including addressing public gatherings and engaging with matters of constitutional reform.Footnote ⁷⁴ The activism around the Anglo-Irish War saw these trends pushed further.

The three major political parties were eager to court women voters in the early 1920s, explicitly addressing them in their campaigning and forming women's organizations within the party structures.Footnote ⁷⁵ Large numbers of women joined political parties in these years, and they were able to parlay their presence in the parties into influence.Footnote ⁷⁶ When the London Liberal Federation considered the possibility of a national campaign on Ireland, for instance, it was at the instigation of the women's subcommittee.Footnote ⁷⁷ Marshall actively pressed for the Labour Party to take stronger action on Ireland “in order to get these horrors stopped,” visiting “chief Labour people” and urging them “at least to insist on the withdrawal of the army & the disarming of the R.I.C.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Throughout 1920, she worked with the Mid-Cumberland Divisional Labour Party to organize and encourage local branches; the twin issues of war in Russia and in Ireland appear regularly in her notes on this work.Footnote ⁷⁹ In June 1920, Marshall attended the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough, where she advocated for the IDL's proposals and tried to facilitate connections between Lord Monteagle and Labour luminaries such as James Ramsay MacDonald, J. R. Clynes, Philip Snowden, and Arthur Henderson.Footnote ⁸⁰ On the local level, Marshall organized a delegate conference in Keswick on 28 August 1920, which sent a telegram to the king appealing for the immediate release of hunger striker MacSwiney and passed resolutions urging a change in government policy on Ireland, Russia, Egypt, and India.Footnote ⁸¹

Women were highly visible as public speakers in the campaign against coercion in Ireland, echoing the precedent established in the Home Rule agitation. The Labour Party mandated that each public meeting hosted by the party on Ireland would be addressed by “a woman speaker” in addition to a member of the commission and an MP or other prominent figure.Footnote ⁸² This rule is consistent with the larger effort by the major parties to include women in formal and visible ways in order to appeal to the new mass of female voters. It is striking evidence also of the ways in which the parties' desire to appeal to women created new opportunities for politically active women, in this case as public speakers. Many of the women involved in advocacy on Ireland took advantage of public or even professional opportunities within the movement and went on to further relevant positions later in the 1920s. Swanwick, for instance, attended the Special Labour Party Conference on Ireland in December 1920 as a delegate from the Richmond Labour Party. While there, she spoke only briefly, to urge the party to follow the lead of prominent Liberal politicians in taking a more public stance on the matter.Footnote ⁸³ Four years later, in 1924, she attended the Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations as a substitute delegate at the request of the first Labour government, indicating that her participation in 1920 was just one part of a larger trajectory of professional and political involvement.Footnote ⁸⁴ Edith Stopford was one of the few paid employees of the movement, working first for Sir John Simon and then for the Peace with Ireland Council.Footnote ⁸⁵ She later moved to Dublin and worked as an assistant to J. L. Hammond for his book on Gladstone and Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁶ Marshall nearly became another employee of the Irish cause when Lord Monteagle, a leading figure in the IDL, approached her about taking on a full-time paid organizing job at the organization's London office. In this, he was acting on a proposal made by Lady Byles to hire one or two traveling organizers to foster grassroots support around the country. Marshall's sex was seen as an asset by Lady Byles and, implicitly, Lord Monteagle as well: “[H]er experience is that women would be as good for this purpose as men, if not better,” he explained.Footnote ⁸⁷ Marshall declined the position, though she remained active on the Irish issue in other ways. Annot Robinson, who had a paid post as the Manchester organizer for the WIL from 1918, traveled to Ireland in that organization's deputation and publicized its findings; she later became the vice chair of the Manchester Labour Party.Footnote ⁸⁸

Finally, middle-class activists on Ireland made strategic use of public and private spaces in order to further the cause, carrying on a long tradition of female political engagement. Clare Midgley's description of women's antislavery work in the nineteenth century provides a useful comparison. Although women were excluded from “positions of formal power in the national antislavery movement in Britain,” they were nonetheless “an integral part of that movement.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Female abolitionists “were involved in constructing, reinforcing, utilising, negotiating, subverting or more rarely challenging the distinction between the private-domestic sphere and the public-political sphere,”Footnote ⁹⁰ whether they were raising funds, spreading information, influencing public opinion, or organizing the boycott of slave-grown sugar that effectively merged “the domestic and the political.”Footnote ⁹¹ The British antislavery movement, like the campaign against coercion in Ireland, contained seeds of both imperialism and anti-imperialism. In Midgley's words, “[O]n the one hand, it was a philanthropic middle-class campaign promoting an imperial Christian mission; on the other, it was a popular movement for human rights regardless of race.”Footnote ⁹² As “the first large-scale political campaign by middle-class women, and the first movement in which women aroused the opinion of the female public in order to put pressure on Parliament,” the antislavery movement is an important antecedent to the Irish campaign of 1919–21.Footnote ⁹³

Socially prominent women made use of the networks of middle- and upper-class society in order to advocate for a change in policy on Ireland. Lady Byles was particularly effective at this type of personal lobbying. Lord Monteagle called her “a good medium for diffusing” information about Ireland within English society.Footnote ⁹⁴ On one occasion, she raised the matter of Ireland's woes at “a small garden-party of Liberal women (mostly poor)” who “spontaneously gathered 14/6 together for the Prisoners' Dependents' Fund,” to which she herself added a further £5.Footnote ⁹⁵ Farther up the social hierarchy, she had a “[l]ong talk” with Erskine Childers over lunch in September 1920, and she also introduced Berkeley, head of the Peace with Ireland Council, to Eleanor Acland, who later wrote a pamphlet on Ireland for that council.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such encounters could occur at a variety of social gatherings, but women also organized events with an eye specifically to the Irish issue, as when Mary Ffrench invited Berkeley to tea with the note, “I am having a few people interested in Ireland and hope you can come.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Maneuvering between separate spheres typified the activities of the extraordinary Molly Childers and her husband, Erskine, an author, soldier, and parliamentary clerk. K. D. Reynolds has argued that in the aristocratic political culture of the Victorian years, “the ‘theatre of politics’ frequently found its stage in the drawing-rooms and salons of the political hostesses.” The hostess was often an “incorporated wife,” a woman “implicated in, yet excluded from, the organizational structure” of her husband's career.Footnote ⁹⁸ Molly Childers demonstrates that the “incorporated wife” could wield her distinctive power in a very different historical and political context as well. Even before the Irish question came to dominate their lives, Molly had been politically active in the years since her marriage brought her from her native Boston to London. Having established themselves firmly in the context of respectable liberalism in Edwardian London, the Childerses dedicated their lives over the course of the next decade to an increasingly extreme form of Irish republicanism. In 1914, the Childerses used their yacht, the Asgard, to smuggle guns to the Irish volunteers.Footnote ⁹⁹ Both Erskine and Molly took active roles on the British side in World War I; Molly worked extensively with Belgian refugees during World War I and was decorated by the king for her efforts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet the Irish issue still loomed large for them. Losing patience with the moderate Liberal approach to Ireland, Erskine made contacts with Sinn Féin, and after much soul searching, the two decided in 1919 to move to Dublin full-time.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Once in Ireland, each partner had significant duties within the movement. Erskine took on considerable work for the Republican Department of Propaganda as well as serving as a republican magistrate and for the new Land Bank, while Molly served as an administrator for the massive loan raised for the republican effort. She also turned their new Dublin home into a refuge for men on the run and a salon of sorts for nationalists and curious English visitors.Footnote ¹⁰² The Childerses functioned as a personal bridge between Sinn Féin and mainstream Liberal opinion in England, providing a conduit in 1920 and 1921 for information on reprisals from the republican perspective into the Liberal antiwar campaign and also introducing key players, such as Berkeley, to other people interested in starting an organization in England on the Irish question.Footnote ¹⁰³ Nearly every account written by Liberal and pro–Home Rule English visitors to Ireland from this period mentions going to the Childerses' house.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When Nankivell and Sydney Loch “paid visits to Mrs. Erskine Childers,” they described her house as “one of the rocks of Republicanism,” where “all sorts of people on the run” stayed, out of view of “the ordinary visitor.” Molly Childers made effective use of her femininity as well as her class: “The nationality of Mrs. Childers, and the fact that she was a person of breeding … made her valuable, and all wandering strangers whose sympathy it was desirable to enlist, were taken to her with the words, ‘Oh, you must see Mrs. Erskine Childers. She can tell you so much.’ Mrs. Childers, refined, daintily dressed, intellectual, lying on her couch, put them right on the wrongs of Ireland.” Erskine, meanwhile, was described as so hardworking that he looked “as though he might die and still sit upon his bicycle with his legs going round and round.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This resembles the classic divide between a masculine public sphere and a feminine private sphere: Erskine out on his bicycle working himself to death, Molly (whose physical movement was limited by a childhood injury) holding court at home.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, this dichotomy must be modified to reflect the fact that the house in Dublin was anything but a private domestic space. A constant stream of visitors passed through, ranging from English journalists to famed Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. The home served also as a bureau for republican propaganda, a repository of documents, and one of the central offices for republican loan operations.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Childerses's home was a hub of republican activity and needs to be analyzed both for its appeal as a domestic, civilized space and also for its very real political utility.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Childerses ultimately supported the antitreaty side in the Irish Civil War, and Erskine was executed by the Free State in November 1922. The couple's efforts during the conflicts of 1919–22, like the personal lobbying efforts of British women involved in the Irish cause, demonstrate that even as the granting of partial suffrage opened new avenues of political influence and new modes of political discourse for women, it did not disrupt longer lines of continuity.

■ ■ ■

Molly Childers, unlike most of the women discussed so far, was a radical republican. Yet she and her husband also maintained connections with their former British Liberal colleagues and friends. In doing this, she directs attention to another aspect of women's involvement with the Irish cause at this time: the way in which middle-class Irish republicans served as a tenuous but significant link between middle-class activists and working-class Irish republicans, two groups of women in Britain who were otherwise deeply separate. There is value in finding the familiar women of the British suffrage movement in an unfamiliar context, working on a cause that has received comparatively little historical attention yet seemed to contemporaries to be one of the deciding moral questions of the day. They appear here less scattered by the divisions over feminism and more united in their explicit goal of improving Britain's policy toward Ireland and the implicit role of claiming their rightful place in the full range of politics. Jo Vellacott has argued persuasively that the split of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1915 over the peace issue effectively foreclosed the organization's earlier progress toward building alliances with working-class men and women and with the Labour Party.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Later in the war, Jill Liddington argues, peace efforts building on both feminist and socialist networks were able to cross class boundaries: the Women's Peace Crusade of 1917–18 in particular drew women's peace work “well beyond its Liberal-suffrage roots” and into new geographical and class territories.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Many of the women who participated in the Peace Crusade went on to join the Labour Party's new Women's Sections after 1918.Footnote ¹¹¹ The final section of this article will take the story of women's participation in the cause of Irish self-determination beyond the “Liberal-suffrage” nexus into the realms of the working class and the republican movement.

British and Irish suffragists had their own history of cooperation and contention. The Irish Women's Franchise League, formed in 1908, was independent of its militant British cousin, the Women's Social and Political Union, but the two movements had connections nonetheless. In her important essay on the topic, Margaret Ward emphasizes disjunctures between Irish and British suffragettes and argues that British women merely used Irish affairs to further their own interests, “accentuating divisions which Irish women had hoped to modify.”Footnote ¹¹² Ward suggests, therefore, that the national question effectively sundered the British and Irish women's movements. She places the blame at the feet of tone-deaf British suffragists who ignored the salience of Irish nationalist issues in their single-minded pursuit of women's suffrage. Yet looked at from other perspectives, the suffrage and women's movements and Irish republicanism have significant shared history. British suffragettes and Irish republicans were linked, for example, by political practice, particularly in the use of the hunger strike while in prison, which, as Kevin Grant has shown, traveled from Russian revolutionaries to British suffragettes and then to their Irish counterparts. James Connolly, a militant socialist and a strong supporter of the Irish suffragettes, followed suit in 1913, bringing the hunger strike permanently into the republican tradition.Footnote ¹¹³ Some Irish suffragists had also turned their energies to international peace.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In 1916, the IIL had been formed as a branch of the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, with full support from the British branch.Footnote ¹¹⁵ After 1918, the IIL was active in promoting Irish self-determination on the international stage, despite the “often radically differing political loyalties” of its members and allies.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In 1919–21, former British and Irish suffragists worked together again, but this time for the national cause of Irish independence. Markievicz, Despard, and Mary MacSwiney made regular appearances at public meetings in Britain.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These women were often remembered for their ability to infuse romance and radicalism into the movement's British image. Nationalist historian Dorothy Macardle lobbied personally in Britain against death sentences for IRA men, “looking rather Kathleen-ni-Houlihan in a long cloak,” in Stopford's words.Footnote ¹¹⁸ When Stopford brought her republican sister Dorothy Stopford to a Liberal meeting in Birmingham, Dorothy refused to stand for the loyal toast, but her gesture opened the door to more personal conservation: the Liberal chairman, who came to luncheon the next day, “was obviously entranced by her courage, and would talk to no one but her.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Another frequent visitor was Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a former suffragist and Irish nationalist whose husband, the pacifist socialist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, had been killed during the 1916 Rising.Footnote ¹²⁰ During her extensive tours of England, Sheehy-Skeffington spoke not only to local branches of Irish nationalist organizations such as the Irish Self-Determination League (ISDL) and the Cumann na mBan but also to local Labour parties.Footnote ¹²¹ Sheehy-Skeffington also addressed meetings organized specifically by women: she was invited, for instance, to address an “Anti-munition [sic] meeting in Stevenson Square” by the Cheetham, Manchester branch of the Cumann na mBan.Footnote ¹²²

Such activities exemplify the hopes of the new internationalists for transnational cooperation on issues of justice and self-determination. More prosaically, they testify to the enduring strength of the networks forged by politically active, middle-class women during the long struggle for the vote. Given the popularity of speakers like Sheehy-Skeffington and Despard at meetings across the social spectrum, their activities might have served as a bridge between middle-class British activists and their working-class Irish republican counterparts in Britain. In fact, any such connections were tenuous at best. Working-class or republican women appear in the accounts of the middle-class anticoercion movement only as disruptive elements, usually in rowdy audiences at political meetings. One London meeting had an audience that allegedly “was too sympathetic, and contained a noisy group of Sinn Feiners,” while at the Peace with Ireland Council's major demonstration at Albert Hall in December 1920, H. H. Asquith was heckled by audience members, including “a woman with an Irish voice,” urging a stronger stance with cries of “Shame.”Footnote ¹²³ This is not, however, because working-class Irish republican women in Britain were inherently disorganized or inactive. Rather, they were part of a grassroots mobilization that supported the war effort in Ireland through fund-raising, gunrunning, and propaganda as well as a campaign of sabotage.Footnote ¹²⁴ There is an ever-present danger of writing political history from the top of the social hierarchy, revealing only the activism that trickled downward, in this case in the form of former suffragists addressing working-class women. Yet such an approach obscures the autonomy of minority or subaltern activism, such as that found in the Irish minority in Britain and among the women of that community. The release in 2003 of the testimonies by participants in the Anglo-Irish War, compiled beginning in 1947 by the Irish Bureau of Military History's team of government officials and professional historians, provides a particularly rich, though complicated, source for documenting these women's activities and, even more, their own perceptions of their roles both in Britain and in the Irish conflict.Footnote ¹²⁵

Irish nationalism tended to be conservative in its gender politics. Officially, women's work was contained within an auxiliary organization, the Cumann na mBan, which had branches in Britain as well as in Ireland and was headed by Markievicz.Footnote ¹²⁶ Some women worked outside of this organization as well, including as members of nationalist organizations such as the ISDL in Britain. As Ward and Jason Knirck have argued, the Irish revolution was ultimately no revolution at all in terms of gender equality.Footnote ¹²⁷ Irish women in Britain, too, struggled to find equality within nationalist organizations that privileged men over women, but that struggle did not prevent them from contributing to the cause of independence energetically and effectively, casting themselves as citizens of a future Ireland. Their organization and work can also be situated in the tradition of British working-class radicalism, which grew out of the same urban districts around London and in the industrial north that saw the strongest manifestations of Irish nationalism. Working-class women had organized female friendly societies, meeting in a pub or a chapel, from the nineteenth century onward.Footnote ¹²⁸ They also formed labor organizations such as the West of Scotland Female Power Loom Weavers Association.Footnote ¹²⁹ Women had supported the Chartist movement as activists and auxiliaries, forming “over a hundred and fifty flourishing female Chartist associations in England, and at least twenty-three in Scotland.” They eventually found themselves marginalized, however, by the Chartists' demands for “the exclusion of women from the work force through pressure on the state to pass factory legislation.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, Anna Clark has argued that “the making of the working class” in the nineteenth century was “in part a struggle by radicals to universalize” the middle class's notions of gendered separate spheres as fundamental to respectability.Footnote ¹³¹ The working-class Irish women in Britain, therefore, drew on lineages of female organization as they struggled to fit into class and national traditions that were deeply invested in the perpetuation of women's exclusion from politics. They did so as members of a minority population—in 1921, approximately 1 percent of the population of England and Wales, and 3 percent of the population of Scotland, was Irish born, though the Irish community including second- and third-generation immigrants was certainly larger.Footnote ¹³² That population tended to be nationalist; although only a small number of individuals became committed republican activists, many more took part in more peripheral nationalist activities such as attending dances or donating funds.

Active Irish republican women in Britain were frequently single women or widows who earned livings through work that had to be squared with a busy political life. Roisin ni Chillin, a teacher who had moved from Manchester to London, organized meetings and lectures on Ireland and also gave talks herself on various topics relevant to the cause of Irish nationalism.Footnote ¹³³ Ni Chillin was described by another activist as a “good lecturer” who was “very well versed in historical and literary matters.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Sorcha Nic Diarmada, an active member of the Cumann na mBan in London, was a teacher born in Leeds whose father had been a Fenian obliged to leave Ireland in the 1860s.Footnote ¹³⁵ She situated herself in a genealogy of Irish nationalism: “I had the same great, great grandfather as Seán McDermott who was executed after the Rising of 1916.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Yet her devotion to the Irish cause was balanced with her career as a London schoolteacher. Appointed as a delegate to the 1917 Sinn Féin convention in Dublin, she had to request three additional days of leave without pay in order to attend.Footnote ¹³⁷ Another prominent republican in London, Elizabeth Eadie, had come to England at 15; her husband died in 1919 as a result of exposure during his war service. She worked at the Ministry of Pensions and also devoted herself and her home to the republican cause.Footnote ¹³⁸

Women's homes were politicized much like Molly Childers's political salon in Dublin. They provided crucial safe houses for those on the run and space to store arms and carry on other illegal activities. Women were leaders in the effort to support Irish prisoners, visiting them while detained and providing shelter for them after their release.Footnote ¹³⁹ James Cunningham, a gunrunner in Birmingham, made his headquarters “with a family named Staunton (who were from Mayo), in Trent Street, a slum area near the Bull Ring.” Paddy Staunton was from Mayo; his wife, Mary, was “a third generation Irishwoman.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Mary Duffy, one of the main organizers of the Birmingham ISDL, credited their hospitality with enabling her to keep the branch going, describing their home as “the shelter of many of Ireland” and a place where “there was always a welcome & a share of the last crust of bread for whoever might be in need.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In London, Mrs. Mary Egan's house “was ‘port of call’ for officers of the first and third Cork Brigades.”Footnote ¹⁴² Especially considering that Egan, the “wife of a railway servant, and housekeeper to a Moorgate-street business firm,”Footnote ¹⁴³ was also involved in smuggling weapons, this was no easy role: “the house was under surveillance, visitors scrutinised and neighbours questioned.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Local IRA man Paddy Daly eulogized the efforts of a Mrs. McCarthy of Aintree, near Liverpool, calling her “representative of a type, an Irishwoman living in a foreign and sometimes hostile city” who worked for a living but also sacrificed much to help “strike a blow for that country which she rarely saw.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Eamon de Valera stayed with Mrs. McCarthy while he waited for his chance to go to the United States, where he conducted a massive fund-raising tour.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ These women also handled clandestine mail services to facilitate communication within the IRA.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Such women were not political hostesses or incorporated wives; instead, they blurred the boundaries of the domestic and the political by turning their homes into spaces for an underground militant movement.

This mixture of the homely and the military was also evident in the activities of the Cumann na mBan. In London, the Cumann actually created a cover group, the Irish Women's Distress Fund, in order to distance putative relief work from military endeavors. This fund provided large numbers of garments to the needy in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ A large Irish social dance at Holborn Hall organized by this committee raised £300.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Nic Diarmada explained that the name “the Ladies' Distress Committee” allowed the group to get halls for their dances, but in republican contexts, such as MacSwiney's funeral, the name Cumann na mBan was openly used. “I was Secretary of both societies and I kept a separate book for each of them,” she recalled.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This dissimulation did not fool everyone, of course. When Eadie was arrested in 1922 for having a box containing bombs in her flat, she claimed to belong merely to “a sewing party” that benefited destitute Irish women and was asked during cross-examination, “Did they not do a little drilling as well as sewing?”Footnote ¹⁵¹

The cross-examiner was correct: republican women were also actively involved in the more military aspects of the Irish cause, though within gendered limitations. Indeed, in September 1921, about a dozen women broke off from the main London Cumann and formed a new branch, discontented with having to “masquerad[e] as The Ladies' Distress Committee” rather than drilling in uniforms as the Cumann did in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁵² Throughout the conflict, British Cumann na mBan branches raised money for arms and transported guns to Ireland.Footnote ¹⁵³ In London, Egan bought “souvenirs” from ex-soldiers, including bullets and occasionally revolvers, hiding them in safe locations in the city.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Cis Sheehan took many clandestine trips, transporting arms, ammunition, and “sums of money that were raised in America” to Dublin on overnight journeys planned to require just one day's leave from work.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Branches of the Cumann na mBan also assisted the IRA in Britain in its various campaigns of sabotage and intimidation. Women collected and stored the paraffin oil used to set fire to Liverpool warehouses and timber yards in November 1920, for example.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ On the Tyneside, Cumann members acted as “escorts” for men involved in the arson campaign, so that they looked like unsuspicious “courting couples”; these escorts were more than decorative, however, since they also carried arms after the job was completed.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Sheehan played an identical role in London during the effort to intimidate the relatives of Black and Tans. She stood aside while “an IRA boy” told the sister of a Black and Tan “to get her brother to leave Ireland or else she would suffer reprisals. … My function was to act as a cover and make it appear that we were just a boy and girl out for a walk and if he were attacked to help in his escape by taking his gun.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Tensions could arise when women attempted to take a more active role in running guns or raising money. In Manchester, a men's meeting was apparently arranged to “forestall” a planned women's meeting on Ireland, a symptom of “the same old jealousy” in the words of a local female organizer.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Nic Diarmada refused Reggie Dunne's request to hand over the money that the Cumann na mBan had raised at a dance to the local men's military unit. She later recalled that he “praised the work I did but did not like me personally because on some occasions I refused to take his orders.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ A woman in Oldham who “had secured six rifles and three revolvers in that town” was stopped by local Irish leaders from carrying them home to Cork, possibly because of her sex, to the annoyance of Michael Collins in Ireland.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Collins preferred to keep as many small channels open and running as possible, rather than try to create a centralized gunrunning system. The goal was, as Edward Brady recalled, that “every conceivable avenue was used to procure arms.”Footnote ¹⁶²

The Anglo-Irish War was suspended by a truce in July 1921, and negotiations between Sinn Féin and the British government produced a treaty in December 1921 that laid the foundation of the Irish Free State as a dominion and established the partition of six Ulster counties into Northern Ireland, a self-governing part of the United Kingdom. The treaty led to a violent civil war between those who accepted it as a workable compromise and those who wanted armed struggle against Britain to continue. It also left the women who had supported Irish self-determination in opposing camps. Most embraced the treaty as a necessary, even reasonable, compromise.Footnote ¹⁶³ Poignantly, Buckmaster extolled the joyful coincidence of the negotiations being successful “so soon before my wedding.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In Ireland, the Stopford sisters, Dorothy and Edith, were split by the Irish Civil War, while Childers lost her husband to execution.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Having sided with the antitreaty forces, Markievicz was elected to the Dáil for the last time in 1927 as a candidate for the new Fianna Fáil party led by de Valera; she died that summer.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Some republican women in Britain participated in the struggle to keep faltering organizations alive as well as to continue to forge their lives in a place they perceived as foreign and, sometimes, hostile. They could be leaders within the nationalist movement, at least at a local level, and they sometimes cooperated with other organizations. By 1923, Mary Duffy had devoted a great deal of energy to keeping the Birmingham ISDL branch alive almost single-handedly, yet she was still called upon to justify her leftist political connections by Joseph Fowler, one of the main republican leaders of interwar Britain. Duffy told him plainly that she had been a member of the Communist Party “for quite a long time,” a fact which she said had “nothing to do with my activities” for Irish independence. Indeed, she had offered to resign from the ISDL if her branch had objections, but they did not. Finally, Duffy appealed to pragmatism and the necessity of forming strategic alliances: “Anyway we had to ask assistance from them at most of our public meetings or we couldn't have carried on.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

The British government regarded antitreaty republican women as a sufficient enough threat to include them in the arrest and deportation of over one hundred people involved in the republican movement in March 1923.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The round up included leaders such as Art O'Brien and Seán McGrath and caused considerable disruption in the movement in Britain.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Sheehan stated frankly that she and others were arrested “because of activities against the Treaty and during the Civil War.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Nic Diarmada described the experience of deportation vividly in her statement to the Bureau of Military History. She recalled being rousted from bed and arrested at midnight. At the police station, she denied that the rubber-stamped paper she was shown ordering her deportation was valid: “And I quoted the four Acts that are the cornerstones of liberty.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ In diction that echoed her work as an English schoolteacher, she claimed the rights of the freeborn British citizen even for Irish republican women. She recalled being “thumped” in the back for asking to attend Mass, and hustled instead onto a train, where she recognized “many of the detectives because they used to attend our Whist Drives.”Footnote ¹⁷² Once in Ireland, Nic Diarmada met a former hunger striker who was now working for the Free State and mocked him for having betrayed the die-hard republican cause: “He said, ‘You want to die for Ireland.’ I answered, ‘There was a time when you did too and don't forget that you gave me your photograph with the words “freedom or death” after twenty-three days hunger strike in Wormwood Scrubbs,’ and he went as white as a sheet.”Footnote ¹⁷³ The deportations were later ruled illegal and the deportees were released and returned to Britain.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In autumn 1923, the British government formed a tribunal to recompense deportees for ill treatment in Dublin, ultimately awarding just over £54,000 in damages.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Nic Diarmada received £600 in recognition, she said, of her ill treatment.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Egan was awarded £1,500 in damages.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Less fortunate was the lecturer and teacher Ni Chillin, who had by 1923 become an established figure within republican London, serving as the secretary of the Roger Casement Sinn Féin Club even as she continued in her work as schoolteacher for the London County Council (LCC).Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Her employment by the LCC was terminated following her deportation.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The LCC's education committee debated its decision in February 1925 after “a number of Labour organizations” sent letters of protest. One member called it a “scandalous case of political persecution,” but another defended the termination on the grounds that “Miss Killen held certain views which in the opinion of the Committee it was not right that a teacher in a London school should hold.” A different committee member remarked that she “was known to be a member of the Roger Casement Society, which was a society of traitors.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The attempt to have her reinstated failed.

The participation of women in campaigns for Irish self-determination in Britain during 1919–23 provides striking evidence of the political power that women were able to wield in the years immediately after the enactment of partial suffrage. Some of their work was consistent with the “women's work” of earlier generations: lobbying discreetly in drawing rooms, organizing sewing parties, and throwing benefit functions. In other respects, however, women were able to expand their repertoire of activism. They were central figures of public meetings and demonstrations and took on leadership roles as well, joining delegations to Ireland, pushing political parties forward, and organizing events. Even in the rigidly gendered republican movement, women took part in gunrunning and sabotage campaigns. Ideologies of gender difference were reflected in many of these activities and in the discourse that surrounded them: women's domesticity and their special investment in peace and humanitarian concerns recur. Yet separate spheres were sometimes used instrumentally and to political advantage, as in the ways that Childers and Irish women in Britain used their homes to provide a safe space for political activities. Moreover, the new category of the female citizen had entered debates on the proper role for women in politics, especially as women intervened in the traditionally masculine realms of war and foreign policy. Interwar feminism has been criticized for its tendencies to splinter and to acquiesce to feminized auxiliary roles. The Anglo-Irish War, however, provides striking evidence that British and Irish women effectively asserted political power in this new era of suffrage. The campaigns for Irish self-determination drew together women who had been divided by nationality at key moments in the past, but it did not transcend the boundaries of class that kept middle-class and working-class activists in decidedly separate spheres.