Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and the other militant suffragette activists mentioned in the book were all real people. Mollie, Nora and their friends, families and teachers are all products of my imagination.
The school the girls attend, however, is real, and I went there. Dominican College was founded in Eccles Street in 1883 and moved up the road to Griffith Avenue in Drumcondra over a century later in 1984. I entered the school four years later, though it wasn’t until the twenty-first century that I discovered Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington had been a pupil and a teacher at the school over a hundred years earlier.
One of Sheehy-Skeffington’s students, feminist activist and educator Louise Gavan Duffy, went to Eccles Street in 1907. She later wrote that ‘it was a very exciting place for me in a very new life: there were crowds of girls from all parts of Ireland – there were whiffs of politics – we had lectures from some very fine women, to whom we owed more than we knew, and who, as well as giving us outstanding teaching in their subjects, let in for us a little outside air.’
While I was researching the book, the school’s archivist Sister Catherine Gibson very kindly allowed me to look at the old Eccles Street yearbooks, The Lanthorn. As well as providing me with details about the routine of the school and the subjects the girls studied there, pictures of some of the rooms and inspiration for the names of all of the characters in The Making of Mollie (apart from the male ones, who are all named after my relatives), the yearbooks also included fascinating and often very funny articles by the girls themselves. These were full of contemporary schoolgirl slang. If you’re wondering if Irish girls around 1912 really did use the word ‘kid’ for a child or use expressions like ‘I say’ and ‘frightfully’, I can assure you that they did!
No Surrender by Constance Maud, the book that inspires Mollie and Nora, is a real book. It was first published in 1911 and was reissued by Persephone Books in 2011. You can find more about it at www.persephonebooks.co.uk
While Mollie and Nora’s adventures are fictitious, they take place against a backdrop of real events. The parade attended by Phyllis which was disrupted by the Ancient Order of Hibernians took place in the spring of 1912, and the Dublin police protected the suffragettes from the violent mob. Dublin suffragettes really did share information about all the cafés, restaurants and shops that would allow suffragettes to use their toilets, and they also chalked slogans and information about suffrage meetings all over the city. The scene in which a passerby thinks Mollie and Nora are praying is based on a real incident which was reported in a Dublin newspaper!
The big suffrage meeting in the Antient Concert Rooms that Mollie and Nora fail to get into took place on the 1 June 1912 and was a big success (Louise Gavan Duffy was one of the speakers). The I.W. F. L. held meetings in the Phoenix Park every weekend and outside the Custom House every Wednesday. There are some descriptions of these meetings in the I.W.F.L magazine The Irish Citizen (which was launched on May 25th 1912), though these reports are not very detailed.
Most of the suffrage meetings I describe in the book are wholly imaginary apart from the very last one, which took place just a few days after the I.W.F.L. women were arrested for breaking windows. That scene in the book is based very closely on the Irish Times report of the meeting which appeared on 17 June 1912. All the speeches and the heckles are direct quotations. The same report includes the story of the melodeon and the women selling ‘suffragate oranges’. The report says that a young suffragette politely corrected the women’s pronunciation, though her advice was ignored – it didn’t give the name of the young activist, so I thought Nora could do it!
And finally, according to the Irish Citizen’s report of the suffragettes’ appearance in the police court on the day they broke windows all over the city, the court was told that on the same morning, the words ‘VOTES FOR IRISH WOMEN’ had been painted on several postboxes across the city, ‘for which the police were not able to produce a single culprit’.