Hanna Sheehy Skeffington was born Johanna Mary Sheehy on 24 May 1877 in County Dublin. Her family was Roman Catholic and nationalistic. Originally from County Limerick, Grandfather Sheehy was an Irish-speaking pacifist who was pro-Home Rule. Hanna’s father, David – at one time MP for south Galway as well as being a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) – served time in a variety of prisons for his own nationalist beliefs. Her uncle, Fr Eugene Sheehy, was jailed for his support of the Land League and was also a member of the first committee of the Gaelic League.
Hanna’s mother, Bessie McCoy, also a Limerick woman, was a strong-minded individual who insisted that the education of her four daughters was as important as that of her two sons. Hanna’s schooling took place at the Dominican convent school in Eccles Street, Dublin, and later at the Royal University (later University College, Dublin).
Her mother’s early and unusual advocacy of equal education rights inspired in Hanna a passionate desire to enfranchise the women of Ireland. Her serious interest in politics started when she was an undergraduate and realised that, because they had no vote, women had no voice and were legally in the same category as criminals and lunatics. This inequity prompted Hanna to become active in her lifelong ideals of suffrage, socialism and Irish independence.
Hanna’s personality was warm, down-to-earth and fair-minded. She was a hard worker and an original thinker who preferred, as her daughter-in-law Andrée noted, to ‘keep her emotions private’. Initially a devout Catholic, during her life she disagreed more and more with the teachings of the Church until eventually she was an avowed atheist.
When Hanna married the Cavan-born academic Francis Skeffington in 1903, it was a marriage of minds. Their decision to combine their surnames was symbolic of the spirit of equality that lay at the foundation of their relationship. As Frank once said when called upon to rein in his wife, he considered himself ‘merely the male member of the Sheehy Skeffington household’ – a far cry from the universally held notion of the husband as the head of the household and, in law, the owner of his wife.
Together, Hanna and Frank embarked on a journey directed towards realising their ideals. They settled in Rathmines, south Dublin, and Frank worked as the registrar of UCD, while Hanna taught at St Mary’s University College, Donnybrook. When Frank resigned from UCD on a point of principle in 1904 – he wished openly to support the admission of women to the college, which was in defiance of the rules of employment – Hanna financially supported them both. Frank thereafter concentrated on his career as a journalist, while Hanna carried on teaching.
In her late twenties, Hanna became more and more active in the cause of women’s suffrage. She began to write articles for the cause and, in what was described as her ‘clear, unhesitating voice’, she spoke at public meetings. She also started to host a weekly ‘At Home’ – a forum for political and intellectual debate that convened every Wednesday at her house. Looking towards England, she was impressed by the banner-waving, law-breaking, hunger-striking militancy of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia.
In 1908 Hanna co-founded, with Margaret Cousins, the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), an activist organisation formed to win the right to vote for women. Theoretically, the IWFL was open to all women of any social class, but in practice, as with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) across the water in England, membership was largely middle class. Only the relatively affluent could afford to use precious reserves of time and energy for doing something other than earning a basic living, which was a lot of women in the so-called lower orders.
Around this time, a potential split among women in the nationalist movement became apparent. Hanna was a nationalist as well as a feminist, but many nationalist women felt they were nationalists first and feminists/suffragists second. As a result, they objected to the notion of Irishwomen attaching themselves to the coattails of Englishwomen in their fight for suffrage, when their problems at home in Ireland were of a totally different order. What was the point in calling for ‘votes for Irishwomen’, they reasoned, when, once won, such votes could be used only to elect an alien Westminster Parliament, whose authority was not recognised by radical republicans.
Unfazed by this disunity, Hanna doggedly continued lecturing and writing on the subject of votes for women, briefly interrupted in May 1909 by the birth of her only child, Owen. Faced with a wall of silence from the press, Hanna and other members of the IWFL started a publicity campaign. They heckled visiting ministers at public meetings; they boycotted the 1911 census; and they physically clashed with police at the United Irish League Convention in 1912.
That same year Hanna and Frank started their own pro-suffrage, pacifist and nationalist newspaper called the Irish Citizen, and Hanna was jailed for the first time. Her arrest followed an appeal by the IWFL to guarantee votes for women. The Home Rule leaders rejected their appeal, whereupon Hanna led a direct action, which involved breaking windows at government buildings, including the GPO and Custom House. She was arrested and briefly imprisoned in Mountjoy Jail, where she demanded and received political prisoner status.
The following summer saw Dublin’s factory owners and managers move against trades unions. They locked out of their premises all those workers who refused to give up union membership, thereby setting in motion what became known as the Great Lock- Out of 1913. On the issue of a worker’s right to belong to a union, Hanna and Frank strongly supported the socialist and labour activist James Connolly, who was the deputy chairman of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Along with Countess Markievicz and others, Hanna served in the soup kitchens set up for the starving families of locked-out workers. During a demonstration, the 5ft 2in (1.58m) Hanna was jailed a second time for ‘assaulting a policeman’.
Frank Sheehy Skeffington had communicated his pacifism to his wife, so when World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, they both wrote strongly against recruitment and conscription in the Irish Citizen. For this, Frank was jailed for six months in Mountjoy Jail, where he immediately went on hunger strike. He was released under the terms of the Cat and Mouse Act (passed in spring 1913, originally to deter suffragettes from hunger striking), and escaped to the USA. In his absence, Hanna took over sole editorship of the Irish Citizen.
Frank came home in time for Christmas 1915. Well aware of the stirrings of rebellion in the winter of 1915 and spring of 1916, he played no active role in the Easter Rising. He was a pacifist and, as he always said, he was prepared to die for Ireland but not prepared to kill for Ireland. Instead, on Tuesday, 25 April, the second day of the Rising, Frank went around the city assisting the injured and trying to prevent looting. He and two other unarmed newspaper editors encountered an army patrol and were arrested. They were taken to Portobello Barracks where, early the following morning, they were shot dead without trial. The officer who ordered and carried out the murders was Captain Riversdale Bowen-Colthurst.
Hanna and her seven-year-old son were told nothing of this atrocity. Their first inkling that something was wrong came on the Friday of Easter week when the army turned up at Hanna’s home, without explanation, and shot out the windows. They then raided the house and went through everything – looking for evidence to justify the murder. They took papers and personal possessions away, much of which was never returned.
Knowing a mistake had been made, the army attempted a whitewash after Frank’s murder and Hanna was pressured to accept compensation. This she quietly and persistently refused to do, insisting instead on a government inquiry into her husband’s death. The ensuing inquiry resulted in the arrest of Bowen-Colthurst. He was court-martialled, declared insane, imprisoned – and released after eighteen months. Meanwhile, Hanna’s house continued to be raided and her movements were constantly monitored.
Hanna did not fall apart after her soulmate’s death. Instead her nationalism came to the fore and she worked towards the cause of Irish independence, touring and lecturing in the USA. She pulled off a publicity coup for republicans when she was invited to Capitol Hill to meet president Woodrow Wilson. She was, she later remembered, ‘the first Irish exile and the first Sinn Féiner to enter the White House, and the first to wear there the badge of the Irish Republic.’ During her visit, she presented the president with an uncensored petition for Irish freedom from Cumann na mBan – and also managed to slip him a copy of the Easter 1916 Proclamation.
On her return in June 1918, she was again arrested by the furious authorities and imprisoned in Holloway Women’s Prison, north London, for going to the USA ‘without permission’. She immediately went on hunger strike and was released after two days.
During the War of Independence (1919–1921), Hanna served as a judge in the republican law courts in Dublin, which had been set up by the rebel republican government to supplant the British courts. Like Countess Markievicz, Kathleen Clarke, Maud Gonne and the members of Cumann na mBan, Hanna was anti-Treaty in 1921, but, as a pacifist, she abhorred the Civil War (1922–1923) and formed a deputation along with Clarke, Gonne, Louie Bennett and others to persuade the pro- and anti-Treaty leaders to negotiate. This attempt failed.
During the Civil War, the Free State government imprisoned some 7,000 republicans, and, in reply, Hanna helped set up the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League (WPDL) with Maud Gonne and Charlotte Despard. The WPDL campaigned for prisoners’ rights and fund-raised to give relief to their families. The group would meet to ‘take tea’ at cafés such as Bewley’s once a week, and the adjoining tables would be full of CID men, also taking tea and trying to overhear the women’s conversation. It was not long before the government banned the WPDL.
When Eamon de Valera’s new Fianna Fáil party was inaugurated in 1926, Hanna was elected to the executive – a post she immediately resigned when she realised de Valera himself was a conservative who was against equal political opportunities for women. She continued to be an active republican, however, and in the early 1930s she edited both the Republican File and An Phoblacht.
She served her fourth and final jail sentence when she was in her fifties, for an anti-partition speech she made in Northern Ireland. She continued to campaign for women’s rights in the work-place. She came out strongly against the 1935 Conditions of Employment Bill, which bluntly prohibited women from working in industry. Two years later, Eamon de Valera’s 1937 Irish Constitution contained the following articles:
41.2.1: The State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.
41.2.2: The State shall therefore endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of the duties in the home.
45.4.2: The State shall endeavour to ensure that the inadequate strength of women and the tender age of children shall not be abused, and that women and children shall not be forced by economic necessity to enter avocations unsuited to their sex, age or strength.
The inclusion of these articles predictably failed to rehabilitate de Valera in Hanna’s eyes. Like Maud Gonne and Kathleen Clarke, she campaigned against the Constitution, which she viewed as a repudiation of the equal rights and opportunities that were the very spirit of the 1916 Rising. Their protests fell on deaf ears and the Constitution was passed.
‘She liked people, and particularly women, to be independent,’ wrote her daughter-in-law, Andrée Sheehy Skeffington, because ‘she herself was fiercely independent.’ It was appropriate, therefore, that in 1943 Hanna stood as an Independent in the general election. She was one of four Independent female candidates, the others were Margaret Ashe, Miss Corbett and Miss Phillips. They campaigned under slogans such as ‘equal pay for equal work’ and ‘equal opportunities for women’. After a press boycott made sure none of the women got elected, Hanna pointed out that there were now fewer women TDs than there had been in 1918 – only three out of 138 TDs. The political dice were and would continue to be loaded in favour of the boys who were still, as she said, ‘allergic to women’.
In her sixties, Hanna enjoyed a wide range of non-political interests – botany and theatre to name but two – and continued to write on the political subjects close to her heart until at last her health gave out. Her final public political act was support for a teachers’ strike in 1946. When her health started to fail, she was nursed by her loving son, Owen, until the end. She died in April 1946, refusing deathbed absolution from the Church and calling herself an ‘unrepentant pagan’. She was buried beside her beloved Frank in Glasnevin cemetery. After her death, her close friend Maud Gonne praised her as ‘the ablest of all the fearless women who worked for Ireland’s freedom.’