Co-founders of the Ladies’ Land League
Fanny and Anna were the younger sisters of Charles Stewart Parnell, the president of the Irish National Land League and Home RuleMPof the 1870s and 1880s. Born into a wealthy Protestant background, their County Wicklow father and Irish-American mother separated when they were young, and they spent their youth roving between Paris, London, Dublin and New Jersey. Fanny studied art in Paris and wrote poetry, while the independent and wayward Anna was a voracious reader of US journals and a feminist ahead of her time.
The girls’ strong-willed mother, Delia, entertained the deepest animosity towards British rule in Ireland, which she passed on to her daughters. When they lived in Upper Temple Street, Dublin, Fanny would walk around to the offices of the Fenian newspaper, The Irish News, and hand in nationalist poems for publication. In 1877 when Charles was following a course of obstructionism and filibustering in the House of Commons, Fanny sat watching him from the Ladies’ Gallery in a gesture of support that lasted twenty-six hours.
In 1879, Delia, Fanny and Anna moved to Bordenstown, New Jersey, where they fundraised against a famine that was threatening Connacht (the potato crops had failed four years in a row). When Charles became involved in the Land League movement in 1879, Anna and Fanny actively supported him and Anna wrote about the League in American journals. The Land League demanded the ‘three Fs’ for those who lived and worked on the land: fixity of tenure, fair rent and free sale. The non-violent campaign largely involved delayed or non-payment of unfair rents by tenant farmers, obstruction of evictions and mass protests. Much of the Land League’s financial support came from the USA, buoyed by the campaigning of Anna and Fanny.
By 1880 it was becoming obvious to the Land League leadership that their organisation would eventually be banned and that they would be imprisoned. The founder of the Land League and secretary of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), Michael Davitt, had the idea of forming a caretaker organisation to continue the protest, and to lead it he chose Anna, whom he referred to as ‘a lady of remarkable ability and energy of character’.
The inaugural meeting of the Ladies’ Land League was held in New York and the following year, against the wishes of her brother who felt a woman’s place was in the home and not in politics, Anna became president of the organisation in Ireland. It was the first time that women had formed an official body specifically to engage in Irish political reform.
In 1881, at the height of the land agitation movement known as the Land War, the government banned the Land League and imprisoned most of its leadership. It was time for Anna and the Ladies’ Land League to step in. While Charles, Michael Davitt et al were languishing in Kilmainham Jail, the ladies kept the movement going by financially supporting evictees and prisoners’ dependants, preventing land-grabbing and liaising with local branches.
The ladies started by overhauling the administration system. The League’s ‘records’ were chaotic, so the ladies compiled from scratch what became known as the ‘Book of Kells’ – a damning report into rents, evictions, numbers of tenants, land evaluations and even the characters of local agents and landlords. They continued distributing the League’s newspaper, United Ireland, which Home Rule politician William O’Brien edited from his jail cell.
When the paper was banned and its staff imprisoned, the ladies actually manned the printing presses and distributed the paper themselves. They personally travelled vast distances across Ireland to attend evictions and to arrange for wooden huts to be built for evictees to live in. All this was disgraceful and unfeminine behaviour for the times, and brought down upon the ladies what Anna called the ‘cold atmosphere of censure’ from the press, the Church and the police.
To Charles’s dismay, it was not long before the ladies’ movement was more radical than its male counterpart. They advocated all-out and escalating resistance, and some admitted that they were not averse to violence. In America, Fanny toured, raised money and became a political celebrity in her own right, while at home Anna’s enormous public meetings often turned into direct action to stop evictions. This was not what their brother had planned. He saw mass agitation as a means to constitutional power and Home Rule, whereas his sisters viewed agrarian revolution, a change in land ownership and expulsion of the ‘foreign enemy’ as the desired end.
In December 1881 the government banned the Ladies’ Land League and started imprisoning its members. The ladies responded to this persecution, as William O’Brien wrote, ‘by extending their organisation and doubling their activity’. By the following year they had 500 branches all over Ireland – and even some in Britain. But by then Charles felt that the Land League had served its purpose. He negotiated the Kilmainham Treaty with the government, which agreed to a cessation of agitation in exchange for concessions for tenants. On his release in May 1882, Charles, as president of the organisation, dismantled both the Land League and the Ladies’ Land League.
It would be an understatement to say that Anna’s efforts and those of the other members of the Ladies’ Land League were not fully appreciated by her brother and his male colleagues. At the same time as congratulating them, Charles publicly humiliated his sisters and the other ladies by cutting off their funds and accusing them of having spent too much money on aid while he had been in prison. The reality was that he considered Anna and the women too radical. For her part, Anna felt betrayed by him and what she saw as his abandonment of agrarian reform. But Charles saw his chance to forge ahead as the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party and make Home Rule a central issue, and he was not going to be side-tracked.
In July 1882 Anna’s much-loved sister and closest ally, Fanny, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of thirty-three. Charles was distraught at the loss of his favourite sister – but this did not prevent him from refusing to allow Fanny to be buried in Ireland. He was aware of her popularity and was worried that her funeral would become a focus of political disunity. After this, Anna had a nervous breakdown. She had in abundance what Davitt referred to as the Parnell ‘resoluteness of purpose’, and she used it to excise her brother from her life. She never spoke to him again.
Anna Parnell retired from political life and pursued her childhood interest in painting. She changed her name to Cerisa Palmer and moved to an artists’ colony in Cornwall, England, but continued to support nationalist organisations, such as Inghínidhe na hÉireann and Sinn Féin, from afar. She died in a freak swimming accident at Ilfracombe, Devon, at the age of fifty-nine. She outlived Charles, who had died in 1891.