Louie Bennett was born in Dublin to a prosperous merchant family. In her early life she had literary aspirations and published two unremarkable novels, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of his Word (1908). In 1911, Louie changed direction dramatically when she co-founded the Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation (ISF) with her lifelong friend and ally, Helen Chenevix. As a feminist, Andrée Sheehy Skeffington remembers that she was ‘not militant’. However, she was involved enough to act as the editor of Hanna’s suffrage newspaper, the Irish Citizen, while Hanna was on a lecture tour in the USA.
Louie became deeply involved with labour rights during the 1913 Great Lock-Out in Dublin, and worked in the soup kitchens set up by various women’s organisations. The same year she started the Suffrage Federation and Reform League in an effort to bring women’s suffrage and women workers’ rights together in one forum. This was typical of her thinking: Louie, a lifelong pacifist, looked to mediation and conciliation rather than outright conflict to advance the interests of different groups.
Louie and Helen’s pacifism led them, in 1914, to join the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). During the war, Louie was the only Irish representative given leave by the government to attend the Women’s International Conference for Peace in The Hague (in the event she did not go because the authorities prohibited her boat from sailing).
In 1917, after labour rights activist and nationalist Helena Moloney was imprisoned for her part in the 1916 Rising, Louie replaced her as secretary of the Irish Women’s Workers’ Union (IWWU). This organisation had been set up in 1911 as a sister organisation to James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Louie was to act as the matriarch of this organisation for the next forty years, imposing her strong personality and individualistic views on it from the start – because of this, and because of her own massive authority, the organisation was not as democratic at that time as it later became.
During her leadership, membership of the IWWU increased and it won important concessions for printing, laundry and textile workers. By the 1930s it represented some 5,000 women trade unionists. It protested the Conditions of Employment Act 1935, which virtually banned women in industry. Strangely enough, Louie’s own views on female employment were somewhat inconsistent. While arguing for equal pay for equal work, she also felt that the increasing numbers of women in industry was ‘a menace to family life’. Louie was not convinced that married women had a right to work if their husbands were employed, because she viewed jobs as a resource to be shared around.
In 1955, a year before her death, Louie retired from active participation in labour affairs and handed over the leadership of the IWWU to her loyal friend, Helen Chenevix, who did the job until 1957. The IWWU lasted as a women-only trades union until 1984, when it amalgamated with the Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland (FWUI).