Essay by Mary Cullen on Anna Haslam - page 4
The political scene was changing rapidly after the 1916 Rising and the reorganisation of Sinn Féin in 1917 as the party of separatist nationalists. In the general election in December 1918 after the great war had ended , Sinn Féin won the vast majority of Irish seats on an abstentionist platform and in January 1919, set up Dáil Éireann and declared an Irish republic. In this election, women in the UK voted for the first time, though on a franchise restricted to women over thirty and with a property qualification. Constance Markievicz was the first woman to be elected to the UK parliament, though as a Sinn Féin candidate she did not take her seat.
In the 1918 election, Anna Haslam finally cast her vote after more than forty years of suffrage activism. Sadly, Thomas had died in 1917 and was not there to celebrate with her. However, despite the high political tension and different political allegiances, suffragists of all political hues, unionist, Irish Parliamentary Party and Sinn Féin, gathered to cheer her and present her with a bouquet of flowers in suffrage colours. The IWSLGA now changed its name again to the Irish Women Citizens and Local Government Association to continue the work to win votes for women on the same terms as men, which would now mean universal suffrage, and to help women to fully use and avail of their new citizenship.
The following years saw the War of Independence from 1919–1921, the partition of Ireland under the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, the truce, the Treaty and the setting up of the Irish Free State in 1922. It fell to nationalist feminists to carry on the struggle with their male colleagues to ensure that women achieved full equality of citizenship in the new state. This was achieved, and Article 3 of its constitution guaranteed to every person 'without distinction of sex' both the 'privileges and .... the obligations' of citizenship.'
Anna Haslam died in the same year of 1922. She did not live to witness the backlash against women's full citizenship in the decades following the setting up of the Irish Free State. The formal equality in the constitution did not translate into the full reality. Nor did the pioneering feminists' belief that women's votes would fundamentally change legislation and society for the better materialise. But feminist objectives and feminist action survived and continued and so did the IWSLGA.
Over the following decades, the association Haslam founded in 1876 was actively involved in feminist resistance to efforts by succeeding Irish governments to claw back a number of aspects of sex equality in areas such as liability for jury service and the introduction of a sex bar in the civil service and a marriage bar in national school teaching. In 1947, the IWSLGA merged with the newly established Irish Housewives Association (IHA). To the merger it brought its long-standing affiliation to the International Alliance of Women, a contact which led directly to the IHA's central role in the setting up of the first Council on the Status of Women in Ireland in 1970.
Anna Haslam's contribution to the development of Irish feminist activism was enormous, as was that of the suffrage association she founded. She combined strong and effective leadership with an ability to win the respect and admiration of many who disagreed with her on various issues. All descriptions of her by contemporaries note her vigour and enthusiasm throughout her extraordinarily long and active career. To this was added the quality of her contribution, her clarity of thought and expression, her long presence as an articulate and confident voice steadily and consistently asserting the self-evident validity of women's claims, and, not least, the inclusiveness of her concept of sisterhood and Irishness.
Though herself a unionist and from a Quaker background, she successfully drew nationalist, Catholic and socialist young women into the suffrage movement and retained their esteem and affection to the end. Her own association accurately summed up her life's work in its 1917 report which described her as 'one of the giants of the women's cause.'
Note on Minute Book of IWSLGA, 1876–1913
The minute book records every committee meeting of the association, 213 in all and not one of which Anna Haslam missed, from the first in 1876 to end of 1913, when she resigned as secretary. She then appended a list of the different 'chairmen' [sic], the number of meetings chaired by each, and a list of petitions gathered and presented over the years.
Meeting by meeting the minutes record the names of those who attended and the changing structure as women increasingly outnumbered men and took over the chairing of most meetings. They follow the development of the association's work, its times of pessimism and of optimism. They record its changes of name, first to the Dublin Women's Suffrage and Poor Law Guardian Association, when women won eligibility as poor law guardians, then formally to the Dublin Women's Suffrage and Local Government Association when they gained all local government franchises and eligibility for election as district councillors, and later to the Irish Women's Suffrage and Local Government Association as the suffrage movement expanded in the early 20th century.
They record the arrival on the committee of nationalists like Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Mary Hayden. The central role of Anna Haslam as secretary is clear throughout her initiative and the burden of work she carried, while it is equally clear that the association was never a one-woman show, as differences of opinion, argument and even resignations over various issues are minuted.
Above all, the minutes are a record of continuous activism and organisation: drawing room and public meetings; petitions to parliament; lobbying of MPs to support the next women's suffrage bill or amendment to a bill. They also record the energy and effort the association put into encouraging and actively helping women to use the franchises they had won and avail of their eligibility for election as poor law guardians and district councillors. At the same time it countered any attempts to disqualify women and pressed for the appointment of women to positions such as rate collectors and sanitary inspectors, while always pursuing the association's main objective of the parliamentary vote.
The minute book is a primary source that will continue to be mined for information as historians continue to pose new questions to the historical record.
Mary Cullen
January 2009
Please click on the link below to consult the minute book which begins in 1876 (DWSA1.pdf) and ends in 1913 (DWSA9.pdf)