A Turbulent Decade: Women Activists in Social, Labour and Nationalist Movements in Ireland, 1912-1922

• History
• Legal, Politics & Economics

During the years before World War I, Ireland was alive with movements and causes. The campaign for Home Rule, the emergence of a cultural and national renaissance, formation of the Gaelic League, and the organization of a vigorous labor movement by James Larkin and James Connolly — all of these added to the melting pot that was pre –WWI Ireland. That melting pot also contained an active women’s movement.

Historian Rosemary Cullen Owens will examine the interaction of the women’s suffrage movement with contemporary developments from 1912 with particular regard to the Home Rule campaign, the 1913 Labor strike and Lockout in Dublin, the stark differences between Unionists and pacifists on the outbreak of war in 1914, and the changing nature of the relationship between suffragists and nationalists pre and post the 1916 Rising. As national and international political conditions became more acute, women would take radically different approaches to such issues.