Louie Bennett

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louisa Elizabeth Bennett (born 1870 in Dublin , United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ; died November 25, 1956 in Dublin, Ireland ), known as Louie , was an Irish trade unionist and suffragette .

Life

Louie Bennett's father was a wealthy art dealer in Dublin, her mother was also from the upper middle class and the Anglican family had ten children. She attended boarding school in England, Alexandra College in Dublin, and studied singing for a few semesters at the University of Bonn . As a young woman she wrote two books.

With her partner, the trade unionist Helen Chenevix , she founded the Irish Women's Reform League in 1911, the aim of which was to study and improve the lot of working women. She wrote reports for The Irish Citizen newspaper . In the same year, the two brought together various suffragette initiatives in the "Irish Woman's Suffrage Federation" (IWSF), which separated themselves from the militant "Irish Women's Franchise League" founded in 1908. Bennett was in favor of nonviolence, which is why she declined the support of the unionist James Connolly , who did not rule out militancy in the detachment of Ireland from the United Kingdom. The course of the strike and lockout in 1913 had a major impact on her political path.

Bennett was a pacifist, and on the war question the fronts ran straight through various social and political initiatives. After the outbreak of war in 1914, most of the British and Irish suffragettes concluded a truce with the war policy, which now courted women as workers and nurses. Bennett became secretary of the Irish section in the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) in 1915 , which opposed militarism in British politics. Together with Frank Sheehy Skeffington in Ireland she was one of the fiercest opponents of the war. In 1915, she was as a British delegate in The Hague at the International Women's Peace Conference to participate, alone, the British government denied her travel documents. After Sheehy-Skeffington's death in 1916, she supported his widow Hannah Francis Sheehy-Skeffington in the continued publication of the Irish Citizen newspaper until it was discontinued in 1920.

Bench in Dublin's St. Stephen's Green Park with the inscription: In Memory of Louie Bennett 1870–1958 (In memory of Louie Bennett 1870–1958)

From 1916 Bennett formed the leadership group of the Irish Women Workers' Union (IWWU) together with Helena Molony, Helen Chenevix and Rosie Hackett . In August 1916 she attended the Irish Trade Union Congress for the first time. In 1918 the IWWU was officially recognized by the other unions, and she and Chenevix became honorary union secretaries in the IWWU. In the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) she was a member of the executive committee from 1922 to 1931 and from 1944 to 1950. In 1932 a woman president of the annual meeting was elected the ITUC with her for the first time, this is a second time in 1948. In 1935 the IWWU took under her leadership in the mass protests against the Conditions of Employment Act the Minister of Economy Seán Lemass in part, by which, among other things, women's work should be restricted.

Family tombstone in Deansgrange Cemetery

In 1927 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the Irish Labor Party . In 1944 she ran unsuccessfully for Labor in the parliamentary elections . In 1945 she organized a 14-week strike by laundry workers. In the early 1950s she supported the anti-nuclear movement .

After almost forty years at the IWWU, she retired in 1955, but died the following year.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Proving of Priscilla . London, 1902
  • A Prisoner of His Word: a tale of real happenings . Dublin: Maunsela, 1908

literature

  • RM Fox : Louie Bennett, Her Life and Times . Dublin: Talbot, 1958
  • Rosemary Cullen Owens: Smashing Times: A History of Irish Women's Suffrage Movement 1889–1922 . Dublin: Attic Press, 1984 ISBN 9780946211081
  • Louise Ryan: Irish feminism and the vote: an anthology of the Irish Citizen newspaper, 1912-1920 . Folens, 1996 ISBN 0861217098
  • Louie Bennett , in: Sheila Rowbotham : A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States . London: Viking, 1997 ISBN 0-670-87420-5 , p. 586
  • Louie Bennett , in: Henry Boylan: A dictionary of Irish biography . 3rd ed.Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1998 ISBN 0-7171-2507-6 , p. 23
  • Bennett, Louie , in: June Hannam, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Katherine Holden: International encyclopedia of women's suffrage . Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 2000, ISBN 1-57607-064-6 , pp. 33f.
  • Ireland , in: June Hannam, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Katherine Holden: International encyclopedia of women's suffrage . Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 2000, ISBN 1-57607-064-6 , pp. 148-151
  • Irish Women's Franchise League , in: June Hannam, Mitzi Auchterlonie, Katherine Holden: International encyclopedia of women's suffrage . Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 2000, ISBN 1-57607-064-6 , pp. 151-153
  • Rosemary Cullen: Louie Bennet, Radical Irish Lives . Cork: Cork University Press, 2001 ISBN 9781859183090

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frances Clarke: Chenevix, Helen Sophia , in: James McGuire, James Quinn (Eds.): Dictionary of Irish Biography . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009
  2. ↑ Mary Jones: These obstreperous lassies; a history of the IWWU . Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988 ISBN 0-7171-1629-8
personal data
SURNAME Bennett, Louie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bennett, Louisa Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish trade unionist and suffragette
DATE OF BIRTH 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Dublin
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1956
Place of death Dublin