Louie Bennett
| Louie Bennett | |
|---|---|
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1870 Temple Hill, Dublin |
| Died | 25 November 1956 (age 86) Dublin |
| Resting place | Deans Grange Cemetery, Dublin |
| Parents | James Cavendish Bennett (father) Susan Elizabeth Bennett(née Boulger) (mother) |
| Known for | Her work as a suffragette, trade unionist, journalist and writer |
Louie Bennett (Louisa Elizabeth Bennett; 1870 – 1956) was an Irish suffragette, trade unionist, journalist and writer. Born and raised in Dublin, she began her life in the public arena with the establishment of the Irish Women's Suffrage Movement in 1911. She wrote two books prior to this, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (1908), and would continue to contribute to newspapers regularly as a freelance journalist. She played a significant role in the Irish Women Workers' Union once it was established in 1911. Bennett became Organising Secretary of the Irish section in the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) in 1915.
In 1927 she was elected to the executive committee of the Labour Party.
In later life she campaigned against nuclear power.
Bennett was born in the ultra-Protestant and arch-unionist Temple Road, one of the nicest in the new upper-class suburb of Rathmines in Dublin, into a Church of Ireland family. The eldest of nine surviving children of ten, she had four sisters and five brothers. Her father, James Bennett, ran the family business as a fine art auctioneer and valuer on Ormond Quay. Her mother, Susan Boulger came from a family of some social standing in Dublin. The family later moved to the terribly desirable suburb of Killiney, overlooking Dublin Bay at the south. Her parents' marriage horrified her mother's people; Susan Boulger came from a British Army family who did not approve of their daughter marrying "into trade".
She was initially educated at home with her brothers and sisters, but later went to a boarding school in England, and for a time, to the unionist Rathmines school Alexandra College in Dublin, and briefly studied music in Bonn, Germany. As a young girl she immersed herself in English novels by Dickens, Meredith, Austen and Thackeray, and was introduced to the alien concept that women might have rights by reading George Eliot. Two worthy novels were published, The Proving of Priscilla (published by Harpers, 1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (Maunsel, 1908).
The Suffragettes fought for the right for women to vote in elections, which was then limited to male property-owners. If women could vote, they reasoned, women would vote other women into power and influence. The term suffragette or suffragist is used to describe those who campaigned for the rights of women to vote in the elections in the United Kingdom. Louie Bennett and Helen Chenevix absorbed the Irishwomen's Suffrage and Local Government Associatiom (IWSLGA) and scattered local suffrage societies into the Irish Woman's Suffrage Federation (IWSF), an umbrella group for most of the non-militant suffrage societies. How she became involved in the suffragettes movement was unknown but from the late 1800s suffragette societies were emerging in Ireland in response to changing social and political times. In 1911, the year when women refused to participate in the census in protest of their lack of a vote, Louie joined with Helen Chenevix to establish the IWSF. After Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams formed a Women's Peace Party in the United States in January 1915, the suffragists divided on the correct stance for women towards war. People with strong English/Unionist connections abandoned or postponed all suffrage work. In the Irish Citizen Bennett stated unequivocally that "Woman should never have abandoned their struggle for justice, war or no war".
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