Ballot Blocked Episode 4: The Radicalism of Irish American Women

Eleanor Mahoney: Welcome to Ballot Blocked, a history of women's fight to access the vote. I’m Eleanor Mahoney. In this six-part series, we talk to historians and scholars to learn about women’s path to the ballot, from the period of the Civil War, through the women’s suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the 2020 election. It’s a story of courage and perseverance, of disappointments and hard-won victories. Some of the people you will hear about are well-known, their names on monuments and memorials. Others may have received less recognition, but their achievements are no less impressive. The history of women’s voting rights isn’t a progressive or linear narrative. Passing legislation is only one step along the way to the ballot box. The laws must be enforced and that takes more organizing and more struggle. New barriers to voting access are still being created today. One hundred years after the 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex, the fight for social, economic, and political equality continues. Ballot Blocked explores how we got here and asks where we might be going next when it comes to voting rights. In this episode, we focus on the role of Irish American women in the suffrage movement. Many of these women were already veteran organizers. They had led strikes and fought for labor unions in cities across the country. They had also campaigned for land reform in Ireland and for Irish independence. To learn more about how these experiences affected their views on women’s suffrage, I spoke with Dr. Tara McCarthy. Dr. McCarthy is a professor of history at Central Michigan University and is the author of Respectability and Reform: Irish American Women’s Activism, 1880-1920. I asked Dr. McCarthy to tell me about the activist history of Irish American women, and how this set them apart from many other suffragists. Tara McCarthy: Yeah, I think that part of the timeline of the way things work for Irish American women is that they really got involved in the labor movement or the nationalist movement first. So, it's not a traditional suffrage story whereas usually when we teach women's history, we start with Seneca Falls and the women's rights and then how that moves into a suffrage movement. Of course, Irish American women really aren't part of that story, so hadn't been part of it. So, when I was really looking for Irish American women's activism, I started really with the labor movement and the nationalist movement, but then you start seeing that some of the earliest suffrage converts really are coming out of the labor movement. So, they have a reason to embrace women's suffrage because of their experiences as workers and organizers. Eleanor Mahoney: The suffrage movement in America began to adopt more confrontational tactics around 1910. Leaders like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns traveled to England and saw that picketing and mass demonstrations for women’s suffrage there were effective at moving public opinion. Bringing those tactics to the U.S. marked a major shift in strategy for most suffragists, who were largely middle and upper-class. But for many Irish American women, these tactics were nothing new. As leaders in the labor movement, they already had experience with radical politics. Union organizing in industrial America was almost always violent and contentious and demanded bold action. This exposure to the everyday struggles of working-class people on and off the job gave many Irish American women a new militancy in their approach to social movements, including the campaign for women’s suffrage. Tara McCarthy: I think one of the things is that for Irish American women, they were sort of obvious militants. And what I mean by that is when the American suffrage movement starts to embrace... Not embrace. Maybe that's too strong of a word, but starts to experiment with militancy, of course, that happens later than the British movement. So we think of the British movement as militant and the American movement is really much more conservative if that's an inappropriate word. But for Irish American women, they kind of were more obvious in being able to really navigate working class neighborhoods and things like that. And they seem to embrace the idea that it's okay to be loud, it's okay to be assertive. So they really bring that. So some of the, I think, fun stories about militants come out of this idea. There was a woman by the name of Margaret Foley and she was from Boston. So she was this working class Irish Catholic and when the Massachusetts Suffrage Association was looking for someone to send to England to train in militancy, they chose her and then another woman, and they basically sort of went over there and kind of studied militant tactics and brought them back to the US. So, her job was essentially to go and heckle local politicians in Boston. So she would go to these other Irish American politicians, right? She would go and she would sort of heckle at them and try to get them to engage with her about suffrage. And that was basically her job was to disrupt rallies and to try and get politicians to change their stance on suffrage. So she had to, I think, kind of embrace a certain level of assertiveness because that was her job. Eleanor Mahoney: Many Irish American women maintained close ties to family in Ireland. They remained engaged in Irish politics, including the fight for Irish independence. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Irish Land League became a prominent cause. It sought to help poor tenant farmers and abolish the landlord system. Irish American women organized on behalf of the League in the United States, raising money, and speaking out publicly in favor of land reform. Tara McCarthy: Well, there are three waves of Irish nationalism. The first one started with the Land League. So that's the 19th century and the Land League really, it started in Ireland. It was an Irish movement to reform basically policies towards tenant farmers to give tenant farmers some rights on the lands that they were farming. The Land League was really a male movement, but what happened in Ireland was that they knew that the leaders would be arrested and put in jail. So they intentionally started a ladies' Land League to take over the work when the men were put in prison. So in Ireland, you had women leading rallies and raising funds and providing help for tenants. You had a few American women who actually went over and helped with that. But the American version of the Land League was more educational and fundraising. And they were learning not only about what's going on in Ireland, but about land theories and ideas about private property and starting to do some of the kind of political activism and fundraising that they really hadn't done before. The other thing that the Land League did was embrace some of the more cultural aspects like learning the Irish language and teaching Irish history. So both in America and in Ireland, it was a way for the Irish to preserve their cultural heritage and to educate the next generation. You have other waves of Irish nationalism that come later particularly after 1916. So I do talk about both of those as being really important. But for suffrage really the militant tactics and the things we were talking about, a lot of that is later into the 20th century, particularly as Irish nationalism takes on really, almost a crisis period after the Easter Rising and during World War I. So, a lot of the most militant stuff that's going on is really that time period, where you have militancy in Irish Republican circles. Militancy in the suffrage movement happening at the same time. Eleanor Mahoney: The latter decades of the 19th century saw a rise in anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States. In response, many Catholic women, including Irish Americans, began to re-think the importance of voting, seeing it as a way to assert social and political power. Tara McCarthy: Yeah. There's, again, I think kind of a couple of important trends. One is just nativism in general. It rises in certain time periods and one of them is the late 19th century. So that particularly 1880s and 1890s, the end of the 19th century, you have a pretty, pretty strong anti-Catholic backlash. So for Catholics who were already in this country, suffrage becomes an issue because there's that question of, "Well, if women get the right to vote, will Catholic women vote, will Protestant women vote and how would that help shape or reshape the dynamics, right?" Again, if you're looking at media coverage, you'll start to see comments like, "Well, we already have Irish men voting. We really don't want Catholic men voting. We really don't want Catholic women voting too," that kind of thing. And then in a later time period, again, in the 20th century, Catholics start to say, "You know what, maybe we are interested in this suffrage question, but we want to start to look at it as Catholics, right?" So, what I mean by that is that you start to have interest from the suffrage movement importing the Irish Catholic vote, but also interest from women in having a kind of a separate Catholic organization or Catholic movement. So you do see, I think, a really interesting trend but it happens late, like around 1914-15. You start to see a trend towards groups of Catholic women working for suffrage as Catholics separately from the dominant suffrage movement. Eleanor Mahoney: Finding the stories of working-class women in the past can be hard because their experiences were often not the ones celebrated in the media or recorded in the history books. Dr. McCarthy told me she often had to search through archival records, personal papers, and old newspapers to find even a trace of the women she was researching. That was the case for Gertrude Kelly, an anarchist, a surgeon, and a suffragist. Tara McCarthy: Gertrude Kelly is a fascinating figure. She was born in Ireland, but came fairly young, so largely grew up in the US as part of a big Irish family. She and one of her brothers whose name was John Kelly were both anarchists in the 1880s. They embraced anarchism and they wrote for these American anarchist publications. So you can actually read what they wrote in the 1880s. But she was a surgeon and pretty well known in New York. Well, enough known, they named the playground after her in the 1920s or '30s, the Gertrude Kelly Playground. I think it's still there. So, she was very active in reform in New York City. She was single. She never married. And she really was devoted to her causes of which there were many, but she shows that most of the time in terms of Irish nationalism. But again, it's very hard to find. I met several other historians who were also trying to find more on her. It's very hard to find much of anything on her because she doesn't leave any papers. So, it's just mentions here and there and then letters that she wrote to connections in Ireland or in the US. But she really embraced... I mean, she was a pretty radical woman and it was her skill as a surgeon that allowed her to be active in some of these other causes as well. In other words, she didn't marry, she didn't have children. She was a respected professional, but also active in lots of causes. Leonora O'Reilly and Gertrude Kelly were friends, which is kind of a great story as well. But Leonora O'Reilly has a pretty different background. Her mother and father came from Ireland and they had a little grocery store and then he died. Her mother eventually lost the store, which forced her to take a job basically in a factory. So, it was just mother and daughter living together. As soon as Leonora was old enough that she basically joined her mother in the factory, and they worked in the garment trade. Her mother, Winifred O'Reilly also brought her daughter into trade unionism in some of the more... I don't want to say radical. I don't think that's the right word, but at least the more cutting edge ideas of the labor movement in her time. When Leonora O'Reilly is older, she was taking care of her mother, of Winifred, and Leonora O'Reilly actually died fairly young. She was in her 50s, I think. And when she died, her mother was still alive. So, the women who were her friends from the Women's Trade Union League took care of Leonora's mother. So, there was that family connection that they stayed together their entire lives, but also the Women's Trade Union League, but essentially became her home, Leonora O'Reilly's home. She came to a lot of her activism really through, again, through the union movement, but embraced suffrage very early on, and then came to Irish nationalism sort of after that as well. So, she was involved in all three. So that's why she shows up all the time. Plus, she had papers. She left letters and diaries. She's one of the few that did. Eleanor Mahoney: Working-class and middle-class women came together to found the Women’s Trade Union League in 1903. The organization promoted trade unionism among women workers and lobbied for labor protection legislation. It raised money for strikes, held protests, coordinated boycotts, and investigated conditions in sweatshops. Leonora O’Reilly worked as an organizer and recruiter for the New York City Chapter of the group for more than a decade. As Dr. McCarthy explains, O’Reilly and other working-class members recognized the organization’s value, but also grew frustrated by the influence of its wealthier members. Tara McCarthy: Well, the Women's Trade Union League, I think plays a really important role in this even though there was certainly tension at times. The Women's Trade Union League as a vision was working class women and middle class, and upper-class women really working together, right? But in many cases these middle and upper-class women took on leadership roles and working-class women, they were the organizers, they were the ones out there on the ground, actually doing the work. What that did though was helped them get out of factory life. So that essentially Leonora O'Reilly stopped being a factory worker once she was able to support herself through her organizing and her activism. And for many other women, this would be the case as well, not just Irish women, but other women as well. But as far as how they work together, there was certainly frustration sometimes. At least for O'Reilly, she quit more than once, the Women's Trade Union League, because she was kind of like, "I've had enough." And she would go back. But the suffrage movement was important, tied to that because particularly in the early 20th century, the suffrage movement started to reach out to working class women more. And so, it makes sense. It would be through either the Women's Trade Union League or some other organizations that they would be able to start these dialogues, right? But especially around 1907, 1908, you start to get a lot more interest in working class women in the suffrage movement. And what that then does is open up opportunities for women to become paid speakers for the suffrage movement. And I mentioned Margaret Foley already. She's a really good example of that. There were women who essentially left behind at least temporarily left behind their working-class jobs to work for the suffrage movement and they would travel when needed for different state campaigns. So again, one of the, I think, the best example is an Irish woman by the name of Margaret Hinchey. She was first-generation Irish, and she worked in the laundry until she was blacklisted for her union activities. And then through the Women's Trade Union League and in close partnership with Leonora O'Reilly, she ends up a pretty popular suffrage speaker. She travels to different states to give speeches and to organize for suffrage. But when suffrage is won in New York, she's not needed anymore. Leonora O'Reilly tries to help raise money for her, but she ends up back in the laundry when the suffrage movement is over. And Margaret Foley was, I want to say she was a hat trimmer. I can't remember what she did for work, but she, after the suffrage movement really was scrambling around for a while looking for some kind of appointment with the Democratic Party or something, because, again, these are working women, right? They have to work. So, when the suffrage movement doesn't need them anymore, they have to find something else. So, it's a tricky relationship. It's part employer and part movement for a lot of women. And the Women's Trade Union League is as well. I mean, it's their job, right? They worked for the Women's Trade Union League. Eleanor Mahoney: An important turning point for working-class women and the suffrage movement came in 1911. On March 25, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. 146 garment workers died in the fire; most were young immigrant women. It was one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history and would eventually lead to the implementation of major workplace safety reforms. After the fire, labor activists like Leonora O’Reilly were more convinced than ever that having working-class women involved in the political process was essential for change. Tara McCarthy: So, Leonora O'Reilly was in New York. It's a moment where O'Reilly says in her diary, "All right, we need a working-class suffrage movement, right? Not just a suffrage movement, but a working-class suffrage movement." It's a moment where she says, it's not enough just to be involved in a suffrage movement. We need working class women to work with working class women as well. Eleanor Mahoney O’Reilly and other working-class women began to form wage earners suffrage leagues across the country. These groups would be run by and for the working-class whose lives were far removed from those of the wealthy elite women who headed most suffrage organizations. Tara McCarthy: There was frustration, at least, again, on O'Reilly's part and also Foley's part, I think, we haven't talked as much about her, with some kind of paternalistic attitudes and not really understanding the needs of working class women. Margaret Foley, one of the interesting things that came out in her letters was that she was largely useful to the movement for her heckling and that sort of activism. There came a point where she was less active in the movement. So she wrote to - I don't know if it was the head or one of the officers with the Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association,And she basically said, "Hey, I'm a well-known Irish Catholic in Boston. Why am I not more needed in the movement? People are asking me why I'm not more visible in the movement." And they basically wrote back to her and said, "Well, you've been really valuable, but the suffrage movement is in kind of a different phase right now. We're focusing on sort of quiet lobbying and things that we don't really think would be your best area essentially." So again, I think the subtext of that was, "Okay, we like when you're loud and you go out and you heckle, and you do these public speeches and demonstrations, but for the quiet lobbying, we're going to send somebody else." So for Foley, again, as I said, since, that was largely how she was supporting herself, she needed to work and she wasn't sort of seen as being useful in that way. For Margaret Hinchey, I think the same thing happens. Leonora O'Reilly is different because, I mean, suffrage wasn't really... I mean, she was a suffragist, but she wasn't the one out there traveling and giving this for the most part. So for some of these women, I think they were useful until they weren't useful anymore. Whereas the Women's Trade Union League would continue to be a home for some women, for women who were specifically within the suffrage organizations, I think it's more complicated. Eleanor Mahoney: Margaret Hinchey and Margaret Foley spent years speaking out in favor of women’s voting rights. Their efforts targeted union members and working-class immigrants. Groups that the mainstream suffrage movement often ignored. Hinchey and Foley made their mark on the fight for ballot access, but, in the end, neither found a permanent home in activism. They didn’t come from money and, unlike many wealthier suffrage advocates, needed a regular paycheck to survive - something that proved hard to come by despite their commitment to labor rights and women’s equality. The 19th amendment barred states from denying the vote based on sex. But, for many women, including the working-class Irish Americans studied by Dr. McCarthy, full and lasting participation in the political process remained an elusive goal. In our next episode, we’ll meet another group of women whose activism had roots in the labor movement. Dr. Josue Estrada will tell us about the struggle for voting rights in Washington State in the decades after World War II. Mexican American women living and working in rural Yakima County east of the Cascade Mountains faced numerous barriers in their attempts to cast a ballot, including literacy tests and English-only elections. Despite these obstacles though, they were determined to assert their right to the vote.