School of Political Science & Sociology Seminar Series: Agitating for political rights: local and visiting suffragists of the West of Ireland

By Mary Clancy (Global Women’s Studies)

At a time of heightened international debate about democratic and social change during the early decades of the twentieth century, the place of the woman citizen remained contentious. The demand to extend the parliamentary franchise to qualified women, debated in Westminster, for instance, since the mid-19^th century, was politically and socially divisive despite the democratic inevitability of its objective. Argument in favour of Irish Home Rule (especially from 1886) complicated the politics of the suffrage debate. The West of Ireland tends to be ignored in analyses of the suffrage campaign. However, it is an exceptionally important and interesting space in which to study how and why the question of political rights for women was visible and, on occasion, volatile. From north Mayo to Galway, local and visiting activists organised in civic and public spaces, powerful representatives of an ignored political class. In reconstructing this history of regional suffrage activism, the talk evaluates the nature of the agitation, and the impact of a complex effort that embodied international ideals of women’s rights, local political perspectives and memories of earlier women’s activism within the region.

Mary Clancy, School of Political Science and Sociology, NUI Galway. Publications include (forthcoming), with C Beaumont and L Ryan, ‘Networks as “Laboratories of experience”: exploring the life cycle of the Irish suffrage movement and its aftermaths in Ireland, 1870-1937’, Women’s History Review and ‘Women’s suffrage in the West of Ireland: Different influences and Life-stories in Histories of Citizenship’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, 2018, (70), pp.119-130.