The Story Of The Ladies' Land League
An Excerpt From
Unmanageable Revolutionaries Women and Irish Nationalism
by Margaret Ward.
The Ladies' Land League, 1881 - 82
On 31 January 1881 a remarkable event took place. On that day Irishwomen were asked by Irishmen to take control of the turbulent mass movement known as the Land League. The Land War was then at its height, with thousands of tenant farmers pledged to fight against rack rents and landlord power, and the League leaders knew it was only a matter of time before they were jailed. The formation of a female organisation, which would be outside the terms of the Coercion Act, was therefore essential. Although the men considered women capable only of providing a 'semblance' of organisation, the gesture would symbolise their determination not to submit meekly to coercion. So, for the first time in Irish history, women were given the opportunity to participate in a political movement and, in the absence of men, found themselves free to assert their own principles and to develop their own organisational skills. Although little had been expected of them, they quickly revealed a determination to provide far more than ineffectual defiance. For the next 18 months militant women directed the campaign and organised resistance on the ground. As Michael Davitt testified: 'Everything in the way of defeating the ordinary law and asserting the unwritten law of the League . . . was more systematically carried out under the direction of the ladies' executive than by its predecessor.'
Yet very little has been written about this unique period and Anna Parnell, the driving force behind the Ladies' Land League, is known only as the sister of Charles Stewart Parnell, hero of the Land League and, at one time, the 'uncrowned king of Ireland'. The women's contribution was carefully expurgated from most contemporary accounts, and with good reason: to have given serious consideration to their work would have involved a more critical appraisal of the Land League itself, and that was something many of the male leaders, busy congratulating themselves upon their success, preferred not to do.
The women's assessment of the situation reveals an uncomfortably different picture, while their activities demonstrated that women were both fully capable of leading a mass movement and could be more efficient and strategically aware than their male colleagues.
The rediscovery of Anna Parnell's history of the period the caustically entitled 'The Land League: Tale of a Great Sham', written to stem this flood of male self-congratulation has helped to redress the balance. It is a scrupulously impersonal narrative of events, in which she completely effaces her own contribution. One historian has, although disagreeing with her conclusions, praised the 'crystal clarity and surgical precision' of her analysis. Its long disappearance enabled a single interpretation of events to remain dominant, which has not only distorted historical understanding, but has led to repercussions of which later generations of women have been only partially aware. The uncompromising stance of the women left a bitter taste in the mouths of male politicians and they were determined to ensure that women would never again be given the power that had been handed to the Ladies' Land League. An awareness of the history of the Ladies' Land League places into perspective the difficulties encountered by other women who later fought for a full and active role within the nationalist movement.
The Parnell Sisters
The Parnell’s came from a Protestant landed family of moderate wealth. Out of eleven children, three Anna, Fanny and Charles Stewart were to devote their lives to the cause of Irish independence. It was an unusual path for members of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, but much of their inspiration came from their American mother, Delia, who was deeply anti-British. Fanny, a well-known writer of nationalist poetry, had attended O'Donovan Rossa's trial after the Fenian rising of 1867, and she retained a sympathy for Fenianism which was never shared by her brother.
Her poems, in particular 'Hold the Harvest', described by Davitt as 'the Marseillaise of the Irish peasant', gave her a fame which lasted long after her death. Her poetry was published in newspapers in Ireland, England and America, while in Ireland lockets containing her portrait were sold for a shilling. 4 While Anna and Fanny did not entirely share the same political views Anna realised that the physical force tradition completely excluded women from its ranks they both felt the injustice of women's sexual oppression.
The period in which they lived offered few socially productive opportunities for women of their class. Ireland was a predominantly rural country with a peasant economy; the basic economic unit was the household, all the members of which worked on the land or in the declining cottage industries, which were adversely affected by the Industrial Revolution taking place in Britain. Only the north provided any large-scale wage labour for women: the Belfast linen industry had a 75 per cent female workforce. But for upper-class women, the role of governess was the only acceptable outlet, and that was a last resort for those without an inheritance.
The Parnell sisters' position as unmarried daughters from a relatively impoverished Protestant landed family had certain advantages: the family was not part of the conservative Irish Catholic tradition and neither did it hold a particularly important position in the social and economic structures of the country.
Delia's American influence was also important: a contemporary account reveals that Anna was a regular reader of New York and Boston journals, and well acquainted with the views of the early American feminists who were fighting against slavery and for the rights of women.
As a young girl living at home, she made friends with the Catholic daughters of a local miller, but broke off the friendship because she found them too conservative in their views, especially in their uncritical acceptance of church teaching on the natural inferiority of women. Her independence of mind made close relationships difficult; only Fanny shared her views.
Although Anna studied painting in Paris (where she was accompanied by her mother) and later attended art college in England, she had no hope of ever achieving financial independence. Her income consisted of a small allowance of £100 a year, derived from the Collure estate of another brother, John Howard, and provided by the terms of her father's will. All the boys inherited property while the girls of the family received identical allowances. Charles, as the inheritor of the family estate of Avondale, was responsible for the support of any member of the family living there. This economic dependence was a humiliation, and Anna wrote with bitterness of the custom of the upper classes of 'giving all, or nearly all, to the sons and little or nothing to the daughters'. 6 The allowances received by such women were usually at the mercy of the family fortunes if these declined, then one of the first economies was to cut off these stipends. Anna empathised with the ignominy of their position, left to the mercy of charitable funds and 'little less the victims of the landlords than the tenants themselves'.
As a landlord albeit a benevolent one Charles Parnell remained unequivocally a member of his class. Anna, however, became more and more critical of the existing social structures. Her alienation was a consequence of her realisation that, as a dependant of her brother, she was simultaneously of the landlord class and estranged from and exploited by it. Her denunciation of her class was couched in terms which did not exclude her brother: 'if the Irish landlords had not deserved extinction for anything else, they would have deserved it for the treatment of their own women.' Few women of similar background saw so clearly the links between their sexual oppression and the class exploitation of labourers and small farmers which underpinned the social and economic structures.
Anna, because of her sex, was deprived of the right to vote or to take political office, a disenfranchisement she acutely resented, as her sardonically entitled ‘Notes from the Ladies' Cage’ testifies. This was a series of articles, written for the Celtic Monthly, evaluating the Irish party's performance in the House of Commons at Westminster; this she witnessed from the secluded gallery where women were allowed to view the proceedings, but not to participate. An Irish Suffrage Society had been formed in Dublin, in 1876, by two Quakers, Anna and Thomas Haslam, to campaign for women's right to vote in local government elections. Its limited aims and moderate views had little appeal for women who wanted a total reform of Irish society and the breaking of the enforced political and economic link with Britain. Anna's exclusion from political life had a paradoxically positive aspect, enabling her to analyse events unswayed by any considerations of future personal power. While Parnell was courted by the English Liberals, his sister became an uncompromising nationalist, refusing to surrender political principles for short-term personal or political gains.
The Formation of the Land League
There had been movements centred around land distribution and high rents before, but none had welded small tenant farmers, large farmers, landless labourers, parliamentarians and politically committed women into a social force which would ultimately change a land system in which 800 landlords owned half the country. Different economic circumstances, combined with a change in political direction, were to create the conditions from which the Land League emerged.
The Great Famine of 1845 had left 800,000 dead while hundreds of thousands fled from the scene of such horror. This decimation of the population had many consequences. People were determined to prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again, and the only way of doing that (in the absence of a revolutionary transformation of society) was to reduce the numbers of people dependent upon each plot of land. In the east and south of the country, the small farms had been consolidated into larger ranches, bought up by those who had survived, but in the west the peasants still scraped out a living on their tiny plots of land, the potato still their staple diet. Although it was, in some respects, a pre-Famine existence, they too postponed marriage to a later age and no longer subdivided the land for their sons and daughters, so afraid were they of the consequences of rearing large numbers of children on a food that had once been tainted with blight. Those who had emigrated wrote of the better land they had found, and dissatisfaction grew amongst those at home. Unlike before, the poorest sections of the peasantry were now aware of the disparities between their way of life and that of those who did not have to eke out a miserable living on barren soil, with no security of tenure, paying rents to often absent landlords for an amount far beyond their means. Gradually rising expectations, cruelly frustrated by a new series of disastrous harvests, focused their hopes upon the Land League.
The season of 1879 was the worst experienced by Irish farmers since the Famine. The potato crop, valued at £12,000,000 in 1876, plummeted to £3,500,000. The larger cattle farmers were also suffering as American competition in grain, which was now pouring out of the recently cultivated prairies, affected the whole of Western Europe and Irish farmers were no longer able to sell their crops to the British market. Seasonal migrants couldn't find work in Scotland or England, a loss of earnings which in the west of Ireland alone was reckoned at £ 250,000. 8 As there was no work for them at home, their support for the Land League was inevitable.
Shopkeepers and businessmen in the towns identified with the plight of the farming community, because if the farmers couldn't afford to buy, those who depended on their trade would be financially wiped out.
Social discontent was widespread, and it was at this point that an alliance was formed between those who believed in physical force, the Fenians, and a section of the Irish parly at Westminster, led by Charles Stewart Parnell. Devoy, the leader of the American Fenians, together with Michael Davitt, a Mayo man recently released from jail, reached an agreement with Parnell in June 1879 by which the campaign on the land question would have as its central aim the demand for peasant proprietorship. The Fenians believed that no British government would concede this demand, so the League would eventually be forced to transform itself into a movement for national independence. Therefore, what appeared on the surface to be a purely economistic movement had the potential to become an instrument of revolutionary nationalism. For his part, Parnell wanted to form an all-class movement to campaign for Home Rule a limited form of self-government and he believed that this would only be achieved when the land question had been resolved. As far as he was concerned, the Land League was not a revolutionary challenge to the exploitative landlord system, but a vehicle to reform its most glaring abuses. Once that had been accomplished, landlords would unite with tenants to fight for Irish political independence. He was therefore careful not to offend the larger landed interests while aiming at this all-class alliance, and he avoided discussions on such radical problems as landless labourers or land redistribution. For the same reason, he was against calling for a full-scale rent strike, because the more prosperous farmers would not have agreed to any actions which would leave them liable to eviction they were in secure possession of their farms and what they wanted was a reduction in rent. On the other hand, Anna Parnell and some of the more radical members of the Land League believed that in the early part of 1880, while the League was in the ascendant and morale was high, the policy of rent strike would have had some chance of success. It was certainly the only time when it could have been reasonably adopted as a tactic.
Davitt had formed the Mayo Land League on 16 August 1879. That summer, blight appeared in the potato fields and excessive rain ruined the harvest. The threat of eviction increased. A central body to direct and co-ordinate resistance was essential so, on the 21st of October, the Irish National Land League, with Parnell as its president, came into existence. Its objects were declared to be the reduction of rack rents and the ownership of the soil by the occupiers of the soil.
The first battle against eviction took place at Carraroe, Connemara, on 5 January 1880, when bailiffs, escorted by armed police, attempted to evict impoverished peasants for failure to pay their rent. It was a 'bloody conflict', with the police using bayonets and firing volleys over the heads of the crowd. The 'fierce daring' women who led the resistance displayed what observers felt to be 'utter recklessness of life', and they forced the police and bailiffs to withdraw. But although the people won that round of the battle the police were quick to alter their tactics so that bailiffs could complete eviction processes. The Land League needed an alternative method of resistance, one which did not depend on the willingness of peasants physically to resist the armed forces of the law.
There had been 1,238 evictions in 1879 and by the following year half the peasants in Connacht were in danger of eviction as a result of the failure of the potato crop for the fourth successive season.
When the House of Lords rejected a bill which would have given compensation to those evicted as a result of bad harvests, the League decided upon a policy of obstruction. If the landlord didn't agree to a reduction in rent, the tenant was to pay only 'at the point of a bayonet'. This entailed holding out until the land was seized by the bailiffs, while at the same time making seizure as difficult as possible by hiding cattle and blocking roads. The Land League pledged itself to pay the legal costs incurred, while the tenant then paid the rent arrears. It was an expensive policy and one which did little to weaken the power of the landlord; the League was raising money which would ultimately go into the landlord's pocket. Although tenants were refusing to pay more than a 'fair rent', an average reduction of 20 per cent benefited only the larger farmers. The uneconomical size of the holdings of the poorer peasants meant that they were simply unable to pay any rent. Although evictions were not prevented, linked to the obstructionist tactic was what became known as the boycott', which isolated land-grabbers and made life so unpleasant for them that it was hoped no one would want to buy up a farm after the previous tenant had been evicted, and the landlord would eventually be forced to take back the original occupant. By the end of 1880, as the Land League grew in strength, the numbers of evictions decreased.
The government decided to prosecute the League leaders for conspiracy in preventing payment of rent and with resisting eviction processes. At their trial in January 1881. Fanny Parnell's poem 'Hold the Harvest' constituted a major part of the prosecution's case, with its passionate appeal to the peasants to be 'bold and stern' in deed, 'and set your faces as a flint, and swear to hold your own'.
Although the outcome was an acquittal, it was not a victory. The government's real intention had been to demonstrate that ordinary law was ineffectual in dealing with subversive movements and they now had the excuse they wanted to do away with the necessity for trial by jury. On 2 March, the Protection of Person and Property (Ireland) Bill, giving 'absolute power of arbitrary and preventative arrest', became law. This coercion act meant that the League would be proscribed and its leaders jailed. The Land Leaguers were faced with two options: either to allow the land agitation to die down for lack of leadership once the government had their leaders arrested, or to devise an alternative form of leadership. The latter meant that they would have, in other words, to enlist the help of women.
The Origins of the Ladies' Land League
While the Land League was steadily growing in strength Delia, Fanny and Anna Parnell were living in America and working for the relief of famine in Ireland. The greater freedom of American society enabled them to work for the Irish cause in a public manner that was unknown in Ireland. Fanny had written a poem ('Ireland, Mother') describing the anguish of a woman wanting to participate, yet unable to do so' I am a woman, I can do naught for thee, Ireland, mother!' and now, at last, she had the opportunity. Parnell and John Dillon, another MP and Land League leader, had been on a tour of America which raised £60,000 for famine relief and
£12,000 for the League, but the level of donations had slowed down since their departure. Fanny and Anna were working ten hours a day on the relief committee, but that alone was not enough. Fanny decided that what was required was to set the women to work, and by this 'much needed stimulus would be given to the men'. On the 12th of August 1880, she wrote a letter to the Irish World and other American newspapers, describing the desperate situation in Ireland and calling for the formation of a sister organisation to support the Land League. A New York woman, Jane Byrne, answered Fanny's plea and the two of them decided to form a New York Ladies' Land League. The first meeting was held on 15 October and was attended by 50 women, including Ellen Ford, the daughter of the editor of the Irish World, who became vice president of the League. Delia Parnell was elected president, a collection of $100 taken up and immediately sent off to Ireland, and the women settled down to plan an energetic programme of work.
Branches soon sprang up in other parts of the country and Fanny embarked on an exhausting tour of the north-eastern states and Canada, raising thousands of dollars for relief. But she was only too well aware of the fact that fund-raising alone was insufficient and that the real solution lay in the agitation being carried out in Ireland. On the 1st of January 1881, the Dublin newspaper Nation published a letter from her in which she urged the women of Ireland to form a similar movement which could take over if the men were imprisoned. Although some women had written to her of their eagerness to take part in such a movement, they didn't respond to this appeal. Lacking the cooler, more analytical judgement of her sister. Fanny fretted over what she considered the timidity of Irishwomen. She lamented that 'not having any leader they remained feeble and obscure', while the situation worsened with the passing of the Coercion Act in March.
Anna, on the other hand, appreciated the difficulties facing women who wished to become politically active; the situation in Ireland was entirely different from the ease of American life and their work would involve not only considerable danger, but also hostility from family and friends. When the Ladies' Land League (Ireland) came to be formed, Anna was the obvious choice for organising secretary, most of all because she understood the necessity of fostering women's confidence in their abilities. Davitt had persuaded the other leaders to agree to the formation of a female organisation and Anna was asked to undertake the work. With considerable misgivings about her own abilities, she returned to Ireland at the end of 1880. She was 28 years of age.
The Formation of the Ladies' Land League
When Davitt broached his idea to the other leaders he had a hard time persuading them to agree. They feared they would be open to 'public ridicule' if they were seen relying on women to organise public agitation. Finally they accepted this 'most dangerous experiment', only because no one could think of a feasible alternative. Davitt, however, was full of enthusiasm and extolled the women's merits to his reluctant colleagues:
No better allies than women could be found for such a task. They are, in certain emergencies, more dangerous to despotism than men. They have more courage, through having less scruples, when and where their better instincts are appealed to by a militant and just cause in a fight against a mean foe.
Most of the men maintained their reservations about the advisability of this move, but there was one other man who, after meeting Anna, agreed without hesitation to the plan. This was Andrew Kettle, a man whose undeviating loyalty to Parnell makes his testimony to Anna's abilities even more convincing. He considered her to have:
a better knowledge of the lights and shades of Irish peasant life, of the real economic conditions of the country, and of the social and political forces which had to be acted upon to work out the freedom of Ireland than any person, man or woman, I have ever met . . . Anna Parnell would have worked the Land League revolution to a much better conclusion than her great brother.
Throughout her life Anna remained adamant that she had not been consulted beforehand about the formation of the Ladies' Land League. Soon after its inauguration she declared that 'Mr Davitt settled it all in his own mind, and then he informed the world that I was going to do it, to carry his ideas out, and never asked my consent at all.' Her memoirs also insist that her only notification was a letter informing her of the decision and asking her to take charge of the office in Dublin. This evidence that Anna never had the opportunity to discuss policy with the male leaders she was simply handed the key to the office and left to her own devices becomes, with the benefit of hindsight, extremely significant. No guidance was ever given as to the course of action to be undertaken and the women were left to discover for themselves the state of Land League affairs. The men, of course, didn't believe the women would be capable of a great deal John Dillon, Parnell's fiery young lieutenant, who was MP for Tipperary, wanted the women to be a charitable group, although he had been outspoken in his calls for a rent strike. Even Davitt's initial expectations of their abilities was not much greater; as well as being the 'medium for charity', they would 'keep up a semblance of organisation during (the attempted repression'. But they hadn't reckoned on the formidable powers of Anna Parnell. Not only were the women going to take over the direction of the movement, they were going to infuse new life into the campaign of resistance and, indeed, redefine 'resistance' itself. Charity was insufficient' the programme of a permanent resistance until the aim of the League shall be attained, was the only logical one', as Anna so forthrightly declared.
The Ladies' Land League Begins to Organise
On the 31st of January 1881, the Ladies' Land League was formally instituted. Davitt was rearrested the following day, his ticket of leave revoked, but he found comfort by thinking of the 'power that had been raised up for Mr Forster (Chief Secretary for Ireland) to grapple with.' On 4 February, the executive council issued a call to their countrywomen which left no one in any doubt that the women were taking their new position seriously and were preparing to challenge the whole landlord system:
You cannot prevent the evictions, but you can and must prevent them from becoming massacres. Form yourselves into branches of the Ladies' National Land League. Be ready to give information of evictions in your districts, to give advice and encouragement to the unhappy victims, to collect funds, and to apply those which may be entrusted to you as emergencies arise.
Anna was only one of a remarkable group of women organisers who now emerged. In addition to Anna, those who put their names to that first address were: Clare Stritch, Hannah Lynch and Harriet Byrneall secretaries of the League; Mrs Moloney and Miss O'Leary treasurers; Mrs Dean, Dillon's aunt, was honorary president; among the organisers were Mrs Margaret Moore (an American), Miss Hanna Reynolds, Miss Mary O'Connor and Miss Yates. Helen Sullivan, whose husband owned the Nation, was a committee member, as was Jenny Wyse Power, the widow of a Fenian. The writer Katharine Tynan, also a member, although a self-confessed 'frivolous one', described them as having 'grown up among the writers, thinkers, orators, politicians, conspirators of their day'. Ellen O'Leary's brother John had served a nine-year jail sentence for Fenian activities, Mary O'Connor's brother was one of the youngest MPs in the Irish party, while the Land League had been planned in the home of two other women activists Bee and Margaret Walsh, from Balla, County Mayo. Hannah Lynch had gone to convent school abroad and travelled extensively as a governess, an experience the women were to find extremely useful. As well as the executive, there was a reserve executive of 21 women, prepared to take the place of anyone arrested. When the arrests did begin, Fanny sent over three American women to augment their forces.
Anna's misgivings about her ability to co-ordinate and inspire the Ladies' Land League were due mainly to her realisation of the difficulties involved in this unique opportunity now open to Irishwomen to work independently, without the guidance of those whom they had been accustomed to 'trust and to look to for help' (as she had once indignantly described women's dependent status). If women proved themselves capable of meeting the challenge, they would have succeeded in wresting a place for themselves in political life. She saw her first task as instilling self-confidence into the women who were beginning to offer their services' You must learn to depend upon yourselves and to do things for yourselves and to organise yourselves.' At a public meeting a few months later she had gained enough confidence to be able to remark, with barbed humour, 'I observe that we have succeeded today in getting rid of the men nearly entirely and I am sure that we all feel much more comfortable in consequence.'
Anna was also uncompromising in her refusal to be characterised in a traditional female role. When a resolution at a meeting applauded her for being 'prepared to work as well as weep', she retorted, with some asperity, that she would leave the weeping to the men. Her unconcealed hostility towards men was reflected in the course the Land War now took. She urged women to pay for all groceries with cash, so that their husbands would be unable to save the money for rent payment. As women lacked any legal entitlements and therefore did not pay the rent (unless they were widows, or unmarried daughters left with the family farm), any blame for the conduct of resistance to rent must, in the women's eyes, fall upon the men.
Anna's initial dislike of the men had rapidly increased as a result of the frustration the women were experiencing in their efforts to bring some order to the chaos of League affairs. Their central office in Upper Sackville Street was shared with the Land League, and existing Land League branches were supposed to encourage the formation of women's branches. However, the women were left to their own devices in determining how best to continue the resistance to rent, the men's assistance confining itself to allowing the women access to the files containing the names and addresses of the principal local officials. This was not the greatest of help. The day before his arrest, Parnell had received a report from one of his organisers describing the demoralisation that was increasing daily and the confusion that existed in the League's affairs, with some active branches not being recorded in the files at all. The women decided to start from scratch and began to compile a Book of Kells, which was a huge dossier of every estate in Ireland, containing records of tenants, rents, evictions, the character of the landlord and the morale of the people. 'The most perfect system that can be imagined', was Davitt's high praise. Unfortunately, all the records of the Ladies' Land League were later destroyed, whether by themselves or by others is not known.
One major difficulty was attracting women who would be able to tour the country, building up branches and directing resistance on the ground, because few families in those Victorian days were prepared to allow their daughters such a degree of freedom. The qualities required were daunting, particularly when one considers the lack of educational opportunities and social experience available to women. They were expected to deal with intricate legal and agricultural matters, while facing hostility from press and clergy and the armed force of army and police. Anna considered 'tact, firmness, common sense . . . powers of observation and natural aptitude for judging character' to be indispensable, as well as youth, physical strength and endurance, because 'long distances were to be travelled; exposure to weather was inevitable; and in most parts of Ireland there was very poor accommodation for travellers.' While the tireless energies of this small group of full- time organisers more than compensated for their lack of numbers, their ranks were soon to be swelled by the addition of scores of women in local areas who volunteered their services to the League.
Their major task was to support the evicted and prevent land- grabbing. When notice was received from a local branch concerning threatened eviction, one of the organisers would then travel to the scene with a supply of money for immediate assistance. Whenever possible, a wooden hut was erected to shelter the evicted family; this had the added advantage of placing them in a position to deter potential land-grabbers. In one year they provided 210 huts, although they were eventually forced to have them transported from Dublin as those built locally were, as a local secretary wrote to Anna, 'splendid monuments to the spirit of the people, but quite unfit for human habitation'. The men were never as keen on the erection of Land League huts as the women, possibly considering it too much bother and of little consequence to the overall campaign. The women, however, were not motivated solely by humanitarian considerations. They believed those crude wooden constructions powerfully symbolised that 'all power did not lie with the foreign enemy in possession of the country'. Parnell certainly never thought in those terms.
In her memoirs, Anna states her surprise at the reluctance of the Land League leaders to initiate an all-out resistance to rent payment. Although she had an 'uncomfortable feeling' that their preparations were less than adequate, at this stage it hadn't occurred to her that preparations had not been made because the men had no intention of stepping up the campaign. An awareness of the true situation soon dawned upon her the Ladies' Land League was only expected to maintain a 'semblance' of organisation because that was all that the Land League itself had achieved. She later bitterly remarked that if the faintest suspicion of this had crossed her mind, she would never have consented to undertake the work. But there was no going back, the men clung to them as 'Pharaoh clung to the children of Israel', and they were reluctant to throw the tenant farmers back on the mercy of the landlords.
Nevertheless, as the women's understanding of the situation grew, they became convinced that in attempting to build a genuine resistance they were reversing the policy of the League and 'raising forlorn hopes in the people'. Money was draining away so rapidly in eviction costs and in supporting those tenants who paid only when the sheriff arrived to remove them from the properties. This expenditure ensured that the 'point of a bayonet' policy could not continue indefinitely. The cost of resistance to rent payment was often greater than the rent itself, and as the rent was ultimately paid, in the case of those who could afford it, the League was doing little more than raise money for the landlord. Although the Land League frequently urged farmers to refuse all reductions in rent which did not include all the tenants on the same estate, if the landlord refused, the individual tenant paid up anyway, arguing that there was no point in rejecting his own arrangement as it wouldn't benefit the other tenants. The more prosperous tenants were therefore able to win a settlement while the poor went, as usual, to the wall. The class differences within the League were beginning to become apparent. As well as this, the women were shocked to discover that applications for relief were coming, not from those who had obeyed League policy and had suffered eviction for refusing to pay more than a reasonable rent, but from those who had simply been unable to pay any rent at all. If that continued, the League would lose all its agitational impetus and become yet another charitable agency.
When a Land League branch secretary wrote to them saying that there was not 'a single tenant in Ireland who would not pay the rent if he could', the true reality of the situation was inescapable. Over the next few months, the women struggled to establish control.
Adequate preparation was almost impossible, due as much to the disarray of the organisation as to their limited resources; they could not spare enough women to travel around the country acquiring knowledge of local conditions. As a result, they had to be very liberal with their grants to evicted tenants, 'deserving' or otherwise, in order to boost people's morale and overcome their fear of the result of eviction. This was the reasoning behind their reliance upon Land League huts, and another reason for the men's lack of interest the latter, not having a fighting strategy, were not particularly concerned in providing shelter to the victims of evictions. All this was necessary, but it was expensive, and when the time came for the men to insist upon the women's dissolution, their supposed extravagance was held up as a cardinal sin.
The women had barely begun to gather together their forces when the expected arrests of the men started. By the end of March, 40 arrests had been made; Dillon was arrested in April and, by May, Brennan, the League secretary, had joined him. In August, the British government passed legislation guaranteed to ensure the continued disintegration of the movement. This was a Land Act, containing provision for fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale. But leaseholders and those in rent arrears were excluded, and the land courts, set up to implement the act, were weighted in favour of the landlord. The omission of leaseholders meant that one-sixth of the Irish peasantry were outside the benefit of the act, and the vital, radical question of land redistribution was ignored. Parnell had been forced to alter League policy from the discredited (and expensive) ''rent at the point of a bayonet' to letting the farms go.
This meant that tenants who had not made substantial improvements to their farms, and who had not been offered a reduction in rent, would leave them to be snapped up by the landlord's agents. It was hoped that, because of the boycott system, the landlord would eventually be forced to take back the original tenants. Although this was potentially a sound strategy, it was doomed to failure once the Land Act came into operation. The Land Act exposed the contradictions contained in the all-class alliance of the League those who abandoned their farms would not benefit from the Act, and the larger farmers refused to forfeit any possible gains. The only groups to continue to have confidence in the League perhaps because they had no alternative were the small peasantry and the landless labourers.
The male leaders decided to 'test the Act' by bringing cases which would show up its inadequacies, while at the same time placating those farmers who did want to bring their claims to the land court. It was a tactical move to maintain unity while continuing to put pressure on the government. The women's attitude was quite different. Fanny wrote a poem about the Land Act which made her feelings plain:
Tear up the parchment lie!
Scatter its fragments to the hissing wind
And hear again the People's first and final cry:
No more for you, 0 Lords, we'll dig and grind;
No more for you the Castle, and for us the Stye!
Anna's views were characteristically forthright: the act was absurd and worthless and the fight would go on.
Prime Minister Gladstone had no intention of allowing his act to be sabotaged, and the arrests continued. On 13 October, Parnell himself was interned in Kilmainham, and, on 20 October, the Land League was declared a proscribed organisation. After months of preparation for this eventuality, the women finally found themselves on their own.
On Their Own
Parnell's arrest had occurred at a fortunate political moment for him. In a letter to his mistress, Kitty O'Shea, he wrote, 'the movement is breaking fast and all will be quiet in a few months when I shall be released.' Once in jail, he issued the 'No-Rent Manifesto', against the advice of more radical members of the League, who felt it was far too late. Anna was furious the Ladies' Land League was placed in an impossible position by this manifesto, issued without their knowledge or consent, which was nothing more than a cover whereby the male leaders could withdraw from the impasse they had placed themselves in, while at the same time maintaining a fiction of a continued opposition. The implication of the 'No-Rent Manifesto' was that the League's money was now to go only to those tenants who were genuinely supporting the no-rent call, but it was becoming more and more difficult to determine when to pay out and when not to pay. At this point Anna took over control of finances, refusing to consult with the Land League treasurer, Egan, who had escaped jail by going to
Paris. The incarceration of the leaders saved their reputation by minimising their responsibility for failure, while the women were left with the unenviable task of trying to 'make ropes of sea sand'.
That July, in an effort to cut down the enormous expenses which were draining away funds, the Ladies' Land League had been forced to inform branches that the League could no longer pay costs for tenants buying in their farms if they wanted, they could buy them at their own expense, but if they gave up their claim they would be supported by the League after eviction.
The women's workload was now doubled. Not only were they helping evicted families and supervising the building of Land League huts for those who had been left homeless, they also had to provide for the steadily increasing numbers of prisoners and their dependants. At the same time, they were also attempting to extend the campaign of resistance. Between October 1881 and May 1882, they paid out a total of nearly £70,000. This was not undue extravagance: in June 1881, Thomas Sexton, another League leader, had pointed out that a large expenditure would be necessary for some time to come and, in that month alone, the Land League had spent almost £3,000. By November, the amount of money required to provide one meal a day for all the prisoners was calculated at £400 a week. To cope with this, Anna established a separate Political Prisoners Aid Society, which was presided over at its first meeting by Helen Taylor, the step-daughter of John Stuart Mill. As its officers were all prominent Ladies' Land League members, the women now had an additional burden. By Christmas, the society had collected £9,000but the total cost of the prisoners during the lifetime of the Ladies' Land League was in excess of £21.000.
Newspapers were predictably scathing about the ability of women to direct a campaign. The Times sneered, 'when treason is reduced to fighting behind petticoats and pinafores it is not likely to do much mischief.' This unheard of phenomenon of a group of women flouting all conventions by taking over a movement which was regarded as dangerous and subversive, excited the attention of the British and Irish press, but, as The Times reporter reassured his readers, although it would be impossible to refuse the 'lady agitators' a hearing, the women could hardly become part of the wider political movement because, 'it will hardly be to the ladies that the men will look for real advice and guidance in the crisis at which they now find themselves.' Underlying this assessment was a barely disguised fear that the women might, in the future, be consulted by the men. It was bad enough to have women carrying on in this way while the men were absent, but of much greater threat to all men supporters or opponents of the League was the prospect that the women would be given status as political equals.
The women were not getting a good press. Six months earlier, they had provoked a hysterical outburst from Archbishop McCabe of Dublin, who condemned those women who were prepared to 'forget the modesty of their sex and the high dignity of their womanhood' by parading themselves 'before the public gaze in a character unworthy of a child of Mary'. Although the individualistic Croke, Archbishop of Cashel, challenged the 'monstrous imputations' cast upon the women, the general violent antipathy towards the Ladies' Land League had the rare consequence of briefly uniting Protestant and Catholic. The (Protestant) Belfast New-Letter attacked the 'distasteful spectacle of women making a harangue from a public platform', with Anna being singled out for special condemnation. The editor made no bones about his views on women activists: 'Sensible people in the North of Ireland dislike to see woman out of the place she is gifted to occupy, and at no time is woman further from her natural position than when she appears upon a political platform.'
Another revolutionary upheaval which the women's intervention had brought about affected that traditional feature of Irish political life the mass meeting. It was an exclusively male practice, in terms both of speakers and audience. Few women attended noisy public gatherings and those who did, stayed at the back. But now that women had come into the public arena, observers noticed that the ordinary woman no longer viewed the proceedings 'at a respectful distance', but thronged around the platform as if she had a right to be there. It was clearly a development that few men welcomed.
Although Anna addressed public meetings all around the country, she never concealed her distaste for the emotionalism they provoked. She regarded it as a peculiarly male form of demagoguery to incite crowds to frenzied cheers, regardless of the content of the speech. One report described her as 'a young lady of prepossessing appearance, who appeared in black, and who spoke slowly and quietly'. She disliked mass meetings because they prevented any explanation or discussion upon issues, and always maintained that the most effective method of putting a message across was by holding meetings at the scene of an eviction, where the necessity of resisting landlordism was powerfully displayed, and where discussion could be generated and a common policy reached. There was without any doubt a genuine spirit of co-operation amongst the women who worked together Katharine Tynan, although only an addresser of envelopes and occasional letter writer, remembered her Ladies' Land League days with great fondness, as being like 'an agreeable picnic', with 'hot tea cakes, bread and butter, jam puffs', contributed by the father of one woman and the husband of another. But as well as this, Katharine also remembered Anna working until after midnight each night, then walking home alone something no 'respectable' woman would ever have done.
Resistance Continues
Although farmers were beginning to take their cases to the land courts, pockets of resistance continued, especially in the poorest areas of the country. The women decided to concentrate their energies into strengthening direct action against landlord power. In August, Anna was a prominent figure at evictions in Mitchelstown. County Tipperary, where she accompanied the sheriff on his rounds, rushing ahead to all the cottages to urge the tenants to stand firm. The police adopted a policy of harassment, and the Land League paper United Ireland now began to list weekly reports of meetings broken up by the police. These were countered by a strong determination to remain unintimidated, as this account of Margaret Moore's (an organiser) refusal to be silenced by a constable indicates:
I defy you to interfere with me. I know the law much better than you do. (applause) You and the like of you try to trample people in country places and you must be taught your position. I will speak to those ladies as long as I like; the law which took the men's arms could not touch the women's tongues, (laughter) If I am acting illegally I shall take the consequences; but I warn you, you are liable to prosecution as a trespasser in this room. (applause).
It was not long before the press stopped sneering at the 'petticoats and pinafores' as they were unwillingly forced to report the successes of the women:
Whatever else may be said of the Ladies' Land League, one thing will be admitted, that Miss Reynolds, its representative, is a smart female who today made the West Cork eviction a laughing stock and foiled them in their efforts to collect rents. She has, within a few hours, wrought a most remarkable change in the disposition of the people in these parts.
Before Hanna Reynolds arrived, the Express added, the people were ''as mild as lambs', but an hour after her appearance, they 'assumed the air of wolves'. She undertook to build huts and supply them with all the necessities if they refused to pay their rent, and with this support, the tenants unanimously agreed to stand by the League. Eighteen new branches of the Ladies' Land League were formed in September; the 3 December edition of United Ireland listed 34 branch meetings, some having attendances of between 100 and 200 women. Branches were also formed in many parts of England, with Helen Sullivan establishing a London headquarters in the Westminster Palace Hotel. Children's branches were instituted, their main function being to teach children Irish history. All members of the Ladies' Land League resolved 'to encourage home manufacture in every possible way . . . and purchase no foreign goods while Irish can be obtained.' In many of the activities they foreshadowed the work of later Irish separatists.
More and more women in rural areas came forward to offer their support; perhaps the arrest of the male members of the family left them free to do so, as they no longer had to seek their male relatives' consent first. Hanna Reynolds reported, in September, that 64 branches had been formed, including Glasgow, London, Liverpool and Manchester. By the beginning of 1882, there were over 500 branches.
The women were fast becoming heroines in many people's eyes. When a branch of the children's league was broken up by the police, the children paraded through their village, cheering for 'Miss Parnell and the Land League'. When a meeting of the Ladies' Land League ended in Macroom, County Cork, 'an immense crowd of young men' collected on the street opposite the women's rooms and as they filed out greeted them with cheers for 'Parnell, the Land League and the Ladies'. In the face of such support, the police didn't interfere. But the women were completely capable of challenging the police without male support. When, in November, a meeting of 200 women in Ballinascreen was forbidden by the police, the women marched to a church one mile away and said the rosary. Although they were followed by the police they declared that they would say the rosary at the same place on every Sunday at 4 p. m. Neither was the Herbertstown branch quelled, as their bloodthirsty resolution proved:
Resolved that those gallant extinguishers of their country's liberty, the Royal (anti) Irish Constabulary do merit the recognition of their masters and we would suggest that they be rewarded with medals of lead that metal representing the attributes for which they are most conspicuous.
Newspaper coverage of their activities was gradually increasing; on 10 December, United Ireland gave them the ultimate accolade of a front page cartoon, showing women with banners facing Forster, the chief secretary, along with police and army, the caption reading: 'Mr Forster sets up his Buggabow to intimidate the ladies of the Land League but they march steadily onwards in the good work, their courage daily increasing, as well as their power.' A song was also written about The Land League Ladies of Erin', the chorus of which went:
Then shout, boys, hurrah, and raise your voices well, Long life to Miss Reynolds and also Miss Parnell, May every Irish woman help the ranks to ""swell The Ladies' Land League of old Ireland".
The women were in fact achieving a considerable notoriety. At this time, Anna was engaged in a speaking and fund-raising tour throughout Scotland and England and Kitty O'Shea wrote to Parnell that Anna had been burnt in effigy, along with the Pope, outside her gate on Guy Fawkes Day. The Ladies' Land League was now so well known that, at a meeting in Liverpool, Anna told the audience that tenant farmers in parts of Mayo were afraid to be seen speaking to strange women, for fear they might be representatives of the Land League!
Cowper, the lord lieutenant, supreme representative of the British government in Ireland, was extremely annoyed to discover that the Land League was not so 'completely broken down as imagined, [because] the work has been taken up by women [who] go about the country conveying messages and encouraging disaffection.' He wanted the cabinet to agree to what he ominously termed 'new measures'. These were finally agreed upon, and, on 16 December 1881, the Ladies' Land League was also suppressed. The inspector general of constabulary announced that 'Where any females are assembled . . . such meeting is illegal.' It was no idle threat Hanna Reynolds was immediately sentenced to one month's imprisonment for inciting a tenant of the Earl of Bantry not to pay rent.
Defying the Government
The women immediately decided to fight this attempt at coercion. A defiant letter was sent by the executive to all branches, calling on members to hold a meeting at 1.30 p.m. on Sunday 1 January 1882. They were determined to start the New Year as militantly as possible. If any arrests were made, the meetings were to be continued every Sunday for as long as the government attempted to treat the Ladies' Land League as an illegal organisation.
The response was tremendous, with mass meetings held all over the country. Jenny Wyse Power, who was to become a veteran campaigner for national independence, justifiably claimed this stance as 'the first time when Britain's power to ''proclaim" was not only questioned but defied." As one observer said, 'Five thousand ladies of Ireland were calling on the government to arrest them and were preaching Land League doctrines as they were never preached before.'
Although the Ladies' Land League continued to counsel resistance, their organisers were steadily being arrested. In January, Miss McCormick of the Dublin branch was sentenced to three months for being seen talking to an old woman in Tulla who was about to be evicted. Margaret Daly, Mary Wall, Ellen Hannigan and Annie McAuliffe of the Drumcollogher branch were all sentenced to one month for holding an illegal meeting of the League, but were released after two weeks. Two members of the Dunmanway branch Mrs Crowley and Mary Ann Hurley and seizing the reins of his horse, angrily asking him to justify the decision of the government to prevent the building of Land League huts.
For all their enthusiasm and commitment, the movement was losing cohesion as the more prosperous farmers applied to the land courts. Only the poor and the landless remained in wholehearted support of the League and they, in desperation, turned to violence as the only source of protest left. It was an attitude, if not encouraged by the women, certainly understood by them. They had done all that they could, only to see the movement no nearer its objective and confronted by a government that appeared able to resist their demands.
In the early days of 1882, the imprisoned male leaders had ordered the women to drop the no-rent call, but their instructions were ignored as the women decided that, ill-advised as the call had been, more harm would be done by suddenly changing policy. Parnell became increasingly alarmed that the League was being used 'not for the purposes he approved of, but for a real revolutionary end and aim', as Davitt scornfully remarked. Forster was also alarmed, confessing to Gladstone that 'impunity from punishment is spreading like a plague.' Although resistance to landlordism had decreased, agrarian crime soared there had been 2,379 'outrages' in the ten months before the Coercion Act and this number increased to 3,821 in the next ten months. The Ladies' Land League was given the credit for having instigated this new wave of crime and Davitt, in describing the effects of the women's handling of the situation, declared that the result was:
(more anarchy, more illegality, more outrages, until it began to dawn on some of the official minds that the imprisonment of the male leaders had only rendered confusion worse confounded for Dublin Castle, and made the country infinitely more ungovernable under the sway of their lady successors.)
He also charged them with having encouraged intimidation, and of characterising districts as 'courageous' or 'timid' according to how well they used the boycott their financial help being dependent upon their approval of the fighting spirit of the area.
Anna later dismissed his book. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland as 'a mass of lies', but Davitt wasn't condemning the women; on the contrary, he was one of the few allies they had. He does, however, overstate the degree to which the women were responsible for the violence it was common practice in Ireland and there had always been plenty of secret societies to carry it out: still, the women's attitude towards it was certainly not the same as the men's. As a nationalist, Anna said simply that 'when people do not govern their own country, then responsibility for crime rests on the conqueror, i.e. England.'
The growing panic of both Parnell and the British government finally created a mutual bond between them: a desire to get rid of these unruly women. Negotiations began which eventually culminated in what became known as (the 'Kilmainham Treaty' of 2 May 1882. By this, the government agreed to release the prisoners, deal with the question of rent arrears, and amend the Land Act by extending the fair rent provision to leaseholders. Parnell in return promised to use his influence to prevent further 'outrages'. He and other prisoners were released on 4 May. Forster and Cowper both refused to be a party to this deal and they resigned their offices of chief secretary and lord lieutenant, respectively.
The Dissolution of the Ladies' Land League
Forster believed the government had suffered a major defeat by not forcing Parnell to give a public promise to obey the law. He was wrong it was a Parnellite surrender but the resignations gave the 'treaty' the appearance of a Land League victory. In reality, Parnell had disowned agrarian agitation and was secretly preparing to co-operate with the Liberals. The Ladies' Land League had become an acute embarrassment to him and was now expendable.
The Land League was euphoric, but the women did not believe that the government had been defeated. Anna felt 'this period of fictitious triumph to be even more unsatisfactory than the cold atmosphere of censure we had for so long been used to.' When the victorious Parnell first met the women after his release, he was infuriated to be brusquely told that he should have stayed in Kilmainham; there was no hero's welcome from that quarter.
Davitt and Parnell met on their release from jail. Davitt reported that Parnell was angry with the women and accused them of having done great harm to the movement, an allegation Davitt was quick to refute, 'the harm is evident in the fall of Forster and in the dropping of coercion and in our release.' That defence of the women didn't help Parnell was even more enraged at the suggestion that it had been them and not he himself who might have been responsible for the ending of repression. He told Davitt that the Ladies' Land League had to be suppressed, and if they were not, he threatened to leave public life.
But just as Parnell was congratulating himself on having brought Ireland to the verge of Home Rule as a result of his new understanding with Gladstone, an event occurred which allowed the government to enforce a new coercion policy and set back Parnell's parliamentary ambitions the Phoenix Park murders. On 6 May, Lord Frederick Cavendish, the new lord lieutenant, and his under-secretary, Thomas Burke, were stabbed to death in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, by a secret group called the ‘Invincibles’.
Many people were appalled by the tragedy and its consequences; Parnell sank into a deep depression, the incident fuelling his deep antagonism to the Ladies' Land League and confirming his resolve to be rid of them as soon as possible. As Katharine Tynan admitted, Parnell had always detested the organisation which, in the hands of 'the sister as like him as a woman can be like a man, had taken a course of its own and one in many ways opposed to his wishes and policy.' He now had the freedom to reveal his feelings.
Three months of tortuous negotiations were now to ensue before the Ladies' Land League finally disappeared. It was a bizarre situation. The women, far from fighting to retain their organisation, had looked forward to their release from a 'long and uncongenial bondage', as Anna described it. Once the men were back on the scene the old antagonisms re-emerged and the women felt it to be 'morally impossible' to continue working with them. They demanded the right to disband 'without unnecessary delay', but reluctantly agreed to continue working during the confusion which the Phoenix Park murders had induced. Parnell wrote privately to Dillon that if the women were to resign now 'they will be acting very badly and may do considerable mischief.' The release of suspects had been halted and evictions continued, so the work went on as usual.
June and July passed without the women receiving any indication of what had been decided. When they asked whether resistance to rent was to continue, their question was ignored; the men either unable to make up their minds, or unwilling to tell them what the policy should be. They were in a strange position: the men continued to be in daily communication with them, although constantly finding fault with their work when the women sent them cases for consultation, they were simply returned. It was obvious that the men were not going to treat the women as political equals, and equally obvious that they were not yet prepared to make this plain. They seemed to have decided upon a cat-and-mouse strategy, and were not willing to release the impatient mice until they had formulated their plans in more detail.
When Davitt, who was now in New York, was asked what had become of the Ladies' Land League, he blandly replied that the political work had been resumed by the men and the ladies 'contented themselves with doing that which was charitable.' But the 'ladies' were far from content and relations between themselves and the men reached ludicrous proportions. On one occasion, as Parnell and Dillon came up the stairs to the office, they were disconcerted to find themselves greeted by the women sarcastically singing Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Twenty Love-Sick Maidens We'. It couldn't go on like this for much longer.
All League funds had been removed to Paris in 1881, so that they could not be impounded by the government. When the Ladies' Land League wrote, as was normal practice, for money to cover their continuing expenditure, all their requests were again, not refused, but ignored. Their bank manager told them he could not continue to cash their cheques. In exasperation, the executive decided to continue issuing cheques in the hope that if the bank dishonoured them, the Land League would be forced to come out into the open and reveal their plans for the future. Anna was in favour of unilaterally dissolving on the grounds of no funds, but the majority of her executive were against this for fear that dragging the quarrel into the open would adversely affect the credibility of the movement.
By August, their overdraft had reached £5,000 and the men finally revealed their scheme. The women's debts would not be discharged unless the heads of the Ladies' Land League signed a resolution guaranteeing that the organisation would disband, while the women would continue their work of considering applications for relief.
They were all outraged at this blackmail this had always been the most heartrending aspect of their work and now, without the benefit of having their own organisers on the ground to advise them, they were to become a 'perpetual petticoat screen behind which [the men] could shelter, not from the government but from the people.' They also had strong political objections to the policy of doling out relief unlinked to any programme of resistance. All fear of public discredit vanished and the women were unanimous in wanting to contest the ultimatum. They told the men they would hand over their records and provide secretarial assistance, but they refused to bind themselves to 'everlasting penal servitude'.
Although the bank overdraft was far greater than their personal savings, they had little fear of having to pay from their own pockets. The previous year, on Anna's advice, they had all transferred their money abroad, so it' proceedings were taken by the bank they would have to be con ducted in America.
The affair did not, however, reach the law courts. According to Anna, a way out of the deadlock was arrived at by (he women altering the wording on the document they had to sign so that they were responsible, not for Land League tenants but for the Ladies' Land League tenants. Whether the men noticed the alteration at the time and decided to ignore it because it provided everyone with a face-saving way out of an impossible situation, remains a matter for speculation. By now Anna was referring to them as 'the enemy' and it was obvious that the women would never have agreed to those conditions. As the women had kept aside a small sum of money from subscriptions which were still coming in, they were able to cover their last obligations to evicted tenants.
At the next meeting of the executive, presided over by Mrs Tilly of New York, the resolution to dissolve the Ladies' Land League was agreed upon. Clare Stritch moved the notice of dissolution, diplomatically avoiding all contentious issues: as circumstances had changed with the Coercion Act due to expire, the formation of a new tenants' organisation, and the setting up of the Mansion House Relief Committee, there was no longer any necessity for their continued existence. Hannah Lynch proposed the election of a working committee to supervise the final discharge of liabilities, and all branches were requested to send the committee any remaining funds. Although the central organisation had disbanded. Miss Kennedy, on behalf of the working committee, declared that the decision to dissolve was to be left to each branch to decide individually, 'as the circumstances in each locality are the only proper guide on this question.' Although Parnell agreed to the winding-up committee, he was determined to keep the women under control and he told Dillon its only function was to act under the men's instructions. His suspicion and distrust could hardly have been greater.
For the rest of August and throughout September, the pages of United Ireland were filled with notices of dissolution, often containing the heartbreakingly poignant pledge to 'come forward any time our country shall need our service'.
The Disillusionment of Anna Parnell
Anna remained completely silent during these last days of the Ladies' Land League. She made no speeches and issued no statements and her memoirs contain no references to her feelings. All she says is that one organiser was now too ill to go to the office and two others had been forced to go to the seaside to recuperate from the strain. This terse statement conceals a tragedy in her personal life from which she never fully recovered. On 20 July, Fanny Parnell, at the young age of 33, died suddenly of heart failure. Her death came as a huge shock to Anna, who was already physically and emotionally exhausted by the strain of the past 18 months. The news of her sister's death precipitated an emotional collapse which forced her withdrawal from the executive, which had to fight the final battle without her. A report on her health at the beginning of August stated that, although she was recovering, it was unlikely she would again assume 'the heroic task she performed in the heat and burden of the life- and death struggle of last winter'. At least, not if the writer of the report (a member of the Land League), had anything to do with it.
One historian, assessing Anna as 'one of the most likeable, and possibly the most admirable of the Parnells', believes that she refused to be a party to the submission and tried to struggle on alone for as long as she could. But her memoirs make it clear that she had no intention of continuing the thankless task of leading a movement, the direction of which would be determined not by the women, but by the men. She may not have wanted to give up without a fight and she certainly resented the high-handed way the men treated the women and the unscrupulous method they used finally to dispose of them, hut there was no rational foundation for wanting to remain once the leaders had been released from jail. As well as a difference in aims, there was the unequal distribution of power to consider. The men, by virtue of their position as Members of Parliament, would always have been in a commanding position, able to subdue their recalcitrant female subordinates.
Parnell was preparing a political deal between the Irish party and the Liberal government, and so he wanted to drop the land agitation in order to concentrate on constitutional issues, conducted not in Ireland, but in the House of Commons. Those of his colleagues who disagreed and who wanted to continue the struggle were those who initially supported the Ladies' Land League's right to continue. But once Parnell agreed to a compromise of forming the more moderate Irish National League, which was not intended to be an agitational body, and which was described as 'an open organisation in which the ladies will not take part'(!), no one had any scruples in ignoring the fate of the women who had only been pawns in a political power struggle. Anna rejected the whole idea of Irish people working alongside a British government for reform. Her vision had been the creation of a movement which would unite (he most disadvantaged sections of the population into a force which would eventually win independence through its own activity, not through an act of parliament. She firmly believed the Liberal promise of support for a Home Rule bill to be mere fiction and her brother's subsequent move towards parliamentarianism a sell-out of national aspirations and a denial of the growing power of the mass movement. She unequivocally condemned the future strategy of the Irish party:
When goods are paid before delivery, not once, but just as often as the manufacturer asks for payment, why should the manufacturer deliver them at all? We have no evidence that Mr Gladstone meant to pass Home Rule, but much ground for suspecting that he knew he could not pass it.
The veteran Fenian John O'Leary later told Maud Gonne that the Land League women may not have been right in the manner in which they pursued the Land War, but they were really suppressed because they were 'honester and more sincere than the men'. This 'sincerity' stemmed from their very lack of bargaining power or political influence. Many of the women felt the most oppressed sections of the peasantry to be their natural allies, and this subjective identification with a similarly oppressed group led them to take a radical view of the land question. As nationalists and as women, the only organisation (hey could support would have to be a militant, open, mass movement because this was the only means by which women could be involved in politics. In striving for this, they followed neither the conspiratorial tradition of Fenianism, nor the constitutionalism of the Irish party, both of which excluded women. The victory of Parnell and the increasing dominance of the Irish party in political life over the next decades was a major defeat for women's political aspirations. There can be no doubt that their subsequent exclusion was a direct consequence of the uncompromising radicalism of the Ladies' Land League.
Anna's personal history was equally exemplary and bleak. Her bitter reflection on her experience was that, as long as she lived, she would never again believe a word any Irishman said. She never spoke to her brother again, cutting him dead on the few occasions they met. She became a recluse after the disappointment of her hopes in the revolutionary potential of the land campaign and went to England, living in an artists' colony in Cornwall. In the late 1890s she wrote an allegorical poem of her disillusionment, when 'a band of thieves' robbed her and 'cast me/All bleeding by the way'. The last stanza summarises the feelings of a woman without any cause into which to channel her formidable energies:
And since that hour I have crawled,
A cripple blind with tears,
While each step I've made has cost me
The pain and strain of years.
However, she never severed her links with Ireland and was particularly supportive to Inghinidhe na hEireann, whose formation must have pleased her. Although almost destitute, she sent Maud Gonne a donation to her Patriotic Children's Treat, which had been organised in protest against Queen Victoria's visit to Ireland in 1900. In 1907, she was invited by Sinn Fein to speak on behalf of their candidate in a by-election against the Irish party the first occasion when the constitutionalists were opposed by the separatists.81
In September 1911, she was drowned while swimming in heavy seas near Ilfracombe, having characteristically (or deliberately) ignored warnings about the bad conditions. As she was living under the assumed name of Cerisa Palmer, it was some time before anyone realised who she was. No member of her family attended her funeral; Parnell probably would have, despite everything, but he had died 20 years earlier.
When some of the participants of the Land War came to write their memoirs of the period, they had the grace to admit that the women had played an important role, but they couched their acknowledgements very carefully. William O'Brien called the 'sweet girl graduates . . . as truly heroic a band of women as ever a country had the happiness to possess in an hour of stress' and he admitted that they had been responsible for breaking Forster's power 'when even pretty resolute men's hearts beat low'. Tim Healy credited Anna for having been perceptive enough to 'scent surrender' when Parnell negotiated the 'Kilmainham Treaty', but no one cared to explain fully why these same women were so rapidly excluded from subsequent political events. The memory of the Ladies' Land League was a male nightmare, and one they were determined to forget as quickly as possible. The subsequent playing down of the women's actual role was a calculated effort to discourage the next generation of women from believing that it might be possible for them to assume the mantle of the Ladies' Land League. For the next 20 years, no group of women activists emerged. When Maud Gonne found women who shared her anger at this exclusion, Inghinidhe na hEireann was born but the legacy of the Ladies' Land League was the bitter realisation that if women wanted to be politically active, they had either to form their own organisation or accept subordinate status.