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Life
1878-1954 [née Gillespie; fam. “Gretta”]; b. Boyle, Co. Roscommon; m. James Cousins, with whom she shared theosophical and educational interests, 1908; fnd. with her husband, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, et al., the Irish Women’s Franchise League, 1908; participated in English suffragette demonstration at Downing St.; arrested and jailed for a month (‘a living death’); twice imprisoned in Ireland for her suffrage and Trade Union work, and went on hunger; emigrated with Cousins to India, 1913; estab. Indian Women’s Association, 1914; appt. the first woman magistrate in India, 1922; jailed for protesting laws restricting free speech, and went on hunger strike in support of Gandhi, before being released in Oct. 1933; fnd. Children’s Aid Society; elected President of the All-India Women’s Conference, 1938; d. 11 March 1954, at Madras.
Criticism
Catherine Candy, ‘“Untouchability”, ‘vegetarianism and the suffragist ideology of Margaret Cousins’, in Irish Women and the Vote: Becoming Citizens, ed. Louise Ryan & Margaret Ward [with a foreword by Rosemary Cullen Owens] (Dublin: IAP 2007) [Chap. 9.]
Commentary
Margaret MacCurtain, The Irish Women’s Franchise League ‘from its inception harried the Irish Home Rule Bill’ (‘Women, the Vote and Revolution’, in Women and Irish Society, the Historical Dimension, ed. MacCurtain & Donncha Ó Corrain, Dublin 1978; quoted in Cheryl Herr, For the Land they Loved 1991).
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Field Day/Cork UP 1996), refers to the support for Jim Gralton given by I. K. Yajnik of the Indian Independence League, and his comparison with the crack-down on the Indian trade unionists, commenting: ‘There is a fitting irony in the fact that Margaet Cousins, jailed in India, was brought up ... not ten miles from Gralton’s own locality.’ (p.106.)
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