Though often overlooked, women played a key role in the Rising, writes Greg Daly
“We were convinced of the justice of our cause, convinced that even dying was a small matter compared with the privilege we now shared of fighting for that cause,” wrote Margaret Skinnider in her 1917 account of the Rising, Doing My Bit For Ireland.
Born to Irish parents in the Scottish town of Coatbridge in 1893, Skinnider was a mathematics teacher who joined Cumann na mBan while in Glasgow, learning to shoot in a rifle club, ostensibly so she could help defend the British Empire. “I kept on till I was a good marksman,” she wrote, “I believed the opportunity would soon come to defend my own country.”
In the months prior to the Rising she smuggled detonators and bomb-making equipment to Ireland, moving there and lodging with Countess Markiewicz a week before the rebellion. When the Rising began, Skinnider was attached to Michael Mallin and Countess Markiewicz with the Irish Citizen Army at St Stephen’s Green, initially acting as a dispatch-carrier and messenger but eventually being deployed as a sniper on the roof of the College of Surgeons.
“I slipped into this uniform, climbed up astride the rafters, and was assigned a loophole through which to shoot,” she wrote. “It was dark there, full of smoke and the din of firing, but it was good to be in action. I could look across the tops of trees and see the British soldiers on the roof of the Shelbourne. I could also hear their shot hailing against the roof and wall of our fortress, for in truth this building was just that. More than once I saw the man I aimed at fall.”
Alternating between uniformed sniping and messenger work in her grey dress and hat, she asked at one point to be allowed use her bicycle to get close to the Shelbourne and throw a bomb through a window. Mallin liked the idea, but was loath to have a woman risk her life so.
“My answer to that argument,” she said, “was that we had the same right to risk our lives as the men; that in the Constitution of the Irish Republic, women were on an equality with men. For the first time in history, indeed, a constitution had been written that incorporated the principle of equal suffrage.”
Appeal
Regardless of Skinnider’s appeal to the Proclamation, Mallin had other plans, entailing the burning of two buildings that would cut off escape routes for British soldiers based in the University Church. Leading a group of four men to do so, Skinnider was shot three times: once in the right arm, once in her right side under her arm, and once in the back. Mallin, she later wrote, could not forgive himself for having sent her “on that errand”.
Subsequently active in promoting the Republican cause and imprisoned during the War of Independence, Skinnider became Paymaster General of the anti-treaty IRA in the Civil War.
The Military Pensions Archive reveals her story as having a troubling epilogue, especially given her pride in how the Proclamation placed women on an equal footing with men. On applying for a pension in 1925 based on her service in the revolutionary period, she was refused payment because she was a woman. Despite having served as a uniformed sniper, led men, and been wounded, on legal advice she was told that her application “could not be considered under the act”. Only after repeated requests was she granted a pension in 1938.
Few of the almost 200 women who participated in the Rising had experiences quite as dramatic as Skinnider’s, though their roles were indispensable during Easter Week.
That so many women mobilised is remarkable given how the confusion over orders and countermanding orders that afflicted the Volunteers proved at least as detrimental to attempts to raise Cumann na mBan; several women who participated in the Rising later testified to having received their orders on Monday morning, but they may well have been the exception rather than the rule.
Only one branch of Cumann na mBan managed to mobilise in an even partially effective way, some ending up with the Volunteers at the Marrowbone Lane distillery while others were famously sent home when they attempted to join de Valera’s battalion at Boland’s Mills. Thomas McDonagh at Jacob’s Factory was initially startled by the arrival of a uniformed Máire Nic Shiubhlaing, but after saying they had made no provision for “girls” there, agreed to her suggestion that they set up a kitchen.
Although Ned Daly had told Phyllis Morkan that “if there was going to be fighting, they would need all the women they could get,” he never requested that women from her company join them, and indeed directed those women who were under his command to demobilise on Monday evening.
Many of those directed to do so refused to stand down, with Leslie Price and Bríd Dixon deciding that they would instead “go down to the centre of the city, see what was going on, and get into any building that was available”. They ended up at the GPO, which drew women who lacked orders, disobeyed orders, or simply wanted to support their comrades; one activist, Cathleen Byrne, kicked her way through a window in order to join the fight.
Louise Gavan Duffy describes how on arriving there she was taken to see Pearse who was “as calm and courteous as ever”. In hindsight describing her behaviour as “insolent”, she told him that she wanted to be in the field, but that she “felt the rebellion was a frightful mistake, that it could not possibly succeed, and it was, therefore, wrong”. Given her unwillingness to take the sort of active role she would truly have preferred, “he asked me would I like to go to the kitchen”, she said.
Kitchen work, though hardly glamorous and certainly not popularly valourised in the way that frontline combat roles were, was absolutely crucial to the rebels’ effort, and something that had been given little thought in advance by the rebel leaders, suggesting that the rebels had never expected to have to hold their positions for long.
While the GPO kitchen was well-supplied given how many shops and restaurants were nearby – Clan na Gael’s Mary Cloughlin said “this was the first time I saw a whole salmon cooked laid on a dish” while long afterwards Bridget Foley said she could “still see the vision of the big sides of beef going into the ovens for their lunches” – other garrisons, such as that at St Stephen’s Green, were not so lucky and were forced to improvise or simply to go hungry.
Rose MacNamara, vice-commandant of Cumann na mBan at Marrowbone Lane, later told the Bureau of Military History that on the Tuesday, “Quinn’s bakery cart was held up and some bread captured, also two cans of milk from a passing cart”, with 19 chickens being “captured” from a messenger boy the next day.
The chickens, she says, made for a “very successful” dinner, though bayonets had to be used to remove them from the pots in which they were cooked, owing to a lack of cutlery. Thursday saw them capturing three live calves, with a Volunteer who was a butcher killing one so it could be used for dinner that evening; Friday morning saw fried veal cutlets on the menu for breakfast, with a meat dinner that evening. Nine live chickens were captured that day, and a “load of cabbage” was taken the next one.
Kept busy
The women at the Four Courts likewise were kept busy feeding the men, Pauline Keating saying that “we busied ourselves mainly with the washing-up and the cooking”, after their discovery on Tuesday evening that, at least as far as Aine Heron could tell, “they had nothing but tea”.
She described the women who’d been sent there to set up a first-aid post making soup and stew, while Bridget Lyons said “we spent a lot of time making tea and sandwiches”, adding “we cooked joints of meat, tea and fried potatoes for constant relays of men”.
They stayed there until the end, cooking, tending to the wounded, and, Eilis Ní Riain said, reciting “Rosary after Rosary during the last 24 hours as the British military were closing in”.
As well as catering work, many of the women were allocated medical duties, in a demarcation of roles in line with Pearse’s Tuesday, April 25 call to the citizens of Dublin that “there is work for everyone: for men in the firing line, and for women in the provision of food and first aid”.
Dr Kathleen Lynn at Liberty Hall had made careful preparations for equipping first-aid posts, with the effect that some garrisons were fairly well-supplied with with field and first-aid kits, though little thought was given to how first-aid posts could be situated in rebel positions.
Aine Heron told the Bureau of Military History of a foiled attempt to set up a first-aid post at Dublin’s Dominican priory on Dominick Street. “The Prior of the monastery was away for the day, and the assistant Prior, who was sympathetic, gave us permission to set up our first-aid post in the priory,” she said. “We were not very long there when we heard the angry voice of the Prior, who had returned earlier than expected and who ordered us to clear out. We hastily and ignominiously retired, I leaving my waterproof coat behind me.”
By this point on Monday afternoon, she said, “the Rising was in full swing”, yet a group of Cumann na mBan members tasked with setting up a first-aid post “were left without any direction” and “just hung about marking time” until a temporary post was set up in a shop on Church Street. It was not until the following day, after collecting armlets marked with red crosses and first-aid equipment including “a ginger-beer bottle full of iodine”, that the women set off for the Four Courts.
Some first-aid points were especially well run, notably the makeshift hospital in Church Street’s Father Mathew Hall, but others were anything but, with Phyllis Morkan describing how after she and others set up an emergency ward on Church Street, they discovered they lacked stimulants and changes of clothes only whom the first patient presented with gunshot wounds to his face.
Given permission to visit her home, her family having two public houses, the women went there and over the course of an hour collected “a lot of brandy and whiskey and all the shirts and socks we could lay our hands on”. Obstructed by British troops on the way back, and carrying some ammunition too, the women “never got back to Church Street after that”.
The most dangerous work typically undertaken by women in the Rising was dispatch-carrying, especially important work given how telephone and telegraph wires had been cut and there were no other reliable ways for the various rebel groups to communicate with each other.
In advance of the rising, Michael Mallin explained to Marie Perolz how she would be needed to act as a dispatch carrier. She felt “very proud”, she said, as he smiled and asked, “Is it dangerous enough for you?”
With the risks came status: Sean MacDiarmada was so impressed by how effectively Bríd Dixon and Leslie Price maintained links between the GPO and North King Street, where the Volunteers’ First Battalion was headquartered under Ned Daly, that he announced they should be treated as officers and they were promoted on the spot.
Lacking uniforms, so less obviously identifiable as rebels than the uniformed men, women were in any case thought less likely to be stopped by soldiers or police, or to be fired on, but neither their gender nor their clothing was any guarantee of safety. Leslie Price by her own account almost broke down in tears when Tom Clarke directed her to cross O’Connell Street with a message on the Thursday evening of Easter Week, and when Elizabeth O’Farrell brought a message from Pearse to Colonel Bertram Portal, she was told “you think because you’re a woman you can say what you like; mind you don’t get shot through that little head of yours”.
O’Farrell is one of the women best known for her part in the Rising, having written an unforgettable account of how she was given the job of passing word to the British command that the rebels in the GPO had decided to surrender, subsequently accompanying Pearse as he formally surrendered to General Lowe and then travelling about the city, accompanied by such Capuchins as Frs Columbus Murphy and Augustine Hayden, passing on surrender orders to the other rebel commanders.
She is, however, perhaps better known for how her feet peek into view in the iconic shot of Pearse surrendering to General William Lowe. Often described as “airbrushed” from history, and sometimes said to have been literally airbrushed from some reproductions of the shot, O’Farrell told the Cistercians of Roscrea 40 years later that she had deliberately hid from the camera. When she spotted a British soldier preparing to take the shot she stepped backwards, not wanting to give the British press the satisfaction of linking her with the rebels’ defeat.
She later came to regret this decision, she said.