Kathleen Ó Brennan (1876 - 1948)
Irish Republican, Suffragette, Journalist, Playwright and Lecturer
Kathleen was born into a patriarchal society in a century of cultural and political repression. From an early age she rejected the misogynistic Victorian-era norms repugnant to her sense of self-worth, gender and ethnic identify. She rebelled against England's attempts to cage her, destroy her culture and, deny her Celtic race the right to control its own land and destiny. In her quest for redress, she became a political activist and journeyed across the Atlantic to secure the help of Ireland’s exiles to right the wrongs wrought by a brutal Empire on Ireland and its people.
Early Years in Ireland
Kathleen M. Brennan, the second of four daughters, was born to Elizabeth Anne Brennan (nee Butler) and Francis Brennan, an auctioneer, in Dublin on November 20, 1876. In 1880, when Kathleen was four years old, her father died, leaving her mother to provide and care for the family.
After Francis died in 1880, Kathleen's mother Elizabeth found employment as a nurse in a workhouse infirmary to support the family. The nearest workhouse to where the family lived was the Dublin Union Workhouse located on St. James Street. It was within walking distance, making it the most likely workhouse where Elizabeth worked.
In the last quarter of the 20th century workhouses began to provide basic medical services to the destitute within the workhouse and to outside poor city dwellers seeking medical and maternity care, particularly for unwed young women and their newborns. Notorious for the inhuman and degrading treatment meted out to inmates within the workhouse system, the Board of Guardians, no longer able to defend against their inhumane modus operandi, invited the Sisters of Mercy to take over the care and management of the section housing Roman Catholic inmates. A similar arrangement applied to the section housing Protestant inmates. In addition to separate sections for Catholics and Protestants, men, women, and children were also separated.
By the time Kathleen had reached school age, two historic events had transpired in Ireland that positively affected her educational opportunities and, as she came of age, her ability to compete more effectively in the prevailing male-dominated society and participate more effectively in the Cultural Revival and Nationalistic movements taking root in Ireland.
The first event was the passing of the Intermediate Education Act (1878) and the Royal University of Ireland Act (1879) by the British Parliament. The Acts established the principle that girls and women had the right to secondary education, to sit for civil service examinations and to take university degrees. Almost all the 60 Irish Home Rule Members of Parliament voted against the bills.
The second event was the founding of the Dominican College in Eccles Street in Dublin in the early 1880's. While the above Acts provided the legal footing, the Dominican College provided the means by which young women could expand their academic horizons and attain the educational credentials required to compete for positions previously held only by men, out of the reach of women. Kathleen was educated at the Dominican College, as were two sisters. Mary, Kathleen's first-born sibling, had died in 1875 in her infancy. From her later accomplishments, it's evident that Kathleen took full advantage of the training and opportunities that the College offered.
The Brennans were Irish Republicans who fiercely embraced their Celtic heritage and in a demonstration of cultural fidelity added an Ó before their surnames. There is some anecdotal evidence that Kathleen's father and other members members on his side of the family, were members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and that ancestral members on Kathleen's mother the mother's side were active in the Society of United Irishmen. Be that as it may, the Kathleen women embraced and promoted the ideals that both organizations invoked in their struggles for universal suffrage, gender equality, civil liberties, and a sovereign Irish Republic.
The sisters were women of courage and conviction, prominent in the Gaelic Revival movement and in Ireland's revolutionary period that included the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence 1919 through 1921 and the subsequent Treaty War (Civil War) 1922 through 1923.
Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Kathleen, the third born sister after Mary and Kathleen was a member of Conradh na Gaeilge (Gaelic League) and Cumann na mBan (League of Women). She was also an Irish Republican, writer and playwright and an active participant during the revolutionary period. She was imprisoned by both the British occupiers and the nascent Irish Free State for supporting the Republicans during the Treaty War.
Frances Kathleen (Aine Ceannt), the youngest of the sisters was also a member of the Gaelic League and Cumann na mBan. She was also an active participant during the revolutionary period. She opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and was imprisoned by the nascent Irish Free State. She was married to Eamonn Ceannt, a signatory of the Proclamation and an executed leader of the 1916 Rising.
During Kathleen's adolescence, the Celtic Revival movement was manifesting itself as a societal change agent impacting almost all areas of human interaction and identity in Ireland. The social construct unique to Ireland was deliberately being deconstructed by the Anglo-Saxon overlord and recast with an Anglocentric tool kit designed to destroy the soul of the Irish Celt and, by extension, the cohesion of the Irish nation. Recognizing British government policy as an act of cultural genocide, Douglas Hyde, Eugene Ó Growney, Eoin MacNeill, and other Gaelic scholars founded the Gaelic League in 1893 to provide the Celts of Ireland with the means to redeem their ancient culture and threatened way of life. The Gaelic League was built on a foundation laid by an earlier generation of Gaelic scholars including John Ó Donovan, Eugene Ó Curry, George Petrie, George Sigerson and Thomas Ó Neill Russell.
When Kathleen and her sisters completed their formal education, they became members of the Gaelic League and advocates for the vision of Ireland espoused by its founders. On joining the League they began using the Irish translation of their names, learning Irish, studying Irish history as recorded by Irish historians and, create their own niches from whence to effectively contribute to the League's herculean task in reversing centuries of colonial indoctrination.
A talented writer, Kathleen chose journalism as a career, a choice that took advantage of her innate writing and analytical skills and penchant for storytelling. She effectively leveraged her skills and knowledge of the Irish political landscape and social goings-on in Dublin to become the Dublin correspondent for the London Times. She also submitted articles to the Irish Times and the Irish Tatler magazine and other publications on a regular basis.
In the United States
In October of 1914, Kathleen journeyed to the United States on a lecture tour designed to tout the work of the Gaelic League and the effort of other Nationalistic organizations and individuals campaigning for Irish Home Rule. The planned visit was to be of short duration. However, the onset of World War 1 and the consequent First Battle of the Atlantic, which in May of 1915 sent the Lusitania and 1,198 of its passengers to a watery grave, changed Kathleen's plans and, inexorably, her life narrative.
Unable to return to Ireland as originally intended due to the resultant transatlantic travel restriction, Kathleen tried to find a job as a journalist, copywriter or some such work in New York. As the Gaelic American newspaper was the largest if not the only exclusively Irish-content newspaper in New York at that time, it's quite possible that Kathleen visited its offices during her search and that she was accorded the same frosty rejection by its editor, John Devoy, as was the case with Sidney Gifford when she approached Devoy for a job. Both Kathleen and Sydney were accomplished journalists who hailed from Republican families with close ties to many of the emerging newsmakers in Ireland. They also were familiar with the evolving political and cultural scene---in all, worthy qualities one would surmise for any Irish-focused American-based newspaper. However, new voices and insights eagerly sought by the newspaper’s readers were not shared by the insular and aging Devoy.
Having decided that opportunities for employment on the East Coast were limited, Kathleen headed west to California, stopping at various venues along the way to fulfill speaking engagements with women's social groups, suffragettes meetings, fraternal organizations, academic societies and myriad cultural and political organizations and groups. Prior to the 1916 Easter Rising, her lectures dealt mostly with the Gaelic Revival movement including the language, literature, plays, music and dance and the role of women in Irish society. She also discussed issues relating to Irish Home Rule including insights into individuals and organizations who either supported or opposed it.
After the Easter Rising, her lectures and talks became more political in content, dealing with the needs of the dependents of volunteers killed during the Rising as well as the dependents of political prisoners rounded up and imprisoned in its aftermath. As events unfolded in Ireland, the essence of Kathleen's lectures evolved accordingly, to describe the role of Sinn Fein in the new political reality reshaping Ireland, the crux of the General Election of 1918, the founding of Dail Eireann, the establishment of the Irish Republic at the Dail's first sitting in January of 1919 and the Irish War of Independence. Kathleen was well versed in all the above events, being continuously updated by her sisters in Ireland who were frontline participants.
After the establishment of the Irish Republic, Kathleen took a more active role in efforts spearheaded by the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) and the American Association for Recognition of the Irish Republic (AARIR) to convince the United States government to recognize the newly established Irish Republic as an independent and sovereign nation, in keeping with President Wilson's formal war aims, specifically aim No. XIV that stated,
"A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike".
During Kathleen’s years in the United States, she traversed the country at least twice while visiting every state up and down the West Coast and most of the states between New York and California. She also visited several Canadian provinces. According to her own account, she had prepared a total of fourteen lectures to be drawn on as audiences and circumstances dictated. Seven dealt with specific topics relating to the Gaelic Renaissance, two with Irish music and art and five with Irish politics. From time to time she met with other visiting Irish speakers including Liam Mellows and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington whom she spent time with in Chicago in the early months of 1917.
It was during a stopover in Portland, Oregon in 1919 that Kathleen became involved in the political controversy embroiling a kindred spirit, Marie Equi, a Massachusetts-born medical doctor, feminist, pacifist and labor activist. When Equi ran afoul of President Wilson's Espionage Act of 1917 for her opposition to the United States entering World War 1, Kathleen headed up the publicity aspect of Equi's appeal after her conviction for sedition. Kathleen's involvement in the Equi affair, coupled with her support for the Industrial Workers of the World (an international labor union), landed her in legal trouble with Oregon's attorney general that resulted in her arrest and a court order for her deportation. However, the deportation order was not enforced, possibly because of the reputation she had engendered amongst influential organizations and individuals across the country or, as the attorney general indicated in a communication to the Bureau of Investigation in Washington DC, that "she had friends in high places". Apart from Kathleen's involvement with Equi's legal defense and labor union activism, it has been widely reported that they were involved romantically. Be that as it may, Equi advised Kathleen to redirect her activist efforts back to her own political agenda, i.e. Irish politics, and to leave the jurisdiction of Oregon attorney general to avoid further trouble and certain deportation.
The advent of 1920 was a pivotal year for women's involvement in the struggle for Irish freedom as well as the culmination of the 100-year struggle for women's suffrage. Many of the Irish and Irish American women who were involved in the Irish freedom struggle were also prominent in the suffrage movement in Ireland and America. The sense of urgency for action was at a high pitch as the War of Independence in Ireland entered into the second year and when Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries into Ireland to augment the British security forces on the ground there. Churchill, an imperialist warmonger, was about to unleash a second wave of terror and carnage on the Irish people who dared mess with his beloved Empire. The bad publicity generated in the United States tempered Churchill's worst instincts, forcing him to abandon his all-out approach to crush the revolution.
In response to Irish special envoy to the United States Harry Boland's call for increased publicity, Dr. William J. Maloney, an advocate for U.S. recognition of the Irish Republic, recruited a group of young women to picket the British Embassy in Washington, DC, with banners calling on the British government to pay back war loans owed to the United States instead of funding an imperialist war in Ireland. Maloney intent was to have the women's photographs in newspapers as a means of generating some short-term publicity. However, after several of the women were arrested and brought before a grand jury, Maloney backed off, leaving the women to fend for themselves. Unbeknownst to Maloney and his cohorts, Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly, Gertrude Corless, Leonora O’Reilly, Kathleen and other activists were planning their own protest in response to Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington's appeal from across the Atlantic to alert the American public to what the British war machine was gearing up to do in Ireland. Kathleen, who was responsible for maximizing publicity, was using aliases to cover her tracks as she was under continuous Bureau of Investigation surveillance.
Instead of the protest collapsing after the women were arrested, more women joined at the behest of Dr. Kelly and her cohorts who took the opportunity to co-opt the remnants of Maloney's pickets and rename the revitalized pickets the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War Aims. One young women aviatrix, Mollie Carroll, flew a leaflet "bombing" mission over the British Embassy describing Britain's war crimes in Ireland. Kathleen, using the name Kathleen Butler, was arrested after participating in a midnight run around Washington posting anti-British posters on walls and buildings. Many of the arrested women refused to abide by the imposed bail conditions. The intensity of the women's protest was too much for the FOIF who tried to control and stop them, to no avail. The women were determined not to be the victims of timid men such as the ones who betrayed the women of the Ladies Land League in 1882.
In August of 1920, the American Women Pickets (AWP) and the Irish Progressive League (IPL) organized a strike at the Chelsea Pier in Manhattan to protest the arrests of Irish Archbishop Daniel Mannix, an outspoken foe of British rule in Ireland, and Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork. Dr. Kelly, Leonora Ó Reilly, Eileen Curran of the Celtic Players and Kathleen organized a group of women who dressed in white with green capes and carried signs that read: "There Can Be No Peace While British Militarism Rules the World."
The strike, which lasted three and a half weeks, was directed at British ships docked in New York. Striking workers included Irish longshoremen, Italian coal passers, African American longshoremen and workers on a docked British passenger liner. According to a local newspaper report it was "the first purely political strike of workingmen in the history of the United States". Before it ended it had spread to Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Boston. Helen Golden, a member of the IPL who was involved in organizing the strike, was working surreptitiously to bring the AWP and the IPL under the control of the American Association for Recognition of the Irish Republic headed up by Harry Boland and Eamon de Valera.
De Valera, who spent eighteen months in the United States from June of 1919 to December of 1920 on a mission to secure America's recognition of the Irish Republic, failed to do so. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern-born segregationist with pro-British bias, chose to consider Ireland a ward of England by virtue of it being one of the British isles. Much of de Valera's time in the Unites States was spent trying to exert control over Irish American activist groups, instead of using their contacts, expertise, and influence in furtherance of his mission.
For the remainder of her time in the United States Kathleen continued with her lecture tour in Canada and the West Coast until her return to Ireland in the early months of 1922.
Back in Ireland
By the time Kathleen returned to Ireland the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was ratified by the House of Commons of Southern Ireland which set up a Provisional Government to administer the affairs of Southern Ireland from January 1922 to December 1922.
Southern Ireland was one of the geopolitical entities established after Ireland was partitioned by the British-enacted Government of Ireland Act 1920. Northern Ireland was the second entity.
The subsequent Irish Free State Constitution Act 1922 was passed by the British Parliament to codify the Constitution of the Irish Free State as an act of British law and to formally ratify the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Thus, without any role by Dail Eireann, the Irish Free State was established by the British government as a Dominion of the British Commonwealth of Nations on December 6, 1922. For one day the Irish Free State encompassed all 32 counties. On December 7, 1922, Northern Ireland opted out of the newly established Irish Free State, a prerogative enshrined in the aforementioned Irish Free State Constitution Act 1922.
The role of Dail Eireann and the Dail debates were inconsequential insofar as the British were concerned. What the Dail debates did was to lay bare the irreconcilable differences between Irish Nationalists and Republicans. The pro-Treaty Nationalists' vision for Ireland was monarchial and dependant in character and, lorded over by a patriarchal government system, resembling the vision held by John Redmond and the Irish Parliamentary Party prior to 1916. The anti-Treaty Republicans' vision was Wolf Tone's vision, as espoused by the Gaelic Revival movement and affirmed by the Irish Proclamation of 1916.
By March of 1922, Kathleen was reporting for the International News Service. One of her articles dealt with women activists in Ireland who were campaigning to force the Provisional Government to lower the voting age for women from thirty, the age fixed by British law, to twenty-one. The gender-equality-based campaign was led by Countess Markievicz, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Aine Ceannt, and Mary MacSwiney who pointed out that a majority of Cumann na mBan women were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five and as such, their sacrifices for Irish freedom must be acknowledged and honored and, likewise, their voting rights unabridged, either because of their gender or for fear of what their vote may do to the established order. As Kathleen pointed out, the vast majority of Cumann na mBan women opposed the Treaty, raising concerns that the pro-Treaty Provincial Government, comprised only of men, would deny them the right to vote as punishment. The women's gender-equality-based campaign was successful in that the voting age for women was lowered to twenty-one. That deviation from British law was included in the new Free State Constitution.
In November of 1922, Kathleen, Dr. Kathleen Lynn and Charlotte Despard attended the Lausanne Conference in Switzerland as representatives of Irish women who opposed the Irish Free State to plead the cause of "an Ireland that will be truly independent." Kathleen, who was the secretary of the delegation, announced they had come to the conference to bring before the world "the appalling conditions In Ireland which have resulted from the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed under duress a year ago". See the attached clipping for more details.
After the Treaty War ended, Kathleen ended her involvement in politics as did most revolutionary women activists because the British-backed Free State regime that had taken over was misogynistic, anti-Republican and opportunistic to its core. The brutality directed at its opponents, particularly women, during the Treaty War far exceeded that meted out by the British during the War of Independence. There was no place in the Dominion State for those who fought for or supported the Republic proclaimed in 1916.
For the remainder of her life Kathleen devoted her time to her literary and journalistic career. The Abbey Theatre debuted one of her plays, ‘Full Measure,’ in 1928. After that, like other women playwrights, Kathleen experienced the Abbey Theatre's bias in not selecting plays written by women. Even as recent as 2016, nine of the ten plays selected for the 1916 Rising centenary were written by men. Kathleen was a frequent guest speaker on Radio Eireann in the early 1940s. She was secretary to the Irish Poets, Essayists Novelists (PEN) club where she met and corresponded with the leading figures in Irish artistic and literary circles.
Kathleen was taken ill in the early part of 1948. She died on May 12, 1948 and is buried in Deansgrange Cemetery, Dublin.
Contributed by Tomás Ó Coısdealbha
cemetery AND grave location
Name: Deansgrange Cemetery
ADDRESS: Blackrock, County Dublin, Ireland
PLOT: St. Patrick's 36 G.
HEADSTONE
