Maud Gonne MacBride issues public letter to Cumann na mBan as new pro-treaty women’s group founded
Dublin, 11 March 1922 – Maud Gonne MacBride has issued an open letter to members of Cumann na mBan calling on them to use their influence to ‘put down bitterness and dissensions that would rob Ireland of the fruit of the victories she has won’ in recent years.
The letter was published in the Freeman’s Journal today. Gonne MacBride opened: ‘I have the right to address you, because I am, in a sense, your mother.’ Recalling her involvement in planning for the organisation and sending out invitations to the first meeting of Cumann na mBan and the subsequent contribution of the organisation to national life, Mrs Gonne MacBride explained that she had been moved to write by the recent decision of the majority to expel the minority ‘because they differed as to the quickest and surest way of obtaining Ireland’s freedom’.
Members of Cumann na mBan, she insisted, all wanted the same thing – a free and independent Ireland. However, she added that Ireland was ‘exhausted after her long fight’ and it faced appalling problems of poverty where in some parts of the country children were to be found ‘raking bare fields for stray potatoes from last year’s harvest to stay their hunger’.
In light of this she appealed to the members of Cumann na mBan to let the provisional government use its power to remedy these problems. ‘Women are fosterers; help the Irish government to build up and strengthen the nation’, she has written. Above all else, she has asked that the women of Cumann na mBan use their ‘great influence that there shall be no quarreling and bitterness to hinder the work – that Irishmen shall not fight Irishmen or try and impede their work when that work is for the nation.’
The expelled minority that Gonne MacBride mentioned in her letter have now founded a new women’s organisation – Cumann na Saoirse – whose purpose is to rally support for the treaty. The first priority of the new group is to assist in the effort to return pro-treaty TDs at the forthcoming elections. A meeting of Cumann na Saoirse will be held tonight at the Mansion House where Jennie Wyse Power is set to preside and the line-up of speakers is to included Alice Stopford Green, Christina Connolly, Louise Gavan Duffy, Máire Ní Chinnéide and Lily Leamy O’Shea.
Historian Senia Paseta on the origins of Cumann na mBan
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
