Born to an upper-class Irish family, Eva Gore-Booth became a leading campaigner for trade union rights, votes for women and Irish independence in the first three decades of the 20th century.
Eva was born in Lissadell,County Sligo in May 1870 into a prominent Anglo-Irish family, the Gore-Booths. She enjoyed a conventional upper-class upbringing but from an early age was entranced by nature and by the delights of novels and poetry. The poet William Yeats was an occasional visitor to the great house and after the deaths of both Eva and her sister Constance Markiewicz wrote a bitter-sweet poem in their memory, whose opening lines recalled those long-ago visits:
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
The turning point in Eva’s life came in 1896 when she was in Bordighera, Italy. Here she met Esther Roper from Manchester, sent there to rest by friends who feared for her health through overwork. Ester told Eva of her work campaigning for trade union organisation amongst women and for women’s right to vote and the two women became friends, for life as it turned out. Eva decided to leave her comfortable home and way of life in Ireland and move to Manchester to help Esther in her work , sharing her house at 83 Heald Place, Rusholme
Trade Unionism
Within months of her move to Manchester Eva was addressing branches of the local Independent Labour Party and Women’s Co-operative Guild on the necessity of women’s suffrage and was soon recognised as an activist in her own right. In June 1900 she was appointed joint organising secretary of the Manchester, Salford and District Women’s Trade Union Council. Eva worked alongside the other worker Sarah Dickenson in their offices at 9 Albert Square. Sarah later remembered Eva thus in a letter to Esther:
“I met her first at your office when she came to Manchester, and my first impression of her was her charming and interesting personality. When I knew her better I found how very genuine she was in all her dealings and discovered all the beautiful traits in her character. The friendly way that she treated all the women trade unionists endeared her to them. If she was approached for advice or help she never failed. She is remembered by thousands of working women in Manchester for her untiring efforts to improve their industrial conditions, for awakening and educating their sense of political freedom, and for social intercourse.”
The Trades Council had been established at a meeting in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour in the Town Hall in February 1895 by a group of men and women mainly connected with the Liberal party, with the aim of assisting women workers to organise and lobby for the improvement of working conditions.
Over the next few years both women worked very hard to encourage women to set up and join unions. It was rarely an easy task. A section in the 1903 Trades Council report described the problems:
“For however severely trade grievances may be felt, the first steps in organisation are always difficult. The timidity of inexperience is hard to overcome, and people naturally fear to jeopardise their week’s earnings. Innumerable meetings are held by the Council, sometimes so small that they are not in themselves worth recording and much personal canvassing and persuasion has to be used before a sufficient number of workers can be gathered together and enough enthusiasm aroused to induce an adequate number of more progressive to take up the responsible positions of officers, committee and collectors.”
One of the difficulties they encountered in getting women to go to meetings was solved by starting a Tea Fund in 1902 to buy tea, sugar, milk and cake:
“It was found that the tea was a great convenience, as many of the women live in outlying districts, they are naturally anxious to hurry home to tea when their work is over and it is both inconvenient and expensive for them to come back to meetings in the evening. We are glad to say that the tea had good results in introducing a social element that promoted good fellowship and a friendly spirit among the members, and the attendance has largely increased.”
The most successful women’s union established by Eva and Sarah was the Salford and District Association of Power Loom Weavers, set up in April 1902. As well as trade unionism the women workers were also interested in politics and the suffrage campaign, sending a resolution just weeks after their establishment to a meeting at the Free Trade Hall called to protest against the imposition of a corn tax. The women’s resolution not only protested against the tax and the fact that it would fall most heavily on women “the worst paid workers in the country” but also objected to the fact that their exclusion from the franchise prevented them “from making an effective protest at the Ballot Box”. Nellie Keenan was the first Treasurer of the union and later became Secretary.
Eva was in demand as a speaker, addressing the May Day demonstration in Gorton Park in May 1902 and a meeting in the Secular Hall, Rusholme later that same month on “The Industrial Position of Women”. In 1903 Eva became the WTUC representative on the Education Committee of the City Council and was later appointed onto the Technical Instruction Committee.
Christabel Pankhurst became friends with Eva and Esther in 1901 and was swiftly drawn into their activities, joining Eva’s poetry circle at the University Settlement, going on the Women’s Trade Union Council, speaking at a number of meetings on the suffrage question and accompanying the two women on holiday to Venice. Her sister Sylvia recalled that at this time Christabel adored Eva “and when Eva suffered from neuralgia, as often happened, she would sit with her for hours, massaging her head. To all of us at home, this seemed remarkable indeed, for Christabel had never been willing to act as the nurse to any other human being”. At Esther’s suggestion Christabel began studying law at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1906 with first class honours. According to Sylvia, Mrs Pankhurst was quite jealous of the time that Christabel spent with Esther and Eva.
In 1904 Eva and Sarah resigned from their posts with the Women’s Trades Union Council in protest at its refusal to support the campaign for women’s suffrage. The issue had been raised by Christabel Pankhurst, who called for the Council to adopt women’s suffrage as a fourth aim. This was rejected by a large majority on the Council on the grounds that “its special work, for which alone its subscribers’ money was asked, was the organisation of women’s labour, and that the advocacy of Women’s Suffrage, however desirable in itself, was outside its scope as a body”. By now passionately committed to the suffrage campaign Eva and Sarah felt that they had no other option but to resign their jobs with the Trades Council.
They did not abandon their work on unionising women workers, however, but immediately set up a new organisation – the Manchester & Salford Women Trades & Labour Council – in September 1904 with Eva and Sarah as Joint Secretaries and with offices at 5 John Dalton Street. According to Esther the next ten years “were full to overflowing with organisation, writing, speaking at large gathering in all parts of England, deputations to Cabinet Ministers and to Members of Parliament. To this was added a new activity, when well-meant and ill-meant efforts were made to restrict women’s labour in various fields. On different occasions, women pit-brow workers, barmaids, women acrobats and gymnasts, and women florists were successfully organized in their own defence.”
Many of the trade unions that the two women had helped to set up withdrew from the Council in their support along with their two thousand members, including the power loom weavers, tailoresses, bookbinders and others. They continued their hard work and by 1907 Sarah Dickenson was able to tell a conference of women workers in Manchester that they now had four thousand affiliated members. Nellie Keenan acted as Treasurer of the new body, which no longer had access to the wealthy Liberal sympathisers of before. Instead they received contributions from local labour and socialist organisations including the Manchester branch of the National Union of Clerks, the Women’s Co-operative Guild, the National Clarion Cycling Club and the Nelson Labour Representation Committee (Eva’s brother Josslyn Gore-Booth contributed a much needed sum of five pounds each year).
Their success enabled them to start a quarterly newspaper called The Women’s Labour News which gave a full account of all the industrial and political activities of the women’s trade unions. In her editorial in the first issue Eva wrote thus.
“Many are the difficult questions connected with labour, many are the misunderstandings and confusions, many are the obscure corners of the industrial world, and many are the wrongs done in the darkness. Those who are working for the betterment of political and industrial conditions of women have great need of fellowship, of coherency and fee discussion, and the ventilation of pressing grievances. The aim of this little paper is to light a few street lamps here and there in the darkest ways, to let us at all events see one another’s faces and recognise our comrades, and work together with strong, organised and enlightened effort for the uplighting of those who suffer most under the present political and industrial system.”
An important campaign waged by Eva and Esther was in defence of women’s right to work. Many men (and some women) – including some leading trade unionists and socialists – believed in the notion that men should be paid enough to support a wife and family, and that in an ideal society married women would not have to work. When David Shackleton, , Secretary of the Darwen weavers, publicly supported this view, Eva wrote a pamphlet entitled Women’s Right to Work, which pointed out how he represented 74,000 married women workers in the cotton industry. When there were an attempt to prevent bar-maids from working Eva and Esther used the occasion of a by-election in Manchester in which Winston Churchill was standing to raise the issue. Eva’s sister Constance came over from Ireland and attracted publicity in a characteristic manner, as the Manchester Guardian reported in April 1908:
“A coach of the olden times was driven about Manchester yesterday to advertise the political agitation on behalf of the barmaids. It was drawn by four white horses, and the ‘whip’ was the Countess Markievicz, sister of Eva Gore-Booth. In all parts of the city the coach and its passengers excited general interest, and in the North-West division especially, the cause of the barmaids was made known not only by demonstration, but by speeches and personal interviews and distribution of literature.”
Eva and Esther also campaigned over the working conditions of other women workers, such as florists’ assistants and the pit-brow women, who worked on the surface at the head of mines in Lancashire sorting the coal. They wore a distinctive working garb of wide trousers and headscarves and wielded shovels with great manual dexterity. In 1911, when parliament threatened to ban women from the work, Eva and Esther organised protest meetings in Wigan and Manchester and made sure that the pit-brow women were on the platform.
Literature and Education
Somehow Eva found time in her busy life to write poetry and plays and a number of collections of her work were published during the lifetime. Some of her poems were set to music by her friend Max Mayer, a Manchester composer, while two others – The Triumph of Maeve and Forth They Went – were set to music after her death by the composer Edgar Bainton. Her work was also included in a collection made by her friend AE in 1904 called New Songs, appearing alongside poems Padraic Colum, Alice Milligan and others. Her interest in literature and poetry led Eva to become involved in the University Settlement, based in Ancoats Hall, Every Street, where Esther was already on the Committee. The Settlement had been founded in 1895, inspired by the work of Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, with the aim of bringing culture into the bleak industrial district of Ancoats. Eva passed on her love of literature to local working class women and after her death one of them Louisa Smith lovingly recalled those classes:
“We were a class of about sixteen girls. I think we were all machinists and we were rough…..We called ourselves the Elizabethan Society because we had no scenery: as we said among ourselves, we had no assets, but we enjoyed every minute of the rehearsals. We were very raw material but keen on acting; she showed such patience and love that we would do anything to please her and she got the best out of us. After rehearsals we would give a show of our own, an imitation of what we had seen or imagined. If any of us were feeling seedy or worried about business or home she could always see, and showed such an understanding sympathy that we came away feeling we had a real friend. I remember one of the girls was very delicate and truly not really fit to fight the battles of life, and Miss Gore-Booth cared for her and sent her little delicacies, and took her to her own doctor, and in a hundred and one ways she cared for us We thought she was a being from another world. I don’t think I exaggerate when I say we worshipped her, but she never knew it, she was so utterly selfless….She took us on picnics, and they seemed to be different picnics from any I had ever been to, so jolly and free, no restraint about them. She was also very keen on women’s rights and trade unions. She persuaded me to join…She was always sympathetic with the downtrodden, and worked and lectured might and main, interviewing Members of Parliament, etc., on their behalf till conditions were mended. She was very frail and delicate herself, but full of pluck and determination, and would stand up for people she knew to be unjustly treated, even though the world was against them, and with all so sweet and gentle that one could not help loving her.”
In November 1902 a well-attended meeting of theTailoresses Union was held in the Shamrock Hall, Rochdale Road (lent by the United Irish League) where the entertainment was provided by the Elizabethan Society and a Miss Dora Villey, who played the piano for dancing. Eva also ran a fortnightly Sunday morning reading class for a number of years at 78 Canning Street for the Ancoats Brotherhood, an educational organisation which for many years held lectures, music evenings, art appreciation and literature classes and much else in the New Islington Hall, Ancoats.
The Suffrage Campaign
In Lancashire many women worked in the cotton industry and were members of the weavers unions (though despite the fact the majority of the members were women, the officers of the union were always men). Able to earn their own living in the great weaving sheds of the north, these women provided a solid base of support for campaigns to give them political as well as industrial rights. Esther and other women political campaigners such as Sarah Reddish, Selina Cooper and Sarah Dickenson saw the vital importance of linking the struggles for women’s right to vote with the struggle for better working and social conditions, of convincing working class women that the vote was not an end in itself but a means to an end.
On 1st May 1900 they launched a petition at the May Day meeting in Blackburn, asking women textile workers to sign, and then sent out organisers to contact every group of women workers they could find in every town in Lancashire. Accompanied by fifteen women cotton workers the petition was finally presented to parliament on 19th March 1901 with nearly 30,000 signatures. The following year the women presented another petition from Yorkshire and Cheshire and in the summer of 1903 the suffrage campaigners set up the Lancashire and Cheshire Women Textile and Other Workers’ Representation Committee (LCWTOWRC) with an office at 5 John Dalton Street (where they were joined a year later by the secessionist Women’s Trades and Labour Council). Bertha Mason wrote of their efforts thus:
“It was the appearance on the scene of action of this new and important force (women textile workers) , the organizing of which was carried out by Miss Esther Roper, Miss Gore-Booth, and Miss Reddish, herself at one time a textile worker, which was chiefly responsible for the wonderful revival of interest in the question of the enfranchisement of women which marked the early years of 1900. There can be no doubt that this active and enthusiastic demand on the part of great army of women who earn their bread by ‘the sweat of their brow’, and not merely their own bread but in many cases the bread of relatives dependent on them, made a deep impression on Parliament, and caused many who had hitherto treated the agitation as an ‘impracticable fad’ and ‘the fantastic crochet’ of a few rich and well-to-do women, to inquire seriously into the why and wherefore of the movement.”
The manifesto of the LCWTOWR, published in July 1904, explicitly linked class and suffrage and noted the way that the male labour movement had formed the Labour Representation Committee to secure a political voice, leading to the conclusion that women should do the same.
“Fellow Workers – During the last few years the need of political power for the defence of the workers has been felt by every section of the labour world. Among the men the growing sense of of the importance of this question has resulted in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee with the object of gaining direct Parliamentary Representation for the already enfranchised working men. Meanwhile the position of the disenfranchised working women, who are by their voteless condition shut out from all political influence, is becoming daily more precarious. They cannot hope to hold their own in industrial matters, where their interests may clash with those of their enfranchised fellow-workers or employers.
The one all-absorbing and vital political question for labouring women is to force an entrance into the ranks of responsible citizens, in whose hands lie the solution of the problems which are at present convulsing the industrial world.
In view of the complicated state of modern politics, and the mass of conflicting interests, the conclusion has been forced on those of the textile workers who have been working unceasingly in past years to secure the vote for women, that what is urgently needed is that they should send their own nominee to the House of Commons, pledged to work in season and out of season to secure the enfranchisement of the women workers of the country……What Lancashire and Cheshire women think today England will do to-morrow.”
The women extended the campaign, speaking to local trade union branches, helping to establish local suffrage societies and getting support from the Labour Representation Committees. Almost all their efforts were now directed towards working class women. As Eva wrote in her contribution to a book on suffrage, “Surely the working women of England have paid the price of political emancipation over and over again! It is no mere insignificant statistical fact that that these millions of workers live laborious days of poverty-stricken and upright independence, and produce by their labour so large a proportion of the material wealth of the country. Here is a force that must in the end be reckoned with.”
Another tactic adopted by the women was to make suffrage an issue in parliamentary elections where Labour candidates were standing. In the summer of 1902 David Shackleton stood for parliament in a by-election at Clitheroe. Eva wrote to the Manchester Guardian, pointing out that women weavers were paying into a fund to support their MP (MPs received no payment at this time) and yet had no vote themselves. The women organised a number of successful meetings during the campaign. This tactic was repeated in the campaign to support the Labour candidate Thorley Smith in Wigan in 1906 and many women went to the town to speak. He came second to the Tory candidate. In January 1910 the committee ran a campaign during the general election in Rossendale, but with much less success.
After 1904 Christabel moved away from Eva and Esther, engaging in increasingly bitter attacks on the Labour party for its slowness in supporting the demands of women. Instead she moved towards the Women’s Social Political and Union, a small grouping of ILP women that had been established at a meeting in Mrs Pankhurst house in Nelson Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock (now the Pankhurst Centre) on 10th October 1903. Few took much notice of the WSPU until 13th October 1905 when Christabel and a mill girl named Annie Kenney attended a meeting at the Free Trade Hall to be addressed by Winston Churchill MP and Sir Edward Grey MP, two prominent members of the Liberal Party and future Cabinet members. At the end of the meeting Christabel and Annie jumped up and shouted ‘Will the Liberal Government give votes to women?’ whilst unfurling a banner inscribed “Votes for Women”. After being hustled out Christabel got them both arrested by spitting at a policeman and they spent in a week in Strangeways.
The WSPU seized on the incident, organising a protest meetings in Stevenson Square and rallying support from the ILP and other socialist organisations. A large crowd of friends and supporters greeted the two women on their release, including Esther and Eva who presented Christabel with flowers and also added their names to the list of sponsors for a protest meeting to be held the following evening, ironically, at the Free Trade Hall. Christabel and Annie spoke as did Keir Hardie, who moved a motion condemning the behaviour of the Liberal party at the meeting the previous week. Eva seconded the motion. It was perhaps the last time that Eva agreed with Christabel’s actions. A few weeks later she caught hold of Teresa Billington, a leading member of WSPU, after a meeting and urged her to tell Christabel not to vary her defence from one meeting to another. “….she cannot fit her explanation to her audience. She either deliberately invited imprisonment or she was a victim; she either spat at the policeman or she did not. She can’t tell one tale in Manchester and another in Oldham”.
In May 1906 Eva, alongside Sarah Dickenson, Margaret Ashton, Emmeline Pankhurst and other women prominent in the suffrage movement, was one of delegation which met the new Liberal Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman. In her speech Eva stressed the economic contribution of women on behalf of the fifty working women who had come to London with them from Lancashire:
“The number of women who are engaged at this time in producing the wealth of this country is double the population of Ireland. It is very large number. These women are all labouring under the gross disability and industrial disadvantage of an absolute want of political power. Every day we live this becomes a more grave disadvantage, because industrial questions are becoming political questions which are being fought out in Parliament. The vast number of women workers have their point of view and their interest to be considered; but those interests are not considered and the whole effect of their crushing exclusion is to react on the question of their wages. I am a trade union secretary in Manchester, and know from personal experience what women’s wages are and the sort of money they get for their work. Six or seven shillings a week is not a sufficient sum of money to live on. This not the rate of wages that could be possibly be enforced upon the enfranchised citizens of a free country. We feel, and I think women in other classes, who are working, also feel that our industrial status is being brought down. It results from the fact that we have no political power. That is the lesson which the working women of Lancashire have learned, and that is the thought they want to bring before you and want you to consider.”
To the bitter disappointment of the women Campbell-Bannerman refused to move on the issue and in response the WSPU adopted increasingly militant tactics, beginning with attempts to ‘rush’ Parliament, chaining themselves to railings, smashing windows and eventually even committing arson, burning postboxes and even churches. The ‘suffragettes’ as they had now became known were often brutally treated by the police on demonstrations and when they were imprisoned went on hunger-strike. The prison authorities, backed by the Home Secretary, retaliated by force-feeding them, a shocking and violent physical assault which sometimes damaged the health of women and led to wide-spread criticism of the government by many who were not sympathetic to the tactics of the WSPU.
The northern suffragists felt alienated by the WSPU campaign and continued to work steadily away at their campaign amongst working class women, gathering increased support and eventually winning over the Labour party to their position. In contrast the WSPU severed its links with the Socialist movement, lost all interest in serious organizing amongst working-class women, and indeed Sylvia Pankhurst was disowned by her mother and sister for continuing to work and organise amongst working class women in the East End.
The dismay of the northern suffragists at the tactics of the WSPU were set out by Eva in a letter to Mrs Fawcett, the most prominent constitutional campaigner, in the autumn of 1906:
“There is no class in the community who has such good reasons for objecting and does so strongly object to shrieking and throwing yourself on the floor and struggling and kicking as the average working woman, whose dignity is very real to them. We feel we must tell you this as we are in great difficulties because our members in all parts of the country are so outraged at the idea of taking part in such proceedings that everywhere for the first time they are shrinking from public demonstrations. It is not the fact of demonstration or even the violence offered to them, it is being mixed up with and held accountable as a class for educated and upper class women, who kick, shriek, bite and spit. As far as importance in the eyes of the Government goes where shall we be if the working women do not support us?”
In June 1908 Eva, her sister Constance, Esther and Sarah Reddish went down to London for a large rally organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Eva told the crowd of several thousand in Trafalgar Square that five million women were working in Britain who were not paid properly for the work that they did, many receiving half the male wage. Constance got the crowd cheering by declaring that “they cannot abolish woman, take away her occupation, and let her starve…We are told that the bar is a bad place for women, but the Thames Embankment is far worse”.
After Manchester
In her memoir Esther Roper records that in 1913 “illness, caused by the climate of Lancashire, made it impossible for us to live there any longer, and reluctantly we left our many friends and went south, though we came back constantly for work”. Not just the soot-filled damp air but surely years of long hours, travel and snatched meals must have taken its toll on the health of both women. In London they took up residence in Hampstead at 14 Frognal Gardens. There was to be no peaceful retirement for Eva and Esther for they were soon caught up in the enormity of the First World War and then the bloody events of the Easter Rising and its aftermath
When the war broke out they opposed it as pacifists as did many of their suffragist and socialist friends, some of whom were active in organisations such the No Conscription Fellowship and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Eva wrote a short story called The Tribunal (which was printed as a leaflet) in which she dramatises the experience of conscientious objectors when arguing for their beliefs before hostile magistrates. In 1915 the two women joined the Womens’ Peace crusade and travelled the country speaking in support of a negotiated peace to end the war. These were very brave actions given the climate of jingoism and anti-German hysteria whipped up by the government and the “patriotic” press.
Constance had followed a very different political path to Eva, joining Sinn Fein in 1908 and setting up the Fianna na hEireann in 1909 as an Irish alternative to the pro-Imperialist Boy Scouts recently established by Baden-Powell. She was an expert shot who in turn taught her young men how to shoot and many of them later took part in the Easter Rising. During the 1913 Dublin Lockout Constance ran soup kitchens to help feed thousands of strikers. During the Rising in 1916 Constance was second in command at St Stephen’s Green and was sentenced to death, though it was commuted to life imprisonment. Eva was granted permission to see her and crossed to Dublin with Esther. On the day they landed they saw newspaper placards announcing the execution that morning of James Connolly. They had been warned not to tell Constance but she guessed from their faces. Writing in Socialist Review a few weeks later Eva said that the rebellion has been a blow to all those who had hoped for a lessening of the hostility between England and Ireland:
“But the severity with which the rebellion was crushed was, many of us believe, a far worse blow. England had her opportunity, an opportunity of treating the Irish rising as De Wet’s rising was treated in South Africa. The rising was crushed, her enemies were at her feet. What a glorious opportunity for killing with clemency the old tradition of hatred and the memory pf the atrocities of ’98 that have festered so long in the imaginations of the Irish people. By some malign fate, as ever England showed her hardest side in her dealings with Ireland. Those irresponsible and extraneous shootings and horrors which seem to be inseparable from the advance of a conquering army were not enough. Fourteen deliberate executions of men widely known and admired were carried out under heart-rending circumstances. And thus Ireland’s old tradition of defiance and hatred gets a new lease of life….”
Constance was moved without warning to England but Esther, usually the more down-to-earth one, had a premonition one late afternoon and they set off to meet the Irish Mail, where Eva found Constance being escorted under armed guard to Aylesbury Gaol. They wrote to each other daily and the letters that survived were eventually published. Constance was let out of prison under an amnesty declared by the British government in June 1917 and returned to Ireland where she became even more involved what was now an Irish revolution. She was the first woman elected to British parliament in December 1918, but along with the rest of Sinn Fein did not go to London to take her seat, sitting in the Dail in Dublin instead. Constance was made Minister for Labour in the revolutionary government.
Eva also gave support to Roger Casement who was tried for treason for his part in the Rising, attending court every day and trying in vain, along with others, to prevent his execution which took place on 3rd August 1916. Many of her poems written at this time reflected the sorrow she and others were suffering in the wake of the Rising and the executions and repression that followed and were published in 1918 under the title Broken Glory, dedicated to Roger Casemnet. In “Easter Week” she wrote thus:
Grief for the noble dead
Of one who did not share their strife
And mourned that any blood was shed
Yet felt the broken glory of their state
Their strange heroic questioning of Fate
Ribbon with gold the rags of this our life.
Last Years
By 1920 Eva and Esther’s work during the war and the trauma of the Rising and War of independence had greatly affected their health, with Eva remaining a semi-invalid for the last years of her life. The two women spent much time travelling in Italy. Always inclined to mysticism Eva became very interested in theosophy, though she still followed affairs in Ireland closely. On 1st July 1921 a letter written jointly by Eva and Clare Annesley appeared in the Manchester Guardian, drawing attention to the fact that a man called Patrick Casey had been condemned to death by a military court for possessing arms and 13 rounds of ammunition. They called on the government to intervene. “If there is to be any chance of peace with Ireland all executions must stop”.
On 10th January 1923 the Manchester Evening Chronicle reported that Eva had refused to do jury service, stating that religion meant to her the determination to avoid punishing or hurting anybody, what ever they might have done. Her pacifist views remained undiminished. “It is absolutely impossible for me to take part in any proceedings which would, under any circumstances, involve me in any share, however small, in inflicting punishment on any human being. For many years I myself have held the opinion that it would be wrong for me to appeal to law for any problem to myself or to take part in passing judgement on anybody else. I, therefore, could not conscientiously sit on a jury.”
Eva continued to write and publish poetry and took up the study of Greek in the last year of her life. She died at home on 30 June 1926 at her home in Hampstead. Her sister Constance followed her the following year. A complete collection of Eva’s poems, together with a biographical introduction by Esther, was published in 1929 and that same year in June Esther unveiled a beautiful memorial window to Eva in the Round House, Ancoats, sadly long since demolished and the window lost. Esther herself died in April 1938 and was buried in the same grave as Eva in the nearby St John’s churchyard.
Sources
‘Women and The Suffrage A Reply To Lady Lovat and Mrs. Humphry Ward’, by Eva Gore-Booth, The Nineteenth Century and After, September 1908
‘The Sinn Fein Rebellion’ by Eva Gore-Booth, Socialist Review, August-September 1916
‘Eva Gore-Booth, Poet, Pacifist and Lover of Humanity’ by R M Fox, Millgate Monthly, September 1926
Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper by Gifford Lewis (1988)
One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement by Jill Liddington and Jill Norris (1978)
‘Miss Eva Gore-Booth’ by J J Mallon, The Woman Worker, 4th September 1908
Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Council, annual reports
Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades and Labour Council, annual reports
‘“If I Could Lose Myself’; Poetic Displacement and Irish-English Literary Politics’, paper on Eva Gore-Booth given by Alyssa J O’Brien at New Modernisms conference, Philadelphia, October 2000.
The Suffragette Movement, An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals by E Sylvia Pankhurst, preface by Dr Richard Pankhhurst (1977 edition)
The Case for Women’s Suffrage edited by Brougham Villiers (1907)
Collected Poems of Eva Gore-Booth, Complete edition and a biographical introduction by Esther Roper (1929)
Article by Michael Herbert
Manchester's Radical History 