Notes by Rosamond Jacob for Reconstruction Talk at a meeting hosted by the Irish Women Citizens' Association

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6 Oct 1945

Biography

Rosamond Jacob (1888-1960) was a novelist and political activist, and a key contributor to the early twentieth-century Irish suffrage and nationalist movements. She was born in 1888 in Waterford to lapsed Quaker parents that were engaged in the political and humanitarian campaigns of late nineteenth-century Ireland. Though her childhood was relatively solitary it was one immersed in discussion of Irish nationalism, female suffrage, and human and animal rights. She became involved in organisations such as the Gaelic League, the Irish National League and, along with her brother, was a member of Sinn Fein from 1905. In 1908 she joined the Irish Women’s Franchise League, founded by her friend and suffragette Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. She moved to Dublin in 1920 and became active in national politics. She opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and in 1922 was a member, alongside Maud Gonne MacBride, of the group of women who attempted to broker peace between republican and Irish Free State Factions. In 1923, she was arrested and imprisoned when the British army raided Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’s house after discovering Sinn Fein’s publicity department was based there. In 1931, she travelled to Russia as a delegate of the Irish Friends of Soviet Russia. She became involved in the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, and later the Irish Housewives Association, which was established in 1942. Rosamond published 5 books in her lifetime, despite initially taking five years to find a publisher willing to publish her first novel, Callaghan. In her later years, Rosamond lived with her friend Lucy Kingston in Dublin. She died in a road traffic accident in 1960.

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Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland