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Role of the Sheely Skeffington Family
09/28/17 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
The role of Hanna and Francis Sheehy Skeffington, feminists, nationalists, pacifists, socialists in early 20th century Ireland
with Dr. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, National University of Ireland-Galway
4 p.m., September 28, 2017
Updated location: Shoenberg Theater, Missouri Botanical Garden |
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| This illustrated lecture will trace the lives of the speaker’s grandparents, the development of their ideas and ideals and what led them to play a prominent role as activists in early 20th century Ireland. As strong feminists, they both were very active in the Irish suffrage movement, founding the Irish Women’s Franchise League and the suffrage socialist newspaper The Irish Citizen. Hanna was jailed several times for suffrage activities, Francis for his pacifist speeches against recruitment during WWI. Despite being a ‘militant pacifist’, he as well as Hanna fully supported the aims, if not the methods of the struggle for Irish independence.
After her husband, Francis, was murdered by the British by firing-squad during Easter Week 1916, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington embarked on an epic journey round the US to tell the truth about what happened to her husband and about British militarism in Ireland. The journey, undertaken with her 7-year-old son, Owen (the speaker’s father), was to make a key contribution to the fight for Irish independence. The lecture will describe this tour and how Hanna reintegrated into Irish political life on her return to Ireland in 1918. |
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| Dr. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington |
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Dr. Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, a plant ecologist recently retired from the National University of Ireland, Galway, is Hanna and Francis Sheehy Skeffington’s granddaughter. An active feminist herself, Micheline has given countless illustrated talks on the role of her grandparents in Irish history, touring the U.S. in 2001, addressing a range of audiences including the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS). During the 2016 centenary, she gave over 30 talks throughout Ireland on her grandparents’ history. Following family tradition, she herself took a gender discrimination case against NUI Galway to the Equality Tribunal. Making headlines in a landmark decision, the Tribunal ruled in her favour in November 2014, pointing to multiple failures in the promotion procedure that echo barriers faced by female academics elsewhere. Micheline campaigns on the issue of gender inequality in academia to this day, having donated her compensation money to help five other female lecturers in challenging their promotion decisions.
This is the centenary year of her grandmother’s epic tour, so Micheline is commemorating it by embarking on one herself. She will re-visit some of the key places her grandmother spoke at and plans to film them if she can get funding. She aims to use the footage on her return to work with a production company to make a documentary about her and her grandmother’s respective tours.
As an ecologist, Micheline has over 60 publications and has also recently published three chapters on her family history and her own activism. |
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| This event is co-sponsored by the Smurfit-Stone Corporation Endowed Professorship in Irish Studies, International Studies and Programs, University of Missouri-St. Louis, and the Missouri Botanical Garden |
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