Political Activist and Feminist
Margaret Cousins (née Gillespie) was born in Boyle, Co Roscommon, in 1878, in a household that was both Methodist and Unionist. Her interest in Nationalism was evident from an early age.
She obtained a B.Mus degree in 1902, having studied in the Royal Academy in Dublin. She married James Cousins in 1903 and, unusually, Cousins continued to work as a music teacher after her marriage.
The couple were both active members of the Irish Vegetarian Society and, with many of the leading literary figures in Dublin (among them James Joyce and George Russell) they shared an interest in theosophy. Cousins also experimented with automatic writing and astrology.
Later, she joined the Suffrage movement and, in 1908, formed the militant, non-party-affiliated Irishwomen’s Franchise League with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, regularly addressing its open-air meetings in Dublin and around the country.
She served one-month prison terms, both in London and Dublin, for breaking windows in 10, Downing Street and Dublin Castle.
In 1915, Cousins and her husband moved to India. Again, she became involved in the theosophical and the women’s rights movement. While working as a teacher in 1916, she became the first non-Indian member of the Indian Women’s University at Poona.
Cousins became the Headmistress of the National Girls’ School in Mangalore.
In 1917, Dorothy Jinarajadasa, a British theosophist, set up the Women’s India Association with the help of Cousins who became the editor of its journal, Stri Dharma, published in English, Telugu and Tamil versions. Their campaign developed into demands for women’s education and against child marriage, leading to the All-India Women’s Conference, 1926, and an All-Asia Women’s Conference in 1931. From December 1932 to October 1933 she was imprisoned in Vellore jail for her political protests.
As a prolific writer, Cousins write many pamphlets, articles and letters on her political ideals and , with her husband, wrote an autobiography We Two Together.
She suffered a stroke at the age of 65 and died in India in March 1954.
For further reading see:
http://womensmuseumofireland.ie/articles/margaret-elizabeth-cousins
And relating to the Irish Citizen:
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home/index.php?DRIS_ID=IN-20-100_269
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