In June 1933, 95-year-old Charlotte Despard (1844-1939), a renowned suffragist, socialist, and anti-fascist, delivered a powerful speech at an anti-fascist rally in Trafalgar Square, London.
Despard, suffragette and social worker, was a tireless campaigner. She became a leader of the Militant Suffragette movement with the Pankhursts, and in 1907 she was arrested during the ‘Women’s Parliament’, demonstration and sentenced to three weeks in prison.
In 1908 Despard joined Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Margaret Cousins and other feminists to form the Irish Women’s Franchise League. She urged members to boycott the 1911 Census and withhold taxes and provided financial support to workers during the 1913 Dublin lock-out.
She settled in Dublin after World War I and was a supporter of Éamon de Valera, remaining bitterly critical of her brother, now Field Marshal the Earl of Ypres, but they were later reconciled.
During the Irish War of Independence, together with Maud Gonne and others, she formed the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League to support republican prisoners. She was classed as a dangerous subversive under the 1927 Public Safety Act by the Irish Free State government for her opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and her house was occasionally raided by the authorities.
In 1930, Despard toured the Soviet Union to look at workers’ conditions there. Impressed with what she saw, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, and became secretary of the Friends of Soviet Russia organization. In 1933 her house in Dublin was burned down by an anti-communist mob. She met and was photographed with the Indian independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose when he visited Ireland in 1936.
She remained actively political well into her 80s and 90s, giving anti-fascist speeches in the likes of Trafalgar Square in the 1930s. She was also guest of honor at the Reading branch of the Women’s Freedom League, of which she had been the first president, celebrating her 89th birthday, held in Anna Munro’s garden at Venturefair, Aldermaston It was reported that “Mrs. Despard had lost but little of her youthful vigor, clarity of speech and clearness of vision.” In her speech, she said that much had been achieved and quoted a Catholic priest who called women ‘the basic force of the world’ but noted that women “still did not have the equality with men that there should be as regards the right to work,” and went on to condemn slums and poverty (quoting Lenin) and condemned fascism and hatred. She urged women to act to help “realize the worth of the human being, take life out of bondage all over the world.”
She died, aged 95, after a fall at her new house, Nead-na-Gaoithe, Whitehead, County Antrim, near Belfast in November 1939. She was buried in the Republican Plot at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
