JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

LOUIE BENNEIT 41Bennett's own relationship with the IWWU and the trade union movement as a whole was alwaysslightly contradictory. Her interests in trade unionism had evolved from her concern with suffrage andthen with the conditions of women workers, which had fIrst come to her attention during the 1913 Lockout,when she was already 43 years old. When theIWWU was formed, she acquired their frrst premiseson Eden Quay, paying the rent herself. Over the next 38 years as General Secretary, she never drewa salary; family money enabled her to work 'voluntarily' for the union. In later years, when she movedpermanently to Killiney, she built a second bungalow and tennis courts on her property, which she gaveto a maximum of ten union members for weekend 'holidays' .83 Admirable as these gestures were, theydemonstate her social distance from the majority of women she represented. Her behaviour and attitudeto her members and to the working class were always guided by her strong moral values; through thetrade union movement she endeavoured to bring society into line with these aspirations. These werethe attributes of altruism and paternalism, not socialism or labourism.Ind~d, she never adopted a working class perspective, always retaining a conciliatory attitudetowardS'employers and social reform. Her elegant clothes highlighted the class divide. Herpersonalitywas sharp and austere. She operated a strict and orderly union organisation; one member of the IWWUexecutive recalled literally shivering when 'summoned' to her office. In other ways, too, she wasextremely old-fashioned, conventional in social and sexual matters, even for the time. She never soughtto disturb existing social relations or to alter the fundamental position of women in society. As GeneralSecretary of a union representing 5-6,000 women, the major women's organisation in the state, onlyon the introduction of the 1937 constitution did she strike a more questioning posture. But even then,her attack on the dual role of women, as represented in Article 41, was limited to the amount of stateaid available to women to enable them not to work. Once the more contentious sections were removed,IWWU protest stopped. 84 In the evolution of Irish feminism, Bennett's theoretical pedigree belongssquarely within the liberal tradition which sought to remove all 'restrictions on individual developmentand achievement' .85 Her views on the economic, educational, and legal rights of women echoed theconcerns of independently-minded, bourgeoi~ women such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet TaylorMill; the latter also sought to reassure men that women did not desire to 'take out of the hands of menany occupation which men perform better than they' .86 It was an apologetic form of feminism.The women workers, in turn, saw Bennett as a person who, because she was better educated and ofthe bourgeoisie, was more capable of leading them than themselves. Their lack of class and personalconfIdence meant that they lacked the ability to produce leaders from amongst their own ranks. Thisclass insecurity was reinforced, in part, by an IWWU rule disallowing offlcership to anyone withouta suitable educational background. The effect was to dampen down class consciousness among womenworkers, to channel protest into specified areas, and always to see advancement in terms of acommunality between workers and employers. That the IWWU has been one of the least mili~t ofIrish unions is not surprising; Bennett's influence in this regard is hardly insignifIcant.Yet, Louie Bennett was an extraordinary woman. There were few opportunities for any woman inIrish society at the time. Certainly her bourgeois upbringing gave her the self-assurance necessary toenter not only into public life but also to take on a leadership role in the labour movement; moreover,it enabled her to be accepted, albeit as an 'oddity'. Conservative in many ways, she was capable ofadopting progressive positions, often putting herself outside mainstream labour opinion: she arguedvociferously against protectionism in 1924, fl7 and was the sole dissenter on the Labour Party executiveagainst co-operation with Fianna Fail in 1927 on the grounds that 'it was never right or wise t6 cooperatewith another party with fundamentally different principles' .88 Throughout the 1920s, sheremained a consistent opponent of a formal split between the industrial and political sections of the!LP& TUC, fearing undue influence being exerted by electoral acti vity - though no doubt her views werebased upon.an underlying support for the moderation of trade unionism versus the potential militancyofpoliticallabour. 89 Her criticism ofConnolly and the narrow parameters of nationalism could not havebeen taken easily. Likewise her consistent pacifism was a singular stance. Her campaign for improvedworking conditions deserves to be recorded for no lesser reason than that it heralded a 'victory' over