Women in the 1916 Rising

Published 3 November 2026

For decades the Easter Rising was remembered largely as the work of the men who signed the Proclamation and the men who fought. Women were there in every phase of it: as fighters, medics, couriers, cooks and organisers. Since the opening of pension and witness records, their stories have become much better known.

Two organisations

Most of the women who took part belonged to one of two bodies. Cumann na mBan, founded in 1914, worked alongside the Irish Volunteers. The Irish Citizen Army, the workers' militia associated with James Connolly and the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, admitted women as members on the same footing as men, and several of its women held rank. A number of women belonged to both.

The Proclamation of the Irish Republic itself was addressed to "Irishmen and Irishwomen", promised equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens, and envisaged a national government elected by the suffrages of all men and women, at a time when women could not vote in parliamentary elections.

Where women served

• The GPO: Winifred Carney, Connolly's secretary, arrived with a typewriter and a revolver and stayed until the evacuation. Cumann na mBan members ran the kitchen and first-aid post, carried dispatches and nursed the wounded, including Connolly himself.
• St Stephen's Green and the Royal College of Surgeons: Constance Markievicz was second in command to Michael Mallin. Madeleine ffrench-Mullen ran the first-aid station, and Rosie Hackett and other Citizen Army women served there.
• City Hall: Dr Kathleen Lynn, the Citizen Army's chief medical officer, and Helena Molony were among the garrison; after the death of Seán Connolly, Lynn was the senior officer present at the surrender.
• The Four Courts and Marrowbone Lane: large groups of Cumann na mBan women provided food, first aid and dispatches.

At Boland's Mill, Éamon de Valera refused to admit women, and some other commandants were reluctant to use them.

Margaret Skinnider

Margaret Skinnider, a Glasgow-born mathematics teacher of Irish parentage, had smuggled detonators from Scotland before the Rising. During Easter Week she acted as a scout and sniper with the Citizen Army at the College of Surgeons and was seriously wounded while taking part in an attempt to burn buildings on Harcourt Street. She later wrote an account of her experiences, Doing My Bit for Ireland (1917). When she applied for a military pension in the 1920s she was at first refused on the grounds that the legislation applied to soldiers "as generally understood in the masculine sense"; she was eventually awarded one in 1938. She later served as president of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation.

Rosie Hackett

Rosie Hackett was a Dublin trade unionist who helped organise women workers at Jacob's biscuit factory and was a founding member of the Irish Women Workers' Union in 1911. She was in Liberty Hall when the Proclamation was printed, and served with the Citizen Army at St Stephen's Green and the College of Surgeons during the Rising. She remained active in the trade union movement for the rest of her life. In 2014 a new bridge over the Liffey in Dublin was named the Rosie Hackett Bridge.

Dr Kathleen Lynn

Kathleen Lynn, a Mayo-born doctor and the daughter of a Church of Ireland rector, was a suffragist and a member of the Citizen Army, in which she was chief medical officer. Imprisoned after the Rising, she was later elected to the Dáil (1923) and, with Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, founded St Ultan's Hospital for Infants in Dublin in 1919, which pioneered work against infant mortality and tuberculosis.

Surrender and arrests

The surrender itself depended on a woman. Elizabeth O'Farrell, a nurse with Cumann na mBan, carried Patrick Pearse's request for terms to the British military on 29 April and then delivered the surrender order to other garrisons (see Elizabeth O'Farrell).

Around 77 women were arrested and held at Richmond Barracks and Kilmainham Gaol. Most were released within a fortnight. Constance Markievicz was court-martialled and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life on account of her sex (see Constance Markievicz). A small number of other women, including Winifred Carney and Helena Molony, were held in prisons in England into the winter.

After the Rising

With most male leaders executed or interned, women did much of the work of rebuilding the movement in 1916–17: organising aid for prisoners' dependants, keeping the story of the Rising before the public and campaigning in the by-elections of 1917. Kathleen Clarke, widow of the executed Tom Clarke, ran the Irish Volunteers' Dependants' Fund, which became a centre of reorganisation.

Women's later recognition was uneven. Pension claims could be harder for women to prove, and popular histories long left them out. Work by historians associated with the women's history movement in Ireland, including members of the Women's History Association of Ireland, has done much to change that (see the WHAI website archive).

Sources and further reading

• Military Service Pensions Collection (Military Archives): pension files for Margaret Skinnider, Rosie Hackett, Elizabeth O'Farrell and others.
• Bureau of Military History witness statements (Military Archives).
• Dictionary of Irish Biography (Royal Irish Academy): entries on Kathleen Lynn, Winifred Carney, Helena Molony and Margaret Skinnider.
• Sinéad McCoole, No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the Revolutionary Years, 1900–1923 (O'Brien Press, 2003).
• Margaret Skinnider, Doing My Bit for Ireland (New York, 1917).

More on Irish women's history

• Cumann na mBan: the Irish women's council, 1914–1923
• Constance Markievicz (1868–1927)
• The Irish suffrage movement: how Irish women won the vote
• Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington (1877–1946)
• The marriage bar in Ireland
• Elizabeth O'Farrell and the surrender of 1916