Land and feminism: Marguerite Moore and the Ladies' Land League

In 1888 the International Council of Women was founded at a conference in Washington DC that brought together over fifty organisations from nine countries. Present were the acclaimed feminists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as Marguerite Moore, the only Irish delegate there. Addressing the convention, Moore described how, through the Ladies' Land League, "we Irish women have already taken our place in the political van. When our brothers were imprisoned we stepped forward and carried on the work." Four years earlier, Moore had emigrated to New York where she became known as a leading feminist, labour reformer and Irish nationalist. She linked her campaigning for women's rights at turn of the twentieth century to her activities in the Ladies' Land League, which had led to her imprisonment for three months in Tullamore in 1882. Later, during the revolutionary era, she provided a direct link between the Ladies' Land League and the new Cumann na mBan generation in the United States.