Margaret (Gretta) Cousins, a women rights activist and educationist, was born in a Irish family in Boyle, County Roscommon on November 7, 1878. She possessed unusual talent in music and studied at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, before earning a university degree in music. In 1903, she married James Cousins, a poet, artist and author and started her career as a music teacher. Her life abruptly changed when she attended a women’ssuffrage meeting in Manchester, England. She decided to devote the rest of her life to the cause of women rights in Ireland and elsewhere. After returning to Ireland, Mrs Cousins joined the women’smovement there. Ireland long had a suffragist organisation: the Irish Women’sSuffrage and Local Government Association. Mrs Cousins joined Hannah Sheehy Skeffington and founded the Irish Women’sFranchise League (IWFL) in 1908. In 1910, she returned to England as one of the Irish delegates to that year’sParliament of Women held in London. Mrs Cousins supported Irish independence but distrusted John Redmond’sIrish Party, which had failed to support women’ssuffrage in the British Parliament. In January 1913, she was imprisoned for suffragette activities in Mountjoy and Tullamore gaols where she went on a hunger strike to secure her release. Apart from being a leading suffragist, Mrs Cousins was also, along with her husband, a committed member of the Theosophy movement, founded by Madame Blavatsky back in the 1870s. They visited India in 1915 at the call of Mrs Annie Besant. For Mrs Cousins this by no means meant an abandonment of her feminist activism: she simply continued her work in her new home in India. In the words of Mrs Cousins, ?With my first year of landing on Indian soil, I was dedicated to the service of India, i.e. service to that half of India?its womanhood.? With her vibrant, loving personality, she inspired all the people around here. Mrs Cousins became the first non-Indian member of the Indian Women’sUniversity at Poona in 1916. In 1917, she was one of the 70 founder-members of the Women’sIndian Association and began pressing to put women’ssuffrage on the agenda of the Indian independence movement. She was the founder-headmistress of National Girls? School in Mangalore, in 1919-20. While preoccupied with philanthropic and social work, in 1922 she was appointed the first woman magistrate in Chennai. In 1928, she was awarded the Founder’sSilver Medal of the Theosophical Society for her services to the movement. In December 1932, Mrs Cousins, while still a magistrate, was sentenced to one year in prison for launching Satyagraha against the inclusion of emergency ordinances under the Indian Penal Code, which curtailed free speech in India. While in Vellore Women’sJail, she went on hunger strike in support of Mahatma Gandhi who was also imprisoned. After her release in October 1933, she continued to campaign for women’srights and in 1938, was elected president of the All-India Women’sConference. In 1941, Cousins published The Music of Orient and Occident. She constantly travelled and lectured all over the country to rouse the women from their age-old lethargy. Mrs Cousins organised many institutions like the Madras Seva Sadan and Children’sAid Society. She organised a women’sdeputation to Mr. E.S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, at Madras, which made the first demand for franchise for women in India. In 1949, the Madras government presented her Rs 5,000 in recognition of her services as a political sufferer for Indian freedom, and in 1953, Prime Minister Pandit Nehru sent her a cheque of Rs 3,000. We Two Together, a joint autobiography with her husband, was published in Madras in 1950. Mrs Cousins continued to work for women’srights in India, but she suffered a paralytic stroke in 1943. She died at the age of 78 at the Theosophical Society, Adyar, Madras, on March 11, 1954. ?Preeti Sharma
Leave a Comment