ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the anti-colonial dimensions of the geographies of Western feminism through the experience of an Irish suffragette – Margaret Elizabeth Cousins (1878–1954). Margaret or Gretta (as mentioned in her jail records in Ireland) was born into a Church of Ireland family in County Roscommon and became familiarised with Irish folklore, literature, and Irish politics. She launched the Irish Women’s Franchise League in 1908 along with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Inspired and supported by the British suffragists – Emmeline Pankhurst and Charlotte Despard – Gretta and a group of other Irish women were imprisoned in 1913. After an intensive suffragist career in Dublin in 1915, at the invitation of Annie Besant, she moved to India with her husband, James Cousins. Within three years of her arrival in Adyar (Madras), she had entered Indian political life primarily with the aim of forming women’s associations and in 1917 she wrote the draft of Indian women’s voting rights. Cousins had an eventful public life in India: she was briefly the Magistrate of a district court in Madras in 1923. In 1931, she was imprisoned for one year for speaking against an Ordinance passed by the colonial government to suppress freedom of speech and association.
