Tweedy, Hilda (1911—)

Irish feminist and consumer affairs campaigner. Born Hilda Anderson in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, on August 26, 1911; daughter of James Ferguson Anderson and Muriel Frances Victoria (Swayne) Anderson; educated at Alexandra School and College, Dublin, and at the University of London; married Robert Massy Tweedy, on July 18, 1936; children: one son, two daughters.

Awards:

honorary doctorate, Trinity College, Dublin (1990).

Hilda Tweedy was born Hilda Anderson in 1911 in Clones, County Monaghan, but spent her childhood in Athlone, in the Irish midlands, where her father was a Church of Ireland cleric. After an education at Alexandra College in Dublin, in 1929 she joined her parents in Egypt where her father had become rector of St. Mark's Church at Alexandria. While there, she studied for an external degree in mathematics from the University of London, and she and her sister also started a small school for English-speaking pupils based on the PNEU system. (The Parents National Educational Union had been set up in England to devise courses for British children living abroad.) In 1936, following her marriage in Alexandria to Robert Tweedy, she came back to live in Ireland. She had applied for a teaching job but was turned down because she was married and "it would not be nice for the girls if you became pregnant." She did not complete her maths degree.

Although Ireland was neutral when war broke out in 1939, there were severe shortages of imported food items and fuel. These bore particularly heavily on the poor, and by 1941 malnutrition and poverty had increased. In that year, the situation was highlighted by Dublin pediatrician Robert Collis who began the Marrowbone Lane Fund with the aim of providing better food and housing for poor Dublin families. Tweedy made a list of friends who could help Collis and his Fund, but she was clear that she "did not want just another organization to alleviate conditions on the surface, but rather to get to the root of the matter, to attack the causes of such hardship." She and four friends—Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington, Marguerite Skelton, Nancye Simmons and Sheila Mallagh —decided to draw up a "housewives' petition" for presentation to the Irish government before Budget Day in May 1941. The petition urged government action on the production and distribution of food and fuel; fair prices; immediate and effective rationing; communal feeding schemes; and free milk for expectant mothers and children of the unemployed. The petition, which was signed by 640 women, had some success and rationing was introduced shortly afterwards.

Tweedy and the other women decided not to lose the momentum they had gained, and in May 1942 the Irish Housewives' Committee (IHC) was founded. Their immediate aims were price control, transport, school meals, and waste salvage. Each of these areas was investigated, and the reports were then sent to the relevant government departments. The IHC encountered some opposition; on school meals, for example, one cleric claimed that they would break up the sanctity of family life. After the war, in 1946, the IHC was reorganized as the Irish Housewives' Association (IHA) and drew up its first constitution. Its principal aims were (1) to unite housewives in order to ensure their right to play an active part in community planning; (2) to establish real equality of liberties, status and opportunity for everyone; and (3) to defend consumers' rights in the supply, distribution and price of essential commodities. In its early days the organization was largely dominated by Protestant women, although this soon changed. However, in her history of the IHA Tweedy acknowledged that the organization never managed to overcome its middle-class image, and this remained a weakness.

The membership of the IHA gradually built up by word of mouth, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, two controversies emerged which created conflict in the organization. In 1949, the IHA was accused of Communist sympathies, when it sent a message of support for world peace to the Paris Peace Conference. This led to the resignation of two branches. In 1952, the IHA was again accused of Communist sympathies by a leading provincial newspaper. This time the IHA decided to institute proceedings for libel, a move which Tweedy opposed. She resigned from the IHA committee and from her position as secretary and concentrated instead on her work for the Lower Prices Council and for the producer-consumer market. She resumed her work for the IHA in 1961.

After its reorganization in 1946, the IHC forged links with other women's organizations both in Ireland and abroad. It became a member of the Joint Committee of Women's Societies and Social Workers in Ireland. The Irish Women Citizens' Association, a direct descendant of the Irish Women's Suffrage Association founded in 1874, amalgamated with the IHA in 1947, bringing into IHA ranks a group of new and able members. The following year, the IHA affiliated to the International Alliance of Women (IAW). Tweedy represented Ireland at IAW congresses between 1949 and 1986. At the first congress she attended in Amsterdam, she and the other Irish delegates were horrified by the extent of wartime destruction still visible in Holland. The 1961 Congress was held in Dublin and received the patronage of the Irish president, Eamon de Valera. The notoriously conservative Catholic archbishop of Dublin, J.C. McQuaid, lent them premises for Congress events.

In the 1960s, the IHA, along with other women's organizations, began to agitate for an end to the marriage bar and for women police and jurors. On the latter two aims they had some success. In 1967, the UN Commission on the Status of Women issued a directive to women's non-governmental organizations to examine the status of women in their respective countries. The IHA and other organizations decided to press the Irish government to set up a commission on the status of women to examine such issues as equal pay, employment discrimination, income tax, pensions, education and non-traditional jobs. After a long delay the government finally agreed to set up a commission at the end of 1969, but attempts to have the new commission chaired by a party political appointee were rejected by the women's organizations. The distinguished civil servant Thekla Beere was appointed chair, and Tweedy represented the IHA on the commission. When the commission's report was published at the end of 1972, it was a major landmark in the advance of women's rights in Ireland. Tweedy became a founder member and the first chair of the Council for the Status of Women which was set up as a result of the commission's report. In 1990, Trinity College, Dublin, awarded her an honorary doctorate of laws.

sources:

Tweedy, Hilda. A Link in the Chain: The Irish Housewives' Association 1942–1992. Dublin: Attic Press, 1992.

Deirdre McMahon , lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland