When a delegation of suffragists met the Irish Chief Secretary in February 1912, to discuss having women’s voting rights included in the imminent Home Rule Bill, they were left with mixed feelings as to how helpful Augustine Birrell had been.
One found him “extremely pleasant”. Another, described by The Irish Times only as “a young lady”, was less impressed. “There was nothing in what he said,” she declared. “I would like to punch him in the eye.”
The five-strong delegation included Mary Strangman, a medical doctor who had just been elected the first woman member of Waterford Corporation.
But she was almost 40 at the time. And even if that were still considered young by the newspaper correspondent, it seems unlikely she was the one who wanted to punch Birrell.
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Biographies of Strangman suggest a quietly determined achiever, not given to acts of extremism, who saved a lot of lives and didn’t take any (that we know of). This may be why she is largely forgotten today.
Even so, she has been belatedly commemorated by having a room in Waterford City Hall named after her. And her life contained enough drama to inspire a new play, of which more shortly.
Strangman was born in 1872 at Carriganore, just west of Waterford, to a local “gentleman” (his description in the Dictionary of Irish Biography) and a mother from Cork.
All six children were home-schooled, the DIB adds. But in 1891 Mary and her sister Lucia enrolled with the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, the first medical school in the UK to admit women on equal terms with men.
After graduating, she spent years in England, first working in an asylum, later in a private hospital where she also lectured on midwifery. Then in 1902, she became only the second woman (after Emily Dickson) to win fellowship of the RCSI, and a year later set up practice back in her native city.
Strangman became known for, among other things, her pioneering treatment of alcoholism and “morphinomania”, as opium addiction was then called.
In a 1907 paper for the British Medical Journal, she described the case of a man she had “completely cured” after a 30-year-long habit:
“He made his first acquaintance with the drug through joining an opium-smoking club in London,” she wrote, “and soon began to appreciate the brilliancy and activity of thought that it caused, then to use it systematically to further him in business. In about four years the craving had become established.”
Much depression and many failed attempts to kick the habit later, he came to her and was treated with strychnine and other medications.
Immediate improvements in his condition included the fading of a delusion in which is sleep was disturbed by the sound of bells and of people coming into his room: “After the first day the bells sounded fainter and the people only came to his door; the next night he hardly noticed the bells and the people seemed to be on the stairs; the next night in the hall, and then they ceased to trouble him.”
In 1908, Strangman was co-founder of the Women’s National Health Association of Ireland, a government-supported body aiming to mobilise women for health promotion, especially in the fight against TB.
But among the challenges she was up against was the negligence of Waterford Corporation. So when women became eligible for election to county boroughs, she ran at the first opportunity and won a seat.
It was soon apparent that, in their greater cause, Strangman and other members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League would not have allies in the MP for Waterford, John Redmond, or his Irish Party in Westminster.
Redmond’s opposition to suffragism earned her scorn. And yet she remained a political moderate, being for example a member of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, set up in Cork in by writers Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (aka Somerville and Ross) to sidestep the militancy elsewhere in the movement.
In the meantime, Strangman’s demonstrations had included boycotting the 1911 census. A note from the enumerator explained: “Head of household absent as protest against unenfranchisement.”
The upheavals of the decade that followed wiped away the old Irish party and brought women the vote. But by 1920, although still only 48, Strangman had already had enough of public representation. She thereafter concentrated on medicine, practising almost up to her death in January 1943.
Somehow, from this understated if high-achieving life, Waterford’s Minaun Community Theatre Group have recently concocted a full-length play.
Modestly titled, A Medical Woman – The Life and Times of Dr Mary Strangman, it had a short, sold-out run in Waterford earlier this year. Now, it’s edging nearer Broadway, or at least across the county border into Cork.
Just in time for harvest, it is headed for one of Ireland’s more season-appropriate venues, the converted grainstore of Ballymaloe House, early next month. The performance is for one night only, on September 7th. Tickets (at €20) are available from ballymaloegrainstore.com.