This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1887 (circa), Ireland
Died: 31 March 1913
Country most active: Ireland, United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
Hasler, Marjorie (c.1887–1913), suffragist, was born in Ireland; nothing else is known of her early life or origins. In July 1910 she joined the Irish Women’s Franchise League (IWFL), which had been founded two years earlier by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and others as a militant suffrage group. Four months later she was among the Irish deputies who went to London to give support to Emmeline Pankhurst in her petition to the prime minister, H. H. Asquith (18 November 1910). This occasion saw police violence against the crowd and became known in suffrage circles as ‘Black Friday’. Hasler suffered injuries; her head was apparently knocked against a stone wall, causing her intermittent headaches thereafter, and her spine was allegedly weakened. This did not dampen her militancy: the following November she was back in London, breaking government windows, for which she spent fourteen days in Holloway prison. Her commitment to female suffrage was part of her larger social conscience; she felt that if women had the vote, they would be free to fight the evils of society.
For her part in the protest in Dublin in June 1912, which involved smashing the windows of the General Post Office, she was one of eight suffragists, including Sheehy Skeffington, condemned to Mountjoy prison after a sensational trial. In an article for the Irish Citizen (22 June 1912) she compared suffragists to Land Leaguers and wrote: ‘We don’t like smashing windows any more than men like smashing skulls, but in both cases there is, I believe, a strong feeling that something must be broken before a wrong can be righted.’ Fined £10 and sentenced to six months, she served four months – the longest single sentence served by any of the eight suffragists – and was released 10 November 1912 in response to a petition signed by ten of the jurymen who had convicted her. According to Sheehy Skeffington, she could have been out earlier but refused to allow the IWFL to petition on her behalf. She apparently emerged in a weakened state of health – though this hardly accords with Sheehy Skeffington’s memory of her doing athletic stunts in prison – and died suddenly in London on 31 March 1913, after contracting measles. The Irish Citizen, holding it indisputable that police brutality and imprisonment had ruined her health, claimed her as ‘the first Irish martyr for the cause’. In an appreciation, Sheehy Skeffington described her as ‘singularly beautiful, her face clear-cut as a cameo, with flashing brown eyes, framed in short brown curls’ (Irish Citizen, 12 Apr. 1913).