Alice Morrissey
British Catholic, socialist leader and suffragette
Mary Alice Connolly Morrissey (c. 1868 – 1912) was a British Roman Catholic socialist leader and suffragette activist from Liverpool, who was imprisoned in the campaign for women's right to vote.
Life
Born into a Catholic family, Mary Alice Connolly's brother became a priest. In 1891, Connolly married John Wolfe Tone Morrissey, who was elected as Liverpool's first socialist councillor. They both had a public political profile and worked together, locally and nationally until her sudden death in 1912. Morrissey was also, in her own right, a branch convenor for political organisations in Merseyside, as well as a Poor Law Guardian. She co-founded the Liverpool Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) branch and was imprisoned twice for suffragette activism.
Suffrage and socialism
Morrissey was a socialist in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a devout and active Catholic and also joined the movement for votes for women, firstly in the Liverpool Women's Suffrage Society (a branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the suffragists) in 1904. Morrissey quickly left that society, along with Dr Alice Ker, as Morrissey saw it as undemocratic and class led. Morrissey was forthright in criticising the lack of a campaign to go out and educate women across all areas of the city to be ready to use the vote.
“Alice Morrissey” enters the record as british Catholic, socialist leader and suffragette. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alice, Morrissey and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alice Morrissey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.