Margaret McCoubrey

Margaret McCoubrey (5 January 1880 – 11 April 1956) was a Belfast-based Irish suffragist, pacifist, and an activist in the cooperative and labour movements. Standing for the Belfast Labour Party, she was elected to Belfast City Council in 1920.

Life McCoubrey nee Mearns was born on 5 January 1880 in Elderslie, near Glasgow in Scotland.

McCoubrey married an Irish trade unionist and moved to Belfast. There, in 1910 she joined the Irish Women's Suffrage Society (established in the city by Isabella Tod in 1872), and was an active militant alongside Elizabeth McCracken (the writer "L.A.M. Priestley") and Elizabeth Bell (the first woman in Ireland to qualify as a doctor and gynaecologist). When in 1913, Dorothy Evans started organizing the Women's Social and Political Union (WPSU), she followed them in joining the British organization, and travelled to London as a representative of women in the north of Ireland. The theme of self-sacrifice was paramount amongst suffragettes and Margaret McCoubrey claimed that suffragettes were continuing an Irish tradition of violent protest.

At the outbreak of the First World War, she and McCracken disagreed with the WSPU's orders to cease agitation, and instead founded a branch of the Irish Women's Franchise League in Belfast. But her efforts were bedevilled by sectarian-political differences and, with "dreams of united womanhood", were abandoned in the spring of 1915.

McCoubrey died on 11 April 1956 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.