Marguerite Palmer

Marguerite or Margaret Blanche Palmer (born 18 May 1886) was an Irish suffragette and was among the first group of suffragettes imprisoned in Ireland, and later known as one of the "Tullamore Mice".

Personal life Marguerite Palmer, also known as Margaret Palmer, was born Marguerite Blanche Bannister in Newtownards, County Down On 5 September 1910 she married Richard James Weldon Palmer, a commercial traveller from Wexford, later an accountant.

Activism Palmer is listed alongside Margaret Connery in the Aberdeen Journal in November 1911 for taking part in the mass demonstration for women's suffrage which obstructed the areas around Parliament Square, Whitehall, and the Strand in London. She was imprisoned in Holloway for a week for her part in these protests. She was a close acquaintance of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and organised an IWFL meeting at the Phoenix Park with her which saw over 1000 women attend. They both addressed the crowd, outlining why they were willing to be imprisoned for the cause. Having refused to pay the fine for the damages, she was incarcerated at Mountjoy Prison, where they received a number of privileges, but they chose to hunger strike in sympathy with suffragettes in Britain. Palmer was featured on the front cover of The Irish Citizen on 22 June 1912, with Sheehy-Skeffington and the Murphy sisters, under the headline "Prisoners for Liberty". She heckled both Mr Birrell at a meeting of the Law Students Debating Society and Edward Carson at Rathmines Town Hall. She was one of the organisers of the census boycott in Ireland, and lobbied Irish MPs on the second reading of the Conciliation Bill on behalf of the IWFL.

After her imprisonment in Tullamore Jail, Marguerite and her husband had two children, Joan (b. 1914, later Mrs George Freeman) and Roger (b. 1918).

Marguerite remained a resident of Dublin for the rest of her life; she was widowed in March 1968 but her whereabouts following that remain unclear.