Hilda Tweedy: Hilda Tweedy, who has died aged 93, was in 1942 a founding member of the Irish Housewives' Association, an influential pressure group that was to speak out about injustices and the needs of Irish women, inside and outside the home, for the next 50 years.
Historian Margaret MacCurtain this week paid tribute to "one of the transforming energies that brought Irish society to new ways of understanding equality, civil, human and gender rights, and the dignity of women and children".
A former colleague on the Council for the Status of Women Nuala Ryan said: "Hilda had an acute perception of the stark reality of women's lives. Each of her initiatives and involvements, at the different times of her life, reflects this perception and her unwavering commitment to radically improving the status of Irish women."
Born in Clones, Co Monaghan, in 1911, she was the eldest of the three children of the Rev James Anderson and his wife, Muriel (née Swaine). She spent her early childhood in Athlone, Co Westmeath, where her father was Church of Ireland rector of St Peter's Church, and was educated at Alexandra College, Dublin.
From 1929 to 1936 she lived in Alexandra, Egypt, while her father was rector of St Mark's Church. There she studied for a degree in mathematics as an external student with the University of London and ran a small school for English-speaking children.
In 1936 she married Robert Tweedy and returned to Ireland without finishing her degree.
In 1941 Hilda Tweedy was one of a group of women who drew up a petition to the Irish government for measures to be taken to alleviate the effects of the Emergency period during the second World War. Later she, along with Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington, Susan Manning and Louie Bennett, founded the Irish Housewife's Association.
The association campaigned for school meals, free travel for pensioners and consumer protection, and in 1945 supported the women laundry workers' strike; later it voiced support for Dr Noël Browne's Mother and Child scheme. In 1947 the IHA affiliated to the International Alliance of Women.
The association subsequently extended its brief and became fully involved in a range of contemporary women's issues. In the 1950s it fell foul of the Catholic weekly Standard, and a section of the provincial press, for its alleged communist tendencies.
It survived the smear and in 1968 played a leading role in the setting up of the Council for the Status of Women. For the first time in the history of the State the demands of women on a range of issues, particularly in the areas of discrimination, equal pay and women in employment, were on the public agenda.
The implementation of equal pay and the removal of the marriage bar, the recommendations in the areas of equal pay, equal opportunities and the promotion of women became the basis of demands from women and their organisations.
Hilda Tweedy taught mathematics in the secretarial department of Alexandra College from 1952 to 1966. She also was a partner with her husband in the Nimble Fingers toyshop, Stillorgan, that they started and ran from 1962 to 1982.
The shop initially sold knitting wools and craft materials, and later stocked educational toys. Hilda and her husband sold a range of wooden, basic educational toys and travelled the country visiting teacher conferences and playgroups to promote their wares.
She held high office in the IHA and the CSW (now the Women's National Council of Ireland). In 1975, International Women's Year, she led the Irish delegation to the UN meeting in Mexico and was a board member of the International Alliance of Women. In 1990 she received an honorary doctorate in laws from Trinity College, Dublin. In 2003 she presented her papers, including records of the IHA, to the National Archive.
In 1992 the IHA dissolved itself. Looking back, Hilda Tweedy asked: "Who would have thought in 1942 that women could move from the kitchen to Áras an Uachtaráin?"
Her husband, Robert, predeceased her in February; her son, Robert, and daughters, Elizabeth and Jean, survive her.
Muriel Hilda Mary Tweedy: born August 26th, 1911; died July 4th, 2005.