Hazel Hunkins Hallinan


Hazel Hunkins Hallinan was an American women's rights activist, journalist, and suffragist.

Early life

Hunkins Hallinan was born on June 6, 1890 in Aspen, Colorado, and grew up in Billings, Montana. She was the only daughter of Lewis Hunkins, a jeweller, watchmaker, and civil war veteran, and an Englishwoman, Ann Whittingham.
Hunkins earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Vassar College.

Career

Demonstrating with the Silent Sentinels she chained herself to the White House gates in 1917, for which she was jailed, along with other suffragists.
Hunkins moved to England in July 1920 to conduct research for the American Railway Brotherhood on the British co-operative movement. Her future husband Charles Hallinan crossed the Atlantic to follow her in November as the financial editor of United Press International. Hunkins and Hallinan lived together in London, but did not formally marry until the end of the decade.
Hunkins Hallinan published a collection of essays, In Her Own Right. She also contributed to Speaker for Suffrage and Petitioner for Peace, a memoir by Mabel Vernon. Other contributors were Consuelo Reyes-Calderon, Fern S. Ingersoll, and Rebecca Hourwich Reyher.
In 1977, she returned to the US to join a commemoration of the 1917 march of 5,000 women along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, that led to her imprisonment, along with Alice Paul. Hunkins Hallinan joined the March for Equal Rights parade along Pennsylvania Avenue from the National Archives to the White House, which also commemorated the August 26, 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which granted the right to vote to women.
In 1977, she stated, "Equal rights is so clear-cut; it's fundamental - a basic change. It really shouldn't be muddled up with anything else - no side issues. All the other little injustices can be taken on later. For half a cent I would stay here and campaign."

Personal life

Soon after her last release from prison, Hunkins met her future husband, Charles Thomas Hallinan, at a pacifist meeting where he was a speaker. They married in the late 1920s and had four children.

Later life

Hunkins Hallinan died from respiratory failure at her home, 15B Belsize Park Gardens, Belsize Park, in north London on May 17, 1982, aged 91. She was buried at Mountainview Cemetery in her hometown of Billings, Montana, next to her husband and parents.

Publications