This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Linde Lunney. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: Unknown (1800s), Ireland (assumed)
Died: Unknown
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Catherine Maillard
Winter, Catherine (fl. 1848–70), publicist and campaigner, was apparently the only daughter among four children of James Nicholas Maillard, brigade major in the army, and Catherine Stubber, who were married in Dublin in 1801. Her father’s family was from the West Indies. Nothing is known of her early life; she married Edward Winter, who died before 1848. She seems to have been in Paris that year during the revolution against Louis Philippe, earning her living by teaching, but returned to Ireland to try to regain an estate which she believed was rightfully hers. This was in the possession of her cousin, Robert Hamilton Stubber, and Winter initiated lawsuits against him, published cautionary notices to his tenants in local newspapers, and began to amass evidence and legal documentation. It would seem that grievance led to obsession, and that eventually, to some extent, she lost contact with reality. It is impossible to make much sense of her entertaining but muddled and repetitive memoirs, the main source of information on her life, which contain extracts from contemporary newspapers, possibly somewhat edited to show herself in a better light. Almost from the beginning, she distrusted lawyers and was enraged by the etiquette and restrictive practices of the legal profession. She determined to plead her own case, in the courtroom as well as in judges’ chambers. It is possible that this had not been done before in Ireland; certainly not in the memory of observers, who were amazed by Winter’s confidence and effrontery. Her appearances caused a great stir; she would coolly march into courtrooms, carrying huge piles of papers, and install herself at the ‘table where her majesty’s counsel and learned doctors of the law usually sit’ (Dublin Daily Express, 17 Feb. 1851). She was quite prepared to talk back to judges and confidently cross-examined witnesses. Observers in the encumbered estates court were impressed by her legal knowledge, and by her ‘collected and consecutive fluency and rhetorical tact and force’ (ibid.), but at least once, in April 1850, a judge had her removed from court by the tipstaffs.
In a talk she gave for women, on her court experiences, in the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute in September 1851, she promised a course of lectures on practical jurisprudence for women who wanted to be called to the bar, but these may not have taken place. Her talk in the Institute was greeted with ‘continual roars of laughter’ (Freeman’s Journal, 8 Sept. 1851). Though like the suffragists of a later generation she came to believe that the establishment was prejudiced against her, and that her best hope of redress depended on subverting the system, Winter could never help making fun of herself as well as of her opponents, and this trait (along with her erratic behaviour in public) made it impossible for others to take her cause as seriously as she did herself.
On 19 May 1860, when she and four bailiffs attempted to drive away bullocks from the lands at Moyne, King’s Co. (Offaly), which were owned by her cousin, she was threatened at gunpoint (according to her own claim) by a respectably dressed man, but faced him down. In October 1861 she and a servant girl climbed through a window into a semi-ruined old castle in Galway, her cousin’ s property, and resisted attempts to evict them. A riot ensued, and she was tried at Galway assizes and sentenced to six weeks in jail in April 1862. Her description of how the wardress tried unsuccessfully to make her wear prison clothes is typical of her literary style and self-mockery. ‘I am five feet ten in my stocking feet, and measure I do not know how many yards round. The flannel petticoat exploded, and just came to my knees like an apron.’ Catherine Winter’s normal appearance in the showy dresses lovingly described in her memoirs must have been most impressive; a speech in court in 1862, which lasted nearly an hour, was accompanied by dramatic action and ringing enunciation and denunciation. Much to the annoyance of judges, she was inclined to lengthy, incomprehensible, genealogical digressions, and she claimed kinship with the mythical Fionn mac Cumhaill, and with the O’Malleys of Clare.
In 1861 she applied to be allowed to vote in an election in King’s Co.; the presumably somewhat flummoxed official in charge had to admit that the applicant was qualified in every way for the franchise, except that she was a woman. This legal anomaly was highlighted in a supportive letter from ‘Publicola’ in a radical newspaper, the London Dispatch (3 Nov. 1861). The letter indicates that Winter had also stated her intention to stand for parliament for King’s Co., and Publicola compared her cause to that of Daniel O’Connell, who eventually won catholic emancipation by obtaining his own return for Co. Clare. However, the letter writer stated his or her belief that Mrs Winter’s effort on behalf of female emancipation was possibly premature.
Thereafter she appears in October 1868 addressing a meeting on women’s suffrage in Dublin and at the Rutunda in Dublin on 28 June 1870 where she gave a public lecture. On the latter occasion, she voiced her support for home rule and expressed her willingness to seek election to a revived Irish parliament.
Catherine’s younger brother Nicholas Maillard, who accompanied her to court to ‘perform the subordinate duty of a junior counsel to the fair advocate who acted as his senior’ (Dublin Daily Express, 17 Feb. 1851), changed his name to Stubber in 1863 and stood as a liberal candidate on behalf of the Reform League for the constituency of Galway borough in 1865, with spectacular lack of success; he received twenty-two votes. The following year he stood again, and, though still unsuccessful, did slightly better with 172 votes. His books and technical inventions are forgotten, except for a History of the republic of Texas (1842), full of historical inaccuracies and virulent diatribes against everything Texan, which he wrote after spending nine months there in 1840, editing a newspaper and practising law. The book is now a collector’s item.
Little more is known of Winter and her family. The estates of her cousin Robert Hamilton Stubber (d. 1863) were passed on to his descendants, despite her challenges, and the first woman barrister in Britain and Ireland was not called to the bar until 1922, seventy years after Winter’s ‘adventures in a new silk gown’.