User:Laurenm55/sandbox

Later Life and Death

Towards Rosa Barrett’s later life, she participated in the formation of an organisation to develop a child care centre that would enable women to find employment. The Foreign Legislation on Behalf of Destitute and Neglected Children, a paper by Rosa Barrett that was presented to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, was issued in 1896.

The Howard Penal Reform League recognised her for Juvenile Criminals (1900). Rosa Barrett subsequently developed into the hagiographic biographer of Ellice Hopkins, the advocate for extending the legal age of consent for girls to sixteen and an advocate of child prostitutes. Rosa Barrett felt continually guilty after reading Ellice Hopkins “thrilling accounts of her public work” for the White Cross Men’s Sexual Purity League. The group was established to take action against threats to society and “purity”. The white Cross Society focussed its efforts on males, urging them to take ownership of diminishing the issue, in contrast to many of the organisations combating prostitution at the time. Rosa Mary Barrett backed other organisations such as women’s suffrage. Rosa Barrett was selected to serve as the representative of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation in London in 1912. Furthermore, in 1907, she also helped to establish the National Women’s Health Association in Ireland, which arranged an educational programme for the public regarding the prevention of diseases such as tuberculosis and infant mortality.

Rosa Barrett was compelled to retire as secretary of the Cottage Home and move to England in 1919, after suffering from a prolonged illness. However she maintained her position as a member of the committee and its president until she passed away. Nearing the end of her life, Rosa finished her brother William Fletcher Barrett’s book on Christian Science, “The Religion of Health” (1925). Interestingly enough it seems that she developed an interest in spiritualism as she published “The Seekers” (1928) and “Beyond” (1929) by a medium. Soon after, Rosa Mary Barrett  died, unmarried at her home in Handside Lane, Welwyn Garden  City, Herts on the 28th on August 1936. Although Rosa’s work was very serious, she was described by a close friend as a woman who had great humour and charm.