[3] On the day of the Rising, Cumann na mBan members, including Winifred Carney, who arrived armed with both a Webley revolver and a typewriter, entered the General Post Office on O'Connell Street in Dublin with their male counterparts.

By nightfall, women insurgents were established in all the major rebel strongholds throughout the city except Boland's Mill and the South Dublin Union held by Éamon de Valera and Eamonn Ceannt.

[15] Helena Molony was among the Citizen Army company which attacked Dublin Castle and subsequently occupied the adjacent City Hall, where she and other women sniped.

[16] At the Four Courts the women of Cumann na mBan helped to organise the evacuation of buildings at the time of surrender and to destroy incriminating papers.

Pearse asked Cumann na mBan member Elizabeth O'Farrell (a mid-wife at the National Maternity Hospital) to act as a go-between.

[11] Revitalized after the Rising and led by Countess Markievicz, Cumann na mBan took a leading role in popularising the memory of the 1916 leaders, organising prisoner relief agencies and later in opposing conscription and internment.

In the Irish elections of May 1921, Markievicz was joined by fellow Cumann na mBan members Mary MacSwiney, Ada English and Kathleen Clarke as Teachtaí Dála.

The government of the Irish Free State banned the organisation in January 1923 and opened up Kilmainham Jail as a detention prison for suspect women.

What strength the organisation had left after 1926 was sapped again when post-1926 president Eithne Coyle repeatedly tried to resign in the late 1930s during World War II in protest against the Sabotage Campaign being waged by the IRA.

Coyle objected to the IRA bombing British industrial targets in Northern Ireland and England due to risks posed to civilians.

[citation needed] Sinn Féin vice-president and leading Cumann na mBan member Máire Drumm was shot dead by loyalists in 1976.

In Northern Ireland Cumann na mBan was integrated into the mainstream Irish Republican Army during the conflict, although the organisation continued to exist.

[citation needed] In 1996, RSF general secretary and Cumann na mBan member Josephine Hayden was jailed for six years on charges relating to the possession of a sawn-off shotgun and a revolver.