The revolutionary history of Ireland has largely forgotten the significant contribution of its women. Aisling Gallagher discusses Constance Markievicz, known as the ‘Rebel Countess’.
Countess Constance Markievicz has long endured as a symbol of the early feminist movement as well as a hero of Irish Republicanism. Born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in 1868 in County Sligo, Constance Gore-Booth could easily have become an emblem of everything that opposed the Irish Republican and feminist movements that she came to embody. Instead she is noted for a number of significant achievements; not least of these is her status as the first woman ever elected to Westminster Parliament, as well as her notable position as Lieutenant in the Irish Citizen Army during the Easter Rising of 1916.
The elder daughter of Arctic explorer Sir Henry Gore-Booth and Lady Georgina Hill, perhaps it is no surprise that Constance chose a life of action and accomplishment, rejecting the fate that had been decreed for her by her ‘noble’ birth. Constance came from a family which had discarded the notion that the Ascendency, as the landed gentry in Ireland were known, were a people who lived separately from the Irish peasants who surrounded them, unaffected by the desperate poverty that enveloped that class; during the food shortage of 1879-80, Constance’s father had distributed food to the farmers and families who inhabited his land. This concern for the wellbeing of the poor and oppressed asserted itself in the mindset of both Constance and her younger sister, Eva, setting them on the paths they were to tread – Constance as a revolutionary Republican, socialist and feminist and Eva as advocate of the labour and feminist movements in England.
While it is evident that her father’s actions during the Famine of 1879-80 were fundamental in instilling in Constance the concern for the poor that was to dominate her life, one cannot conclude that the socialist politics she came to espouse were born of that same influence. It is true to say that living amongst the Irish peasantry had led Henry Gore-Booth to sympathise with their plight; however, it is essential to note that he, and the majority of his class, did not wish to change the circumstances in which these people lived. Gore-Booth had no desire to allow self-determination for the Irish peasantry or working class; he merely wished to ease their burden whilst maintaining the status-quo of landowner and tenant, Lord and peasant.
It is here that the politics of Henry Gore-Booth differ significantly from those of his daughter and this was the sticking point that made their lives take such dissimilar paths.
In 1892, Constance left home to train as a painter. She moved first to London, where she joined the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), and then took up studies at the celebrated Académie Julian in Paris, where she met her future husband, a Polish count by the name of Casimir Markievicz. At this point in her life, Constance had not yet displayed any outward signs of socialist or Republican leanings; while she could be labelled a feminist at this point due to her membership of the NUWSS, it is really in name only that one would call her this, as her level of political activism was relatively low.
The catalyst for pushing Constance from idle compassion for the cause of Irish freedom to Republican activism came in the summer of 1906, when she rented a cottage in the hills outside Dublin and took to reading the many Republican papers and manuscripts that had been left by its previous tenant, the poet Padraic Colum.
Subsequently, Constance immersed herself in the burgeoning movement that was beginning to flourish in Dublin and beyond. Republican activists like Maud Gonne, Padraic Pearse and Tomas Clarke were amongst those responsible for the rebirth of the Republican movement, and Constance was anxious to get to know those who shared her sympathies and beliefs.
Where Constance’s priorities differed from the likes of Pearse however, was in her sense of injustice on behalf of Ireland’s late-emerging industrial working class in Dublin. Those who lived in Dublin’s sprawling slums experienced poverty very different from that of Ireland’s vast impoverished countryside; while a number of Republicanism’s leaders at that time had never observed either of these ways of life, Constance had borne witness to both. It was her ambition to improve the lot of Dublin’s poor, a conviction which led her to befriend and work with the socialist trade unionists, James Connolly and James Larkin.
In the subsequent years, Constance’s activism took many forms. She joined Maud Gonne’s revolutionary women’s organisation Inghinidhe na hEireann and became an active member of Sinn Fein. She also founded the Fianna Eireann in 1909, an organisation for young boys that provided an alternative to the Scouts. It was Constance’s view that no young Irishman should be a member of an organisation that was affiliated to the British Crown and required its membership to salute a foreign king. Many of the young boys trained by Markievicz went on to fight in the Easter Rising.
During the Dublin Lockout of 1913, Constance was notable for starting and maintaining soup kitchens for the families of the striking workers, a move that saved many from almost certain starvation. During this time Markievicz also planned, along with Larkin, to evacuate the strikers’ children to England to be re-housed for the duration of the Industrial Action, believing that not having to worry about their children going hungry would keep the workers’ morale high. However, the Catholic Church in Ireland felt it was more appropriate that the children of these families be kept in Ireland, objecting to them being sent to a “foreign, Protestant” country. This clash of opinions led to violent clashes on the streets of Dublin between these two groups.
Markievicz is perhaps best remembered for her significant role in the Easter Rising of 1916. In the decades preceding the build up to 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood had been just that – an organisation of men whose goal was an independent Irish Republic. Constance and a few other notable women were the first to break through this barrier and be permitted membership of the secret organisation, a fact that is significant not just because she was a woman, but also because of her family background.
Although also a member of the IRB, Markievicz fought in the Easter Rising as a Lieutenant in James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, a socialist organisation that played a significant part in the rebellion. She was depute to Michael Mallin at the St Stephen’s Green garrison, instructing the men in her command how best to maintain the position they held by setting up barricades and then occupying a prime position within the Royal College of Surgeons building. Markievicz and Mallin held out for six days, refusing to surrender their position until they were brought a signed copy of Padraig Pearse’s surrender.
Upon her arrest for her part in the Rising, Markievicz was condemned to death alongside the other leaders of the revolt. This sentence was later converted to life imprisonment, as the British establishment felt that to execute a woman would leave them too vulnerable to criticism. Markievicz violently opposed this downsizing of her sentence, reportedly telling the court, “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.”
Markievicz, along with the other participants of the Rising, was released from prison in 1917 as part of a general amnesty. She was elected to Westminster in the 1918 General Election, the first woman ever to be so, although she refused to take her seat in a foreign parliament and instead joined with other successful Sinn Fein candidates to set up the first Dail Eireann – despite being in Holloway prison at the time of its first assembly. She also set a precedent in Irish politics by being the first woman to sit in the Dail Cabinet as Minister for Labour.
In January 1922, Markievicz left the Dail Eireann alongside Eamon De Valera in protest at the implementation of the Treaty that partitioned the northern six counties of Ireland and retained them as part of the British Empire while establishing a Free State in the remaining twenty six. Markievicz felt betrayed by the Treaty, viewing it as a sell-out of the Irish community in the North in favour of those in the South. Once again, Markievicz took to arms, participating actively on the Republican side in the Civil War of 1922-23.
She was re-elected to the Dail Eireann in the Dublin South constituency in 1923, a position she held until her death in June 1927. During this time, Markievicz was once again imprisoned for her Republican beliefs, going on Hunger Strike in protest against this alongside ninety two other female prisoners. Alongside De Valera, she broke from Sinn Fein to set up the Fianna Fail party in 1926, under whose umbrella she ran for parliament and won in the 1927 election.
For the remainder of her life, Markievicz maintained her Republican and socialist beliefs; she worked tirelessly to better the lot of Dublin’s poor, dying in poverty in the city in 1927 amongst the class of people she had always loved best.
Although born into wealth and privilege, Markievicz had dedicated her life to the pursuit of freedom for Ireland, as well as taking up the cause of the poor and the working class. Giving the oration at her funeral, Eamon De Valera labelled her “the friend of the toiler, the lover of the poor.”
From International Socialist Group site
