Constance Markievicz

Constance Georgine Markievicz (Polish: Markiewicz [marˈkʲɛvitʂ]; née Gore-Booth; 4 February 1868 – 15 July 1927), also known as Countess Markievicz and Madame Markievicz, was an Irish revolutionary nationalist politician, suffragist and socialist who was the first woman elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Born in London, she came from the upper class Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning elite, which she abandoned in favour of Irish independence and social reform.

She served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Dublin St Patrick's from 1918 to 1922. In the Irish Free State, she was elected Minister for Labour in the First Dáil, becoming the second female cabinet minister in Europe. She served as a Teachta Dála for the Dublin South constituency from 1921 to 1922 and 1923 to 1927.

A founding member of Fianna Éireann, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Citizen Army, she took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, when Irish republicans attempted to end British rule and establish an Irish Republic. She was sentenced to death but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of her sex. On 28 December 1918, at the 1918 general election, she was the first woman elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, though, being in Holloway Prison at the time and in accordance with party policy, she did not take her seat. Instead, she and the other Sinn Féin MPs (as TDs) formed the first Dáil Éireann. She was also one of the first women in the world to hold a cabinet position, as Minister for Labour, from 1919 to 1922.

Markievicz supported the anti-Treaty stance in the Irish Civil War. She continued as an (abstentionist) Dáil member for Sinn Féin until 1926 when she became a founding member of Fianna Fáil. She died in 1927.

Constance Georgine Gore-Booth was born at Buckingham Gate in London in 1868, the elder daughter of the Arctic explorer and adventurer Sir Henry Gore-Booth, 5th Baronet, an Anglo-Irish Protestant landlord who administered a 100 km² (39 sq mi) estate, and Georgina, Lady Gore-Booth, née Hill. During the famine of 1879–1880, Sir Henry provided free food for the tenants on his estate at Lissadell House in the north of County Sligo in the north-west of Ireland. Their father's example inspired in Gore-Booth and her younger sister, Eva Gore-Booth, a deep concern for working people and the poor. The sisters were childhood friends of the poet W. B. Yeats, who frequently visited the family home Lissadell House, and were influenced by his artistic and political ideas. Yeats wrote a poem, "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz", in which he described the sisters as "two girls in silk kimono, both beautiful, one a gazelle", the gazelle being Eva, whom Yeats described as having "a gazelle-like beauty". Eva later became involved in the labour movement and women's suffrage in Great Britain, although initially Constance did not share her sister's ideals.

Gore-Booth wished to train as a painter, to her family's dismay; in 1892, she went to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where she lived at the Alexandra House for Art Pupils, Kensington Gore, founded five years before by Sir Francis Cook, a wealthy great-uncle of Maud Gonne. One of her contemporaries there was Blanche Georgiana Vulliamy. It was at this time that Gore-Booth first became politically active and joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Later she moved to Paris and enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian where she met her future husband, Casimir Markievicz (Kazimierz Markiewicz) an artist from a wealthy Polish landowning family in present-day Ukraine (then under the rule of the Russian Empire).

The Markieviczes (or Markiewiczes) settled in Dublin in 1903 and moved in artistic and literary circles, with Constance gaining a reputation as a landscape painter. In 1905, along with artists Sarah Purser, Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne and John Butler Yeats, she was instrumental in founding the United Arts Club, which was an attempt to bring together all those in Dublin with an artistic and literary bent. This group included the leading figures of the Gaelic League founded by the future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. Although formally concerned only with the preservation of the Irish language and culture, the league brought together many patriots and future political leaders. Sarah Purser, whom the young Gore-Booth sisters first met in 1882, when she was commissioned to paint their portrait, hosted a regular salon where artists, writers and intellectuals on both sides of the nationalist divide gathered. At Purser's house, Markievicz met revolutionary patriots Michael Davitt, John O'Leary and Maud Gonne. In 1907, Markievicz rented a cottage in the countryside near Dublin. The previous tenant, the poet Padraic Colum, had left behind copies of The Peasant and Sinn Féin. These revolutionary journals promoted independence from British rule. Markievicz read them and was propelled into action.

In 1908, Markievicz became actively involved in nationalist politics in Ireland. She joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ('Daughters of Ireland'), a revolutionary women's movement founded by the actress and activist Maud Gonne, muse of WB Yeats. Markievicz came directly to her first meeting from a function at Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, wearing a satin ball gown and a diamond tiara. Naturally, the members looked upon her with some hostility. This refreshing change from being "kowtowed"-to as a countess only made her more eager to join, she told her friend Helena Molony. She performed with Maud Gonne in several plays at the newly established Abbey Theatre, an institution that played an important part in the rise of cultural nationalism. In the same year, Markievicz played a dramatic role in the women's suffrage campaigners' tactic of opposing Winston Churchill's election to Parliament during the Manchester North West by-election, flamboyantly appearing in the constituency driving an old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white horses to promote the suffragist cause. A male heckler asked her if she could cook a dinner, to which she responded, "Yes. Can you drive a coach and four?" Her sister Eva had moved to Manchester to live with fellow suffragist Esther Roper and they both campaigned against the anti-suffragist Churchill with her. Churchill lost the election to Conservative candidate William Joynson-Hicks, in part as a result of the suffragists' dedicated opposition.