On my Ireland trip, I visited the cell in Kilmainham Goal where Constance Markievicz was held after her arrest, and the spot where 16 of the ringleaders of the Easter Rising were executed by firing squad and Constance narrowly escaped with her life.

Yard at Kilmainham Goal with cross marking location of executions, Dublin.

Constance née Gore-Booth was an unlikely revolutionary, born an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, raised on a wealthy estate in Sligo, trained as a landscape painter in Paris where she met and married a Polish count, Casimir Markievicz. Returning to Ireland, living by chance in a rented cottage she discovered literature promoting Irish independence, yes, the power of the written word thrust her into a life of activism.

“The first step on the road to freedom is to realize ourselves as Irishwomen – not as Irish or merely as women, but as Irishwomen doubly enslaved and with a double battle to fight,” she wrote in 1909. 

One of her first crusades helped defeat Winston Churchill's bid for a British Parliament seat. He'd spoken out against women's right to vote.

“[Women's suffrage] was one of the first things I worked for since I was a young girl. That was my first bite, you may say, at the apple of freedom and soon I got to the other freedoms – freedom to the nation, freedom to the workers. The question of votes for women, with the bigger thing, freedom for women and the opening of the professions to women, has been one of the things that I have worked for.”

Constance worked with the Cumann na mBan, a revolutionary women's movement, Sinn Féin (Irish republican and democratic socialist party) and became a commissioned officer in the Irish Citizen Army, a volunteer armed force formed during labor troubles in 1913 to defend workers from the police. She would become world famous for her role in the Easter Rising.

Markievicz in uniform examining a Colt New Service Model 1909 revolver, posed c.1915 
National Library of Ireland on The Commons

The 1916 Easter Rising is often compared to the American Revolution, illustrating what would have happened to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the signers of the Declaration of Independance if the British had won the war.

The Irish rebels 1916 Proclamation declared an independent Irish Republic and guaranteed ‘religious and civil liberty, equal rights and opportunities’ and would ‘pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation."

A little-known difference between the American declaration and the Proclamation is that the Irish document was addressed to both men and women and guaranteed women's right to vote. 

It's estimated between 250-400 women participated in the Rising, with 77 being arrested and sent to prison.

Some of the women who participated in the Rising pictured in Dublin in the summer of 1916.

 (Courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum) 

Constance Gore-Booth with her sister Eva, also a suffrage activist. 1895

Constance did not look away from the deplorable plight of the poor in Ireland and jumped to action in 1913 when Dublin's trade unions and mostly-British employers faced off, some 20-thousand workers going on strike or locked out of their jobs for five months.

Crowded, disease-ridden slums in Dublin rivaled those in Calcutta, with a staggering death rate (27.6 per 1000) and even high numbers of infant mortality (147 per 1000). Unskilled workers competed for scarce jobs deflating wages. 

Constance helped set up a soup kitchen at the workers' headquarters during what came to be known as the Dublin Lock-out of 1913. She spent hours a day peeling potatoes, and that winter made regular trips to gather turf in the Dublin mountains, driving it to the city and lugging bags of fuel up the dark stairs of crowded tenements to provide some heat for families of striking workers. 

It's little wonder five years later, the voters of a Dublin borough elected her to the House of Commons, making her the first woman member of Westminster Parliament in London. Though as a member of Sinn Féin she refused to take her seat.

​​​Irish revolutionaries refused to recognize the British parliament and instead established an independent legislature in Dublin, the Dáil ÉireannT. Constance was elected at the first meeting in 1919, and appointed Minister for Labour, the first female minister in a modern democracy. 

However, she was back in jail, this time for working against the conscription of Irish men to fight with the Bristish army in WWI. She would serve four more prison terms for her activist work in the following years.

The bust of Constance Markiewicz in St Stephen's Green in Dublin.

Though Constance and her compatriots failed in the Easter Rising, the rebellion sparked the Irish War of Independence resulting in the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921.

Despite this new freedom from the British, women's rights almost immediately started to backslide. The new Irish government, influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, passed laws keeping women for sitting on juries, forced women working as teacher or civil servants to retire when they married, and limiting women's employment in general.
Laws in 1924 and 1927 largely excluded women from sitting on juries. 

Then in 1937, the new constitution sealed women's fate for decades, Article 41
stating “by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

Today, woman in Ireland continue to push for equal rights and for remembrance and honor for the women, like Contance, who fought for a more just society.

Countess Constance Markievicz died a pauper in the public ward of a Dublin hospital in 1927, suffering complications of appendicitis. Thousands of working-class people lined O'Connell Street and Parnell Square to pay their respects as her funeral procession passed by.

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