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 Email: info@searcs-web.com Searc's Web Guide to 20th Century Ireland - Constance Markievicz (1868-1927) |
 Constance Markievicz (1868-1927) |
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Constance Gore-Booth was born in London. She grew up in Lissadell House, County Sligo
and studied art at the Slade School, London from 1893. She later lived to Paris
where she married a Polish Count, Casimir Dunin-Markieviez, in 1900. They lived in Dublin where Markievicz immersed herself in revolutionary politics, joining Sinn
Fein and
James Connolly's labour movement. Markievicz worked ceaselessly for women's suffrage and the national cause, delivering lectures and writing articles for Bean na hÉireann, the journal of Inighnidhe na hÉireann [Daughters of Ireland] which she joined in 1907. In 1909 Markievicz founded Na Fianna, the boys wing of the IRB, whom she drilled in the use of firearms in the Dublin mountains. In 1913 she joined the Citizen Army, founded by James White and James Connolly and in 1914 Markievicz became a founder member of Cumann na mBan, the women's branch of the IRB. Markievicz was instrumental in organising the 1916 Rising and, as a Major in the Citizen's Army, she was second in command of the College of Surgeons, St. Stephen's Green during Easter week. For her part in the Rising Markievicz was sentenced to death but because of her gender this was commuted to life imprisonment. Markievicz spent a year in prisons in England during which time she was baptized a Catholic before returning to Ireland and a heroine's welcome. In 1918 Markievicz was again imprisoned in Holloway Gaol, London and during her imprisonment she became the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons. However, like the other Sinn Féin MPs, she refused to take her seat. On her release she became President of Cumann na mBan which overwhelmingly rejected the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. During the remainder of her life Markievicz worked for a united and socialist Ireland, making lectures tours of America and working with the poor of Dublin. She was frequently imprisoned until her death of peritonitis in 1927. The Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz were published posthumously in 1934 . This extract is from Markievicz's pamphlet Women, Ideals and the Nation (1909) which was first delivered as a lecture to a Cumann na mBan convention.© Fix your mind on the ideal of Ireland free, with her women enjoying the full rights of citizenship in their own nation, and no-one will ever be able to side-track you, and so make use of you to use up the energies of the nation in obtaining all sorts of concessions, that for the most part were coming in the natural course of evolution, and were perhaps just hastened a few years by the fierce agitations to obtain them... Tenant right and peasant proprietorship, extension of the franchise and universal suffrage, are all but steps in the evolution of the world; for as education and with it the knowledge of the rights of a man or a woman is gained by the masses of mankind, so gradually they push their way - individually and collectively - into the life of the nation, and being in the majority, the moment they realise their power, the world may be theirs for the taking. But our national freedom cannot, and must not, be left to evolution. If we look around us we will find that evolution - as far as Ireland is concerned - is tending rather to annihilate us as a nation altogether. We seem day by day to be brought more and more in touch with England, and little by little to be loosing that distinctiveness which pertains to a nation, and which may be called nationality. London seems to be coming nearer and nearer to us till quite unperceptibly it has become the centre of the universe to even many good Irishmen... Ireland wants her girls to help her build up the national life. Their fresh, clean views of life, their young energies, have been long too hidden away and kept separate in their different homes. Bring them out and organise them, and lo! you will find a great new army ready to help the national cause. The old idea that a woman can only serve her nation through her home is gone, so now is the time; on you the responsibility rests. No-one can help you but yourselves alone; you must make the world look up to you as citizens first, as women after. For each one of you there is a niche waiting - your place in the nation. Try and find it. It may be as a leader, it may be as a humbler follower - perhaps in a political party, and perhaps in a party of your own,- but it is there, and if you cannot find it for yourself, no-one can find it for you. If you are fitted for public work take up any that is within your reach, so long as you feel you can do it. Ireland wants reforming, sweeping from ocean to ocean; and it is only the young people can do it. Since the Union we have been steadily deteriorating; all our ideals have been gradually slipping from us. Let us look all these facts bravely in the face, and make up our mind to change them. We know that the government of England is responsible for all this. First, for the famine, with its deaths and desolations, by which our people were taught to be submissive. Emigration, - another policy sent to us from England - has helped to build up another great nation at Ireland's expense. The men and women who she could least afford to loose were the ones who had so often to go, leaving the week and feeble to continue their own race. But what has done us most harm of all is a system of government calculated to foster all that was low or mean in our nature - treachery, place-hunting, besides all the petty, mean vices that follow on the idea that commercial prosperity and nothing else is the highest ideal of life. These ideas and many more, we have been allowing a subtle foe to graft on our national character at her will. But we have seen it in time; and a nation of idealists and soldiers has only to see it, and she will prune off the bad growths, as a strong nature will throw off an unclean sickness... In every action we do in life, the idea behind it is the thing that counts - if you go deep enough, to the soul as it were. And so it is only by realising that unless the ideal, the spirit of self-sacrifice and love of country, is at the back of our work for commercial prosperity, sex emancipation, and other practical reforms, that we can hope to help our land. Every little act 'for Ireland's sake' will help to build up a great nation, noble and self-sacrificing, industrious and free... Regard yourselves as Irish, believe in yourselves as Irish, as units of a nation distinct from England, your conqueror, and as determined to maintain your distinctiveness and gain your deliverance. Arm yourselves with weapons to fight your nation's cause. Arm your souls with noble and free ideas. Arm your minds with the histories and memories of your country and her martyrs, her language and a knowledge of her arts, and her industries. And if in your day the call should come for your body to arm, do not shrink that either. May this aspiration towards life and freedom among the women of Ireland bring forth a Joan of Arc to free our nation! © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008 |
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