March 19, 2018 • 36 mins
Born Constance Georgine Gore-Booth to a wealthy Protestant family, Constance Markievicz made a somewhat surprising transition to become a leader in the Irish Nationalist movement.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back
in and also as our most recent Saturday classic, we
(00:21):
did an episode on the Easter Rising, that was an
armed rebellion that struck Ireland in nineteen sixteen, and in
that episode we made a couple of brief mentions of
Constance Markavitch, and I made an aside that she was
one of the most fascinating characters that I learned about
while we're searching that episode, and that if I had
found out about her earlier, the episode might have been
(00:43):
all about her of about the Easter Rising in general.
So she's been on my short list ever since then,
which probably gives you a sense of how long my
short list is, since that was two years ago and
we are just now getting around to it. We've also
gotten a few were quests for a show on her recently,
so I thought it was finally time for her to
make it up to the top of that list. There
(01:06):
was a lot of conflict in Ireland during this period
of history, and uh Constance Markevitch was involved in a
lot of it, so we're not going to get back
into the details of the Easter rising again. That is
why we had it as our most recent Saturday Classic
for maybe folks who are newer to the show or
(01:27):
don't really remember, so that is easy to find in
the archive um for that part of the story. But
there's a lot more to talk about, so we're not
going to get into the Easter rizing so much today.
Constance Markovitch was born Constance Georgine Gore Booth on February
four eight. Her father was Henry Gore Booth and her
(01:48):
mother was Georgina may Hill. Constance was their oldest child,
and she was born in a townhouse that the family
kept near Buckingham Palace in London. She'd eventually have four
younger siblings that she was always closest to her sister, Ava,
who was two years younger. Constance grew up and was
educated at Lisadel House. Although her mother was from Yorkshire
(02:09):
on her father's side, the family had lived in this
part of Ireland since sixty one. That was when Paul
Gore was made a baronet and granted part of the
land that would become Lizadella state. The house itself that
she was raised in was a lot newer than that,
though it was only about thirty years old when Constance
was born. This was a forty eight room country house
(02:31):
decorated with paintings by the old masters, and there the
young Constance was educated by governesses and tutors. She was
described as a happy child, high spirited, and excellent on horseback.
Her father made repeated expeditions to the Arctic, almost as
a hobby, and he seemed to raise his oldest daughter
with the same eye for adventure. She was also tomboyish
(02:54):
and she didn't like most of the activities that were
considered feminine. She did like to draw into sketch and
she was considered to be quite good at it, and
she got older, she also learned to shoot, and she
developed a fondness for playing pranks on people. This is
a very affluent family. Constants and her family were part
of the Protestant Ascendancy, and this is a term that
(03:15):
was coined in the eighteenth century to describe the domination
of majority Catholic Ireland by a Protestant and mostly English minority.
It was also used to describe the members of the
Protestant aristocracy that were part of this domination as well.
So even though this term came into use in the
eighteenth century, the practices involved with it went back much farther.
(03:39):
They were largely associated with Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland
and with the period following the Glorious Revolution in six
eight the Protestant ascendancy turned former Irish Catholic landowners into
tenant farmers working for Protestant landlords, many of whom were English,
and generations later these landlords were not viewed as proper
(04:00):
really Irish and were instead described as Anglo Irish constance.
As father had at least a thousand families as tenants,
although some of his tenants managed huge acreages that they
subdivided and then least to other tenants, So he had
these direct tenants and then sort of an indirect pool
of tenants that some of his tenants were managing. A
(04:22):
lot of this property was adjoining Lisadel, but some of
it was in Manchester. To be clear, this entire system
of Protestant landowners managing land that had previously been owned
by Irish Catholics directly was exploitive and unjust, and it
contributed to a lot of problems in Irish history, but
as landlords went, Henry gore Booth had a reputation for
(04:45):
being fair and reasonable. Many Protestant landlords were basically absentee landlords,
but the gore Booth family was in residence at Lisadel
for at least part of every year. Henry gore Booth
also charged lower rents than the market value you and
he ran the whole enterprise in a very organized, thoroughly
documented way, with orderly, up to date bookkeeping. If this
(05:08):
seems like a really low bar kind of is, but
it's also indicative of like how messed up this whole
system was. That like that was the blar that made
a person just be seen as a good landlord. He
also did seem to treat his tenants pretty compassionately, if
also paternalistically. In the late eighteen seventies, just a couple
(05:31):
of decades after the Great Famine in Ireland, heavy rains
crossed widespread crop failures, and for a lot of Irish
tenants this meant going to a workhouse and losing their
homes and their land. Many of Henry gore Booth's tenants
still wound up in workhouses, but he arranged for them
to go to one that he personally oversaw without having
(05:52):
to forfeit their lands or their homes to do it.
So it's still a bad situation, but not as bad
as it could have been. The rest of the family
was part of this approach as well. During this same time,
Lady gore Booths, Constance and the older children set up
a food distribution system for the tenants, and they arranged
delivery of straw to homes where there weren't any beds.
(06:14):
Both Constance and Ava tried to be benevolently helpful, and
apparently they were genuine enough about it that they really
endeared themselves to the tenants, who they referred to as
country people. In eighteen eighty six, when Constance turned eighteen,
she spent six months in Italy with a governess before
making her formal debut. She was presented to Queen Victoria
(06:36):
as a debutante on March seventeenth, eighteen eighty seven, which
was during the Queen's Golden Jubilee. Year. After her debut,
Constant spent several seasons in London, where she was always
described as the life of the party. Although she was popular,
her behavior wasn't considered very ladylike. While the other young
women in London tended to be coy and demure, Constance
(06:57):
was vivacious and direct. Those pranks that she liked to
play on people could also be kind of mocking and
mean spirited, which may have turned off some suitors. She
could also be very daring. One night, she actually jumped
out of her carriage to physically get in between two
men who were fighting on the street, calling for other
passers by to come help her break up the bit.
(07:20):
In one oft repeated story from this time in Consences Life,
one night, a male guest at Lisadel was making a
number of unwanted advances toward her, and then he was
seated next to her at dinner. While they were eating,
he put his hand on her knee, and her response
was to pick it up, hold it up for everyone
to see, and exclaim, just look what I have found
(07:42):
in my lap. That's a pretty good story. By the
time she turned twenty five, tensions were high between Constants
and her parents. She was basically a spinster at that point,
and she was seen as an annoyance and a burden
as they were all increasingly at with each other. At home,
Constance started asking to go away to art school, and
(08:04):
she spent more time on art than socializing during her
eighteen season in London. They finally gave her permission to
go to the Slade School in London, which we will
get to. After a quick sponsor break, Constant started studying
(08:25):
art at the Slade School in London in eighteen ninety three.
She still spent a lot of time back home in Slago,
but just being able to have some measure of independence
helped to ease some of the tension between her and
her parents. Constance and her sister Ava started socializing with
lots of artists and writers, including William Butler Yates, who
(08:45):
had ongoing connections with the gore Booth family and with
the part of Ireland that they were living in. In
eight Constance, Ava and their sister Mabel became focused on
the issue of women's suffrage. Together they started a Votes
for Women organization in County Sligo, with Constance serving as president,
Ava as secretary, and Mabel as treasurer. And a speech
(09:10):
at one of their meetings, Constance posed the question of why,
if women were so incompetent, had there been no enormous
uprising against Queen Victoria. She also argued against organizations having
separate auxiliary units just for women, because doing so set
up women as a separate class from men. In Constance
(09:31):
continued her study of art by moving to Paris to
study at a studio run by Rodolph Julienne. She was
at this point completely dedicated to this study, even wearing
a wedding ring to symbolize that she was married to art.
But not long after arriving in Paris, she met Polish
playwright and artist Count Kasimir Markovic. Constance and Kasimir were
(09:53):
immediately taken with each other. He was tall and handsome
and six years younger than she was. He was also
a very good painter. He was, being from Poland, very
unlike most of the people that she had known in
her life. He was also married, although his wife died
in eighteen ninety nine, just a few weeks after he
and Constance met. By the time Kasimir's wife died, he
(10:16):
and Constance were already quite close. They had a passionate
romance that involved lots of bicycling and at one point
a duel that Kasimir fought to defend Constance's honor after
someone insulted her at a costume ball. On September twenty
nine hundred, they got married. Constance's younger sister, Mabel, who
had been engaged for years, also got married not long after,
(10:39):
suggesting that the family was traditional enough to insist that
the oldest daughter get married before the younger ones. Although
Kasimir styled himself as a count, it is not completely
clear whether he actually was one if he did have
some kind of title, he did not have a lot
of money, and even though Constance came from quite a
(11:00):
lot of money, her father had died in January of
nineteen hundred and virtually the entire estate was settled on
her brother. So as the newlywed couple divided their time
among Paris, Lisadel, and the Markovic family estates in Poland,
they mostly did it with the financial help of the family.
On November nineteen o one, they had a daughter named Mayev.
(11:22):
In nineteen o three, the Markovic family moved to a
home in wrath Guar, which was at the time its
own village but today is a suburb of Dublin. Constance's
mother had secured the house for them and was also
largely raising young mave Stanislaus the count's son by his
first marriage, moved into the wrath Car home and may
have visited from time to time. While living in Ireland,
(11:46):
Constance and Casimir started spending more and more time among
artistic and literary circles, and they joined an art society
with William Butler, Yates and George A. E. Russell, and
Constance became increasingly interested in Irish nationalism. She met maud Gonne,
who was the founder of the Irish nationalist women's organization
Daughters of Ireland, and started becoming involved in other nationalist organizations.
(12:12):
At first, Constance's involvement in Irish nationalism was viewed with suspicion.
It didn't make a lot of sense that the oldest
daughter of an ascendancy family would take the side of
Irish nationalists at all. After all, she was part of
a minority ruling class that was almost the exact opposite
of the idea of a free, independent Ireland. Aside from Ava,
(12:34):
her relatives didn't approve of the connections she was making,
and those connections suspected she was really a spy. She
stuck with it, though, even as she and Kasimir started
to drift apart. When they met They had both had
a tremendous passion for art and common and now Constance's
passion was becoming Irish nationalism and fighting for a free Ireland.
(12:57):
And this was a passion that Kasimir just didn't share.
You wouldn't necessarily think he would share it. He was
not Irish. Earlier in their marriage, Constance had styled herself
as a countess because she had married a count, but
as they grew apart, she started calling herself madam, which
was a fashionable thing to do among women in the movement.
(13:18):
In the early nineteen hundreds, there were several different nationalists
and separatist organizations operating in Ireland who wanted Ireland to
be independent from the British Empire. In nineteen o five,
Arthur Griffith established shin Fayne meaning We Ourselves or Ourselves Alone,
which absorbed some of these organizations. Constance began attending shin
(13:40):
Fayne meetings in nineteen o eight, and she joined its
council in nineteen o nine. Also in nineteen o nine,
she co founded Nafena Aaron also known as just the Fienna,
which was an Irish nationalist scouting organization for boys. Part
of its purpose was paramilitary. They were training boys and
marksmanship and drill and basically preparing them to join nationalists
(14:03):
and Republican militia as they got older. A lot of
these boys were living in extreme poverty and thinking that
a country life would help them. Constance least a large
country house and basically operated it as a commune for them.
Sometimes the Fenna was known to pick fights with some
of the more affluent Anglo Irish boys and more wealthy neighborhoods,
(14:25):
which was something that Constance tacitly allowed. Throughout all of this,
Constance also became more serious about feminism, but she didn't
see this issue as separate from Irish nationalism. From her
point of view, it would do no good for women
to have the right to vote if Ireland did not
have its own parliament to represent them. And it wasn't
(14:45):
just about having the right to vote because that was
the right men had. Every person who had the right
to vote needed to be making an active and positive
contribution to the society they were living in. So she
thought Ireland needed to be its own free nation, and
that a free Ireland also needed to incorporate equal rights
for women as its core identity. As a nation. She
(15:09):
also felt that a free Ireland needed to be free
of the kinds of wealth disparities that she had personally
benefited from for her whole life. So in reality, Constance's
political views united feminism, socialism, and Irish nationalism all into
one package. And in this work Constance gave speeches she
(15:30):
wrote and edited for a feminist journal. In nineteen ten,
she demonstrated against a visit of King George the Fifth
and Queen Mary, avoiding arrest herself but having to bail
out one of her friends and later testify that she,
not the man on trial, was the one who had
burned a flag in protest. This, by the way, did
not sway the court, and the man in question went
(15:51):
to prison. In nineteen twelve, Constants and some of her
friends started serving Irish stew to school children, both to
feed them because they were living in poverty, and also
to draw attention to the fact that a law that
was allowing local authorities to provide school lunches had been
written not to include Ireland, where a disproportionate number of
(16:11):
school children were living in poverty. She did similar work
during the nineteen thirteen Dublin lockout. This was a massive
labor dispute in which companies responded to growing efforts to
unionize by locking employees out of their jobs. This dispute
started at the Dublin United Tramway Company and then spread
out through other industries. Eventually, about twenty thousand workers in
(16:34):
Dublin had been locked out of their jobs, and violent
clashes between workers and police were ongoing. Constance Markovich and
Delia Larkin, who was the sister of labor organizer James Larkin,
ran a soup kitchen during this lockout that fed about
three thousand people a day. By August thirteen, James Larkin
(16:55):
was a wanted man. He stayed at the Markovitch home
on August that year here and then the next day
Constance and some others helps to smuggle him past police
presence so that he could make a promised public appearance.
That appearance did not last long, though, He got onto
a balcony at the Imperial Hotel, where police promptly spotted
(17:15):
him and arrested him. When Larkin was being escorted to
a police car, Constance went to tell him goodbye and
good luck, and a police officer struck her in the
face with the baton. This sparked a melee between police
and workers in which two men were killed with police
batons and more than four hundred people, including both workers
(17:36):
and police, were injured. This incident became one of several
days in history known as Bloody Sunday. Anytime somebody sends
us a message asking if we will do a podcast
on Bloody Sunday, I have to ask which one? There
are so many that there are in fact two in
this episode. The Doublin Lockout is often cited as one
(17:56):
of the precursors to the nineteen sixteen Easter Rising, which
we're going to touch on after a sponsor break. Constance
Markovitch continued her work with the Soup Kitchen during the
remainder of the Dublin Lockout, which ended unsuccessfully, at least
from the workers point of view in nineteen fourteen. Basically
(18:19):
at that point everyone was returning for work having gotten
none of the improvements that they were trying to campaign for.
By then, her marriage to Casimir Markovitch was basically over.
Their split was amicable, though, and he left Ireland in
nineteen thirteen to take a position as a war correspondent.
Tensions in Ireland were continuing to escalate. The Government of
(18:42):
Ireland Act was given Royal assent on September eighteenth, nineteen fourteen,
which was intended to give Ireland home rule within the
United Kingdom, but on the same day the Suspensary Act
of nineteen fourteen delayed the Government of Ireland Act from
being put into effect because of World War One, and
no one in Ireland was happy with this situation. Unionists
(19:04):
who wanted to remain part of Great Britain objected to
the Government of Ireland Act in general, as did the
Radical Republicans who wanted Ireland to be independent, and the
Moderate faction, who were happy for Ireland to be part
of the UK as long as they had home rule,
were angry that the Government of Ireland Act had been delayed.
This conflict, which I mean this had been building for years,
(19:28):
eventually led to the nineteen sixteen Easter Rising, which was
an armed uprising against British rule in Ireland. Our previous
episode has more detail on the rising itself. Constance Markovitch
joined the Irish Citizen Army and acted as a liaison
officer during the Easter Rising. She also acted as a
sniper and when she was finally arrested, she famously kissed
(19:51):
her pistol before surrendering it. Markovitch was one of many
women who took part in the Easter Rising, but she
was the only one who was court mark shold. Afterward,
she was kept in a cell by herself, and while
she was awaiting sentence, she and all the other prisoners
could hear the executions of those who had been sentenced
to death being carried out every morning. In the end,
(20:13):
she was found guilty and sentenced to death, but her
sentence was commuted to life in prison with hard labor
on account of her gender. When she was given the news,
she said she'd wish they'd had the decency to shoot her. Eventually,
she was moved to Mountjoy Jail, where she could no
longer hear her compatriots being executed every morning, and where
(20:34):
her family could visit her. When her sister brought her
the news that James Connolly, who was one of the
most prominent figures in the rising, somebody she had been
working with for a long time, had been executed, Constance asked,
why didn't they let me die with my friends. Authorities
were worried that Constance would develop a following if she
was kept in a prison in Ireland, so she was
(20:56):
transferred to a prison in England, where she was placed
in the General Prison pop Relation. She and the other
incarcerated women were housed in squalor, only allowed to write
one letter a month, and fed barely enough to keep
them alive. While in prison, she converted to Catholicism. Most
of the surviving participants in the Easter Rising were released
(21:17):
from prison in the spring of nineteen seventeen. Constance was
released on June eighteenth of that year. She returned to
Dublin to a hero's welcome and was formally received into
the Catholic Church a week later, though she was being
treated as a celebrity. Markovic picked right up where she
had left off. She continued to be involved in numerous organizations,
(21:38):
including being president of kumin Aman, chief scout of the Fiena,
a major of the Irish Citizen Army, on and on.
She was also elected to the Shenfean Executive Council and
soon she and other members were back in prison, partly
because of anti conscription activities. Again this was during World
War One, and partly because the British government just didn't
(22:00):
think it was possible to both fight World War One
and fight Irish nationalists at the same time, so they
imprisoned all the movements leaders. This time, though she was
treated as a political prisoner rather than being in the
general prison population. A general election was called in the
United Kingdom immediately after the end of World War One.
(22:21):
It was held on December fourteenth, nineteen eighteen. Shin Fayn
ran Constance Markovic as its candidate for the St Patrick
division of Dublin. She won by a wide margin, defeating
an incumbent of twenty six years and becoming the first
woman to be elected as a member of Parliament. She
was at the time in prison. In spite of half
(22:42):
of its candidates being incarcerated at the time, seventy three
members of shin Fain were elected in nineteen eighteen. They
defeated candidates from the Irish Parliamentary Party in almost all
of Ireland. This was a huge upset. Those who were free,
which was a portion of them were not in prison
at the time, didn't take their their seats in Westminster,
(23:05):
though in Parliament convened. Instead, they formed the First Doyle,
which was basically a parliament for the Irish Republic. Amon
de Valera, who had been a leader in the Easter Rising,
had been spared execution because he was an American citizen,
meaning that he wasn't guilty of treason. He was elected
president of the Doyle and he made Markovic, who is
(23:26):
still in prison, his Minister of Labor. She was finally
released from prison in March of nineteen nineteen. She and
the other She and the other members of the movement
who were imprisoned were basically released out of the fear
of the ongoing flu pandemic. Officials were worried that if
they contracted influenza and died in prison, they would all
(23:47):
become martyrs. By this point, guerrilla warfare had been underway
for months and what became known as the Irish War
of Independence or the Anglo Irish War. As Minister of
Labor cons since kept strict security procedures, instituted a labor
court to resolve disputes, and basically tried to mediate between
Shinfane and the Labor Party. Her Department of Labor worked
(24:10):
out of a building that claimed to be an apartment
leasing office and also contained several pianos, so people working
there could pretend to be giving piano lessons if there
was a police raid, does make it super clear what
was going on. Uh. Rather than joining the rest of
the members of Parliament and the regular British Parliament, they
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had founded their own parliament, which they were having to
operate in secret because it wasn't actually legal for them
to be doing it, and at some points various members
of that parliament were doing so from prison. I find
this whole thing fascinating. So Conserence was arrested again in
October of nineteen nineteen. During all of this, by that point,
(24:54):
the Doyle and most of the organizations that she was
involved with had all been outlawed after her. At least,
she managed to run the Department of Labor while in
hiding for several months before being arrested once again in
September of nineteen twenty when the car that she was
riding in was pulled over by police. This time, while
in prison, she learned to speak Irish. This is that
(25:17):
moment I've had several but it's that moment when I
was looking over this earlier where I'm like, she was
born a rich, spoiled girl. Yes, we're gonna talk about
that a little bit more at the end. Yeah, it's
just it's one of those times where you particularly these
times in prison that clearly were very transformative for her.
(25:37):
I'm always like, this is so far removed from probably
what anyone who knew her as a child thought her
life path would be. Throughout all of this violence was
going on in Ireland, including another Bloody Sunday, this one
on November twenty one, which started with the assassination of
several British intelligence officers in Dublin and ended with the
(25:58):
Royal Irish Constabulary British Auxiliary Division police killing at least
thirteen spectators during a Gaelic football match. On December twenty nine,
Parliament passed the Government of Ireland Acts that attempted to
partition Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, with two
separate parliaments that each had two different home rule jurisdictions,
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but because of this ongoing violence and the Irish War
of Independence, this never really went into effect in the
southern part of Ireland. Instead, just under a year later,
after lengthy negotiations, representatives of the British Government and of
the Irish Republic signed the Anglo Irish Treaty, which established
what had formally been designated as Southern Ireland as the
(26:45):
Irish Free State Constance. Markovic, Aimon de Valera and many
other Irish nationalists did not agree with this treaty. They
wanted Ireland to be its own self governing republic, but
the Anglo Irish Treaty set up an Irish free state
within the British Empire. Members of the Free States Parliament
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were also required to take an oath of allegiance to
the Crown, which its most nationalist members, including Markovitch, refused
to do. There was a walkout of like this. The
treaty was ultimately passed on the Irish side by a
kind of narrow majority, and there was a mass walkout
of the people who didn't agree with it after it
(27:27):
had been signed. Markovitch left Ireland for a time after
the signing of the Anglo Irish Treaty. She traveled both
to Paris and then to the United States, and there
she went on a lecture tour to support total Irish independence.
When she got home, she found that Ireland once again
was being struck by violence, now in the Irish Civil War,
(27:48):
which was between Irish Republicans and Irish nationalists. These are
people that had previously been mostly on the same side,
now against one another. Markovitch, who was now fifty four,
joined the nationalist cause once again, taking up arms as
a sniper. In ninety three, she was arrested and imprisoned again.
(28:10):
Many of the Irish nationalists imprisoned at the time had
started a hunger strike, which Markovitch joined as soon as
she was incarcerated. She fasted for three days, at which
point the strike was called off because of the death
of one of the participants. She was released from her
final incarceration on Christmas Eve nine. Out of prison, Constance
(28:31):
Markovitch was really disappointed in what Ireland had become. She
had envisioned a free Ireland that would be a radical
workers democracy, and instead they add this Irish free state
that was still part of the British Empire, even to
the point of having to have an oath of allegiance
to the Crown if you were going to be a
member of its parliament. She was also disappointed that a
(28:54):
lot of the social hierarchies were in place now as
had been before. She started turning her attention to local
politics and service, including working with the Wrath Minds Urban
Council to build wash houses and public baths to serve
the four hundred thousand residents who did not have running
water in their homes. In ninety six, she joined Phiena Foil,
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the newly established Irish Republican Party, which had split off
from shin Fain. She continued to be politically active for
the rest of her life. She died in Dublin on
July fifteenth, nine seven, not long after she had had
an appendectomy. Casimir and Stanislaus were both with her when
she died, although at that point she was estranged from
(29:35):
her daughter Mayeve. Her sister Ava died the year before,
having spent most of her life dedicated to social and
political issues, working with her lifelong partner Esther Roper, who
she had been with since eighteen ninety six. Constance's funeral
was attended by thousands of people, with a procession that
took hours to pass. After her death and really before. Frankly,
(29:58):
people had a lot of disparaiting comments to make about
Constance Markovitch. Playwright Sean O'Casey, who was in the Irish
Citizen Army with her, called her a quote Catherine Wheel
of irresponsibility. Judge William Evelyn Wiley, who was present at
her court martial, later on wrote of it, saying that
she had curled up completely and cried a lot and
(30:21):
said things like I'm only a woman and you cannot
shoot a woman, basically moaning the whole time. Official court
records say the opposite. They say that she actually stood
up to the court. In her account, she said in
court that she had fought for Ireland's independence during Easter
Week and was as ready to die for it now
as she had been then. Her correspondence during her incarcerations,
(30:44):
which were I mean this correspondence was consistently steadfast and
resolute and sometimes even optimistic, also suggests that like a
teary breakdown and a bunch of moaning in court would
have been completely out of character for her. Basically, in
the years after her she was criticized as being a
rich dilettante who was just doing all of this work
for attention. There are, of course, some very legitimate conversations
(31:08):
to be had about her work, like whether it is
right to arm young boys and indoctrinate them as a
separatist paramilitary unit, or whether her unyielding insistence on total
independence for Ireland was ultimately divisive. I was not what
a lot of the criticism was about, though it was about, uh,
but what she wore, that she had in my nice
(31:29):
uniform made for herself, that she had a portrait made
of herself with her gun. Like. People made a big
deal out of things that she was wearing and the
way that she talked, and the fact that she had
come from rich affluence. Uh. And the whole only doing
it for attention claim, I think is one that you
mainly hear about women and children. Uh, and also doesn't
(31:52):
really jive with having gone to prison repeatedly and been
on hunger strikes and done hard labor. Like none of
that really adds up to, oh, just doing it for attention,
which is gendered and dismissive comments make in the first place. Uh.
Some of the criticisms along those lines have softened in
(32:16):
the decades since her death, and a portrait of her
was presented to the Speaker of the House of Commons
on February. At least it was announced that was going
to happen. I did not find an article saying that, yes,
it actually did. Um. It was part The presentation of
that portrait was part of the year long celebration of
the Representation of the People Act of nineteen eighteen, which
(32:39):
became law on February sixth of that year and gave
um all men over twenty one and all women property
owners over the edge of thirty the right to vote.
So it was part of a suffrage celebration. Do you
have a listener mail for us? I knew I have
listener mail that came from a parcel because I had
(33:01):
the uh, the opportunity to be the one opening the
mail recently, which doesn't happen all that often. It's from Angela,
and it's a long letter, so I'm not going to
read all of it. But Angela starts by saying, first
of all, thank you so much for all the work
you do. I have so much fun listening to all
the gems of information that you share with us on
the podcast. I feel like a long time listener, even
(33:22):
though I've only been listening for about six months. And
then she goes on to talk about where she works
and why she sent us delicious grandola. Thank you for
the delicious grandola. Fortunately I was able to get the
granola through airport security. Uh, there was a granola bag search.
(33:46):
Angela goes on to say that she has been listening
to all of the podcasts in order, which is a
feat and I salute you. She's currently at the end
of and she sent a few thoughts about the prior
episodes on Cokia and on the Ghost Army, and then
went on to say, I would also like to take
a moment to thank you for the episodes on Frankie
Manning and the Lyndy Hoppers. I've been part of a
(34:07):
ballroom dance world for the last six or seven years,
so hearing about the history of dances in that sphere
was amazing. You would think that after spending that much
time enjoying East Coast swing with various other styles of dance,
that I would have at least learned about the origins
of swing being an African American culture, But no, I
feel ashamed to admit that until that point I had
always associated big band music and swing dance with Fred
(34:28):
Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Thank you for enlightening me to
something that I not only missed in history class, but
in dance class as well. She talks a bit more
and concludes, thank you again for all the hard work
you put introducing the podcast. You really make history come
alive in such an enjoyable way. The broad spectrum of
subjects you cover our mind blowing and I love it.
(34:51):
In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I found out
that my grandfather is a great grand student of Franz
List and the only reason I knew that was because
of your show. This letter ended up being longer than
I intended, but I just love you, ladies and everything
you do. Keep it up, cheers, Angela. Thank you so much,
Angela uh for this I um. I admire the fortitude
(35:15):
of people who were listening to the entire show all
the way through the archive, and I also loved it.
Sometimes it gives us a chance to revisit old episodes
in listener mail. And also thank you again for the granola. Uh.
I love granola. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast where History podcasts
at how staff works dot com. Our social media is
(35:35):
also missed in history, and that is at Facebook and
Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. You can come to our
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will find a searchable archive of every episode we have
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else you listen to podcasts. For more on this and
(36:03):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back
in and also as our most recent Saturday classic, we
(00:21):
did an episode on the Easter Rising, that was an
armed rebellion that struck Ireland in nineteen sixteen, and in
that episode we made a couple of brief mentions of
Constance Markavitch, and I made an aside that she was
one of the most fascinating characters that I learned about
while we're searching that episode, and that if I had
found out about her earlier, the episode might have been
(00:43):
all about her of about the Easter Rising in general.
So she's been on my short list ever since then,
which probably gives you a sense of how long my
short list is, since that was two years ago and
we are just now getting around to it. We've also
gotten a few were quests for a show on her recently,
so I thought it was finally time for her to
make it up to the top of that list. There
(01:06):
was a lot of conflict in Ireland during this period
of history, and uh Constance Markevitch was involved in a
lot of it, so we're not going to get back
into the details of the Easter rising again. That is
why we had it as our most recent Saturday Classic
for maybe folks who are newer to the show or
(01:27):
don't really remember, so that is easy to find in
the archive um for that part of the story. But
there's a lot more to talk about, so we're not
going to get into the Easter rizing so much today.
Constance Markovitch was born Constance Georgine Gore Booth on February
four eight. Her father was Henry Gore Booth and her
(01:48):
mother was Georgina may Hill. Constance was their oldest child,
and she was born in a townhouse that the family
kept near Buckingham Palace in London. She'd eventually have four
younger siblings that she was always closest to her sister, Ava,
who was two years younger. Constance grew up and was
educated at Lisadel House. Although her mother was from Yorkshire
(02:09):
on her father's side, the family had lived in this
part of Ireland since sixty one. That was when Paul
Gore was made a baronet and granted part of the
land that would become Lizadella state. The house itself that
she was raised in was a lot newer than that,
though it was only about thirty years old when Constance
was born. This was a forty eight room country house
(02:31):
decorated with paintings by the old masters, and there the
young Constance was educated by governesses and tutors. She was
described as a happy child, high spirited, and excellent on horseback.
Her father made repeated expeditions to the Arctic, almost as
a hobby, and he seemed to raise his oldest daughter
with the same eye for adventure. She was also tomboyish
(02:54):
and she didn't like most of the activities that were
considered feminine. She did like to draw into sketch and
she was considered to be quite good at it, and
she got older, she also learned to shoot, and she
developed a fondness for playing pranks on people. This is
a very affluent family. Constants and her family were part
of the Protestant Ascendancy, and this is a term that
(03:15):
was coined in the eighteenth century to describe the domination
of majority Catholic Ireland by a Protestant and mostly English minority.
It was also used to describe the members of the
Protestant aristocracy that were part of this domination as well.
So even though this term came into use in the
eighteenth century, the practices involved with it went back much farther.
(03:39):
They were largely associated with Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland
and with the period following the Glorious Revolution in six
eight the Protestant ascendancy turned former Irish Catholic landowners into
tenant farmers working for Protestant landlords, many of whom were English,
and generations later these landlords were not viewed as proper
(04:00):
really Irish and were instead described as Anglo Irish constance.
As father had at least a thousand families as tenants,
although some of his tenants managed huge acreages that they
subdivided and then least to other tenants, So he had
these direct tenants and then sort of an indirect pool
of tenants that some of his tenants were managing. A
(04:22):
lot of this property was adjoining Lisadel, but some of
it was in Manchester. To be clear, this entire system
of Protestant landowners managing land that had previously been owned
by Irish Catholics directly was exploitive and unjust, and it
contributed to a lot of problems in Irish history, but
as landlords went, Henry gore Booth had a reputation for
(04:45):
being fair and reasonable. Many Protestant landlords were basically absentee landlords,
but the gore Booth family was in residence at Lisadel
for at least part of every year. Henry gore Booth
also charged lower rents than the market value you and
he ran the whole enterprise in a very organized, thoroughly
documented way, with orderly, up to date bookkeeping. If this
(05:08):
seems like a really low bar kind of is, but
it's also indicative of like how messed up this whole
system was. That like that was the blar that made
a person just be seen as a good landlord. He
also did seem to treat his tenants pretty compassionately, if
also paternalistically. In the late eighteen seventies, just a couple
(05:31):
of decades after the Great Famine in Ireland, heavy rains
crossed widespread crop failures, and for a lot of Irish
tenants this meant going to a workhouse and losing their
homes and their land. Many of Henry gore Booth's tenants
still wound up in workhouses, but he arranged for them
to go to one that he personally oversaw without having
(05:52):
to forfeit their lands or their homes to do it.
So it's still a bad situation, but not as bad
as it could have been. The rest of the family
was part of this approach as well. During this same time,
Lady gore Booths, Constance and the older children set up
a food distribution system for the tenants, and they arranged
delivery of straw to homes where there weren't any beds.
(06:14):
Both Constance and Ava tried to be benevolently helpful, and
apparently they were genuine enough about it that they really
endeared themselves to the tenants, who they referred to as
country people. In eighteen eighty six, when Constance turned eighteen,
she spent six months in Italy with a governess before
making her formal debut. She was presented to Queen Victoria
(06:36):
as a debutante on March seventeenth, eighteen eighty seven, which
was during the Queen's Golden Jubilee. Year. After her debut,
Constant spent several seasons in London, where she was always
described as the life of the party. Although she was popular,
her behavior wasn't considered very ladylike. While the other young
women in London tended to be coy and demure, Constance
(06:57):
was vivacious and direct. Those pranks that she liked to
play on people could also be kind of mocking and
mean spirited, which may have turned off some suitors. She
could also be very daring. One night, she actually jumped
out of her carriage to physically get in between two
men who were fighting on the street, calling for other
passers by to come help her break up the bit.
(07:20):
In one oft repeated story from this time in Consences Life,
one night, a male guest at Lisadel was making a
number of unwanted advances toward her, and then he was
seated next to her at dinner. While they were eating,
he put his hand on her knee, and her response
was to pick it up, hold it up for everyone
to see, and exclaim, just look what I have found
(07:42):
in my lap. That's a pretty good story. By the
time she turned twenty five, tensions were high between Constants
and her parents. She was basically a spinster at that point,
and she was seen as an annoyance and a burden
as they were all increasingly at with each other. At home,
Constance started asking to go away to art school, and
(08:04):
she spent more time on art than socializing during her
eighteen season in London. They finally gave her permission to
go to the Slade School in London, which we will
get to. After a quick sponsor break, Constant started studying
(08:25):
art at the Slade School in London in eighteen ninety three.
She still spent a lot of time back home in Slago,
but just being able to have some measure of independence
helped to ease some of the tension between her and
her parents. Constance and her sister Ava started socializing with
lots of artists and writers, including William Butler Yates, who
(08:45):
had ongoing connections with the gore Booth family and with
the part of Ireland that they were living in. In
eight Constance, Ava and their sister Mabel became focused on
the issue of women's suffrage. Together they started a Votes
for Women organization in County Sligo, with Constance serving as president,
Ava as secretary, and Mabel as treasurer. And a speech
(09:10):
at one of their meetings, Constance posed the question of why,
if women were so incompetent, had there been no enormous
uprising against Queen Victoria. She also argued against organizations having
separate auxiliary units just for women, because doing so set
up women as a separate class from men. In Constance
(09:31):
continued her study of art by moving to Paris to
study at a studio run by Rodolph Julienne. She was
at this point completely dedicated to this study, even wearing
a wedding ring to symbolize that she was married to art.
But not long after arriving in Paris, she met Polish
playwright and artist Count Kasimir Markovic. Constance and Kasimir were
(09:53):
immediately taken with each other. He was tall and handsome
and six years younger than she was. He was also
a very good painter. He was, being from Poland, very
unlike most of the people that she had known in
her life. He was also married, although his wife died
in eighteen ninety nine, just a few weeks after he
and Constance met. By the time Kasimir's wife died, he
(10:16):
and Constance were already quite close. They had a passionate
romance that involved lots of bicycling and at one point
a duel that Kasimir fought to defend Constance's honor after
someone insulted her at a costume ball. On September twenty
nine hundred, they got married. Constance's younger sister, Mabel, who
had been engaged for years, also got married not long after,
(10:39):
suggesting that the family was traditional enough to insist that
the oldest daughter get married before the younger ones. Although
Kasimir styled himself as a count, it is not completely
clear whether he actually was one if he did have
some kind of title, he did not have a lot
of money, and even though Constance came from quite a
(11:00):
lot of money, her father had died in January of
nineteen hundred and virtually the entire estate was settled on
her brother. So as the newlywed couple divided their time
among Paris, Lisadel, and the Markovic family estates in Poland,
they mostly did it with the financial help of the family.
On November nineteen o one, they had a daughter named Mayev.
(11:22):
In nineteen o three, the Markovic family moved to a
home in wrath Guar, which was at the time its
own village but today is a suburb of Dublin. Constance's
mother had secured the house for them and was also
largely raising young mave Stanislaus the count's son by his
first marriage, moved into the wrath Car home and may
have visited from time to time. While living in Ireland,
(11:46):
Constance and Casimir started spending more and more time among
artistic and literary circles, and they joined an art society
with William Butler, Yates and George A. E. Russell, and
Constance became increasingly interested in Irish nationalism. She met maud Gonne,
who was the founder of the Irish nationalist women's organization
Daughters of Ireland, and started becoming involved in other nationalist organizations.
(12:12):
At first, Constance's involvement in Irish nationalism was viewed with suspicion.
It didn't make a lot of sense that the oldest
daughter of an ascendancy family would take the side of
Irish nationalists at all. After all, she was part of
a minority ruling class that was almost the exact opposite
of the idea of a free, independent Ireland. Aside from Ava,
(12:34):
her relatives didn't approve of the connections she was making,
and those connections suspected she was really a spy. She
stuck with it, though, even as she and Kasimir started
to drift apart. When they met They had both had
a tremendous passion for art and common and now Constance's
passion was becoming Irish nationalism and fighting for a free Ireland.
(12:57):
And this was a passion that Kasimir just didn't share.
You wouldn't necessarily think he would share it. He was
not Irish. Earlier in their marriage, Constance had styled herself
as a countess because she had married a count, but
as they grew apart, she started calling herself madam, which
was a fashionable thing to do among women in the movement.
(13:18):
In the early nineteen hundreds, there were several different nationalists
and separatist organizations operating in Ireland who wanted Ireland to
be independent from the British Empire. In nineteen o five,
Arthur Griffith established shin Fayne meaning We Ourselves or Ourselves Alone,
which absorbed some of these organizations. Constance began attending shin
(13:40):
Fayne meetings in nineteen o eight, and she joined its
council in nineteen o nine. Also in nineteen o nine,
she co founded Nafena Aaron also known as just the Fienna,
which was an Irish nationalist scouting organization for boys. Part
of its purpose was paramilitary. They were training boys and
marksmanship and drill and basically preparing them to join nationalists
(14:03):
and Republican militia as they got older. A lot of
these boys were living in extreme poverty and thinking that
a country life would help them. Constance least a large
country house and basically operated it as a commune for them.
Sometimes the Fenna was known to pick fights with some
of the more affluent Anglo Irish boys and more wealthy neighborhoods,
(14:25):
which was something that Constance tacitly allowed. Throughout all of this,
Constance also became more serious about feminism, but she didn't
see this issue as separate from Irish nationalism. From her
point of view, it would do no good for women
to have the right to vote if Ireland did not
have its own parliament to represent them. And it wasn't
(14:45):
just about having the right to vote because that was
the right men had. Every person who had the right
to vote needed to be making an active and positive
contribution to the society they were living in. So she
thought Ireland needed to be its own free nation, and
that a free Ireland also needed to incorporate equal rights
for women as its core identity. As a nation. She
(15:09):
also felt that a free Ireland needed to be free
of the kinds of wealth disparities that she had personally
benefited from for her whole life. So in reality, Constance's
political views united feminism, socialism, and Irish nationalism all into
one package. And in this work Constance gave speeches she
(15:30):
wrote and edited for a feminist journal. In nineteen ten,
she demonstrated against a visit of King George the Fifth
and Queen Mary, avoiding arrest herself but having to bail
out one of her friends and later testify that she,
not the man on trial, was the one who had
burned a flag in protest. This, by the way, did
not sway the court, and the man in question went
(15:51):
to prison. In nineteen twelve, Constants and some of her
friends started serving Irish stew to school children, both to
feed them because they were living in poverty, and also
to draw attention to the fact that a law that
was allowing local authorities to provide school lunches had been
written not to include Ireland, where a disproportionate number of
(16:11):
school children were living in poverty. She did similar work
during the nineteen thirteen Dublin lockout. This was a massive
labor dispute in which companies responded to growing efforts to
unionize by locking employees out of their jobs. This dispute
started at the Dublin United Tramway Company and then spread
out through other industries. Eventually, about twenty thousand workers in
(16:34):
Dublin had been locked out of their jobs, and violent
clashes between workers and police were ongoing. Constance Markovich and
Delia Larkin, who was the sister of labor organizer James Larkin,
ran a soup kitchen during this lockout that fed about
three thousand people a day. By August thirteen, James Larkin
(16:55):
was a wanted man. He stayed at the Markovitch home
on August that year here and then the next day
Constance and some others helps to smuggle him past police
presence so that he could make a promised public appearance.
That appearance did not last long, though, He got onto
a balcony at the Imperial Hotel, where police promptly spotted
(17:15):
him and arrested him. When Larkin was being escorted to
a police car, Constance went to tell him goodbye and
good luck, and a police officer struck her in the
face with the baton. This sparked a melee between police
and workers in which two men were killed with police
batons and more than four hundred people, including both workers
(17:36):
and police, were injured. This incident became one of several
days in history known as Bloody Sunday. Anytime somebody sends
us a message asking if we will do a podcast
on Bloody Sunday, I have to ask which one? There
are so many that there are in fact two in
this episode. The Doublin Lockout is often cited as one
(17:56):
of the precursors to the nineteen sixteen Easter Rising, which
we're going to touch on after a sponsor break. Constance
Markovitch continued her work with the Soup Kitchen during the
remainder of the Dublin Lockout, which ended unsuccessfully, at least
from the workers point of view in nineteen fourteen. Basically
(18:19):
at that point everyone was returning for work having gotten
none of the improvements that they were trying to campaign for.
By then, her marriage to Casimir Markovitch was basically over.
Their split was amicable, though, and he left Ireland in
nineteen thirteen to take a position as a war correspondent.
Tensions in Ireland were continuing to escalate. The Government of
(18:42):
Ireland Act was given Royal assent on September eighteenth, nineteen fourteen,
which was intended to give Ireland home rule within the
United Kingdom, but on the same day the Suspensary Act
of nineteen fourteen delayed the Government of Ireland Act from
being put into effect because of World War One, and
no one in Ireland was happy with this situation. Unionists
(19:04):
who wanted to remain part of Great Britain objected to
the Government of Ireland Act in general, as did the
Radical Republicans who wanted Ireland to be independent, and the
Moderate faction, who were happy for Ireland to be part
of the UK as long as they had home rule,
were angry that the Government of Ireland Act had been delayed.
This conflict, which I mean this had been building for years,
(19:28):
eventually led to the nineteen sixteen Easter Rising, which was
an armed uprising against British rule in Ireland. Our previous
episode has more detail on the rising itself. Constance Markovitch
joined the Irish Citizen Army and acted as a liaison
officer during the Easter Rising. She also acted as a
sniper and when she was finally arrested, she famously kissed
(19:51):
her pistol before surrendering it. Markovitch was one of many
women who took part in the Easter Rising, but she
was the only one who was court mark shold. Afterward,
she was kept in a cell by herself, and while
she was awaiting sentence, she and all the other prisoners
could hear the executions of those who had been sentenced
to death being carried out every morning. In the end,
(20:13):
she was found guilty and sentenced to death, but her
sentence was commuted to life in prison with hard labor
on account of her gender. When she was given the news,
she said she'd wish they'd had the decency to shoot her. Eventually,
she was moved to Mountjoy Jail, where she could no
longer hear her compatriots being executed every morning, and where
(20:34):
her family could visit her. When her sister brought her
the news that James Connolly, who was one of the
most prominent figures in the rising, somebody she had been
working with for a long time, had been executed, Constance asked,
why didn't they let me die with my friends. Authorities
were worried that Constance would develop a following if she
was kept in a prison in Ireland, so she was
(20:56):
transferred to a prison in England, where she was placed
in the General Prison pop Relation. She and the other
incarcerated women were housed in squalor, only allowed to write
one letter a month, and fed barely enough to keep
them alive. While in prison, she converted to Catholicism. Most
of the surviving participants in the Easter Rising were released
(21:17):
from prison in the spring of nineteen seventeen. Constance was
released on June eighteenth of that year. She returned to
Dublin to a hero's welcome and was formally received into
the Catholic Church a week later, though she was being
treated as a celebrity. Markovic picked right up where she
had left off. She continued to be involved in numerous organizations,
(21:38):
including being president of kumin Aman, chief scout of the Fiena,
a major of the Irish Citizen Army, on and on.
She was also elected to the Shenfean Executive Council and
soon she and other members were back in prison, partly
because of anti conscription activities. Again this was during World
War One, and partly because the British government just didn't
(22:00):
think it was possible to both fight World War One
and fight Irish nationalists at the same time, so they
imprisoned all the movements leaders. This time, though she was
treated as a political prisoner rather than being in the
general prison population. A general election was called in the
United Kingdom immediately after the end of World War One.
(22:21):
It was held on December fourteenth, nineteen eighteen. Shin Fayn
ran Constance Markovic as its candidate for the St Patrick
division of Dublin. She won by a wide margin, defeating
an incumbent of twenty six years and becoming the first
woman to be elected as a member of Parliament. She
was at the time in prison. In spite of half
(22:42):
of its candidates being incarcerated at the time, seventy three
members of shin Fain were elected in nineteen eighteen. They
defeated candidates from the Irish Parliamentary Party in almost all
of Ireland. This was a huge upset. Those who were free,
which was a portion of them were not in prison
at the time, didn't take their their seats in Westminster,
(23:05):
though in Parliament convened. Instead, they formed the First Doyle,
which was basically a parliament for the Irish Republic. Amon
de Valera, who had been a leader in the Easter Rising,
had been spared execution because he was an American citizen,
meaning that he wasn't guilty of treason. He was elected
president of the Doyle and he made Markovic, who is
(23:26):
still in prison, his Minister of Labor. She was finally
released from prison in March of nineteen nineteen. She and
the other She and the other members of the movement
who were imprisoned were basically released out of the fear
of the ongoing flu pandemic. Officials were worried that if
they contracted influenza and died in prison, they would all
(23:47):
become martyrs. By this point, guerrilla warfare had been underway
for months and what became known as the Irish War
of Independence or the Anglo Irish War. As Minister of
Labor cons since kept strict security procedures, instituted a labor
court to resolve disputes, and basically tried to mediate between
Shinfane and the Labor Party. Her Department of Labor worked
(24:10):
out of a building that claimed to be an apartment
leasing office and also contained several pianos, so people working
there could pretend to be giving piano lessons if there
was a police raid, does make it super clear what
was going on. Uh. Rather than joining the rest of
the members of Parliament and the regular British Parliament, they
(24:32):
had founded their own parliament, which they were having to
operate in secret because it wasn't actually legal for them
to be doing it, and at some points various members
of that parliament were doing so from prison. I find
this whole thing fascinating. So Conserence was arrested again in
October of nineteen nineteen. During all of this, by that point,
(24:54):
the Doyle and most of the organizations that she was
involved with had all been outlawed after her. At least,
she managed to run the Department of Labor while in
hiding for several months before being arrested once again in
September of nineteen twenty when the car that she was
riding in was pulled over by police. This time, while
in prison, she learned to speak Irish. This is that
(25:17):
moment I've had several but it's that moment when I
was looking over this earlier where I'm like, she was
born a rich, spoiled girl. Yes, we're gonna talk about
that a little bit more at the end. Yeah, it's
just it's one of those times where you particularly these
times in prison that clearly were very transformative for her.
(25:37):
I'm always like, this is so far removed from probably
what anyone who knew her as a child thought her
life path would be. Throughout all of this violence was
going on in Ireland, including another Bloody Sunday, this one
on November twenty one, which started with the assassination of
several British intelligence officers in Dublin and ended with the
(25:58):
Royal Irish Constabulary British Auxiliary Division police killing at least
thirteen spectators during a Gaelic football match. On December twenty nine,
Parliament passed the Government of Ireland Acts that attempted to
partition Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, with two
separate parliaments that each had two different home rule jurisdictions,
(26:21):
but because of this ongoing violence and the Irish War
of Independence, this never really went into effect in the
southern part of Ireland. Instead, just under a year later,
after lengthy negotiations, representatives of the British Government and of
the Irish Republic signed the Anglo Irish Treaty, which established
what had formally been designated as Southern Ireland as the
(26:45):
Irish Free State Constance. Markovic, Aimon de Valera and many
other Irish nationalists did not agree with this treaty. They
wanted Ireland to be its own self governing republic, but
the Anglo Irish Treaty set up an Irish free state
within the British Empire. Members of the Free States Parliament
(27:06):
were also required to take an oath of allegiance to
the Crown, which its most nationalist members, including Markovitch, refused
to do. There was a walkout of like this. The
treaty was ultimately passed on the Irish side by a
kind of narrow majority, and there was a mass walkout
of the people who didn't agree with it after it
(27:27):
had been signed. Markovitch left Ireland for a time after
the signing of the Anglo Irish Treaty. She traveled both
to Paris and then to the United States, and there
she went on a lecture tour to support total Irish independence.
When she got home, she found that Ireland once again
was being struck by violence, now in the Irish Civil War,
(27:48):
which was between Irish Republicans and Irish nationalists. These are
people that had previously been mostly on the same side,
now against one another. Markovitch, who was now fifty four,
joined the nationalist cause once again, taking up arms as
a sniper. In ninety three, she was arrested and imprisoned again.
(28:10):
Many of the Irish nationalists imprisoned at the time had
started a hunger strike, which Markovitch joined as soon as
she was incarcerated. She fasted for three days, at which
point the strike was called off because of the death
of one of the participants. She was released from her
final incarceration on Christmas Eve nine. Out of prison, Constance
(28:31):
Markovitch was really disappointed in what Ireland had become. She
had envisioned a free Ireland that would be a radical
workers democracy, and instead they add this Irish free state
that was still part of the British Empire, even to
the point of having to have an oath of allegiance
to the Crown if you were going to be a
member of its parliament. She was also disappointed that a
(28:54):
lot of the social hierarchies were in place now as
had been before. She started turning her attention to local
politics and service, including working with the Wrath Minds Urban
Council to build wash houses and public baths to serve
the four hundred thousand residents who did not have running
water in their homes. In ninety six, she joined Phiena Foil,
(29:14):
the newly established Irish Republican Party, which had split off
from shin Fain. She continued to be politically active for
the rest of her life. She died in Dublin on
July fifteenth, nine seven, not long after she had had
an appendectomy. Casimir and Stanislaus were both with her when
she died, although at that point she was estranged from
(29:35):
her daughter Mayeve. Her sister Ava died the year before,
having spent most of her life dedicated to social and
political issues, working with her lifelong partner Esther Roper, who
she had been with since eighteen ninety six. Constance's funeral
was attended by thousands of people, with a procession that
took hours to pass. After her death and really before. Frankly,
(29:58):
people had a lot of disparaiting comments to make about
Constance Markovitch. Playwright Sean O'Casey, who was in the Irish
Citizen Army with her, called her a quote Catherine Wheel
of irresponsibility. Judge William Evelyn Wiley, who was present at
her court martial, later on wrote of it, saying that
she had curled up completely and cried a lot and
(30:21):
said things like I'm only a woman and you cannot
shoot a woman, basically moaning the whole time. Official court
records say the opposite. They say that she actually stood
up to the court. In her account, she said in
court that she had fought for Ireland's independence during Easter
Week and was as ready to die for it now
as she had been then. Her correspondence during her incarcerations,
(30:44):
which were I mean this correspondence was consistently steadfast and
resolute and sometimes even optimistic, also suggests that like a
teary breakdown and a bunch of moaning in court would
have been completely out of character for her. Basically, in
the years after her she was criticized as being a
rich dilettante who was just doing all of this work
for attention. There are, of course, some very legitimate conversations
(31:08):
to be had about her work, like whether it is
right to arm young boys and indoctrinate them as a
separatist paramilitary unit, or whether her unyielding insistence on total
independence for Ireland was ultimately divisive. I was not what
a lot of the criticism was about, though it was about, uh,
but what she wore, that she had in my nice
(31:29):
uniform made for herself, that she had a portrait made
of herself with her gun. Like. People made a big
deal out of things that she was wearing and the
way that she talked, and the fact that she had
come from rich affluence. Uh. And the whole only doing
it for attention claim, I think is one that you
mainly hear about women and children. Uh, and also doesn't
(31:52):
really jive with having gone to prison repeatedly and been
on hunger strikes and done hard labor. Like none of
that really adds up to, oh, just doing it for attention,
which is gendered and dismissive comments make in the first place. Uh.
Some of the criticisms along those lines have softened in
(32:16):
the decades since her death, and a portrait of her
was presented to the Speaker of the House of Commons
on February. At least it was announced that was going
to happen. I did not find an article saying that, yes,
it actually did. Um. It was part The presentation of
that portrait was part of the year long celebration of
the Representation of the People Act of nineteen eighteen, which
(32:39):
became law on February sixth of that year and gave
um all men over twenty one and all women property
owners over the edge of thirty the right to vote.
So it was part of a suffrage celebration. Do you
have a listener mail for us? I knew I have
listener mail that came from a parcel because I had
(33:01):
the uh, the opportunity to be the one opening the
mail recently, which doesn't happen all that often. It's from Angela,
and it's a long letter, so I'm not going to
read all of it. But Angela starts by saying, first
of all, thank you so much for all the work
you do. I have so much fun listening to all
the gems of information that you share with us on
the podcast. I feel like a long time listener, even
(33:22):
though I've only been listening for about six months. And
then she goes on to talk about where she works
and why she sent us delicious grandola. Thank you for
the delicious grandola. Fortunately I was able to get the
granola through airport security. Uh, there was a granola bag search.
(33:46):
Angela goes on to say that she has been listening
to all of the podcasts in order, which is a
feat and I salute you. She's currently at the end
of and she sent a few thoughts about the prior
episodes on Cokia and on the Ghost Army, and then
went on to say, I would also like to take
a moment to thank you for the episodes on Frankie
Manning and the Lyndy Hoppers. I've been part of a
(34:07):
ballroom dance world for the last six or seven years,
so hearing about the history of dances in that sphere
was amazing. You would think that after spending that much
time enjoying East Coast swing with various other styles of dance,
that I would have at least learned about the origins
of swing being an African American culture, But no, I
feel ashamed to admit that until that point I had
always associated big band music and swing dance with Fred
(34:28):
Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Thank you for enlightening me to
something that I not only missed in history class, but
in dance class as well. She talks a bit more
and concludes, thank you again for all the hard work
you put introducing the podcast. You really make history come
alive in such an enjoyable way. The broad spectrum of
subjects you cover our mind blowing and I love it.
(34:51):
In fact, a couple of weeks ago, I found out
that my grandfather is a great grand student of Franz
List and the only reason I knew that was because
of your show. This letter ended up being longer than
I intended, but I just love you, ladies and everything
you do. Keep it up, cheers, Angela. Thank you so much,
Angela uh for this I um. I admire the fortitude
(35:15):
of people who were listening to the entire show all
the way through the archive, and I also loved it.
Sometimes it gives us a chance to revisit old episodes
in listener mail. And also thank you again for the granola. Uh.
I love granola. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast where History podcasts
at how staff works dot com. Our social media is
(35:35):
also missed in history, and that is at Facebook and
Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram. You can come to our
website which is missed in history dot com and you
will find a searchable archive of every episode we have
ever done, and show notes for all the oppisodes that
Holly and I have ever done, and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Play, and wherever
else you listen to podcasts. For more on this and
(36:03):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com
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Tracy Wilson
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