Hello, and Happy Saturday. Constance Markovitch was born a hundred and fifty five years ago on February four, eight sixty eight. She was an Irish political activist and the first woman elected to the British Parliament and played a role in the Easter Rising of nineteen sixteen. When we originally aired this episode, we've re aired our prior episode on the Easter Rising as a Saturday Classics shortly beforehand. We are not doing that this time around, since at least so far, we haven't really been repeating Saturday Classics, but just for folks who are interested in more on that part of her story, it is still in our feed. It originally aired on April. This episode originally aired on March nineteen Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back in and also as our most recent Saturday Classic, we 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 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 requests 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 was a lot of conflict in Ireland during this period of history, and Constance Markovitch 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 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 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, so she was always closest to her sister Ava, who was two years younger. Constance grew up and was educated at Lisadell House. Although her mother was from Yorkshire. On her father's side, the family had lived in this of Ireland since sixty one. That was when Paul Gore was made a baronet and granted part of the land that would become Lisadella 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 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, 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. Constance and her family were part of the Protestant Ascendancy, and this was a term that 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. 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 properly Irish and were instead described as Anglo Irish. Constance's father had at least a thousand families as tenants, although some of his tenants managed huge acreages that they subdi bided and then least two other tenants, so he had these direct tenants and then sort of an indirect pool of tenants that some of his tenants are managing. A lot of this property was adjoining Litadel, 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 exploited and unjust, and it contributed to a lot of problems in Irish history. But as landlords went, Henry gore Booth had a reputation for 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, and he ran the whole enterprise in a very organized thoroughly documented way with orderly, up to date bookkeeping. If this seems like a really low bar kind of is 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 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 to forfeit their lands or their homes to do it. So 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 they weren't any beds. Both Constance and Eva 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 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 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 fight. In one oft repeated story from this time in Constances 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 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 odds with each other at home. Constance started asking to go away to art school, and she spent more time on art than socializing during her eight 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 art at the Slade School in London in eightee. She still spent a lot of time back home in Sligo, 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 had ongoing connections with the gore Booth family and with the part of Ireland that they were living in. In 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 at one of their meeting Constants 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 eight Constance 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 Casimir Markovic. Constance and Casimir were 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 eight ninety nine, just a few weeks after he and Constance met. By the time Kasimir's wife died, he and Constance were already quite close. They had a passionate romance that involved lots of bicycling and at one point, a duel that Casimir fought to defend Constance's honor after someone insulted her at a costume ball. On September hundred, they got married. Constance's younger sister, Mabel, who had been engaged for years, also got married not long after, 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 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 pair riss 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 in common, and now Constance's passion was becoming Irish nationalism and fighting for a free Ireland. 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 account but as they grew apart, she started calling herself madam, which was a fashionable thing to do among women in the movement. 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 chin Fayn meetings in nineteen o eight and she joined its council in nineteen o nine. Also in nineteen o nine, she co founded Nafenna 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 drilling and basically preparing them to join nationalist 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 Fianna was known to pick fights with some of the more affluent Anglo Irish boys and more wealthy neighborhoods, 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 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 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 wrote and edited for a feminist journal in En 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 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 disproportioned a number of school children were living in poverty. She did similar work during the nineteen 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 workers in 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 was a wanted man. He stayed at the Markovitch home on August that year, 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. The he got onto a balcony at the Imperial Hotel, where police promptly spotted 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 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 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 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 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. No one in Ireland was happy with this situation. Unionists who wanted to remain part of Great Britain objected to the Government of Land 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, 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 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 martialed. 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, 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 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 transferred to a prison in England, where she was placed in the general prison population. 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 imprisoned, she converted to Catholicism. Most of the surviving participants in the Easter Rising were released 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, including being president of kuman 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 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. 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 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 the portion of them were not in prison at the time, didn't take their their seats in Westminster, though in Parliament convened. Instead, they formed the First Doyle, which was basically a parliament for the Irish Republic. Aimon 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 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 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, Constance kept strict security procedures, instituted a labor court to resolve disputes, and basically tried to mediate between shin Faine and the Labor Party. Her Department of Labor worked 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 in the regular British Parliament, they 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 Consence was arrested again in October of nineteen nineteen. During all of this. By that point the Doyle and most of the organizations that she was involved with had all been outlawed. After her release, she managed to run the Department of Labor while in hiding for several months before being arrested once again in September of nineteen e 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 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. 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 Royal Irish Constabulary and British Auxiliary Division Police killing at least thirteen spectators during a Gaelic football match. On December ten, twenty 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, 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 formerly been designated as Southern Ireland as the 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 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 walk out of like this. This 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 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, 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 nine she was arrested and in prisoned again. 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. Out of prison. Constance 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 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 a hundred thousand residents who did not have running water in their homes. In ninety six, she joined Piena Foil, 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 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, people had a lot of disparaging comments to make about Constance Markovich. 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 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, 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 and court would have been completely out of character for her. Basically, in the years after her death, 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 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 so, what she wore, That she had my nice 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 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 if her attention, which is a gendered and dismissive comment to make in the first place. Uh. Some of the criticisms along those lines have softened in 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 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. Heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hello, and Happy Saturday. Constance Markovitch was born a hundred and fifty five years ago on February four, eight sixty eight. She was an Irish political activist and the first woman elected to the British Parliament and played a role in the Easter Rising of nineteen sixteen. When we originally aired this episode, we've re aired our prior episode on the Easter Rising as a Saturday Classics shortly beforehand. We are not doing that this time around, since at least so far, we haven't really been repeating Saturday Classics, but just for folks who are interested in more on that part of her story, it is still in our feed. It originally aired on April. This episode originally aired on March nineteen Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly fry So. Back in and also as our most recent Saturday Classic, we 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 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 requests 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 was a lot of conflict in Ireland during this period of history, and Constance Markovitch 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 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 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, so she was always closest to her sister Ava, who was two years younger. Constance grew up and was educated at Lisadell House. Although her mother was from Yorkshire. On her father's side, the family had lived in this of Ireland since sixty one. That was when Paul Gore was made a baronet and granted part of the land that would become Lisadella 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 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, 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. Constance and her family were part of the Protestant Ascendancy, and this was a term that 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. 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 properly Irish and were instead described as Anglo Irish. Constance's father had at least a thousand families as tenants, although some of his tenants managed huge acreages that they subdi bided and then least two other tenants, so he had these direct tenants and then sort of an indirect pool of tenants that some of his tenants are managing. A lot of this property was adjoining Litadel, 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 exploited and unjust, and it contributed to a lot of problems in Irish history. But as landlords went, Henry gore Booth had a reputation for 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, and he ran the whole enterprise in a very organized thoroughly documented way with orderly, up to date bookkeeping. If this seems like a really low bar kind of is 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 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 to forfeit their lands or their homes to do it. So 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 they weren't any beds. Both Constance and Eva 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 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 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 fight. In one oft repeated story from this time in Constances 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 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 odds with each other at home. Constance started asking to go away to art school, and she spent more time on art than socializing during her eight 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 art at the Slade School in London in eightee. She still spent a lot of time back home in Sligo, 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 had ongoing connections with the gore Booth family and with the part of Ireland that they were living in. In 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 at one of their meeting Constants 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 eight Constance 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 Casimir Markovic. Constance and Casimir were 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 eight ninety nine, just a few weeks after he and Constance met. By the time Kasimir's wife died, he and Constance were already quite close. They had a passionate romance that involved lots of bicycling and at one point, a duel that Casimir fought to defend Constance's honor after someone insulted her at a costume ball. On September hundred, they got married. Constance's younger sister, Mabel, who had been engaged for years, also got married not long after, 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 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 pair riss 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 in common, and now Constance's passion was becoming Irish nationalism and fighting for a free Ireland. 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 account but as they grew apart, she started calling herself madam, which was a fashionable thing to do among women in the movement. 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 chin Fayn meetings in nineteen o eight and she joined its council in nineteen o nine. Also in nineteen o nine, she co founded Nafenna 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 drilling and basically preparing them to join nationalist 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 Fianna was known to pick fights with some of the more affluent Anglo Irish boys and more wealthy neighborhoods, 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 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 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 wrote and edited for a feminist journal in En 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 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 disproportioned a number of school children were living in poverty. She did similar work during the nineteen 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 workers in 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 was a wanted man. He stayed at the Markovitch home on August that year, 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. The he got onto a balcony at the Imperial Hotel, where police promptly spotted 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 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 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 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 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. No one in Ireland was happy with this situation. Unionists who wanted to remain part of Great Britain objected to the Government of Land 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, 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 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 martialed. 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, 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 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 transferred to a prison in England, where she was placed in the general prison population. 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 imprisoned, she converted to Catholicism. Most of the surviving participants in the Easter Rising were released 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, including being president of kuman 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 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. 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 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 the portion of them were not in prison at the time, didn't take their their seats in Westminster, though in Parliament convened. Instead, they formed the First Doyle, which was basically a parliament for the Irish Republic. Aimon 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 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 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, Constance kept strict security procedures, instituted a labor court to resolve disputes, and basically tried to mediate between shin Faine and the Labor Party. Her Department of Labor worked 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 in the regular British Parliament, they 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 Consence was arrested again in October of nineteen nineteen. During all of this. By that point the Doyle and most of the organizations that she was involved with had all been outlawed. After her release, she managed to run the Department of Labor while in hiding for several months before being arrested once again in September of nineteen e 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 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. 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 Royal Irish Constabulary and British Auxiliary Division Police killing at least thirteen spectators during a Gaelic football match. On December ten, twenty 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, 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 formerly been designated as Southern Ireland as the 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 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 walk out of like this. This 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 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, 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 nine she was arrested and in prisoned again. 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. Out of prison. Constance 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 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 a hundred thousand residents who did not have running water in their homes. In ninety six, she joined Piena Foil, 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 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, people had a lot of disparaging comments to make about Constance Markovich. 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 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, 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 and court would have been completely out of character for her. Basically, in the years after her death, 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 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 so, what she wore, That she had my nice 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 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 if her attention, which is a gendered and dismissive comment to make in the first place. Uh. Some of the criticisms along those lines have softened in 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 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. Heay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.