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Maud Gonne MacBride

1866–1953

 

Constance Gore-Booth,

the Countess Markievicz

1867–1927

 

Given that Irishmen have, in general, a reputation for being male chauvinists, it is all the more remarkable that women have played major parts in all national movements.  Among the most outstanding and charismatic were Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz.  Even more astonishing was the fact that these champions of the poor and the oppressed came from socially privileged backgrounds.

    Constance was born Gore-Booth, of a Sligo landed family (members of which still serve in the British Foreign Service).  She was presented at court in 1887 and hailed as 'the new Irish beauty'.  She wished to become a painter, and was already a friend of W.B. Yeats and others in the Irish literary revival which was making such a heady, creative ferment at the time.  In pursuit of her ambitions as an artist she went to London, and later to Paris.

      In Paris she met and married Casimir Markievicz, a Polish nobleman by whom she had a daughter.  Though he had extensive estates in the Ukraine, they returned to live in Dublin, where they involved themselves in many artistic movements.  The count was a genial man, and with his wife helped to found the Dublin Arts Club.

      Constance, however, became interested in Irish nationalism and joined her friend Maud Gonne in her organization, the Daughters of Eireann, the feminist side of the nationalist cause.  In 1909 she established her own group of boy scouts, Na Fianna, who were taught the use of weapons as well as woodcraft.  Her husband did not find these activities quite so appealing, and returned to the Ukraine.  She never saw him again.

      She was involved in the Lockout of 1913, running a soup kitchen for the workers, who were verging on starvation.  She also took part in the Easter Rising, commanding the garrison which was installed in the College of Surgeons in St Stephen's Green.  She was sentenced to death, but reprieved because she was a woman.

      In the general election of November 1918, she was elected from a Dublin constituency, the first woman ever elected to the British Parliament - itself an historic achievement.  It might have been more notable if she had taken it up, but along with the rest of Sinn Féin, she refused to take her seat in London, and instead was one of those who met in Dublin in January 1919 and proclaimed the independence of the Irish republic to the world.

      She minister of labour in this government, which existed underground during the troubles.  When the war with the British came to an end, she opposed the treaty settlement and supported the republican cause.  She continued in politics, being elected again in 1923 after a defeat in 1922.  Arrested, she went on a hunger strike.  A founding member of Fianna Fáil, she was re-elected to the national assembly in 1926, but by now her activities had undermined her health, and she died on 15th July 1927.

      Maud Gonne, another social beauty, the daughter of a British army officer, was also the beloved of WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8].  But she refused to marry him, and instead devoted her life to the cause of Ireland.  Her love life was centred on a French politician, Lucian Millevoye, an ultra-nationalist supporter of General Georges Boulanger, whom she met in France in 1890 while recuperating from a serious illness.  They became lovers but never married.  By him she had two children, a boy who died, and a girl, Iseult (later Mrs Francis Stuart), who was described for many years as her niece, and who Dublin gossip saw as the daughter of Yeats.

      In Paris she edited a paper which supported Irish extremists and broke with her lover because of his failure to support her cause after Boulanger committed suicide.  She acted as an active gadfly of the period.

      When Queen Victoria visited Dublin in 1900 to thank the Irish for their support of the Boer War, Maud Gonne organized a counter-celebration.  She was still involved with literary matters - she acted in Yeats' play Cathleen Ni Houlihan in 1902.  She married Major John MacBride, who had commanded a Boer unit, and by him had two more children.  However, MacBride was, in Yeats' words, 'a drunken, vainglorious lout', from whom she soon separated.  He was one of those executed after the Rising in 1916.

      Maud worked for the White Cross and ambulance service during the troubles and opposed the treaty.  To the end of her life, she and her family remained deeply involved in republican activities.  She wrote an account of her life, A Servant of the Queen, in 1938 - the queen in question being Ireland rather than Victoria.

      Maud died on 27th April 1953, by which time her son Seán MacBride had risen to be foreign minister for Ireland, after a controversial career in republican politics.  It was his government that finally declared Ireland a republic and took it out of the commonwealth.  Her funeral was attended by huge crowds, gathered not only to see the passing of the grand dame of Irish politics, but the woman whose beauty in her youth had captured the heart of Ireland's greatest poet, W.B. Yeats.

      These two women, in very different ways, are representative of thousands of others who were involved with the labour and republican causes in Ireland and America.  At a time when women were seen as secondary figures, they created their own organizations and gathered their own followers.  For a while they were a significant force in Irish life and politics, and generations of women after them were less content with their conventional roles.  The Irish constitution of 1937, which recognized the special place of women as being in the home, seemed to many radicals to be a snub to the achievements of gallant women like Maud Gonne and Countess Markievicz, with men once again claiming the political arena exclusively for themselves.  When the women's liberation movement came to Ireland in the late 1960s, however, it was to Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz that it turned for role models.  They remain icons of the women's movement to this day.