Constance Georgine Markievicz (Polish: Markiewicz [marˈkʲɛvitʂ]; née Gore-Booth; 4 February 1868 – 15 July 1927), also known as Countess Markievicz and Madame Markievicz, was an Irish republican politician, suffragist, socialist and labour activist who was the first woman elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Born into the Anglo-Irish ruling-class, Markievicz abandoned her social position in favour of Irish independence and social reform. A founding member of Fianna Éireann, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Citizen Army, she took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, when Irish republicans attempted to end British rule and establish an Irish Republic. She was sentenced to death but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of her sex.
On 28 December 1918, at the 1918 general election (while in Holloway Prison), she became the first woman elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom; in accordance with the abstentionist policy of the Sinn Féin manifesto, she did not take her seat on her release, serving as a TD in the revolutionary Dáil Éireann. She served as a TD for Dublin St Patrick's from 1918 to 1921, and for Dublin South from 1921 to 1922. She served as Minister for Labour in the Ministry of Dáil Éireann from 1919 to 1922, becoming the second female cabinet minister in Europe. She served again as a TD for Dublin South constituency 1923 until her death in 1927.
Markievicz opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and supported the Anti-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War. She left Sinn Féin in 1926 to become a founding member of Fianna Fáil.
Markievicz was born Constance Georgine Gore-Booth on 4 February 1868 at 7 Buckingham Gate, London to Henry Gore-Booth (later Sir Henry Gore-Booth, 5th Baronet) and Georgina Mary Gore-Booth (née Hill, later Lady Georgina Gore-Booth). Markievicz's father was an Anglo-Irish arctic explorer and later landowner and landlord of Lissadell House, and her mother was British and founded the Lissadell School of needlework. Following the death of her paternal grandfather Sir Robert Gore-Booth, 4th Baronet in 1876, Markievicz's father became the 5th Baronet of Artarman and took over the running of the family estate.
The eldest of five siblings, Markievicz was the sister of the poet and labour activist Eva Gore-Booth. During the Irish Famine of 1879, Markievicz's father reinstated the Carney and Drumcliffe Relief Committees and provided free food donations to his tenants. Their father's example inspired in Gore-Booth and her younger sister, Eva, a deep concern for working people and the poor. The sisters were childhood friends of the poet W. B. Yeats, who frequently visited the family home Lissadell House, and were influenced by his artistic and political ideas. Yeats wrote a poem, "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz", in which he described the sisters as "two girls in silk kimono, both beautiful, one a gazelle", the gazelle being Eva, whom Yeats described as having "a gazelle-like beauty". Eva later became involved in the labour movement and women's suffrage in Great Britain, although initially Constance did not share her sister's ideals.
Gore-Booth wished to train as a painter, to her family's dismay; in 1892, she went to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where she lived at the Alexandra House for Art Pupils, Kensington Gore, founded five years before by Sir Francis Cook, a wealthy great-uncle of Maud Gonne. One of her contemporaries there was Blanche Georgiana Vulliamy. It was at this time that Gore-Booth first became politically active and joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Later she moved to Paris and enrolled at the prestigious Académie Julian where she met her future husband, Casimir Markievicz (Kazimierz Markiewicz) an artist from a wealthy Polish landowning family in present-day Ukraine (then under the rule of the Russian Empire).
The Markieviczes (or Markiewiczes) settled in Dublin in 1903 and moved in artistic and literary circles, with Constance gaining a reputation as a landscape painter. In 1905, along with artists Sarah Purser, Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne and John Butler Yeats, she was instrumental in founding the United Arts Club, which was an attempt to bring together all those in Dublin with an artistic and literary bent. This group included the leading figures of the Gaelic League founded by the future first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. Although formally concerned only with the preservation of the Irish language and culture, the league brought together many patriots and future political leaders. Sarah Purser, whom the young Gore-Booth sisters first met in 1882, when she was commissioned to paint their portrait, hosted a regular salon where artists, writers and intellectuals on both sides of the nationalist divide gathered. At Purser's house, Markievicz met revolutionary patriots Michael Davitt, John O'Leary and Maud Gonne. In 1907, Markievicz rented a cottage in the countryside near Dublin. The previous tenant, the poet Padraic Colum, had left behind copies of The Peasant and Sinn Féin. These revolutionary journals promoted independence from British rule. Markievicz read them and was propelled into action.
In 1908, Markievicz became actively involved in nationalist politics in Ireland. She joined Sinn Féin and Inghinidhe na hÉireann ("Daughters of Ireland"), a revolutionary women's movement founded by the actress and activist Maud Gonne, muse of W. B. Yeats. Markievicz came directly to her first meeting from a function at Dublin Castle, the seat of British rule in Ireland, wearing a satin ball gown and a diamond tiara. This refreshing change from being "kowtowed"-to as a countess only made her more eager to join, she told her friend Helena Molony. She performed with Maud Gonne in several plays at the newly established Abbey Theatre, an institution that played an important part in the rise of cultural nationalism. In the same year, Markievicz played a dramatic role in the women's suffrage campaigners' tactic of opposing Winston Churchill during the 1908 Manchester North West by-election, flamboyantly appearing in the constituency driving an old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white horses to promote the suffragist cause. A male heckler asked her if she could cook a dinner, to which she responded, "Yes. Can you drive a coach and four?" Her sister Eva had moved to Manchester to live with fellow suffragist Esther Roper and they both campaigned against the anti-suffragist Churchill with her. Churchill lost the election to Conservative candidate William Joynson-Hicks, in part as a result of the suffragists' dedicated opposition.
In 1909 Markievicz founded Fianna Éireann, a nationalist scouting organisation that instructed teenage boys in scouting, in the style of Robert Baden-Powell's then-paramilitary Boy Scouts. At the Fianna's first meeting in Camden Street, Dublin, on 16 August 1909, she was almost expelled on the basis that women did not belong in a physical force movement. She had drawn in Bulmer Hobson, who had earlier founded a less successful boy scout group in Belfast. He supported her and she was elected to the committee. She was jailed for the first time in 1911 for speaking at an Irish Republican Brotherhood demonstration attended by 30,000 people, organised to protest against George V's visit to Ireland. During this protest, Markievicz handed out leaflets, erected great banners emblazoned "Dear land thou art not conquered yet", participated in stone-throwing at pictures of the King and Queen and attempted to burn the giant British flag taken from Leinster House, eventually succeeding, but then seeing James McArdle imprisoned for one month for the incident, despite Markievicz testifying in court that she was responsible. Her friend Helena Molony was arrested for her part in the stone-throwing and became the first woman in Ireland to be tried and imprisoned for a political act since the time of the Ladies' Land League.