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Today (Feb 4) marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the first woman elected to the British parliament! This was in the general election of December 1918, at the end of WW1. No, not a Tory reactionary, but an Irish revolutionary - Constance Markievicz. She was in jail at the time in London. She had been second-in-command lof the insurrectionary forces at Stephen's Green during the 1916 Rebellion in Dublin; after the surrender she was tried by court-martial and sentenced to death, commuted to penal servitidue for life on account of being a woman. The British were subsequently forced to release the prisoners, from the end of 1916 to mid-1917. Considered one of the hardest of the hard-core, she was in the very last group of prisoners to be released, returning to an ecstatis welcome in Dublin. In May 1918 she was arrested for sedition and again imprisoned in England. It was here that she ran for parliament. She stood on a platform of independence and radical social change in Ireland and not taking her seat at Westminster if elected. In that election, 73 seats were won by people who said they wouldn't take their seat at Westminster if elected. Markievicz was the founder of the very first republican paramilitary organisation of the 20th century, Na Fianna Eireann. She was one of the founding leaders, a few years later, of a workers' militia, described by Lenin as "Europe's first Red Army". And she subsequently led the women's wing of the Irish Republican Army, Cumann na mBan. She opposed the "Anglo-Irish Treaty" of Dec 1921, arguing that it was an attempt by the ruling classes of England and Ireland to prevent the unity of British and Irish workers and a betrayal of the masses of countries like India and Egypt who were still struggling to free themselves from the yoke of British imperialism. Here is Markievicz's speech against the Treaty, delivered in the Irish parliament, where she was minister of labour at the time. https://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/markievicz-speech-against-the-1921-treaty/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
