Back to Basics

A mosaic of Irish revolutionary nationalist politician Constance Markievicz in the People’s History Museum in Manchester. As well as taking an active part in the Easter Rising of 1916, she was a suffragist and socialist, becoming the first woman elected to the UK Parliament, serving as MP for Dublin St Patrick’s from 1918 to 1922.

She was actually born in London into an upper class Anglo-Irish Protestant landowning family, making her embracing of Irish independence and social reform even more impressive.

The quotation is striking in its contrasting of practical clothes with fancy jewellery, and of fripperies with a firearm. The language is very powerful, almost poetic, whatever you think of the justification of violence (which she no doubt considered self-defence under the colonial circumstances). It’s also incomplete and without full context – which tells you a lot about quotations and what you can do them to, to some degree, transform their meaning. (You’d think from the Manchester mosaic she said it on the eve of the Easter Rising.)

The better ideal for women who, whether they like it or not, are living in a work-a-day world, would be — If you want to walk round Ireland, or any other country, dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank, and buy a revolver. Don’t trust to your “feminine charm” and your capacity for getting on the soft side of men, but take up your responsibilities and be prepared to go your own way depending for safety on your own courage, your own truth and your own common sense, and not on the problematic chivalry of the men you may meet on the way. [Women, Ideals and the Nation speech, 28th March 1909 — Students’ National Literary Society, Dublin]

 “I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.”