Constance Georgine Markievicz (February 4, 1868 – July 15, 1927)

Constance Georgine Markievicz played an active part in the Easter Rising of 1916 and in post-1916 Irish history. Born in 1868 as Constance Gore-Booth, Countess Markievicz was sentenced to death for her part in the Easter Uprising but had the sentence commuted to life imprisonment on account of her gender.

Countess Markievicz was born in London into a wealthy family that had a large estate in County Sligo. Her father, Sir Henry Gore-Booth, was an explorer, but unlike many landowners in Ireland, he treated his tenants with concern. Therefore, Markievicz was brought up in a household that showed care and concern to those on the family estate in Lissadell. Her sister, Eva, would later involve herself in the labour movement in England - and women's suffrage. The future countess did not share, at this time, her sister's aspirations. Constance wanted to be an artist and in 1893, she went to London to study art at the Slade School. In 1898, she continued her studies at the Julian School in Paris. It was here that she met Count Casimir Dunin Markievicz. He was from a wealthy Polish family but was already married when he met Constance. However, his wife died in 1899 and he married Constance in 1901 making her Countess Markievicz.

In 1903, the couple moved to Dublin and the Countess gained a reputation for herself as a landscape artist. In 1905, the Countess founded and funded the United Artists Club which was an attempt to bring together all those in Dublin with an artistic bent. At this moment in time there was nothing tangible to link her to basic politics, let alone a drive for Ireland's independence from British rule. Then in 1906, something happened which pushed the Countess headlong into Irish politics and away from art. In 1906, she rented out a small cottage in the countryside around Dublin. The person who had previously rented it was a poet called Pádraic Colum. He had left behind old copies of 'The Peasant and Sinn Fein'. This was a revolutionary publication that pushed for independence from British rule. The Countess read those publications that were left behind and was taken in by what they wanted.

In 1908, the Countess became actively involved in nationalist politics in Ireland. She joined Sinn Fein and Inghinidhe na hEerann - a women's movement. In the same year, the Countess stood for Parliament. She contested the Manchester constituency where her most famous opponent was Winston Churchill. The Countess lost the election but in the space of two years she had gone from a life oriented around art to a life oriented around Irish politics and independence in particular.

In 1909, she founded Fianna Éireann which was a form of Boy Scouts but with a military input, including the use of firearms. Patrick Pearse said that the creation of Fianna Éireann was as important as the creation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913. In 1911, the Countess was jailed for the first time for her part in the demonstrations that took place against the visit of George V. In the lock-out of 1913, she ran a soup kitchen to aid those who who could not afford food.

When war broke out in August 1914, many in Ireland were happy to support the suspension of Home Rule until the war was over. Thousands of Irishmen volunteered to fight in Britain's hour of need. However, a hard core of people were not prepared to accept this situation and they were willing to use Britain's involvement in the war as an opportunity they could exploit. This led to the Easter Uprising of 1916 and it was almost natural for the Countess to have got involved.

The Countess played a very active role in the fighting that took place in Dublin. Having joined James Connolly's Citizen Army, she was second in command at St. Stephen's Green. Those who fought there held out for six days and surrendered only when they were given a copy of the surrender order signed by Patrick Pearse. Ironically, the British officer (Capt. Wheeler) who accepted their surrender was a distant relative of the Countess. As with many of the arrested rebels when they were paraded through the streets of Dublin, the Countess was verbally abused by Dubliners who had seen part of their city devastated.

The Countess was not the only women arrested at the end of the rebellion. In total, 70 women were but the Countess was the only one held in solitary confinement at Kilmainham Jail. It is possible that the British authorities believed that by herself she was less of a problem; allowed to socialise with other women at the prison, she might be a source of trouble. However, from her cell the Countess could hear the firing squads. She was brought before a court martial and sentenced to death. She effectively admitted her guilt by saying:

"I did what was right and I stand by it."

 However, General Maxwell, the officer commanding the court martial procedure, commuted her sentence to life in prison on account of the fact that she was female. When she was told the news, she said:

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

The Countess was released from prison in 1917, along with others involved in the Uprising, as the government in London granted a General Amnesty for those involved in the Easter Uprising. However, her experiences did nothing to dampen her involvement in politics. In 1918, she was jailed again for her part in anti-conscription activities. While in prison she was elected an MP standing as a Sinn Fein candidate. The Countess refused to take up her seat as it would have involved swearing an oath of allegiance to the king. During the Anglo-Irish War, she was either on the run from the British authorities or she was, once again, in prison. She was a staunch opponent of the 1921 Treaty which gave Ireland dominion status within the British Empire. The Countess referred to those who supported the treaty as "traitors". Michael Collins, the man who signed the treaty, claimed that she could never understand the rationale behind the treaty as she was English.

After the civil war in Ireland, she toured America. The Countess was also re-elected to the Dáil but her staunch republican views led her to being sent to jail again. In prison, she and 92 other female prisoners went on hunger strike. Within a month, the Countess was released. The hunger-strikes of the Suffragettes had been a huge embarrassment to the British government before the war. The newly created Dáil could barely afford a similar scandal. In 1926, the Countess joined Fianna Fáil led by Eamonn de Valera. She died in 1927. It is estimated that over 250,000 people lined the streets for her funeral in Dublin and de Valera read the eulogy.

Susan Brownell Anthony (February 15, 1820 – March 13, 1906)

Susan Brownell Anthony was an American social reformer and feminist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Abolitionist

After they moved to Rochester in 1845, members of the Anthony family were active in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-slavery Quakers met at their farm almost every Sunday, where they were sometimes joined by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Anthony's brothers Daniel and Merritt were anti-slavery activists in Kansas.

In 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, arranging meetings, making speeches, putting up posters, and distributing leaflets. She encountered hostile mobs, armed threats, and things thrown at her. She was hung in effigy, and in Syracuse her image was dragged through the streets.

In 1863 Anthony and Stanton organized a Women's National Loyal League to support and petition for the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. They went on to campaign for full citizenship for women and people of any race, including the right to vote, in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They were bitterly disappointed and disillusioned when women were excluded. Anthony continued to campaign for equal rights for all American citizens, including people who had been enslaved, in her newspaper The Revolution, which she began publishing in Rochester in 1868. Anthony attacked lynchings and racial prejudice in the Rochester newspapers in the 1890s.

Educational Reformer

In 1846, at age 26, Susan B. Anthony took the position of head of the girls' department at Canajoharie Academy, her first paid position. She taught there for two years, earning $110 a year.

In 1853 at the state teachers' convention Anthony called for women to be admitted to the professions and for better pay for women teachers. She also asked for women to have a voice at the convention and to assume committee positions.

In 1859 Anthony spoke before the state teachers' convention at Troy, N.Y. and at the Massachusetts teachers' convention, arguing for coeducation (boys and girls together) and claiming there were no differences between the minds of men and women.

Anthony called for equal educational opportunities for all regardless of race, and for all schools, colleges, and universities to open their doors to women and people who had been enslaved. She also campaigned for the right of children of people who had been enslaved to be able to attend public schools.

In the 1890s Anthony served on the board of trustees of Rochester's State Industrial School, campaigning for coeducation and equal treatment and opportunity for boys and girls.

In the 1890s Anthony raised $50,000 in pledges to ensure the admittance of women to the University of Rochester. In a last-minute effort to meet the deadline she put up the cash value of her life insurance policy. The University was forced to make good its promise and women were admitted for the first time in 1900.

Labor Activist

Susan B. Anthony's paper The Revolution, first published in 1868, advocated an eight-hour work day and equal pay for equal work. It promoted a policy of purchasing American-made goods and encouraging immigration to rebuild the South and settle the entire country. Publishing The Revolution in New York brought her in contact with women in the printing trades.

In 1868 Anthony encouraged working women from the printing and sewing trades in New York, who were excluded from men's trade unions, to form Workingwomen's Associations. As a delegate to the National Labor Congress in 1868 Anthony persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work, although the men at the conference deleted the reference to the vote.

In 1870 Anthony formed and was elected president of the Workingwomen's Central Association. The Association drew up reports on working conditions and provided educational opportunities for working women. Anthony encouraged a cooperative workshop founded by the Sewing Machine Operators Union and boosted the newly-formed women typesetters' union in The Revolution. Anthony tried to establish trade schools for women printers. When printers in New York went on strike, she urged employers to hire women instead, believing this would show that they could do the job as well as men, and therefore prove that they deserved equal pay. At the 1869 National Labor Union Congress, the men's Typographical Union accused her of strike- breaking and running a non-union shop at The Revolution, and called her an enemy of labor.

In the 1890s, while president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Anthony emphasized the importance of gaining the support of organized labor. She encouraged Florence Kelley and Jane Addams in their work in Chicago, and Gail Laughlin in her goal to seek protection for working women through trade unions.

Temperance Worker

Susan B. Anthony was brought up a Quaker. Her family believed drinking liquor was sinful. While Anthony was working as head of the girls' department of Canajoharie Academy she joined the Daughters of Temperance, a group of women who drew attention to the effects of drunkenness on families and campaigned for stronger liquor laws. She made her first public speech in 1848 at a Daughters of Temperance supper.

When Anthony returned to Rochester in 1849 she was elected president of the Rochester branch of the Daughters of Temperance and raised money for the cause. In 1853 Anthony was refused the right to speak at the state convention of the Sons of Temperance in Albany. She left the meeting and called her own. In 1853 Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the Women's State Temperance Society with the goal of petitioning the State legislature to pass a law limiting the sale of liquor. The State Legislature rejected the petition because most of the 28,000 signatures were from women and children. Anthony decided that women needed the vote so that politicians would listen to them. She and Stanton were criticized for talking too much about women's rights and resigned from the Women's State Temperance Society.

In the 1860s Anthony and Stanton drew attention to the case of Abby McFarland whose drunken and abusive husband, Daniel, shot and killed the man she had divorced him to marry. They protested when Daniel was acquitted of murder on a plea of temporary insanity and given custody of their son.

In the 1870s Anthony supported the Rochester women organizers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, although she told them that women would need to get the vote to reach their goal. She refused to support Prohibition because she believed it detracted attention from the cause of woman suffrage.

Suffragist

Susan B. Anthony was convinced by her work for temperance that women needed the vote if they were to influence public affairs. She was introduced by Amelia Bloomer to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leaders of the women's rights movement, in 1851, and attended her first women's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852.

Anthony and Stanton believed the Republicans would reward women for their work in building support for the Thirteenth Amendment by giving them the vote. They were bitterly disappointed when this did not happen.

In 1866 Anthony and Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association and in 1868 they started publishing the newspaper The Revolution in Rochester, with the masthead "Men their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less," and the aim of establishing "justice for all."

In 1869 the suffrage movement split, with Anthony and Stanton's National Association continuing to campaign for a constitutional amendment, and the American Woman Suffrage Association adopting a strategy of getting the vote for women on a state-by-state basis. Wyoming became the first territory to give women the vote in 1869.

In the 1870s Anthony campaigned vigorously for women's suffrage on speaking tours in the West. Anthony, three of her sisters, and other women were arrested in Rochester in 1872 for voting. Anthony refused to pay her streetcar fare to the police station because she was "traveling under protest at the government's expense." She was arraigned with other women and the election inspectors who had allowed her to vote in Rochester Common Council chambers. She refused to pay bail and applied for habeas corpus, but her lawyer paid the bail, keeping the case from the Supreme Court. She was indicted in Albany, and the Rochester District Attorney asked for a change of venue because a jury might be prejudiced in her favor. At her trial in Canandaigua in 1873, the judge instructed the jury to find her guilty without discussion. (The jury didn't get to discuss the verdict!) He fined her $100 and made her pay courtroom fees, but did not imprison her when she refused to pay, therefore denying her the chance to appeal.

In 1877, she gathered petitions from 26 states with 10,000 signatures, but Congress laughed at them. She appeared before every congress from 1869 to 1906 to ask for passage of a suffrage amendment. Between 1881 and 1885 Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslin Gage collaborated on and published the History of Woman Suffrage. The last volume, edited by Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, was published in 1902.

In 1887 the two women's suffrage organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton as president and Anthony as vice-president. Anthony became president in 1892 when Stanton retired. Anthony campaigned in the West in the 1890s to make sure that territories where women had the vote were not blocked from admission to the Union. She attended the International Council of Women at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

In 1900, aged 80, Anthony retired as President of NAWSA. In 1904 Anthony presided over the International Council of Women in Berlin and became honorary president of Carrie Chapman Catt's International Woman Suffrage Alliance.

Susan B. Anthony died in 1906 at her home on Madison Street in Rochester. All American adult women finally got the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment, also known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, in 1920.

Women's Rights Campaigner

Susan B. Anthony advocated dress reform for women. She cut her hair and wore the bloomer costume for a year before ridicule convinced her that this radical dress detracted from the other causes she supported.

In 1853 Anthony began to campaign for women's property rights in New York state, speaking at meetings, collecting signatures for petitions, and lobbying the state legislature. In 1860, largely as the result of her efforts, the New York State Married Women's Property Bill became law, allowing married women to own property, keep their own wages, and have custody of their children. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton campaigned for more liberal divorce laws in New York.

In 1869 Anthony persuaded the Workingwomen's Association in New York to investigate the case of Hester Vaughn, a poor working woman accused of murdering her illegitimate child. Vaughn was pardoned, and Anthony used the case to point out the different moral standards expected of men and women and the need for women jurors to ensure a fair trial.

In 1875 she attacked the "social evil" of prostitution in a speech in Chicago, calling for equality in marriage, in the workplace, and at the ballot box to eliminate the need for women to go on the streets.