A Call to the Women of Ireland by Constance de Markievicz 1918

The first woman elected to the British Parliament: her rallying cry for Irish Independence.

Markievicz, Constance de (1868-1927). A Call to the Women of Ireland. Dublin: Fergus O'Connor, 1918.

Octavo, 130 x 190 mm. 16 pp. Original green wrappers printed in black, stapled as issued. Crease to the upper right corner, staples rusted, with mild creasing to the leaves; otherwise a very good copy.

A scarce appeal for women's participation in the struggle for Irish independence, republishing under a new title Markievicz's 1909 lecture, Women, Ideals and the Nation. Combining demands for national freedom and women's equality, she urges Irishwomen to enter public life, support Irish industry and preserve their country's language and culture. She challenges suffrage organisations that fail to embrace Irish independence, proposing the motto: "A Free Ireland with No Sex Disabilities in her Constitution". Her concluding appeal is explicit: "Arm yourselves with weapons to fight your nation's cause."

Born Constance Gore-Booth into an Anglo-Irish landowning family, Markievicz became a suffragist, socialist and revolutionary nationalist. An officer in the Irish Citizen Army, she fought in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to imprisonment. This pamphlet appeared in the year she became the first woman elected to the British House of Commons, winning Dublin St Patrick's for Sinn Fein while detained in Holloway Prison. Following her party's abstentionist policy, she refused to take her seat at Westminster. She subsequently served as Minister for Labour in the revolutionary Irish government.