WIMB £100 RUNNER UP PRIZE WINNER RHIANNON HEAVEN
A Woman’s Role is in the Revolution by Rhiannon Heaven
As a teenager, I was captivated by Constance Markievicz. She seemed to leap from the pages of the history books with her rousing appeal to “leave your jewels and gold wands in the bank and buy a revolver;”1disrupting both the male-centric picture of the Easter Rising and my impressions of what women could achieve in the early twentieth-century.
In 1915, Markievicz wrote a column in which she looked back to the women of the 1798 rebellion to find “the heroic greatness of these our foremothers which may be a light in the path of us women of to-day.”2 While she noted that much of what was available amounted only to drifting “allusions”3to the actions of women, she found material to fill her column and I felt a great sense of affinity with her in, nearly a century later, repeating the act of looking for inspiration in the women of the past.
But researching Markievicz also introduced a very different revolutionary figure; her sister, Eva Gore-Booth. In much of what I read, she merited only a brief mention in a list of Markievicz’s siblings. I would quickly skim these details to get to the interesting parts where Markievicz trained Na Fianna Éireann and took up arms against an empire.
Sonja Tiernan has noted that Gore-Booth is often relegated to a footnote in the life of her sister,4and that was what she remained to me until I found a copy of the Prison Letters of Constance Markievicz.5 These letters brought Markievicz to life but also ignited a new curiosity in the ‘Dearest Old Darling’ to whom she wrote.
My early attempts to find out more about Gore-Booth were marred with a frustrating lack of details, but I was lucky that my interest in her began just prior to the publication of her biography by Tiernan, whose extensive research filled many of these gaps.6
Discovering more about Gore-Booth provoked both enthrallment and a sense of horror at how easily I had dismissed her as less interesting. Though she abhorred the militarism embraced by her sister, she was no less of a revolutionary. Her revolution was staged, not at St. Stephen’s Green, but in her writing, her committed activism, and her unrelenting questioning of the norms of her society.
The litany of her remarkable achievements makes her relative obscurity in Irish and British history bewildering. She was prominent in the suffrage movement and fought paternalistic legislation that disadvantaged women while claiming to protect them from ‘dangerous’ and ‘immoral’ jobs.7 Surely her 1907 campaign, which took on and defeated none other than Winston Churchill in defense of Manchester barmaids, should alone have cemented her place in the annals of the women’s movement.
Risking imprisonment, she promoted pacifism during the First World War and drew attention to the government’s brutal treatment of conscientious objectors.8 Despite her rejection of violence, she supported the cause of Irish nationalism and was involved in post-Rising efforts to support imprisoned rebels and bereft families.9 As part of the radical Aëthnic Union and its journal Urania, she not only challenged gender roles and stereotypes but rejected the duality of the gender binary itself;10 a rejection often framed in contemporary discourse as being an unprecedented, 21st century idea.
1 Constance Markievicz, “The Future of Irishwomen: Speech delivered by Countess Markievicz at I.W.F.L. Meeting, October 12th,” Irish Citizen, October 23, 1915, https://www.irishnewsarchive.com/ina_wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Irish-Citizen Publictions.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1JI4vQNJHXrA4PDEBDowpy6bB3rLk9Vi0575yvdus1OE_-M00cJ_ysKXw. 2 Constance Markievicz, “Women of Ninety-Eight: II,” Irish Citizen 4 (26), November 13, 1915, 161,
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/parent/2v23vt37b/works/k643b283q.
3 3 Constance Markievicz, “Women of Ninety-Eight,” Irish Citizen 4 (25), November 6, 1915, 150,
https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/concern/parent/2v23vt37b/works/k643b283q.
4 Sonja Tiernan, “Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality: Eva Gore-Booth, A Biographical Case Study,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 37, no. 2 (January 1, 2011), https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2011.370205.
5 Esther Roper (ed.), Prison Letters Of Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth) (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1934). 6 Sonja Tiernan, Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 7 Tiernan, Image of Such Politics.
8 Tiernan, Image of Such Politics.
9 Tiernan, Image of Such Politics.
10 Tiernan, Image of Such Politics.
The journal also presented same-sex female relationships as an ideal and Tiernan argues that this is a key factor in Gore-Booth’s erasure from history.
Her earliest biographer, Gifford Lewis, went to great lengths to deny any evidence of what she termed “perverted sexuality.”11 However, in reading Gore-Booth’s sapphic poetry and of her devotion to Esther Roper it is not difficult to conclude that Lewis either did not look very hard or, more likely, was profoundly unobjective in her research.
If women’s position in history is obscured, women who are further marginalized by factors such as race or sexuality are only increasing erased. Tiernan argues that Eva has been excluded from history, despite the great prominence and recognition that she gained in her time, not only due to misogyny, but in large part because of homophobia.
It can be easy to assume that the narrative of history that we have is the only one available. But even that which we consider certain and unshakable can be challenged and reformed, while what was once buried or erased can be resurrected. Eva Gore-Booth’s poem An Epitaph visualizes this:
'Alas that every flower is dead!'
These words a smiling angel read
Carven on an ancient stone,
By wild roses overgrown.12
In the years since I first searched for Eva Gore-Booth, besides Tiernan's biography, she has been remembered in a speech by President Higgins,13 been discussed on Panti Bliss’s Pantisocracy podcast,14 and her poem "The Body to the Soul" set to music by Loah.15
Like the wild roses of her poem, Eva’s life and works have re-flourished and begun to reoccupy spaces from which she was excluded by virtue of her gender and sexuality. The work of historians, like Tiernan, in recovering supposedly ‘forgotten’ revolutionary women is a revolution in itself, which challenges and transforms the familiar narratives of history.
Dale Spender lamented that, in each generation, women should have to “reinvent the wheel” and begin from scratch to recover the buried stories of women’s history.16 However, there seems to be a growing feeling that a history that centers only straight, white men will no longer be accepted.
I am hopeful that, at last, the recovered narratives of revolutionary women like Eva Gore-Booth will not be reburied but instead become so firmly rooted as to overgrow the accepted histories of every political and social revolution until it becomes both impossible and unthinkable to separate ‘women’s history’ from ‘history.’
When future generations of women look back to their own foremothers, they should have no need to scour the archives to reconstruct 'forgotten' stories or to be content with 'allusions' as Markievicz was. Rather, they should easily see that a woman's role is whatever she wants it to be: a writer, a politician, an activist, and, undoubtedly, a revolutionary.
11 Quoted in Tiernan, “Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality,” 60.
12 Eva Gore-Booth, Poems (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898).
13 Michael D. Higgins, “The importance of Eva Gore-Booth’s Radical Vision in the Dramatic Historical Events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” transcript of speech delivered at Congress Hall, London, UK, October 14, 2016, https://president.ie/en/media library/speeches/speech-by-president-michael-d.-higgins-on-eva-gore-booth.
14 Panti Bliss, host, “Season 2 Episode 2: Women in the Making,” Pantisocracy (podcast), 2017, http://pantisocracy.ie/se2e2/. 15 Loah, “The Body to the Soul,” April 29, 2021, https://loah.bandcamp.com/track/the-body-to-the-soul.
16 Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (London: Pandora, 1988): 13.
Bibliography
Gore-Booth, Eva. Poems. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.
Tiernan, Sonja. “Challenging Presumptions of Heterosexuality: Eva Gore-Booth, A Biographical Case Study.” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 37, no. 2 (January 1, 2011). https://doi.org/10.3167/hrrh.2011.370205.
Tiernan, Sonja. Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
Roper, Esther (Editor). Prison Letters Of Countess Markievicz (Constance Gore-Booth). London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1934.
Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. London: Pandora, 1988.
